 Good evening. Buenas noches. Buenas noches. Welcome to those in the room, and welcome to those watching us live. We're live streaming tonight, so we have a big audience online and in the room. Thank you for supporting this third installment of the Dear Fiscal Board series by Piloto 151, Piloto 151. And thank you to New America for hosting us. This is one of those institutions in the city of Washington that you can always count on and that we always turn to. So we're very, very grateful to be here. I heard from my mother two days after the hurricane. She lives in Puerto Rico. Communication was spotty. Meoges. It was hard waiting those 48 hours to hear from family members and loved ones. In the days that followed, we had better communication. But what I heard was along the lines of, I'm slowly running out of food. The lines at the grocery store are hours long in the sun. My mother's 69. She's alone in Puerto Rico because her kids have migrated to the mainland. My brother's Border Patrol officer in Arizona. And I, after spending almost 12 years here in DC working in policy, have migrated to South Florida to work at the local level on policy issues. And to hear her struggle for those few days was hard to say the least. It was hard on me. It was hard on all of us. Eventually I decided to bring her to South Florida with me to spend a few weeks. She got called back a few weeks later because she's a professor at the University of Puerto Rico and they were reopening her campus. She had to go back. And she wanted to go back for her students. Her students needed her. Like her commitment, many of us have given and been committed to Puerto Rico in different ways before the hurricane and after the hurricane. Here in DC, in 2014, a group of Puerto Rican diaspora got together and we formed a small nonprofit, a platform for the diaspora to get together and seek solutions. We called it Senadores because we started gathering around a dinner table. Senas. And it was a play on senators because we're in DC. And we built a very strong engagement with partners on the ground in Puerto Rico. Civil society, specifically and exclusively. And we didn't know the power of those relationships and that track record of working with them for three years until the hurricane hit. And all of a sudden, all the big foundations, funders, philanthropies, relief efforts, volunteer waves, we're looking for people on the ground to connect to to channel their efforts and nobody knew who to talk to and our relationships were very valuable at that time for me to be able to call Giancarlos directly. Anybody else on the island was very valuable and it made a lot of these things happen. Giancarlos and Sofia are forces of nature, if you know them. They are out of the box thinkers and they are relentless in their efforts for Puerto Rico. I won't talk about the work they do directly because many of you know them, you know of the work they've done and because you're going to hear from Giancarlo in a second. But I want to say that we're here tonight because Piloto 151 and their partner organizations believe that in this time of great crisis lies great opportunity. Opportunity to reimagine what Puerto Rico can be. But not just imagine. We're going to talk about concrete ways to actually rebuild it in a new image. But not just a new image but an effective and efficient one that we get through digital solutions. We're in here for a very special treat through our keynote and our panelists. Heavy brain power that's been at the forefront of policymaking in IT and fiscal policies for a long time. So what we want out of you tonight is to think like Sofia and Giancarlo out of the box. We want you to be passionate and relentless. We want you to think about what your role can be because there is a role for everybody in the rebuild of Puerto Rico. You can do a lot with whatever you have from wherever you are. We want to hear your ideas. We want you to come back to us at the end of the night. We want you to reach out to us after the event. I'm going to be rigorous with time and I'm also going to remind you that the donations that you gave for this event which now totaled $1,200 are going to go to Compromatidos an NGO that's been very committed and relentless on the ground. They've been supplying different civil society groups with off-the-grid boxes that allow them to filter water and provide energy in contained boxes. And I'm going to remind you that there's a very special Piloto 151 Ware that we are going to be hawking tonight and we're going to model it for you briefly later. But without further ado, the creator of the Deer Fiscal Board series, the former CIO of Puerto Rico and force of nature, Giancarlo Gonzalez. Thank you, Frances. Yeah, that's me. So welcome to the third installment of the Deer Fiscal Board. Quickly, a show of hands in previous Deer Fiscal Board attendees in Puerto Rico. One, two, we got a few. Okay, so tonight I think we have an amazing agenda to discuss, as Frances said, a digital strategy for rebuilding Puerto Rico. And it touches on three main points. Shaping digital policy, leveraging the civic tech community and sustaining and strengthening the tech ecosystem in which, in spite of the fiscal crisis that we were facing, it was thriving in Puerto Rico. Now, what do I mean by digital policy? Well, I'm going to take a quote from Tom Loosmore, who was our speaker at the first Deer Fiscal Board. And he says, digital means applying the policies, I'm sorry, applying the culture, practices, processes and technologies of the internet era to respond to people's raised expectations. Now, what does he mean by that? Well, I've been here in the United States for about 30 days. I ordered some winter clothes through Amazon Prime. I get a push notification that there'd be arriving soon. I walk outside and I'm actually greeting the delivery person as he is about to arrive. As I prepare to head out to my next meeting in New York, Google Maps tells me it's a 28-minute walk, subway walk to my destination and if I walk faster, it will be 27 minutes. And when I log in to use all my devices, they recognize that I'm logging in from a different location and they factor in two-way authentication and I feel secure in using them. And when my cousin Veronica ran the New York Marathon, I was able to download an app and see her as she was running around the marathon and I had a time estimate on when she was going to get to the finish line. You know, if only the power authority could have such type of app for you to know when they're going to get to your house, right? But we laugh about that. But we have students in the audience today. Do we have students in the audience? The students did not make it. I think Kenneth McLean Tuxon is on his way. He's not a student anymore, okay. But the young generation and the people here represent the future of that expectation. We are part of a digital age growing up in a place where we hit a button and we expect an Uber to arrive. Where is this magic in our government today? And what do we expect to come out of this rebuilding process in Puerto Rico? I want to recognize the effort that Governor Rosselló has made to steer us into the right direction. There are some great stories of success through what he calls and it's the new office of Puerto Rico Innovation Technology Service. There are some success stories evidenced, for example, by the deployment of point of sale devices to facilitate electronic benefit transfers in the island of Culebra. And in this case Luisa Rocho, the CIO of Puerto Rico identified a specific problem he brought together the parties that he wanted to engage to solve it and they delivered a solution to be able to process EBT transfers in Culebra. This story is not the exception, but it's also hardly the rule. And this type of talent and process thinking needs to be ubiquitous throughout all of our government. So, what's the expectation? We can do a lot better than a Twitter Excel spreadsheet of where the power authority is working that day. And we can do a lot better than a picture of a document of how much debris the municipality of San Juan has cleaned up. Right? We should be able to know where they are, where they'll be and what routes they're going to be taking. People are going five times to the Department of Labor to fill out unemployment forms and leaving with no answers. You don't know when the next boss is going to arrive and you need exact change to use it. And the Secretary of Justice, you know, Rosario recently had everybody sign resignation letters. One of that I read in the news was that the Secretary of Justice was in the hot seat for not being able to provide data on sex offenders that were in shelters. There's a lot of people in the community who don't have data and technology teams here. We could solve these problems pretty easily. And the problem is we need a digital ubiquity in our government. We need to have the concept of digital being able to be understood across all government agencies. So this event is about showing how it's done. And in the previous series, we actually did just that. We showed how the city of San Diego provided you an update of what streets are closed down, when they're going to be finished, what work they're doing. So are we expecting to rebuild Puerto Rico to see services being informed like this or like this? And what do we need to do so that our government rebuilds more effectively to be able to show you information as we actually needed and expected? With Maxine from San Diego, the event happened at the hurricane Irma hit. And Maxine, along with a Civic Tech group, some of them you will hear from them today worked on opening up FEMA flood zone data. And we actually made it available through Amazon Web Services the day before Irma hit. And it was actually adopted by the Puerto Rico Technology Service and it was put on the app where they were showing shelter availability. So thanks to Civic Tech we were able to provide a better application for the government to show not just where the shelters are, but if you were going to be in a flood zone. And that was done through Civic Collaboration which we're going to talk about also today. So in the end it's not really about the technology it's about the imperative to redesign public services to work better and cost less and improve lives of citizens. And tonight we're going to percent ways to make this happen so we rebuild the eco that we all want to live in. Thank you. I'll stand on the shoulders of others. People that support us, mentor us, these organizations have supported the work of Piloto 151 and this series. So we wanted to acknowledge them tonight before we head out and introduce our keynote. Those organizations are special because they know the work of Piloto just as it is they understand where they have been accept them for what they have become and gently have allowed them to grow but continue to support them. Our keynote speaker is a dear friend and mentor. When I met Cecilia we were all part of a task force. It was the first task force named under the administration of Obama for Puerto Rico. She was in charge of keeping us on task and getting to the real issues and what I remember was a very focused leader who knew exactly how to keep us on track and that knew how to keep the noise out. And it was a pleasure to serve on that task force with her. We traveled to Puerto Rico and it's just been a pleasure to see the work she has done throughout the years in the administration and now in her life post administration here in New America. Without further ado, Cecilia Muñoz. Thank you so much. Buenas noches a todos. Good evening. Like any good keynote speaker I'm going to be brief because the really important stuff is what follows and I am humbled really to be in the presence of so many people who know so much more about Puerto Rico than I do. So but I did learn a lot from the experience especially of working in the Obama administration. As you heard I had the privilege of for my first three years when I was President Obama's director of intergovernmental affairs. I had the privilege of co-chairing his task force on Puerto Rico and I learned a ton from that experience and from other experiences in government and some of which I think is relevant to this conversation. I learned one that Puerto Rico is amazing. That's not hard to figure out. I also learned that there are not great structures in the federal government for addressing situations in Puerto Rico that other parts of the United States that are not states have the Department of the Interior, Puerto Rico the arrangement isn't structured in the same way. So I discovered that the only office really with a mandate it's certainly in the White House and really across the federal government with a clear mandate to make sure to focus on Puerto Rico is the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs of the White House because of the existence of this task force which when you think about it is terrible and I because we had amazing people from all of the federal agencies sitting on this task force engaging both on the question of Puerto Rico's political status which is the mandate of the task force but also President Obama added Puerto Rico's economic status to the mandate of the task force because the island was going through an economic crisis and because we had all of the agencies of the federal government sitting around a table it was important to make sure that we did our part and look I learned that there are a lot of things that are broken which people in this room know better than I do and that's why we're still struggling with the electrical grid now there are systems that should be better than they are and there are a lot of historical reasons that that is so but it is so and for better or worse we have an opportunity as you just heard from Giancarlo whose work I am very grateful for to rebuild in a way that does not just replace what was there before but to rebuild in a way Puerto Rico is better footing than anybody on the mainland and that's what we should be aiming for we have an opportunity to rebuild in a way which modernizes which updates and which can become a model for what the rest of the country should be like and that is really what we should be aiming for among the other things I learned when I was in government was how transformative tech can be and you got a little taste of this from Giancarlo's presentation and you'll get more of it from the panels that you're going to hear from and I work here with my colleague Vivian Grubart who is extraordinary on public interest technology because what we learned when we were in government through the creation of the U.S. digital service is that you don't just need tech capacity to make sure that government functions at least as well as Amazon or Uber or some of the other things which are transforming our lives you don't just need technological capacity you don't just need to build things within government you need to apply tech thinking to how government works and you need tech at the table when you're doing the planning, when you're doing the thinking not just when you're doing the building and we're engaged here at New America in a body of work that is about bringing that kind of expertise, that kind of thinking to what government does at the federal level, what government does at the local level what NGOs do in doing their work we're trying to build a field of public interest technology where there isn't one and in some ways the best example of why we need that capacity is what's happening Puerto Rico now and the opportunity that we have to build in a way that surpasses anything that's going on anywhere else in the United States is a profound one but we have to take advantage of it we have to be deliberate about it you heard that we have to be relentless about it and I completely agree and here's the thing we must insist that we all be engaged in the process of rebuilding and that we bring the best minds and hands and hearts and resources to the table people in Puerto Rico deserve nothing less that's really our obligation and our responsibility as a country to people who are going through this extraordinary time right now and this is the United States of America we have the capacity to do this we build better stuff and do more innovative thinking than anyone else in the world this is the moment to bring that thinking to this challenge and I'm extraordinarily grateful that we at New America have the opportunity to host you all here I'm extraordinarily grateful for the Dear Fiscal Board series for the thinking that's gone into this and especially grateful for the work that's going to follow we intend to be engaged with it we intend to be part of it we intend to encourage it but most important are the hands and hearts and minds that are in this room I think some really very well-planned panels that are really going to dig deep into what this work could look like and this is really only the beginning we have to be committed to carrying out this work over the long term so I'm extraordinarily grateful to all of you for being here I'm extraordinarily grateful to Giancarlo for his leadership to Vivian for her leadership thank you all so much for being here and then let's get on with the work Muchísimas gracias May I ask the three special models in the front row can you please rise this special edition Piloto 151 shirt is available to you tonight for the special price of $25 all donations will go to the work of Compa Matidos on the ground you can also make donations on the website for Piloto our goal sponsors these people have invested in Piloto they believe in them they believe that Pilotoís success is their success so we recognize their work tonight our next panel will focus on how rebuilding and digitalization go together our moderator is going to be Giancarlo Gonzales and our two panelists Shelley am I getting this right? Yes, Shelley Me and Aaron Snow weíll join him on stage now Carlos is on his way and you should arrive for the finish but letís join in and he will he just texted me that he is arriving thank you, Shelley and Aaron for being a part of this panel so I want to start off with this quote from Tom Steinberg whoís a friend of this techie group thatís trying to change government and he said you cannot rebuild a country properly if the elites donít understand technology the same way they understand economics or ideology or propaganda what good governance and the good society looks like today is inextricably linked to understanding digital so letís dive right in in Puerto Rico the credibility issue is a problem I think the white fish fiasco in contracting and as congress looks to assist us in the rebuilding process there is a procurement problem in Puerto Rico and a methodology problem that part of it may be political but part of it may be in terms of processes and what takeaways can we apply from your experiences in how we approach buying services okay hi well so yeah a couple baseline things I would say about procurement one is that I donít think any amount of change in procurement process cures a problem if the folks doing procurement do not understand the thing theyíre buying so I take my car to the auto repair shop and I donít know anything about how my car works I donít know how cars work I know how to drive and so the odds are I probably sometimes get overcharged and underserved and I have no way of knowing right and IT procurement in many many places private sector, public sector, government not for profits there is a lot of that that happens so I would say that number one number one thing you want to do to help solve the procurement problem is to solve a skills problem underlying in government it is not and on that point I donít think itís about finding a vendor to help make recommendations for your technology so that you can continue to not understand you need to hire you need to have a core set of folks in your government in your agencies who understand what it is the second thing Iíd say about procurement is generally speaking there are lots of good reasons procurement is small generally in IT the larger the procurement the more likely that procurement is going to fail and or run late and or cost much more money than you think it will which is already more money than it should so we donít have lots of time I can offer two examples that build on the great things that Aaron just shared with us especially in regards to having people in government that understand what it is that is being purchased a great example of that is at VA they put out one of the first large contracts that were evaluated based on a live coding challenge I was on the team that won the challenge so I can definitely say worked out in our favor but there are two really important things that they did one because it was a live coding challenge they asked people to demonstrate what they could do not just talk about it and secondly the requirements that they gave us to code against were descriptive they were not prescriptive so they described problems and let us show them how we would sell them go ahead which ties right back into the first point there is no way they could have written that challenge if they didnít have talent in the house to understand enough to write the challenge and to evaluate the submissions for that challenge so to tie that to Puerto Rico the Puerto Rico Innovation Technology Service doesnít have funding itís not structured by law itís not currently hiring the best talent to help amplify their capacity to solve problems we keep treating tech as in the background weíre not scaling it large enough how many people did you have at AT&F in your organization now itís close to 200 but itís started at 10 and thatís the final place in Puerto Rico approach a digital rebuilding effort we only have a few minutes right thatís the question of the hour I would say start at the top you need to hire you need to make the first hire thatís a little bit of a bootstrapping issue but you need to whoever has control of the money and the ability to give the green light or the red light to projects that needs to have with them someone who understands and thatís the first hire hopefully that first hire is someone who also knows how to build a team who understands how to do build but who also understands how to structure procurements and then follow through with award processes and all the rest sometimes crises can be instructive so weíre probably all aware of healthcare.gov and how it didnít quite work when it was just launched and through that crisis the team was able to focus on one core incredibly important outcome for the end user of healthcare.gov which was how many people could go through the website and sign up for health coverage and get covered in the first 24 hours of the site only about 6 people were able to successfully complete this even though millions needed to get through the whole process so that one core outcome how do we get from 6 people to millions of people who can successfully go through this website brought in people across silos really helped us scope down our efforts to rebuild the site so similarly for Puerto Rico what are core outcomes that everyone can agree on and work towards. Okay so speaking of a core outcome I'm going to invite Carlos Mercadero director of the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration Thank you Carlos I knew youíd make it some people were doubting telling me he may not make it heís not going to make it I appreciate it I know youíve had very stressful past few weeks so appreciate it speaking of digital policy and strategy and focusing on outcomes you are actually very instrumental in a particular outcome not small but it also provides an example of how we made it happen and how can we make more of these types of outcomes possible and it had to do with the Airbnb signing in Puerto Rico you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah well thank you for the invitation and thank you for allowing me to be here in this panel yeah I remember when we first got into the administration like 10 months ago I remember talking to Giancarlo and we were friends from before I was working in the government and you told me about different ideas that you had and then he mentioned the Airbnb contact that he had and he said that it would be very good to see if we could work out something with the government so thatís how we started talking to their contact here in DC and we started working towards a solution so that Airbnb could come into Puerto Rico had a direct interaction with the tourism company and work on different aspects of the tax collection but also on the data gathering that they do and the data analysis that eventually would be of a lot of help for the tourism company so that they could they could make better they could target better their advertisements or the selling of the Puerto Rico brand to the different audiences here in the United States and beyond so we started that process and it took a while obviously thereís always some processes that really need to the legal process the negotiation of how thatís going to be worked with the corporation the administration the data actually the company they want to protect the data that they collect to be helpful with the government so that process of finding the common ground of how is it that that collaboration was going to be ensuing after the relationship was it was going to be formal it took a while but then finally we did it finding that common ground in something as executing that contract we scale finding that common ground to collaborating with civic tech people and questioning if they can work with government data thatís sensitive or not and then suddenly the common ground finding common ground can be a huge gap that prevents government and other people from collaborating maybe you had some experiences in Pittsburgh as a co-america fellow maybe you want to add something to that the experience that jumps to mind is our work with the city of Pittsburgh as fellows we worked for one year we got there the mayor of Pittsburgh said to us I need your help blowing up procurement of course we took a step back we were like okay no one has got procurement figured out one way after talking to frontline workers in the government that we could help them out with was we heard from the parks and rec department that they had trouble finding vendors to clean park restrooms in fact so few people had bid on the cleaning contract that park employees were working overtime to clean bathrooms and this was not an ideal situation for citizens of Pittsburgh for government employees and probably not for local businesses who would be happy to take on this contract one thing we realized was that the cityís advertising outreach methods were really not meeting businesses where they were they were advertising opportunities in the print and classified sections of the local newspaper there are many other places where businesses are so we worked with them on some pretty basic outreach methods like telling businesses that we found via Yelp and other listings to sign up for a sitting mailing list to find out about business opportunities we took the very complicated language in the RFP and simplified it and made a one page website that anyone could easily find via social media to learn about the contract we advertise the contract weeks before certain deadlines happened and as a result we were able to boost the number of people that applied to it from just 0 or 1 to 16 and the city eventually found a vendor they were happy with but the ultimate result of the story is it happened from listening to problems that government workers were actually having on the ground finding government partners who were open to trying something new to solve the problem and meeting local businesses where they happened to be and the culture and practices changed that Tom was more referred to at your first event is very much about the undercurrent of what you were just saying Shelley was that you built a positive relationship very quickly with the folks in government who did not have the tech chops but did have the subject matter expertise the experience in the role of the day contact with the people who are consuming the services and needing government help that first contact between folks who come in especially if you recruit from outside of government if you recruit from private sector technology there is a lot of folks carry a little bit of dust things better and they have no idea what they are getting into when they get into government we all played this out and so that first contact building positive relationships from the beginning and not coming in with an attitude of I know and you don't absolutely critical we had a great experience with the state of California they had a very very large hundreds and hundreds of pages request for proposal going out for an IT system for their child welfare services a system that was 30 years old and badly needed replacing we and Cook for America together we were able to work with the folks in California to set up a week where a team went out and did something called RFP ghost writing where we basically go and do a little bit of coaching and training and here is what we bring to the table but bringing all of the folks in government all the stakeholders of the system together show them what we have to offer them not what we are trying to push on them and help them rewrite that RFP down from hundreds and hundreds of pages that was going to cost half a billion dollars or more to a handful of smaller modular RFP that reached 50 pages most of which is boilerplate and those modules are each going out for seven figures or less and the process and so this is the culture point is those folks became converts a couple weeks later saying there is a revolution going on they established a digital service in the division in California a terrific guy from Cook for America they are now other agencies in California are seeing that actually worked the standard government trope nobody wants to try something new but everybody wants to be the second and see it works then everybody wants to get on board and so now there are lots of folks that want to get on board the train what supporting elements could we have from AT&F you mentioned ghost writing what could we do to approach similar pilots and leverage BRAFA to perhaps try some projects this way I want to make a point of I'll highlight something that he said me from the government standpoint I think that with the Airbnb situation we experienced we experienced a definitely that shock of we do things this way and we have our own data collection which is great me from the government really is it great not but I think that's something that we faced when we were in that process that people were hesitant to undertake this new challenge of working with this new organization that was coming in that was going to be providing this and this way and we said no the first reaction was that and I think on that particular issue but now going to RFQs whatever things that they got to do on a daily basis even now during the disaster relief process that we're in we are now entering into a process a long-term recovery we're going to be having this new organization basically that's going to be handling the long-term recovery and they'll have to enter into a whole process of sending our RFPs every second because of the many things that are going to be happening in Puerto Rico so I think that we got to talk after this conversation because I think you can definitely so we can definitely use the help in streamlining that process and making it in a way that it's transparent that it's efficient and it really helps us save in the process save time, save money and again I cannot highlight the issue of transparency I think it allows for us to be much more transparent and also the example I gave was one of learning on the job Tracy Walker over at USDS also has run multiple classes of essentially digital training for contracting officers to teach them to be like fluent capable digital acquisition specialists and that has reached all kinds of benefits for a bunch of agencies so there are coaching, there is training, there is do one together and do one what is it teach one do one there are lots of models there are platforms that you can avail yourself of that are helpful as well there is a lot I look forward to a collaboration between you two the fiscal board is going to now have a contract review process as well and I think that it's beyond just reviewing $10 million contracts to say yes or no there is a work that goes before that there is also the challenge sometimes that you have the legislature then to re-change government they want to change government agencies around and then they legislate specific things that we need to execute and maybe they change whatever is the work that somebody is going to be doing on RFP so that even complicates things further maybe you have an experience to share with that I in fact do at the department of veteran affairs nothing is quite as simple as it looks on the surface so I'm part of a team that's working on the Nutshells process New York Times article just came out about it which is pretty excellent it's a lot of first-hand experiences but in a Nutshell, if you're a veteran you get hurt, you get benefits and if you disagree with the amount of benefits that you receive or you think you should receive them at all, you can appeal for more and the problem right now is there are about half a million veterans waiting to hear back about their appeal because on average it takes five or more years to hear something so our team is working on figuring out technology solutions but also while developing technology figuring out process solutions to cutting down that way time that's our core outcome how do we make it less than five years about two months ago Congress has also been hard at work thinking about this problem as well and passed legislation I think unanimously in the house called the Veteran Appeals Improvement and Modernization Act was introduced in 2017 and it gave VA a couple months to come up with a detailed implementation plan basically this legislation also changes the appeals process from one linear process to about four or five different paths so we're working on our own changes Congress legislated a bunch of changes around us we're actively working with our government partners to steer them in a direction that makes sense and actually works out for veterans so I think the silver lining is that what Congress legislated left enough breathing room for teams on the ground to really define implementation the point that software design is process design and process design is software design in a modern digital world cannot be stated enough when anybody legislator committee, agency anyone goes off and tries to think through about understanding technology or vice versa Megan Smith the CTO of the United States until last year in any room she goes alright when the policy discussions we're starting to go off the road how many people in this room are technologists and she would always look and ask is there a technologist at the table if there isn't you have a problem and we have that problem in every single law that's being presented to fix our government and we're expecting to get it right we don't have anyone that's high technology quotient in those bills so looking one year into the future and we want to see Puerto Rico getting this right you know what would be the most important thing for us to get right right now besides YouTube talking and actually getting something going each of us we have one minute so this is the final question well I think that when we came to the administration the governor announced that he was creating Pritz so I think that we definitely need to legislate for that office I think that office needs to have legal autonomy that deserves an applause everybody please because we need to have Pritz in law Pritz is basically it's like a parallel to what USDS is for the federal government and I think that needs to happen and actually I think now it's the time whatever we do now we have the chance right now in government to rebuild Puerto Rico that's what the hurricanes had the opportunity that we have after the hurricanes it's a opportunity in a rebuilding process that we're going to be we're in right now we're still getting out of that emergency timeline but for sure within the next couple of weeks and then for the upcoming year or years we're going to be in that recovery process so I think it's an opportunity to bring up the legislation do it now and then have a digital impact in whatever we do in government going forward Aaron? folks need to say the only thing harder in government than procurement is hiring I would get back to make sure that whatever laws are being passed whatever policies are being acted they're enabling leadership to hire efficiently and quickly and to get the right people for the job and not the people that have a government process which can sometimes be bogged down to get the right people in the room quickly that's number one I think there's lots of conversation about procurement policy that we can put to another day and the other thing I would say is start now even before you have those folks start looking for who your partner champions are in the various agencies of your government so that you can start to talk about what are the first projects that this team once you've assembled it will be able to take on and know that they've got someone on the other end of the project who actually is enthusiastic about embracing a new way of thinking about procurement and about delivery I couldn't agree more about the hiring funny thing in Puerto Rico nobody wants to get hired to work for the government but they all want a contract with it how many great techie people we have here that would go work directly for the government if they came calling to help raise your hand techie people wouldn't you want to go fix and serve your government good thank you Shelly I'll keep this short I've mentioned this a couple times it's really like what is the core outcome for people that we're trying to accomplish within the next year who are the most vulnerable people right now who needs help the most and who can you get to agree that this is the most important problem to solve and to be descriptive and not prescriptive about it so allow people the space to try to solve this problem but first agree what is the most important thing to get fixed right now thank you so much Carlos Aaron Shelly they will be here for discussions after the event feel free to talk to any of them thank you so much again and let's move on our DC based sponsors have a special place in their heart for social impact as dos piloto with its work in Puerto Rico as does our next panel our next panel is about leveraging civic tech for the benefit of the greater good our panelists include some of my favorite people in DC I'm going to ask them to start coming up to the room both of the Maria Tech Brigade Edric Ortiz of Hack Nights and Code for Puerto Rico and our moderator Denise Ross who is a public interest technology fellow at New America this is especially relevant to me personally because I was in New Orleans for Katrina and so my heart just breaks every time I see one of these disasters happen over and over again and we keep reliving the same mistakes but with different technologies and so I feel like we're finally starting to get some traction on this and it's because of brigade and civic tech folks like we have up here today that I think the future will be different I'm optimistic about that I'd like to start with us talking about how we became involved in civic tech and how our roles changed after the storm I'll start with myself I was lucky enough to be working in civic tech as my day job when Katrina hit I had moved to New Orleans in 2001 to organize census data by neighborhood so there was this potential that instead of decisions being made about communities behind closed doors by people in power we could democratize that data and make it really easy for folks to use to help chart their own destinies when the storm hit what happened is that the stakes went up we were flying blind we didn't have the information we needed and people were begging us for data that we just didn't have the other thing that happened to me was personally the stakes got very high I was without power for six months so I experienced the bureaucracy of trying to get my power hooked back up didn't have child care experienced the bureaucracy of trying to open a new child care center experienced that surprised land use changes across from my house so it became not just a professional thing but a very personal thing so I'd love to hear from the three of you how did you become involved in civic tech and how has your role changed since the storm I'll start my name is Forlan I started in actively in civic tech about four years ago the Code for America fellows went to Puerto Rico I was part of the founding group of Code for Puerto Rico which I believe is still going on and that's really when I started I too felt Katrina does my family from New Orleans I still have my father there and it was scary at that moment only to relive it now well with Maria my role has greatly changed in that when we started the Maria Tech Brigade I thought I'm going to sit down and I'm going to do a bunch of apps that has not been my role I think I found that a more important role has been of cat herder because a lot of people want to do things and a lot of people are not focused on how they do things and a lot of people like to scream at people that are doing things so I became a cat herder in a punching bag so now people scream at me and let people that are actually working do their jobs and contribute back to the island excellent on my end I was part of the government of Puerto Rico back in the Code for America days I was part of the team that actually won someone as a city and I was part of funding team also of the Code for Puerto Rico Brigade and I had like a mixed role I was part of government so I could serve as a liaison and help things happen and also engage with the civic tech and after the year again like I also used to work for a second like respondent an emergency environmental agency back in Puerto Rico so I was always into this like the emergency response the issues with it so after the year again not only my family was back home I couldn't talk to them for like two weeks my mom but I was asking myself like what can I do to make a difference and help rebuild things so not only we got together because we're friends we used to work together too but I actually walked through the local government office here and we said hey we're here how can we help the urban sector be useful to you guys So for me I think I got tired of how I went in civic tech I got tired of things don't go involved in government government don't do things like they should be done and then I met Giancarlo to a friend of us and I guess it all starts there like I get involved in how I can change things how I can do for better and well that's actually how I got involved after Maria well I was in Puerto Rico so I guess everything changed because it just was about thinking what can I what can I do from there what can I change from there but not at the moment I guess what can I do in the upcoming months when everything goes back to maybe be stable and then technology will come in and what is the first things that needs to be there in order for things to get there so I get that I love the fact that you're starting to think ahead it's so hard when you're still in response mode to think about the long term recovery the best bits of advice we got in New Orleans was it's a marathon not a sprint and it's so true the recovery will be a very long slog and you'll need the same level of energy to make it through and data and technology are going to be a core part of that and the other truth about disasters like this is that they're bigger than government can fix alone it's really an all hands on deck endeavor and one thing I appreciated is the Brigades person finder tool I thought it was a great example of what can happen when you leverage the private sector and civic tech and I'm assuming a little bit of government to help solve an immediate problem can one of you speak to the people finder yeah so the people finder was interesting how we started using it it originally didn't start with the people finder it started with a project called snail check which Miguel Rios is right there sitting down he was part of that the team that thought up of this and the Google people finder is great but people back home can't use it there's no power in this situation so the thought what started as a thought experiment of how can we get people on people became asking people on the ground if you're going to one of these disaster areas take a pen and paper whoever you talk to ask their name and where they live and just send it to us and we will find a way to get this into the Google people finder it started as a manual process but being Puerto Ricans and since we're basically everywhere somebody works in Google and it's part of the Maria Tech Brigade and they got us an API token which they usually never give out so we were able to upload about 11,000 names wow and what would it have taken to go to a greater scale like what could you have done in advance you think made perhaps collaborating with government or the nonprofit sector to go further people finder presents some of the challenges that you have in these situations we were taking pictures of lists from shelters and there were people all around the nation writing them again on a digital format so I think part of the biggest challenge we had and where most of the projects were revolving around was how to get data how to visualize information and reverse things to a digital format and that was a terrible challenge because it's kind of all over the place there's an open data portal that exists but the organization that runs that today doesn't have maybe the power to maintain it as it was it's not used by all agencies as the system of truth and system of record and then people would you would have people like trying to get the same data from different sources quality of the data how data was useful was kind of challenging that sounds like a very familiar challenge and also this is reactionary right and when it's reactionary you have to work with what you have so modernizing the complete tech stack that we have in Puerto Rico and stop using in premise data centers that hurricane comes through and there's no power and now we have nothing could be a way to scale this and just say people that can actually access this it's in the ether it's in the web you can access and you can actually create whatever you want with it and then you can use it so you mentioned data and open data we've seen that that's the fuel for civic tech around the country and after Katrina that was before open data was a thing it was 2005 but in the absence of government transparency what we've seen is a few different types of data collection emerge and you're probably familiar with these things in Puerto Rico the first is crowdsourcing we had residents literally walking the streets collecting attributes information about the status of property the condition of properties in their neighborhood we relied a lot on private sector data for example for tracking repopulation of the blocks of New Orleans we used an address list from the company that sends junk mail to your home to the private source there's also we've seen a lot of scraping or retyping of data as you mentioned out of Hurricane Harvey recently the Code for America Brigade there scraped environmental quality data from the state and then they were able to analyze that to give the public a clearer picture of where the toxins were after the storm and then lastly this is the weirdest phenomenon there starts to be sort of an underground network of sharing of data that might get loose from government and so this underground market for data starts to emerge and of course that can just increase the disparities between who has access to information and who doesn't so I'd love to know more about how forthcoming the government has been in response to the storm about open data and what types of and in the absence of data coming from government what are you doing to fill the gaps and what are you seeing done yeah so data is like a hot issue at this point it matters for rebuilding right away from funding to actually like how to properly invest resources people's times and effort there's a lot of people with good intentions money available but how do you make the best use of that I think there's a current challenge right now for local government to gather data right I think the statistics institute is having some challenges about how to be more effective about this also agencies have a lot of data sources and maybe they're not sharing that properly there's a very good project that was put together the status.pr which is kind of a dashboard I think the sentiment around the community is that it's a great indicator like you can see current status of things there's no actual way to see historical trends you cannot see like historical data you cannot get data sets and compare them which I think are very valuable in what's needed right now to know how we are and what we need to do absolutely I looked at the status.pr data set and it looks on the front end it looks good you know it looks like oh they're being transparent but you can't dive into it and there's not context around it so yes you can the Maria Tech Brigade one of the members did status.pr.hotapadilla.com we didn't have a chance to talk before so that's fantastic what he does is that he scrapes the site every hour and maintains a historical record of everything that happens on that site and he tweets about it so from there you go to his page which I can provide it maybe through a tweet or something and he has the graphs and it's very interesting to see the graph hit 100% and then drop to zero and then back to 100% and it's like okay that's weird I mean what happened but it's another example of how civic tech says that's not good enough and we'll just do it ourselves right? I love that for example he was asking like does anyone know why the tower percentage just drop because that was one of those things that wouldn't seem to drop drastically because they've been restored or something and you know those types of questions emerge right around old data sets it's kind of difficult I guess for government right under conditions to provide data you know they're tackling the emergency there's people that need immediate care but I guess my opinion right I've been in government before I work for government right now I've been in government before particularly in Puerto Rico and I think that they like channels to engage with civic tech right? Like members have proposed can the government vet crowdsourced information so it can become kind of legitimate and be used how can sharing from different like private organizations that are doing great data gathering could be like encouraged and like used by government and adopted and that be communicated those are challenges that aren't solved right now but I think would provide a lot of benefit if they were tackled actually looking beyond Maria and in order for civic tech to succeed and the data which is open is helpful in it to impact as much people as you can that way the government will see like these people with this just with this data this much and in fact this much of citizens of our island so talking about that I guess there's a piece of data in Puerto Rico that's really valuable in terms of how can you impact a lot of people and it's that the public transportation system in Puerto Rico has GPS on the buses the AMA has GPS on the buses so people can be can know where the where the bus is how far is from it and one perhaps is 10 minutes from here I can go and grab a coffee and economies can be built around stops and that so that kind of that is very valuable because when you can impact as that much people government will see and say hey this people is for serious because as for now we are not taken seriously you're just a bunch of nerd guys there doing something they got a page yeah it's good but I'm going to do it by myself in my with my people right so that kind of data is the one that is guaranteed success for the government to see and say yeah let's go open I love the idea of starting with public transportation data in these times when some data might be very controversial that seems like a sure win that you know you want your first engagement with government to allow them to really shine so we had a we had a project that we started it's called it's a slang word for for boss so and we made a video it's a short video it was done by students when we made the approach to them they do it for free because they believe in the idea they believe it will be good and they were very excited about that so with with the citizen on the stop and paying the boss and doing the whole stuff so hopefully this will raise a flag to the government in order for them to open more data yeah absolutely and so that brings me to my last question in New Orleans our Code for America Fellowship I think was the turning point for the recovery and a change in the way that the public was having the conversation with government and they while we were opening the data about blighted storm damage properties the Code for America team was building a thin lightweight app on top that made it really easy for citizens to access and I remember seeing that for the first time in action at a city council meeting and a woman came up to the podium and she said you know I have a complaint about the house next door to me one two three Main Street and she had a paper and it was printouts from light status this Code for America app she gave the address the city council staffers started typing it into the app they started looking at the same information the city's code enforcement director typed it into his his tablet so for the first time since the storm this is seven years after the storm everyone had the same information and they weren't squabbling about what the facts were they were talking about what the solution might be so with that in mind thinking ahead what would you like to see from your government to reshape and enable this type of engagement with the civic tech community to be quite honest I would love to see more government liaisons that are technologists that can actually interact with civic engagement and civic tech we did not have that when we started Code for Puerto Rico we had partners that were very enthusiastic Alberto was one Giancarlos was another but they could do only so much we need people that if somebody comes to me and say oh I want to build this app it seems ridiculous to some civic tech minded person from Puerto Rico to send me a message in Washington DC to like hey I want to build this app what should I do they should think oh I want to build an app for water treatment I should go to the AAA and they have a liaison there that can tell me these are the data sets these are tokens for APIs this is what you have to do with you and actually know what he's talking about that's something that I've never seen and it's incredibly frustrated for somebody that's taking from their time to try to improve their community and actually get squashed down because somebody looks at you with a glazed and that's who me it's like what do you mean or that they actually have a service that we can consume and they say oh we didn't realize we were going to consume it yeah but it's public but it shouldn't be public so we're going to block you off and it's like seriously there's already people that depend on this app they say sounds like a game changer and I went to like emphasize the openness of data governments should get serious about opening data like the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap mapped old buildings for Puerto Rico for the first time ever because the partial data is not open like if that data was opened three years ago like the work would have been a lot less increase in accuracy of geocoding would have been improved businesses would have like built solutions around that right for example so I think this is a turning point like data sets and data that is valuable important via like APIs or whatever it is they should really open them and look for people to contribute and collaborate using them I also think that the government should get serious about their digital services strategy like Pritz is great it exists there's like great people there with good intention highly skilled people but they just need the resources there's so much you could do if you don't have resources if you cannot hire someone if you're told like yeah you need to modernize government but do more with less and there's no budget for that I think there's no room for that there's no seriousness in that discourse absolutely I'm so glad you mentioned the partial data by the way parcels are the unit of recovery there's no other data on top of it so the parcel data was our biggest illicit bootleg data set after Katrina and it was the first data set I opened when I went into local government right now there's buildings but there's no address information about them there's no owner information there's nothing else there's a lot of data that could be added that I know organizations on the ground that they're like going house by house and they have no actual way so it's one area attach it to a person or to a building and measure how successful they're being and there's no room for that anymore I think so I guess government needs to take seriously it's not a new key from above the blog like it's not something they need to do in order to be a bounty we need to do that because everyone is doing it they need to realize they're doing the technology it's not very if they don't realize that then we're going to be at the same place so they need to to realize that the text should be taken seriously I like that text should be taken seriously thank you so much all three of you thank you our next set of sponsors includes a very special one which is the organization I mentioned at the beginning Senadores Puerto Rico our group here in DC yes give it a hand these sponsors are near and dear to our hearts because they are the ones that put the reputation on the line they vouch for these types of efforts so we thank them tonight our next panel also has put their heart into helping these efforts our panel will be growing and sustaining the tech ecosystem in Puerto Rico we're going to get into the nuts and bolts of how we can actually sustain this work I'm going to call our panelists to the front Javier Sade from Fenway Summer former associate administrator of small business administration Greg Gersham CEO and founder of ad hoc LLC formerly of the US digital service and Sofia Stolberg the founder and CEO of Piloto 151 and co-trotters $25 everybody $25 so I think that one of the first things that obviously the tech ecosystem noticed post-hurricane was that the tech ecosystem that had worked so hard to build that had been cited as one of the tech hubs to watch by Inc and many other platforms it was hurting and so I think I'm going to start with you Sofia I want you to talk a little bit about the data I'm going to put that up and get us going with that can you tell us a little bit about what you asked of the tech ecosystem the information you got back and what that means and what we're doing about it and we have some very basic questions we asked do you have power and energy and do you have access to internet so you can continue working we also asked are you working do you have work opportunities at this moment and this picture the data that you're seeing in the bag obviously the first thing that you'll notice is that over 50% of respondents said we don't have power and we don't have connectivity but more interestingly I think and I'll talk about how we solved that issue and how we created solutions for that but more interestingly is that 100% of the people that responded to the survey said even if they had power and connectivity 20% had power and connectivity 25% a full quarter where in the states had relocated had connectivity but none of them had job opportunities or work opportunities and this was across the board not just freelancers but members of the community who had start ups that were no longer relevant in the post Maria reality so very big problem for us and I think I'll just mention briefly what we did about the connectivity issue we at Piloto 151 were fortunate enough to have a generator and we were up and running five days after the hurricane but Piloto is not huge and it's in San Juan and a lot of people had connectivity so one of the great things that happened and this was just recently was that we were able to partner with government we were able to partner with the economic development department and they created an initiative called co-labs where not just Piloto but also other co-working spaces and other universities and other spaces and offices that were available and that had power and resources for the tech community and for people to get back to work so that was priority number one and we've done a lot to do that now priority number two which is getting people back to work and finding opportunities for them is a little bit more complicated can you talk a little bit about the tech hire initiative I know you've been leading that and I know that's one solution something that you've been working on for a while and I'll put that up so folks know where to look but I think that it was a solution created a number of years ago that Piloto has been leading in Puerto Rico and you talk about how this could be leveraged and then we'll go to Greg to see how companies have concretely leveraged these types of solutions absolutely so the tech hire initiative for those of you that don't know it it's actually a national initiative in the mainland it was started by the Obama administration and the purpose of the initiative was really to have job seekers from marginalized communities and regions and cities that were not major tech hubs participate in the upside of the tech sector economy and so basically what the tech hire initiative did or does to this day is it pairs it partners with both employers on the one hand people that are looking for tech talent and are having challenges finding that talent and on the other hand it partners with accelerated training providers so coding boot camps right that can teach people how to code and skill up in a matter of weeks or months and Puerto Rico and this is going on at nationally at around over 70 communities I think there's 75 communities right now Puerto Rico last year in part because of our efforts through Code Trotters which is our our coding boot camp we were able to participate in tech hire and so now what we have been doing is we've been partnering with employers not just in Puerto Rico but employers also stateside and saying Puerto Rico has amazing tech talent because it does right I mean you've heard from the Maria Tech Brigade there's lots of tech talent here stateside but there's also a lot of great on tap tech talent back home as well and opportunity for employers to really think about hiring remotely right think about what it really means to to do that hire from somebody in Puerto Rico first of all the cultural fit is there of course it's better than outsourcing to India you have you know the same time zone which is actually a very important piece of the pie as well it's great talent and if you're hiring them remotely then it will be more cost efficient than hiring a program a programmer say in New York City right or in Silicon Valley so we are reaching out this is a call to action for all of you that have companies IT companies out there that are looking for tech talent that are looking for the best in the brightest minds and that are open to remote working and remote hiring and if you are one of those few companies out there then we encourage you to fill this survey at this website so Greg on to you you have actually done some of this employing remotely you take it to another level though it's almost exclusively remote can you tell us what that looks like what's been important to you and what companies could look to do to get in on this game as well as what policies need to be in place for this to work so we started the company ad hoc we do software development design product development mostly with government federal and state government customers we started the company and you know we I had a background in consulting my partner had been working in start-ups and so we were in two different cities at the time when we started the company and so we worked remotely we hired two other people in you know different parts of the country and so you know our team kind of got started remote and as we grew we just you know continued through with that and you know at some point realized hey we've got a team of ten people and we're all in different places and so it made the conscious decision from that point out that the company would be a remote first company and so as we built the team and now we have over a hundred people we we've built that into our culture and into how we recruit and how we you know how we build the teams you know taking advantage of people from all over all over the US we have initiatives in our company that focus on diversity and inclusion and one of the diversity aspects that we look for is geographic diversity because we feel like it helps us as a team especially working with government customers you know bring better representation of people from you know all over we have people in 25 different states so all over the country and there are different perspectives on things one thing which has been really really important for us in building this team has been you know building a remote first culture which is very different than a lot of companies that have remote workers if they have a headquarters and that's where everyone works remotely are very much you know second class citizens to to the rest of the company what has been really important for us and really allowed us to scale to 100 people and still be very effective build very effective teams that work well together has been making sure that we don't create that kind of tiered structure in terms of our employees and so you know everything from not having a headquarters that really takes over the company and really becomes the hub of where everything works and is done but you know really having you know having the online presence you know Slack you know Google Docs Google Hangouts and things meet and things like that really have those things be the core tools that the company uses and the core space that the company kind of puts itself into have really been instrumental in allowing us to do that and I think it's really you know it's been eye-opening to me and you know not having really known how to do this from the beginning but you know kind of thinking at it thinking through it as we go through it has been has been really interesting to kind of see how we make those decisions to really make everyone feel a part of things and really build a good inclusive team so I think those are those are very key things to rolling this out as you bring in remote workers to your company so Javier I want to go to you and ask you a little bit about this concept of exporting services and in many discussions you hear how Puerto Rico has really not leveraged that aspect of the talent it has could you speak to that as it relates to the topic of sustaining this tech ecosystem but also a little bit deeper in terms of during your years in government I know you were at the forefront of a lot of these economic incentives and programs that would help economies and different regions of the United States get on its feet and take advantage of programs what is out there that Puerto Rico may be using but not as much and that is still untapped so thanks for the question and thank you for having me this is an important conversation look just on the last two panels one thing that was really clear to me and I'll kind of tie it into your question because we're in DC I'm answering my own question that's how it works here is that it's about culture right if you want the government to be more innovative government is not a black hole it's people and if you want to replicate what the USDS or AT&F did in other places it's about that the other thing that somebody said in the last panel is that when people think about tech it's kind of like an ugly step child let me tell you something I don't know if you've heard the term fangs Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google combined market capital companies is north of three trillion with a T by the way T trillion dollars so I don't know in what world is tech an ugly step child it's 12% of the global GDP in the US it's growing and in a place like Puerto Rico now answering your question where the actual tangible asset in an information driven economy is people in a highly educated workforce which is brain I'm going to leave aside the glass half empty situations there's a brain drain we all know the issues but the fact is that just how Japan Singapore Hong Kong many other essentially island nations were able to develop an information driven digital people driven economy Puerto Rico can also do it and somebody mentioned earlier that this disaster and it was a disaster on top of the fiscal disaster dear fiscal board is actually a good opportunity because it's a blank sheet of paper and when do you get an opportunity to have a blank sheet of paper now you can put your head in the sand and complain and that's not what obviously anybody here is doing so that blank sheet of paper allows you to do things differently and people won't have a lot of reasons to complain because things are tough so some things I saw in my shorts two-and-a-half years since in government running investment and innovation for the SBA were that entrepreneurial ecosystems in the United States just like Piloto 151 are the life blood of a lot of economies that are not Silicon Valley so we should encourage and have the startup ecosystems and the startups leverage a lot of these programs the SBA has the 7A loan program the 504 loan program the 8A which classifies you as a minority or women-owned business there's all kinds of issues with those there's a SBIR program which if you don't know I happen to have run that program it's the U.S. government spends $140 billion in R&D 3 billion of it is for small businesses Puerto Rico since 2008 guess how many people have applied to that program that has given billions and billions and billions to startups one is does that make sense to anybody here no and it happened to be not that there's anything wrong with this a Korean professor based in the Mayagüez engineering school it made no sense this is money available to all Americans DOE the Department of Energy has a still has authority or 41 billionish I googled it I didn't know it 41 billionish to give companies attempting to do guess what Puerto Rico needs right now a way to rethink its energy grid 41 billion to do all kinds of things and this is not just solar and there's kind of stuff Tesla's doing with their batteries in the hospitals in Puerto Rico but all kinds of things let me introduce you what is the obstacle to more applicants from Puerto Rico I think it's I think it's like every good answer a three-legged stool one leg of that stool is awareness and education and that is two ways that is people not searching out of and I think the mentality is changing not looking outside of Puerto Rico for things that are mine because you're all you're in Puerto Rico you're an American you should be going just like any other American anywhere else the other one is maybe a little bit of cultural I don't know if I'm going to get it and it's too much work and the RFP process is brain damage we were talking about RFPs earlier you actually get brain damage in RFPs and how do you simplify those to get people to participate and the other one is that when people think about tech people immediately go to IT to ones and zeros but the reality is that tech is better than that 3D printing and manufacturing in the physical world tech is changing all kinds of things it's not just Google selling ads or Facebook which is also in the business of selling ads it's not about just ones and zeros there's all kinds of things happening I mentioned DOE there's a similar program at the Department of Agriculture that's another thing that Puerto Rico I don't know what the number is one of the crops decimated something like that the Department of Agriculture they're well known for the loans for people to buy houses in rural areas of the United States but they also have all kinds of loans for people to finance a new way of growing coffee oh and by the way we'll finance the land to do it so there's all kind of I'm not saying dependent on the government but there's stuff there in the dollar budget that Puerto Rico is actually not leveraging for a lot of structural issues but anyway I don't know if I answered the question you did and you answered your own question too going back to this idea of blank slate we talked about the beginning reimagining Puerto Rico what are some things and I'll say this we don't know what's going to happen with this package we don't know how much aid will come when it will come so in many ways we can say that we do have a blank slate and that we have to sort of take matters into our own hands quite a bit here and we have to think that way and be prepared and so thinking of that blank slate what things can the ecosystem in Puerto Rico do for investors for companies that want to come in for people that would see that blank slate as an opportunity so I think first and foremost a lot of companies are going to start looking to Puerto Rico as a pilot testing ground because of the post Maria situation there is new opportunities for companies working in energy and clean tech can successfully test and pilot their technologies and their products and services so we're hoping to attract into our ecosystem companies that are looking for that opportunity in a landscape that has because of the hurricane provided those opportunities to them the other thing is that I think that we are going to see a lot of our entrepreneurs that are staying spawning new ideas that are hurricane proof so before we were really good at the recession proof businesses and a lot of us built those companies successfully and now we're going to start building hurricane proof companies as well so I think that I'm optimistic that we'll be able to do that and part of that is also leveraging civic tech and we hope that government will open more data and that our entrepreneurs and our startup founders and leaders will be able to leverage that data and start new companies that are as I mentioned hurricane proof I wanted to add to that two weeks ago I went to Stanford for a conference on human automation and there was a particular group of Japanese startups many of them had a lot of the things that we're looking for in Puerto Rico resilient building materials there's disasters in Japan all the time they've learned how to build in a different way water filtration a lot of agritech and we had a conversation and I said you know I'm really interested in this idea of you coming to Puerto Rico taking your solutions there seeing how we might apply them and they wrote back their team is ready to go they want to come these are opportunities where if you're iterating on a product or solution having a playground like this where you can test and at the same time offer a service and offer a solution to the ecosystem it's another opportunity in that blank slate so let's do one final round I'm going to go to each of you to tell me one thing that the ecosystem can do and one thing that the government can do local government can do and you can slice a government slash fiscal board dear fiscal board to sustain this ecosystem to help it grow again to what it was but maybe even better let's start with you Greg sorry I would sort of echo the comments about a blank slate one of the hardest things to deal with is legacy infrastructure and if you have a situation where you can start over that's a great opportunity to do things the right way from the beginning and not be beholden to anything that you had in place the other thing that I would say is don't underestimate the need to market yourselves whether that is your people your resources the talent that you have or the opportunities that you have if you are a government and you want to attract people it is not enough to just put it out there on a website and hope that people will come you have to aggressively market and go after and find the people that you want to work with and get them to come to you make them make it known reach out to them that there are opportunities there and bring them in and encourage them to look you know it takes a little bit more work but you will get better results if you reach out to the right kinds of people thank you, Sofia so I think that in Puerto Rico lately we've been saying this a lot but one thing that the ecosystem can do everyone can do really is reinventarse reinvent yourself we need to start thinking export first remote first in the short term and I think a lot of our companies are doing that a lot of our tech community is doing that and we need to continue pushing because this is also an opportunity to get our products and services out into the world and to ride this wave of attention that we're getting right now and one thing that government can do I'm going to say two sorry the first is pass the legislation so we need Pritz and we need the CIO to clear mandate and authority to be able to enact digital policy that's the first thing and then the second thing is with that authority and that mandate open data and let us as a tech community take advantage of that build companies on top of that and leverage civic tech I see that we're out of time so I'm just going to say whatever they said at the end of the day the blank slate cannot be that is the marketing actually if I were to think about it that is actually the marketing you do for companies to relocate for people to relocate for new money to be tried for little pilots or in the words of technologists agile development or hackathons you can do that with all kinds of things now but we gotta try it and necessities the mother invention is that right so blank slate is the mother of also inventions so anyway I think the blank slate is actually the real opportunity thank you join me in thanking our panelists what are the payment options available for the t-shirt credit card so somebody in the audience asked me how do I get my t-shirt I love how it looks over your elegant black dress now you know you can go to the website so our next session we'll take us back a little bit to when Promesa as it is fondly known was first drafted we're gonna go back a little bit we are going to welcome to the stage Bill Cooper he's a drafter of the 2016 Puerto Rico Oversight Management and Economic Stability Act and our moderator Giancarlo Gonzalez this session is brought to us by our special sponsor for the night Oracle so Bill a man who drafted part of our constitution well I really would have liked to have done that so Bill you drafted Promesa one thing that I have found is that it could be interpreted it's subject to interpretation I've read it many people have read it and depending on who I talk to they interpret it differently in your view what was the initial objective of the board I want to issue a cautionary statement I think on the front end I haven't practiced law for a number of years drafted a lot of legislation it's easy to read the words for what you want the words to say it's difficult to read the words for what the words actually say so I think one of the fundamental tenets of drafting legislation is drafted so that if you read the words for what the words say it should be clear in its intent and it should be clear in the path forward so I believe that Promesa is clear on its face when you read it for what it actually says but therein is the difficulty and a lot of folks have want to imprint their vision or their view on the bill and it leads to erroneous conclusions so the intent behind it it's really hard to say that there was any one particular intent but I think the fundamental aspects of the bill was how do we craft legislation that provides the tools for an oversight board to do what up until that point in time was not being done by the government and yet respecting the sovereignty and the self-governance of the Commonwealth Government so we tried to thread that needle and I think the way we did it was to allow the oversight board a fair amount of authority on the backside and through the implementations of the fiscal restraints to in essence guide the government in the proper direction so that there would be fiscal responsibility in the future and a return to the capital markets I think the big key that people gloss over a lot of times when they think about this bill is Puerto Rico has to figure out a way to return to the capital markets in a way that it can afford what we know to be the inevitable infrastructure projects they're going to come into the future and to ignore that it's going to drive the cost of borrowing up it's going to make it more difficult for those projects to come to fruition and there's really not any other backstop how do you think the board carried out its role to achieve that objective up to this point premaria in terms of getting that groundwork done to do what the government had not done let's take for example financial systems at the treasury or having a solid base of employees to really carry out data functions or information how did you think they carried out what the objective of that baseline that you talked to was what promesa what promesa is in its most fundamental basis is a how-to manual for the oversight board to execute its statutory mandate now it doesn't specifically say you have to have these number of employees you have to do it this particular way you can't outsource it or you must outsource it to professionals but the intent was that the board would operate in a fashion like most boards of directors set a broad policy and look for ways to make the commonwealth government particularly on the finances more transparent more accountable to the people and to do that we felt like the board and the reason we provided the mechanisms we did was for the board maybe to step up to 50 75 people to accomplish those goals with the main goal being doing the forensic accounting necessary to figure out what the true numbers really were and that wasn't explicit and the board shows a different route as far as the way they to be more like a managing board and to outsource a lot of the work to contractors versus bringing that in-house and the past panels they've talked about the importance of hiring bringing that talent in it's been highlighted by Aaron from ATNF it was highlighted in the next panel we need to bring the talent in the board now has the authority it's now going to exercise the authority to review contracts do you think that's something they should have started doing before they're going to start doing it now the process to go about that was that what did you mean when you wrote that in there giving them the authority and how do you see that playing out there was a big discussion when we drafted that language that originally the language read that the oversight board must review all contracts and it became readily apparent that that would be an incredibly overwhelming job for the board to review every single contract that the common wealth and every single instrumentality entered into so the way we solved it was to say the board needs to be able to do that because if there isn't some sort of oversight in the contracting fiscal plans and budgets don't really mean anything so the way to solve it was to say give the board the power to do it but also give the board the authority to enact you the regulations or policies in how they would manage that so what you see is a cap or a floor price that might trigger that type of review and you said about the timing of it I mean if we had this conversation three or four months ago reasonable minds might have differed in light of what's transpired post Maria and with some of the contracts that Preppa has issued it seems like maybe hindsight is 20-20 so another part of the bill that I was actually particularly a fan of is that it says that the board may detail federal employees to the authority and I thought when I read that hey we could request detailing U.S. digital service 18F people and actually build a highly capable digital team and what did you have in mind when you wrote detailing employees I mean was it actually a way for the board to actually staff some of the top talent that we maybe actually need to hire absolutely one of the problems that we faced was if the oversight board in the commonwealth government were really working hand in hand and trying to resolve the past accounting issues get a true number on the revenues and expenses try to get the budgets balanced and then get the oversight board out of a job it's difficult to go hire people and say we want you to come to work for us and oh by the way your job is only going to last five years so the concept was that if you could get detail ease from the proper places in federal government to do the work that needed to be done those detail ease would still be paid by the federal government would still enjoy their retirement still enjoy their benefits and still have a job at the end of the term of the board that was a concept behind it. Plus it's a good place to go for a lot of skill sets quickly that you may not be able to go find if you're in the open market keeping in mind that the oversight board when it was formed needed to ramp up very quickly had no HR department no benefits no recruiting effort for employees and they had all these other problems that came in facing them immediately so the Detail E program was a good way to get that talent and get it in a hurry so Judge Swain in her ruling said the board and the government must find ways to collaborate and see the biggest problem that the board has is its data, financial data from what you saw in these other panels how could the board leverage some of these technology resources to say you know what we're going to try to move forward and use the authority they have to invest in the treasury and maybe in financial systems to actually improve on a specific problem that we have which is the financial data and reporting do you think we need more changes in the bill or could they just use what they have to actually improve on this? The power is there in promesa what we found out through the process of negotiating the language drafting the language and meeting with all the various stakeholders was that the accounting systems were antiquated at best for instance tax abatement agreements were not centralized they were in various drawers in various departments and people didn't even know what they were so there was no way really to account for the influx of money and the outflow for expenditures to anywhere approximate generally accepted accounting principles or standards so the idea was that I guess the way we thought about technology is not a means it's not an end in and of itself it's a means to an end so that to make sense of all what we perceive to be an accounting mess technology would have to play the role to pull all that together so that information would be available to those folks that need to make the decisions in real time and then it would be more transparent and folks that wanted to know what was going on would be able to find out And now post Maria what should be in your view the board's most important role as we look to rebuild I don't think you can say there's any one particular substantive aspect that the board needs to address but certainly the board needs to be a facilitator it needs to facilitate modernizing the commonwealth government and all of its instrumentalities to be able to provide affordable and reliable services to the people that pay for it that should be the goal of any government and the oversight board in particular is empowered to facilitate that end result and I would hope that that's what they would focus on If they can facilitate finding the best for the job that would be great and and in your view do you think there's going to be a change in the promesa bill from what it currently is or do you think it's going to as it is should help carry out the functions at your I don't think there's going to be a change in promesa in any fundamental way it's impossible to predict what may happen in the future of any piece of legislation but the bigger the legislation the more major the legislation the more difficult it is again because congress would only say I thought we dealt with that we're done and they move on to other massive problems for instance you do promesa then you've got an election then you have tax reform or you've got healthcare issues that come up and there's always some bigger issue coming down the pike so I don't see wholesale changes in promesa but it would go so far as to say that I think promesa provides the tools necessary for the work that needs to be done promesa does creates two things it creates the opportunity for cooperation and it creates tension and the way that's solved depends upon the way the various groups purpose to work together the tension is that the oversight board under promesa doesn't have the plenary power to just do what it wants the cooperation is that it has the opportunity to facilitate a fresh look at the way the commonwealth works by working with the governor and the legislative assembly to achieve fiscal plans that are rational that makes sense and put the commonwealth back on the track to regain access to the capital markets and it does that with budgets too it's almost it's not designed to be an incredibly efficient process it's a process that's designed to build a consensus necessary so that everybody has ownership in the outcome if we look one year into the future and where would you want to see the board and the government in terms of their working relationship and what we have achieved to that point we're sitting again here in a year and I think I think in many respects the hurricane has has caused a tremendous setback and it's exposed a lot of weaknesses in the system that here to for may not have been exposed so with that stress that added stress I think it makes it a little more difficult for people to see their way clear in the middle of the crisis what I would hope to see is that maybe that there would be a reset button of some sort the oversight board needs to work with the governor and vice versa the oversight board and the governor need to work with the massive amount of debt and bond holders that are out there that may be critical to regain access to the capital markets got to figure out a way to take care of retirees and their needs so that's only going to happen through cooperation running out of time one Title V talks about infrastructure I think there's a lot of digital components here to revitalize talking about data parcel data so important for rebuilding we don't treat digital infrastructure digital as infrastructure I think Title V may help do that any recommendations for how to perhaps make Title V more influential in looking at the digital infrastructure aspect well I think the first thing I would do is try to bring it to the attention of the infrastructure coordinator and solicit his help because that's what he's there for the idea behind Title V was that in any permitting project the bureaucratic red tape is enough to strangle the project before it even gets started that seems particularly so in this instance so the idea was we need somebody that can clear out the underbrush for applicants get the projects going I think that would be my first stop Bill, thank you very much for your thoughts you can engage with anybody else that may have a question later in the cocktail good I've got a bunch of broken electronics if you all want to come up I'll get you to fix it right thank you that our event is coming soon to a close we have a special treat for our closing remarks with us tonight will be Vivian Graubard she's a director of strategy and public interest technology at New America before joining New America she worked at the White House as a founding member of the U.S. Digital Service and also as a senior advisor to the U.S. Chief Technology Officer there her work focused on the intersection of technology and policy implementation particularly on issues affecting vulnerable communities we want to learn from you tonight Vivian take us home join me in welcoming Vivian to the stage the remarks is a lot I'm really going to I wanted to just bring this to a wrap and thank you all for being here so like Sarantas said I am the director of strategy for the public interest technology team here at New America with the goal of doing a lot of the work that we were doing in government improving government digital services for nonprofits for local government for the large institutions that serve as a cornerstone for serving vulnerable populations and so a few things that I wanted to recap as Giancarlo and Francis were asking questions and as Denise were asking questions I was sitting in my seat and thinking like I want to answer that I want to answer that question and so I thought I'm going to go panel by panel and just throw in all of my candid remarks very quickly so you know I wanted to talk about procurement because as we when we started our program the first thing that we did that we decided to do like any good technologist was go out and do a bunch of field research on the existing civic tech ecosystem and one thing that came up time and time and time again was the importance of procurement and I think it was Giancarlo that asked Shelly and Erin you know how we can't hire people we can't buy things what should we do and I saw both of their faces and I was like here's what we need to do we need to save money on procurement because right now it is a huge cost thing in Puerto Rico so much money goes to waste in federal IT and in local and state government IT and that is money that you could use to hire good people to do good things to better serve the community so I remember thinking if I funny fun fact Giancarlo tried to recruit me last year to take the job of CIO and director of Pritz for Puerto Rico and the governor yeah and I was thinking if I had taken thinking back a year what I might have done was sit line by line and look at every single contract that exists in Puerto Rico today and figure out how to save money on them the second thing that came up in one of the other panels was this notion of democratizing technology today we shouldn't look at this as something that is some sort of like magic magic that happens behind a veil right that only a few experts in the whole country know how to do it's crazy it's absolutely nuts that we think that we need to just call up someone and I say this about ourselves someone who worked at USDS someone that worked at 18F someone that worked at Code for America those can't be the only people in the world that know how to do this work it needs to be everyone in every community that thinks about this job technology must be intersectional right I think about intersectional feminism and I also think about intersectional technology right it should be technologists sitting with the communications directors with the policy people with the subject matter experts with the budget and with the finance teams with the lawyers and designing better programs and better policies that work for everyone and then the last thing hitting on what Bill just said in his conversation with Giancarlo was this idea of and I wrote it down it was engaging everyone in this work right building a platform on which people could really contribute to rebuilding efforts of Puerto Rico and I think so I have my family in Puerto Rico is now with my parents in Miami and I was talking to my mom the other day on the phone and she kept on saying well you know it was the weirdest thing because she was saying the Americans they're not doing enough and I said mommy you keep on forgetting that you are a US citizen and that you are as entitled as anyone else to demand more from your government every single day and if you're angry you have to show up and you have to demand it every single day and it has to be relentless and it can never end and so I wanted to just end on that no and thank all of you for showing up tonight to learn more about these types of efforts in Puerto Rico and I hope that we can move forward together thank you thank you all once more we intend to prepare a report on the results of this event tonight to share with the dear fiscal board the government of Puerto Rico and the House Committee of Natural Resources and Senate Energy Committee FEMA and the White House thank you for coming do what you can from wherever you are with whatever you have we need you Puerto Rico needs you let's reimagine what it can be good night