WILLIAM CLIFT

William Clift is a designer from Joplin, Missouri who loves abandoned houses, fat dogs, and dairy products. His degree project focuses on one of the hidden forces driving inequality in America: sparsely-attended neighborhood meetings that make huge decisions with nobody watching. He hopes to use existing technologies to level the playing field in housing, politics, and beyond. 

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“FRANKLY, EVERYBODY DESERVES TO EXERCISE THEIR VOICE IN THEIR COMMUNITY.”

One of the United States’ most pervasive and destructive problems rarely receives the conversational limelight it deserves: we need 3.3 million units of housing more than we currently have. This drastic shortage has far-reaching consequences. Particularly in dense coastal cities, housing shortages create homelessness; it leaves many millions more of our poorest citizens without the money they need to cover food, rent, and healthcare. 

Unlike many other wicked problems in our political discourse, however, there is no feasible federal solution to a problem so inherently local. The responsibility for these shortages falls on the thousands of zoning boards, planning commissions, and neighborhood-level organizations dotting the country that make ad-hoc decisions on housing developments in hours-long monthly meetings. Only a narrow slice of the population has the time, energy, and acumen to voice their concerns at these meetings, and that crowd tends to be older, wealthier, and especially resistant to change. 

In the working-class neighborhood of North Heights in Joplin, Missouri, William Clift met residents who valued the rewards of community organizing and desired to involve themselves but were held back by the demands of their work and family. Some worked a long, inconsistent schedule. Some took care of kids or elderly parents. Some just didn’t know how to start pitching in. All of them comprise a huge, silent majority that is excluded from an important civic process as well as the meaningful social benefits of community involvement.

William conceptualized a system called Community Blueprint with these gaps in mind. The Community Blueprint initiative would be funded through the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and would provide organizers and officials in each community with the digital tools they need to reach those excluded by traditional in-person meetings.

The flagship of this system is a virtual meeting platform that uses speech recognition and abridgement technology to automatically create concise meeting minutes and migrate them to the web. This eliminates the need for a notetaker, allows remote participants to attend whichever sections of the discussion they please, and empowers everybody to participate asynchronously. These existing technologies also allow for closed captioning and simultaneous translation, which would increase accessibility for non-native English speakers and the hard-of-hearing.

Democracy starts at the grassroots, and our current democratic processes tend to exclude those who have the most to lose. It’s time we re-invest ourselves and our resources in our communities.