Seattle has never shied away from experimenting with participation. In the 1970s, we launched one of the country’s first “P-patch” community gardens. Today, we run one of the largest participatory budgeting processes in America, allocating $27 million through resident input. The spirit is clear: Seattleites want to help.
What’s missing is a bridge that lets their skills — not just their votes — shape solutions to the city’s toughest problems.
Our city has no shortage of challenges: small businesses waiting months for simple permits, residents in South Park still bracing for flooded streets after heavy rains or bus riders stranded when scheduled trips are suddenly canceled. At the same time, Seattle is home to thousands of engineers, designers, health care workers and students who solve complex problems every day. Too often, their expertise sits on the sidelines.
I’ve seen this disconnect firsthand. As a military veteran, I know how purpose and service can drive people to extraordinary achievement. Working in the tech industry, I’ve seen professionals wrestle with whether their work contributes to the greater good. And in my Seattle neighborhood, I hear neighbors express the same sentiment: I want to help, but I don’t know how.
A Civic Solutions Exchange could close that gap.
Here’s how it could work: City departments post scoped challenges — designing better storm-drain alerts, streamlining small-business permitting, or analyzing 211 response patterns. Residents form small teams to propose ideas, analyze data, or prototype tools. The city pilots the best solutions and publishes decisions about the rest. Every idea gets closure. Every participant sees where their effort went.
This isn’t a fantasy. Taiwan’s vTaiwan platform has mediated national regulation. Barcelona and Helsinki use Decidim, an open-source tool that turns civic ideas into policy. Even U.S. federal agencies run Challenge.gov competitions to tap outside expertise. And closer to home, Seattle has proved residents will engage: Participatory budgeting shows they want input on spending, and the “Find It, Fix It” app shows they’ll report problems when given the tools. A Civic Solutions Exchange would be the natural next chapter — shifting from pointing out problems to actually co-creating solutions.
Seattle should pilot a Civic Solutions Exchange within the next year. Start small: Pick three pressing issues, post them publicly and invite residents to form solution teams. Use microgrants, open-source tools, and existing platforms to support their work. Measure what works, and scale it.
The payoff would come in three ways. First, residents would gain a sense of purpose, knowing their skills are being put to use for the city they live in. Second, city departments — often overstretched — would gain capacity through fresh ideas and working prototypes they could never generate on their own. And third, it would build trust by showing people their contributions don’t disappear into a void, but translate into visible action or, at the very least, transparent decisions. Could this just become another slow bureaucratic process? Possibly — unless it’s designed with guardrails: short sprints, deadlines and clear departmental owners.
Seattle has always been a city of builders. We’ve built airplanes, software and climate solutions. But our civic infrastructure, the systems that connect people to their government, lags. A Civic Solutions Exchange is not a magic bullet, but it is a bridge, between caring and contributing, between talent and need.
At its core, this is about service and community. Those are the values that built Seattle’s civic traditions, from neighborhood councils to P-patch gardens. They remain the positive vision we need now — to fix problems, yes, but also to restore meaning, trust and connection.
Seattle already has the spirit. Now it needs the structure. Let’s put our talent to work.
