Title
Acknowledging a public purpose of community participation in the co-design of City services and technical solutions and granting permission to the Office of Technology and Communication to spend city funds on behalf of the City to incentivize and compensate residents, business owners, and other community stakeholders who participate in design research and usability testing.
Body
WHEREAS, The City of Saint Paul and the Mayor of Saint Paul deem it an appropriate public purpose to build engagement processes where all critical stakeholders, from experts to end users, are encouraged to participate and are respected as equal partners sharing expertise in the design of services and products; and
WHEREAS, The City Council and the Mayor are desirous of intentionally involving target community members in designing solutions, postponing design decisions until after gathering feedback, synthesizing feedback from community participants into insights, and developing solutions based on feedback; and
WHEREAS, the Office of Technology and Communication is recruiting underrepresented community members to participate in research and testing activities and requires authorization to spend city funds; and
WHEREAS, working directly with underrepresented community members and compensating them for their role is an important step toward equity and inclusion in the design and delivery of City services and technical solutions; therefore, be it
RESOLVED, the Office of Technology and Communication is hereby authorized to make any expenditure, not to exceed $2,000, to fund compensation for participant design contributions and shall provide itemization of such expenditures to be approved in a future resolution; and be it
FURTHER RESOLVED, that the Mayor and Saint Paul City Council hereby authorizes the Office of Technology and Communication to act on behalf of the City to offer participant compensation; and be it
FINALLY RESOLVED, that a list of such expenditures, within the name of the recipient and value of compensation amount, shall be kept and included in future resolution dispensing compensation in compliance with all the requirements of Chapter 41 of the Administrative Code.