 Yeah. Good morning everybody. Good morning. Hello. The internet is watching. We're going to start in about as soon as we can get everyone to their seats, we will start. We've designed the day intentionally to create lots of space for people to have conversations, but we do have a little bit of programming, and so we're going to interrupt the conversations and ask you all to take your seats for a minute, and I will begin calling out individual names I see still chattering out there. Michael and Lori, please come on down and take a seat down here and be part of all the product you guys have pulled together. Chris Barr. Chris Barr in the back there. Come on down. Lead some people down with you. Yasha, we want you to join us. Professor Darren Walker is coming down. We're ready to start everybody. Thank you so much. Apologies to those of you watching on the live stream. We're getting a later start than we anticipated today because of some machinations on the New York City subway system. So some of our participants and some of our guests are stuck on trains and delayed, and I'm going to keep delaying for a minute more and see who else break up some more conversations in the back. Mark, can you whistle? Come on down everybody. Thank you so much. My name, I'll be your hectorer today. My name is John Bracken. I run the technology innovation program at Knight Foundation along with my friend and colleague Mark Sermon will be your your host and your emcees for the day. My first task is to introduce us to our host. In 2011, Anthony Marks was appointed president and CEO of New York Public Library in where we are today. The nation's largest library system. Tony's been an inspiration I think for a lot of us across the country, not just as a spokesperson for libraries and their importance in the digital age, but in particularly for articulating and investing in forms of ensuring that the internet reaches everyone in society. And I think that's going to be a core component that we hear about throughout the day. Knight's been lucky enough to work with New York Public Library support projects like such as the space time directory and a library lending hotspot program. And he's been lovely in us to when we bring try to bring together friends like we are today to work with us to host it here in this beautiful beautiful building. So Tony, take it away. Thanks for having us. Congratulations to those of you who survived the subway this morning. I was on the subway. There was no problem. So I'm taking no excuses. It's wonderful to have you all here. Let me just give a quick commercial why you're in the building today during a break. Don't if you haven't, don't miss going directly across the hall. The Rosemaine reading room is I think in my view the greatest public room in the city of New York possibly beyond that. And it opens at 10 and by about 10 45 every seat will be filled. It is inspiring to see people coming to the library to be inspired by these amazing spaces and there are lots more in the building which you should explore, but also being inspired by each other at a moment when we are fracturing or have fractured library. This library, all of our libraries are the places where we come together. If we want an open society, if we want a civic society, libraries have always been at the foundation of that vision and they must be even more given the challenges of the day. So thinking about your topic of the day, I couldn't help but go back to think about Mr. Gutenberg. Usually the Gutenberg, the oldest Gutenberg Bible is in the hallway outside, but it's currently being restored. I apologize. And of course we know that the Gutenberg revolution massively expanded access to information and books. We also should remind ourselves that that is not what Gutenberg's initial intention in inventing the printing press was. Gutenberg actually wanted to make money by selling mass produced indulgences. Interesting that tech revolutions of information often begin with indulgences. And here we are. You can't make this stuff up. Here we are in the middle of the next tech revolution and there are some indulgences. But the one thing that we mustn't indulge is the unequal distribution of the access to that connectivity and to what it brings. Not everyone is connected, though I bet everyone in this room sort of takes this little gizmo or its type for granted. In fact, in the city of New York we think there are about two and a half million of our fellow citizens in the United States. We think there's something in the area of fifty five oh million Americans who don't have basic broadband access at home. They can't do their homework. They can't look for a job. They can't have access to all this amazing information. And that is actually quite shocking. It's all the more shocking because we're living in a moment in which the FCC is reversing course dramatically on what was efforts that we were involved with them in solving the digital divide. As you heard from John, we got creative. We started lending 10,000 households, Wi-Fi or broadband to take home for a year at a time. We raised the money. I'll thank some of the supporters for that in a minute. But not only to do that in New York, but in Kansas and Maine. That was surely the first time the New York Public Library has raised money for Kansas and Maine libraries because we wanted to prove that there is a national solution. We still need to find that national solution. We also need to make sure that everyone has the basic skills to use this technology. Connectivity isn't enough. The New York Public Library now teaches a hundred thousand people a year. Basic computer skills. We are the provider of free coding instruction in the poorest neighborhoods of New York. We have 5,000 people on a wait list for those 12-week courses. The majority of the participants are women. The majority are minority. And the persistence rate is well over 95% for the 12-week courses. We have to meet those needs. And I'll say more in just a minute about the content. It is the library's job. It is all of our jobs to make sure that the technological innovation of the day does not continue to widen the gaps that already exist. Because left to its own devices, it will do that even though we assume something different. This library is particularly positioned, as John said, to play a role. In part because we are the biggest, most used library. John, it's in the world, not in just the United States. Sorry, I'm the president. I have to say that. Of course, that means our branch is 40 million physical visits to the branch libraries throughout the city of New York a year. That's more than all the museums and sporting teams combined. That's very good news for the life of the mind. 500% increase in English language instruction for immigrants. We're teaching citizens skills. We're having legal services in the libraries. We're doing everything we can because we know we have the access to the people who are in need and they need more than ever. We can't do any of this alone. And some of our partners, some of our supporters are here today. So that Wi-Fi hotspot lending program was supported by the Knight Foundation and the Open Society Foundation. We're now working with thanks to the Ford Foundation in a project I'll describe in just a second on an author's portal in terms of content. Both, all three, Knight Open Society and the Ford Foundation supported our acquisition announced last week, I think, of the James Baldwin archive. And that is remarkable. It only took five years of negotiating. And it's just fabulous to have that archive. And of course, working with MacArthur and Mozilla's Hive through the years as well. So thank you all for that. Today's topic is the Internet of Things. And I'll confess I'm mostly here to learn. I have a few questions that I'm going to be listening for answers to. One, I know we're going to talk about, Chris and I were just mentioning to each other, privacy issues. I said toasters are going to talk to each other. Chris said, no, toasters are going to be spying on us. Sorry, I stole your line, Chris. So of course, privacy and here at the library, you know, where we destroy the records of what you've read as soon as you return the circulating book, we, we're very eager to ensure that privacy. Second topic I'm going to be listening for is jobs. If the Internet of Things is designed to create greater efficiency in our lives, that's fabulous. But who pays the price of that efficiency? Let's just say, I'll be a little coy, we have just seen what it does to our politics, to global politics now, to ignore at our peril when people feel that there are no jobs in their future or their children or communities future. That's not an argument against efficiencies. It's an argument that says if we just focus on the efficiencies and enjoy the profits thereof and ignore those who are paying the cost of it, we will pay the cost of that. And we are today paying that cost. And then thirdly, because we are a library, efficiency, if it works, means you have to spend less time thinking about the things that the machines are now doing the thinking for you. That's great. I want to know what we're going to do with the attention, the mental energy freed by that. We live in a world where profit driven assumptions are grabbing our attention for, and I'm told I'm supposed to be polite, superficial activities. That was actually polite. And those are massive and they are filling our lives and our children's lives. That is a tragedy. It is not what this amazing technology wants to bring. It's like the indulgences to start with at the Gutenberg era. I believe that we as a society, as a world, have barely begun to tap the intelligence, the aggregated mental activity of the world. Not even close. This device, this technology is the greatest tool to turn that around. We will probably ever have. And we're not using it for that. So here's what the library, this library and all libraries that I talked to together are committed to. We are committed not only to helping people get connectivity, to learn how to use that connectivity, but to fill that connectivity with all of the world's quality information. We aspire as a collective to get every book ever written on these devices for anyone in the world to read for free through their libraries. That's the vision. The technology makes it possible. There are some rights issues. You may have read some about that. Susan and I have talked about it. I love when I have to talk to lawyers about library work. It's why the Ford Foundation is supporting our efforts with the Authors Guild, why we're working with the Digital Public Library of America, with the Internet Archive, with the Library of Congress, with all the great libraries of America and of the world to say, what will it take to break the logjam that Google couldn't solve? How do we get all that material up? Not two sentences, not snippets, that's superficial, but all of it. How do we change the graph of reading that is now so focused on bestsellers because that's what people have access to, thicken the long tail so that all of the information that is held in those millions of books in this building is unleashed into the world again so that people can contribute the next generation of wisdom? If the Internet of Things enables us to have more time to dig into that information and use our brains to solve our problems and to create new solutions, that will be a great thing. And I hope today's discussion will help to lead the way towards that result. Welcome to the library. Thank you, Tony. So many of you were with us two years ago when the Ford Foundation hosted us for the first NetGain collaboration. NetGain, for those of you who don't know, is five foundations working together to address public interest technology issues. We've spent in those two years working together. We've explored issues, but we've also invested in those issues. We've made over $22 million in grants together. And it's been, I think, for all the foundations involved. It's been a real additive to all of our work. This year's focus, as you know, because you're here and you responded to the invitation, is on the Internet of Things. And I'm going to ask Mark to say a couple things about that context. And just to be... Feel free to introduce me. Mark Sermon, the president and executive director of Mozilla Foundation. I didn't know what you were about to do. That's exactly what I was about to do. My friend, John. Thank you, John. And just in full open source transparency spirit, do we have our next speaker as we go to pass after her? We do not. She was stuck on the train. She's 10 minutes away. All right. So that means we have to talk for 10 minutes. Can we talk slowly? I don't know if I can talk slowly. So we may have a brief pause or John will come back and do a dance. Anyways, welcome to the third NetGain event. You know, I would frame NetGain a little bit differently than John and really riff off what Tony said. What I think of, and Darren sort of originally convened us, I don't know, four years ago to talk about this, to have a conversation that I thought really to be, as philanthropy, as the people who work for social good in this room, what do we use this for? And you know, if I look at the current environment, those of us who have stood up for the idea that this is a source of hope and opportunity. And as Tony said, often we assume it will be that, have looked up over the last year after the last six months and to be in play, I think I could be in place your house, Tony, so I don't have to be polite, right? It's like, holy shit, what did we build? And I think we really are at a crossroads where it is incredibly clear that this can be for hope, it can be for the mind, it can be for democracy, or it really can be something that divides us, something that fractures us, and something that creates outcomes that are not the outcomes we want. And what NetGain is, I think, is a seed of the philanthropic community asking how do we go down the good path or maximize the good path of where this goes and mitigate or avoid and at least be aware of the risks that we're facing. And that's just a seed of that conversation. I mean, how I think about it often is, you think about the environmental movement inside of conservation and parks, in the 50s there were no environmental programs in any foundations anywhere in the world. And now I assume both Ford and Soros and most of our colleagues have done or are in, you know, the environmental space and we certainly agree it is an issue of importance. We're at that same spot of say the 60s or the 70s when Rachel Carson, you know, first talked about DDT and Silent Spring or when Greenpeace sort of brought the issue of the environment into the public consciousness that what we decide to do with this, what path we go, is an issue of public concern. And that of course is what philanthropy does is try to make sure we go in the right way with issues of public concern. So that's a, you know, I would kind of paint out NetGain a little bit more broadly in that and then say, you know, why IOT in that? You know, I guess a quick poll is how many, because Tony came to learn, so just get a sense of the room. How many people feel like IOT is an easy to explain concept for you around the dinner table, just a small poll. Okay, well it's an educated room so we can have a very different conversation. For most of the world that is not the case and I think certainly a year ago when we sat around as the kind of core team around NetGain and talked to the presidents, it was like, is this the right thing? It seems kind of a bit narrow. But the thing that we really come to think, and it's in that paper that we named We All Live in the Computer Now, it was a bit of the framing for this year, you know, this thing is jumping outside of itself to surround us completely. What is happening as we talk about things that sound, you know, quite friendly, like a smart home or a smart city is not just that, you know, there's a kind of nice set of shiny design sensors that will plop into our house or into our city, but we are extending the computing environment that we've been building for the last 50 years all around us. And a lot of stuff is good about that. As somebody who grew up tinkering with technology, works as an organization that is about building technology that people like, I'm excited about many aspects of that. But there are very clearly risks and social and ethical questions as we effectively move into the matrix of our own design. So that is really what the conversation is here today, is how do we start to investigate what this next phase of the growth of the computing environment all around of us means? What are the things we want to pay attention in terms of taking it in the right direction socially? And really what can we all do and the people we all work with do to build an internet of things that is good for humanity or extend the computing environment in a way that is good for humanity and not something that creates the kind of surveillance state, the kind of threats to democracy, the kinds of work displacement, which I think we have to have an honest conversation about. That's the last thing I'm going to talk about today. And it isn't an abstract conversation. Because it isn't just the devices you haven't bought yet. It's every time you walk into the Walgreens or the Safeway and use the checkout robot, that's the internet of things. And that's a bunch of jobs. And that's what is going on all around us. And that's a bunch of surveillance. And that's a bunch of shifting in the fabric of the everyday. And so where do we want to take the fabric of the everyday is the exploration for today. And if our speaker had gotten out of the taxi, I would then bring Natalie Segway to talk about Julia Angwin and how incredibly smart she is on these issues and we'll tee us up. Save that for when she walks in in a few minutes. Maybe you'll tell us about how the day will go, John. We could do that. Would you all have the programs and you've been in the event, right? We can walk through. You'll be hearing from many, if not all of the grants that we've been working on over the last year. But I also wonder if we want, you know, using your provocation and Tony's provocation, if getting a sense, we've designed the day to be interactive. We designed the day to minimize people on stage and to maximize the opportunity to converse in the back. And we set a time and hour at the end of the day to actually have a cocktail reception in the back. But I don't know if we want to, in the open-store style, if folks want to ask folks to chime in now about what they're hoping to get out of the day. Tony put himself in learner mode. I don't know if folks want to kind of state out a little bit why they're here. I think it would help some of the presenters to get a sense of who's in the room and what the appetite is. We have Mike, Susan, our major demo here. Yes. My name is Peter Shanley. I work for the Community at Civic Hall here in New York. We're all about convening diverse perspectives to hash out these very challenging emerging technologies and their applications on civil society. And so I'm here to both be inspired from the stage and to make some connections with the folk here. And maybe one question I'll pose as part of this consideration is what's, are you coming here as a pessimist or an optimist? Right. I recall earlier this year I was visiting a library in Charlotte, North Carolina. And I got a question that I'd never received before, which is do you think the internet is a boon for society or harmful to society? And as someone who's worked on helping to ensure that the internet maximizes its impact on humans for most of my career, I was surprised at how much I had to pause to weigh that question. And I have a feeling on this topic it's something that duality is in figuring out the gray areas within that is going to be a key theme today. Anyone else want to share why they're here? Yes. I'm Bob Bennett. I'm the Chief Innovation Officer for the city of Kansas City of Missouri. And we're here today to kind of figure out a little bit. We are about ready to expand our smart city from 51 blocks in the core of our downtown to about 200 blocks in the core of a part of our city that desperately needs this expansion. And we want to do it right. So I'm here to learn. And we'll be hearing from lots of the city folks later on a panel with Susan Crawford. Good morning. I'm Alan Enor with the American Library Association. And I've been thinking about how the nation's libraries can engage in the internet of things in terms of getting the general public more aware and educated about the benefits and the downsides of the internet of things. And indeed what does that actually even mean? Hi. My name is Bruce Lincoln. I'm the co-founder of Silicon Harlem. And one of the things that we're very focused on is that we think that this smart technologies can potentially be a boom, but we think it'll be the next form of the divide that could potentially worsen what we see in Harlem and in East Harlem already, where so many people, I think it's as much as 40%, don't have access to the internet just for means to express themselves or make things better in their lives. Good morning. My name is Leon Wilson. I'm the Chief of Digital Innovation in CIO at the Cleveland Foundation. And we're on the cusp in our early stages of investing and funding in IOT research and R&D in Northeast Ohio. And I'm here to learn and see how I can collaborate more with some of my sister organizations. Good morning. My name is Atsila Amane. I'm a member of ReSync Link NYC. And I'm here to learn about what level the public is being involved in these discussions. Link NYC had no form of public debate in its mass surveillance masquerading as free Wi-Fi for the people. Thank you. Anyone else want to give a little context? All right. Well, as Julia sips some water and dries off from her rush over here, I'll ask Mark to do that wonderful introduction that he started to do without Julie in the room to complete the wonderful introduction to our friend and colleague Julia. Thank you. And I really, again, I'm super glad everybody is here because it sounds like you're coming with a lot of the right questions. And to kick us off, I've had the pleasure of seeing a preview of what Julia Angwin from ProPublica is going to talk about today, which I think will really give us a provocative frame, which probably has a little bit of the optimist, but a good chunk of the pessimist in it. But I think that's important as we dig in. And if you don't know, Julia is, I think, one of the best writers on tech and privacy anywhere. I had a great conversation with her last night and really just super inspired. She wrote Dragnet Nation, which is looking at surveillance issues. She currently writes a ProPublica and was at the Wall Street Journal before that, winning many awards, but more importantly, really digging in with a whole kind of algorithmic investigation approach that Julia Angwin is doing. So I would love to share Julia's wisdom with you or invite Julia up to share her wisdom with you. Thank you guys for bearing with me. If there was one thing I needed this morning, it was the Internet of Things because the subways don't tell you when they're coming. And so I'm sorry that I'm late. I had to run down Fifth Avenue. It was super fun. I'm really honored to be here to kick off this discussion of the Internet of Things and I want to start it with kind of provocative talk about how I see the Internet, also the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things is like a subset of this whole world that we're in, connected all the time. It has the benefits and some downsides. So I think if I click this, something will happen. Yes. So people talk about the Internet of Things like it's just about devices and that's true. It's a lot about hardware. But the way I like to think of it is really about the ability to see everywhere. Because that's what it really means. It means that you can put in to any piece of device or into your walls of your home or whatever, something that will communicate two ways. It'll take in information and send back information. And so that is sort of the great dream of humanity, right? To see places that you aren't physically at, right? So of course it's incredibly alluring to be able to see everywhere. This is what we consider omniscience. It's what we used to call God. So, you know, we are really into this idea of the Internet of Things. And I think it's worth pausing. This is going to be my only moment of optimism, so enjoy it. There are some really great things about being able to see everywhere. So of course you know about the Fitbit. People are tracking their activities, but there is actually benefits that could be done for healthcare. And those are actually being pioneered right now. And that could really change and save lives across ways that we can't even imagine right now. Things maybe we haven't thought about are agriculture. My husband actually works a lot on this in the third world. And so the ability to fly drones over Africa, sense the soil quality, tell the farmers what the best plant with the most yields would be. These are the kinds of things that are going to transform agriculture and yields and help us feed this populist, overpopulous world that we're in. I want to pause and say that I want to go back to the salt treaty, actually. I feel like it wasn't really the Internet of Things, but if you think about the cold war, mainly the reason we were able to avert a nuclear holocaust, putting aside current weirdness, we made a treaty to do remote surveillance of each other's stockpiles. The US and Russia flew planes over each other, and they allowed that aerospace to be used for monitoring the stockpiles in order to keep the threat at bay. Because information is power, and if we had the information about each other's stockpile, we could actually prevent each other from killing each other. And those weren't drones, but I think that that is the kind of benefit of remote sensing that we can envision. You could make an argument that it could end war. I'm not going to make that argument, but I think we have seen some signs that remotely being able to see has great benefits. And so I want to just put that on the table that although the rest of this talk is going to be very pessimistic, there are some great things, and if we can capture all those things, that would be great. So let's go to the downside, which is obviously my favorite part. So you've probably heard all the stories about the teddy bear that kids had, and it was recording their voices, got hacked, all of the kids' voices are out there for the hackers. There's the Jeep that was hacked while the guy was driving it. He consensually agreed to be hacked, but he did end up in that ditch as the hackers took control of his vehicle. There's the router, this D-link that you probably all have in your home actually, and Consumer Reports has been advising you to get rid of it because the FTC just recalled it and filed a case saying that it's deceptive because it is so insecure that it's basically hacked already. And then there's the CCTV cameras that are everywhere, which are also, it turns out, a huge part of this, the Marae botnet. So how many people have heard of the Marae botnet? Oh good, we have a very educated audience. So basically the Marae botnet is for those people. It's a bunch of CCTV cameras and possibly teddy bears and routers around the world that have been hacked and strung together in a way that somebody at a command and control center can control them and use them as a weapon. So this botnet has so many nodes in it, and those are all the nodes around the world, that it can be used to kind of attack and do a denial of service attack. So this botnet has shut down the internet in Liberia. It disabled the internet for a million Germans. It took down the website of a noted security researcher in the US and Virginia. It's a very powerful weapon and what we're seeing is that the internet, the ability to see everywhere is also a thing that can be weaponized and used. And so what does that mean? What are we going to do about that? Most people would frame that as a trade-off. I think one of our lovely congressmen just said this the other day at a town hall well if you don't like these rules about the internet just don't use it. Well that's not an option. That ship has sailed. If we don't use the internet we will not be able to communicate with each other and participate in the modern world. And so I want to reframe the conversation a little bit because it's constantly framed as or. You can have progress or you can have security. You can have convenience or you can have privacy. You can have a techno utopia or you can just be in a techno panic. And this is how it's described to everyone and it makes you feel like well I don't want to be against progress. I'm for convenience. So I guess I just have to give up. I have to give up all the privacy and security and all those things. I'm going to have to be hacked. I'm going to be in a ditch. It's going to be fine. It's going to be worth it. I don't think so. I don't think it's worth it. So I think we have to think about it differently. We have chosen to build this wonderful technology called the internet. It has incredible benefits but we have to pay the bill. And the bill is we chose to make it a decentralized system with many nodes that makes it hard to take down. That was built so it would be robust which also means that you can build a Mirai botnet. We also chose to make it a quote free ad supported system which means that any technology that you don't pay for is going to be spying on you in order to monetize itself. Meaning there's a huge incentive built into the system for over collection of data to sell. And that creates vulnerabilities. And then we also have chosen to make it unregulated. Essentially the internet there are few rules here and there, most of which are being rolled back at the moment. But we've chosen to make it sort of an unregulated platform. And these are things we decided and there are lots of benefits to them but we also have to pay the bill for those things. So I think the bill comes in this form of attack surfaces. Basically the idea is you've built this whole decentralized system and it can be attacked in all sorts of places. The whole point is it's decentralized so there's many nodes of attack. And so security researchers use this term all the time. How big is your attack surface? Can you minimize it? And what that means is how much are you laying open? And every time you basically open up an internet of things port or any kind of connection, a two-way connection, that is a moment of vulnerability and a possibility for attack. So I think there's two kinds of attacks that I want to talk about. There are many types of attacks and if you want to hear them I'll Bruce Schneier will give you a lecture later about that. And already I'm going to just nod to him that everything I learned is from him. But I would like to focus on two things, exfiltration and infiltration. So exfiltration is basically what we call security. It's the theft of your data. It's breaking and entering. Into your home taking your things, right? So there's a data breach where your data is stolen. There's privacy issues where your data is monetized, seems like stolen, whatever. There's theft of money, right? So there's ATMs that have been hacked, there are bank accounts that get hacked, they steal your money. And then there's theft of control. So we're seeing a lot of this with ransomware. It's software that comes in, takes control of your devices until you pay up. And these are sort of the classic security attacks. And I think most of us are familiar with the concept of this threat. And the truth is that this incentive for fixing this are very poorly aligned right now. Basically the person whose data is stolen, the victim of this theft, is usually not the customer, right? Meaning they're not a paying customer who's the company who's in charge of protecting the data it cares about. So if I'm getting ransomware, you know, I call Microsoft, I have a Microsoft operating system, not my fault. Apple, my hardware device, nope, not my fault. It's not anybody's fault, apparently. It's me, I have to deal with it. And this is particularly true in the advertising world where the websites take no responsibility for the ads that are placed on it, and some of those ads contain malware that will steal your data. And then there's also the fact that there's no penalty for companies who lose your data. So we don't have data breach finds. We're currently fighting in this country about data breach notification. And so most states have notification laws but not all. But there is basically no finds. A company that loses all your data just sends you a letter saying you could get free credit monitoring and they fill out some paperwork and they pay their lawyers and they're done. And it's your problem that your data was lost. And so as a result of this, there's no good incentive for a company to protect your data, right? They don't have to pay any money so they're not going to try to mitigate that risk because it would cost them more to try to build a secure network than it would to just pay you, pay the lawyers to send you a letter about your credit notification. And I think the best example of this is the Sony hack. The Sony hack was pretty devastating. It shut down all of their computers for several days. It was attributed to a nation state adversary in North Korea. In their SEC filings, they said the cost of that hack to them was $41 million. To Sony, that is absolutely nothing. I don't know if you remember this movie, Sasha Baron Cohen came out with the Brothers Grimsby last year. Nobody saw it. They lost $1.3 billion on that and that's just the cost of doing business at Sony. So for them, a $41 million loss is not going to incentivize them to do anything. They're not going to say, oh, I'm going to spend $50 million on a better computer security system. Why not just write off $41 million every year? No problem. It's just probably Sasha Baron Cohen's trailer fees. So that is the problem with security. And I want to go back for a second and just say that Bruce has written a whole genre of literature about basically if we could make a risk market arise for insurance where the penalties were high enough, if the penalty for a breach was high enough, companies would actually want to pool their risk. They would get insurers to cover it and then the insurers would demand that they have a certain level of protection and that seems like a really good way to address this problem. But because the costs are so low it hasn't arisen. But now I want to talk about something a little bit controversial. People don't talk about this as much. But I think we have to start talking about infiltration too. So exfiltration is a known risk. Somebody's taking your stuff. What happens with infiltration when somebody gets in and stays in? This is where we get into some kind of loaded words, propaganda, brainwashing. And before you think I'm a total lunatic, let me just give you some evidence of how this is happening. So obviously you know about your Facebook newsfeed is already this is a type of infiltration. You have supposedly chosen your style of infiltration. But you don't control really what gets inserted into your feed. And of course it's extremely political whenever Facebook makes a change. Sometimes last year during the election they thought people were reading too much about cats and not enough about Syria. They started to actually inject news about Syria into people's feeds and everybody went crazy and said no. And so it's very political what you get to inject into the things that people read. And this is something that I as a career newspaper journalist you know we all have taken this very seriously in my profession. The idea is that you're morally responsible for the choices you make about what news to cover. And we've left that behind and now we have sort of unseen forces that can make these decisions for us. Another thing that you probably aren't aware of is that Google is right now in the midst of a losing losing a war on all fronts against fake news. Not just fake news that you think of but fake everything. So I don't know if you know but they have been fighting for years against fake Google map listings. People put up fake businesses in order to trap people into coming to them or thinking they're near something and selling them fake services as a result of that. They have, they say that they've reduced the fake listings by 70% since 2015 but they are constantly battling and they are not winning. And they are the best at winning this game. Right? And then you know as you know they're not winning the battle on fake news. They've added this fact checking effort but the truth is if you read anything and look for news on Google you'll see plenty of things that don't qualify for what I and maybe you would consider legitimate news. And the other thing they're losing is actually they're losing the battle still. They're still losing the battle on search. So I don't know if you have been following this but essentially these are the most recent ones. Did the Holocaust happen? So if you type in did the H and then it starts to autocomplete. So this autocomplete system is extremely vulnerable to gaming because it's a machine learning system and it has a very small corpus that it's built on and so it's extremely vulnerable. So they continue to lose. They've been losing this battle for a straight year. They had our Muslims bad and then they solved that but now it's did the Holocaust happen and why are Republicans so stupid and why are Democrats called snowflakes? These are current searches. I think this was recently and they continue to lose this battle. And so my point being that if Google and Facebook, the two best resourced companies out there on the Internet can't win against infiltration. And that's what this really is. This is infiltration of propaganda. And they're losing. So where does that leave us? We are definitely losing. And the other thing is that it's worth noting that this stuff matters. It turns out that we are manipulated and manipulable by these things. Emotional manipulation online works. So there was the famous study that Facebook did where they made half the people's feeds all depressing and half of them all positive and they saw whether the people became depressed or cheerful and it worked. I don't know if you know about Google's redirect method. Has anyone heard of it? Okay, so Google is doing a service to humanity by attempting to brain wash people who might become jihadis into not being jihadis. And it's called the redirect method. They've applied all sorts of AI and machine learning to it. And basically if you go look at a YouTube video about jihad, they will try to reprogram and send you things that would convince you that jihad is bad. Now obviously this is okay. I mean we're not in favor of beheadings. But it's just worth pointing out these are real things. You can influence people through infiltration. And the large companies are trying to figure out how to do it. And so is everyone else in the whole world. And everyone has the means to do it because our attack surfaces are so broad and so distributed that there's always a way to infiltrate. And our incentives are extremely badly aligned. Right? So the ad tracking model, behavioral advertising that follows you around on the internet, which is the fundamental financial structure of our internet ad businesses, it defunds legitimate journalism and funds illegitimate outlets, right? Places like Breitbart would not have been able to sell ads against Wall Street Journal in the past, right? The Wall Street Journal ad rep would always be able to say, no, you should buy for me instead. But now that the advertisers just track a person off the internet, they can just get them at their weakest, most vulnerable point. And that is the point they want them to be at. They don't want them to be next to really good content that's absorbing. They want them to be in a state of emotional outrage or confusion and then click around to be like, why am I on this page? I better click on this ad to get out. That's like the optimal scenario. And so basically this model of advertising incentivizes the kinds of people who want to do infiltration. And so that is sort of the beginning of a very bad system for this. The other thing is that the advertisers want to find you at their most vulnerable point. And the websites have no responsibility. They say I have nothing to do with the ads. They just come in on some other server. It's like not my responsibility, no legal responsibility, no moral responsibility for it. Nor do they say they have any responsibility for the content. And we made that decision early on in the internet and it's allowed a lot of great things to blossom. But it's also something we have to think about paying the cost for. So really what we've done is we put all the liability onto the readers to learn how they're, what am I reading? Is it true? Is it not true? And that's a lot to ask. I struggle every day with my kids who are 9 and 12 asking me is this real mom that I saw on the internet? Is that real? Is this real? They don't have a way to tell. And I have probably particularly web savvy kids because I've tried very hard to teach them. And so we struggle, we're struggling with this as a society. And so I think, you know, we have to think about the fact, look, we're not going to give up the internet, but we have to figure out how to pay these costs. And one thing we could do is we can minimize the attack surfaces. We could rebalance some of these incentives to try to bring in some of those outliers. And it's like minimize how much we're making ourselves vulnerable, right? And these are provocative questions. But could we start finding data breaches? Could we just have ads that don't track you, but you still see them. They're just like the old time ads where you looked at them and you read it. It was really awesome apparently. You know, this is pretty provocative, but should platforms be responsible for the content? Should they be legally responsible for it, for the ads and content that they show? These are questions we need to ask. Because all these things if we change those incentives, we could change the attack surface. And then we have to admit we're going to get attacked. So we have to think about, well what steps do we have? What do we have at our disposal to deal with an attack? Do we have due process? Do we have the right to see the information that was used against you? Do we have strong prosecution of digital crimes? You know, I think we basically don't. Women who are harassed online would say they're very unlikely to get the police interested in their case. So I think we have to think about how can we add some systems for how we address attacks that are going to happen. I think we do have one model out there that is sort of broken, but sort of works, which is the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which basically says if there's a score about you that's used for important things like getting loans, the FICO score, you get the right to see the data and challenge it, right? So what if that was true about your Facebook newsfeed? You could see the data used to make these decisions. You could adjust it. You could challenge it. These are the kinds of questions I think we need to ask about our future in the world of the internet, which we love, but we need to minimize the threats. And so I guess what I would end with is, look, I know I'm supposed to be talking about the internet of things and your thermometer, but I really want to talk about human rights. I think we have to think about all of these issues in that frame. This is the world we live in. We're all humans interacting with each other. We have to think about how to minimize the threats to ourselves and provide justice if we are victimized. Thank you very much. This is the moment where my friend John comes up and thanks, Julia. Thank you, Julia. We have time for questions. Oh, well, let's do that. So do you want to come back up? Julia, that was great. And I think it connects back to that point, which is really critical that this is not a separate thing from the internet or from the computing environment we've been building, but the internet things is tied to the broader set of questions. So let's take some time for some questions. Any questions? About 10 years ago, we were the White Hat Research Group and we launched Interest Manager. And so we actually focused how we bucketed you for behavioral targeting and let you toggle and say, are you right or are you wrong? Unfortunately, it exposed how terrible Yahoo was at doing this practice. But our research and our program went in front of the federal government. I was watching our general counsel argue that we're doing the right thing. We're doing behavioral targeting the right way. And Google's next to us who does contextual targeting, who actually maps specific keywords to ads and they say, well, we don't behaviorally target. And the government was like, well, we don't have any beef with that. In this IoT world around kind of inferred versus contextual mapping, seeing as hard as it was to have conversations on policy around simpler things than internet of things. Is there like a mapping here that's interesting around usage that's kind of contextual versus usage that we are now talking about? Is there something about you and have an intervention or an action based upon that? I do think that's a good point. There's something that feels like you have more control over it when it's something you've explicitly shared than something that's implicitly inferred about you. And so the movement to add interest managers to all these ad tracking platforms is a good one, although I don't think anyone other than me uses them. And everyone of mine says I'm a well 30 year old interested in technology, which I'm happy to have them think. But I think that essentially I do think that I've always firmly wanted to see all the data about myself and I know that most people, I know want to see it. And so that the right thing to do is to share it, particularly if it's an assumption like that. And that's why I said the fair credit reporting act is a very good model for that because it's something that is inferred from your underlying data, but you do have some rights around it. Any other questions? Hi, Yasha Franklin Hodge of the city of Boston. I know that Europe has a very different approach to privacy and data rights, both sovereignty over one's data, access to information, the right to be forgotten. And I'm curious if looking at that way that those countries have approached this, if there's any lessons that you would say things that have been really successful that we should be trying to adopt here in the US or things that you would say, we thought that was a good way to address privacy, but it hasn't really worked out to have the impact we hoped it would. Yeah, it's a good thing. The European model is that privacy is a human right, so you don't have to fight for that. Right here we haven't even agreed on that. And we only have secular rights to privacy. We have a right to financial privacy, we have a right to educational privacy when you're in school, but not as soon as you graduate they sell everything. So we have these weird pockets where your data is protected under some limited regime. I think that the idea of having a baseline human rights protection that is the minimum standard for all data is a good one, and it has allowed a lot of transparency in Europe that we haven't had so people can ask for their own records from Google or Facebook and get them although it's getting harder and they try to make it hard, but they do have a right to see that. The thing that hasn't worked is that little notice on every website saying there's cookies here you know, opt in. What is your choice? That's not a real choice. I'm gonna not get the information on this site. So I think that one hasn't panned out. No more questions. Thank you again Julia and thank you everybody. So thank you again Julia and thank you everybody. So we are going to take a 15 minute break, which brings us to when? It will be a 10 minute break. So we're gonna grab some coffee, take advantage of the facilities, be back here at 10.50 and we will move on to the panel of the Neckain Presidents. Hello again everyone good morning. Hello. I'm gonna ask you to take your seats again please. I'm gonna ask folks. Come on down Patrick Morgan. Please take your seat. Thank you very much. Come on down. Who else can I see the back there folks? The Berkman Klein Center colleagues. Come on down please. Folks we're gonna start back up. Please take your seats. The Internet is watching us. They're looking at our punctuality. Do we have all the foundation presidents down here ready to go? We're missing one. Three guesses as to whom we're missing. Sam Gill if you could tap the gentleman behind you and ask him to head on down to the panel. Thank you very much. Good luck with that. Nice try. Folks in the back if you wouldn't mind taking your seats please. Andrew Rache if you could accompany a couple of people with you on down. Alright. Alright let's see. Mark Morgan are you down and ready to go? I think we're getting close to having everyone ready to go. Welcome back everyone. Welcome back. If folks in the back could be seated we are ready to start. We are ready to start with our bosses. Our presidents panel. We're really excited. The last remaining folks to come on down. We're getting there. Alright. So we're gonna hear from our first panel and maybe as I'm speaking maybe the first panel might want to come on up. I'd like to introduce Marta Theado who is the president and CEO of Consumer Reports. A former philanthropist herself we should say. And we're really lucky to have her with us to help lead our first discussion. And I'll let her introduce her August colleagues. Bang this is quite an impressive place and I'm just gonna get my things together here. I thought we would take a quick poll. How many of you are first time net gainers? That's good. That's progress because I think Mark you said this is year number four. And the idea is year number three. Karen that convened us for year number zero four years ago. So let's start. Thank you all so much for being here. We have a remarkable set of visionary leaders who are the force and the founding partners behind what we call the net gain movement and cooperation. And I for one spend a lot of my time thinking about the opportunities and the challenges of the internet of things. We in any given years test maybe three to four thousand products and our work world is changing completely because every one of those products moving forward is going to be embedded with code and software and tracking and hacking and all the vulnerabilities we've been talking about. So that is the world I live with every day. But what I'm curious about is that philanthropy is now thinking about the internet of things and worried about what that means for society and culture. So that's what we're gonna begin to today. And first I'm gonna just introduce you to these marvelous people on the panel. But we're gonna do that quickly because there are new net gainers in the room and I know they're curious about who you are. Alberto Ibarguen are built through the president and CEO of the Knight Foundation. And before that he is a former publisher of the Miami Herald. And while he was at the Miami Herald there were one not two but three Pulitzer prizes written by me. But I'll take credit for all of them. Well very well. And of course he is a tireless man of service and sits on numerous boards, World Wide Web Foundation, Arts Boards, you name it. And we're gonna turn now to Mark Sermon. Mark you are a visionary of the open source movement. Absolutely. Mark is at the Mozilla Foundation and he is growing a block of open source people as he moves. That is something that I have been introduced to by Mark. And we first, we launched our first open source project trying to create a digital standard for digital products. And I think you and Mozilla were the inspiration for that. So I want to give you credit. But you've done other things. Telecenter.org. Common Ground Group for ten years. Trying to preach the open source and evangelizing to nonprofits and corporations and governments. Let's turn to Darren Walker, my dear friend and former colleague. Darren, president of the Ford Foundation, the largest, second largest of the nation. Philanthropies. Darren, since your arrival at the Ford Foundation, Darren's had a laser like focus on inequality and it is very timely. And I think we'll be hearing more about that. Prior to that, you were in philanthropy at the Rockefeller Foundation. And prior to that, working in Harlem at the Community Development Foundation. Community Development Organization. In 2016, now this is rather curious, 2016 Time Magazine named Darren one of the most influential 100 and the top 100 influential people in the world. Darren. I don't know that many people in that list, so I had to say that. Chris Stone. Chris, president of the Open Society Foundation, he comes to this panel as an expert in international criminal justice reform and leadership. So you're going to have a very interesting take on notions of justice in a digital environment. Before coming, he was a Guggenheim professor of practice in criminal justice at Harvard, Kennedy School, and director of the Hauser Center for Non-profits. And before that, at the legendary and remarkable Vera Institute as well. So you get the flavor of the kind of folks that are up here that care about this issue and that want to explore some of what Julia just frightened the heck out of us with on her presentation around the digital things. So let's set the table a little bit and talk a little bit about what's at stake. Why are we here? Why does philanthropy care about this? And I think Julia gave you a flavor of the universe of connected devices, how they're going to be talking to one another, sharing information with governments, with other people, with corporations, and so on. And so I think it's an understatement to say, at least from our perspective, that things are changing. Everything as we know it is going to be impacted by the connectivity and the code flowing through us. And as you would say, us living in the internet and as part of the internet. So we've already seen indications about the kind of impact this is having in the revolutionary nature of it. And it's, of course, its impact on privacy. You've heard about that, but we're going to hear about economic equality as well as inequality and the kind of challenges. And the power dynamic that this is creating between consumers and corporations. So I'm going to give you a couple statistics to give you the enormity of it. Bear with me, and then we're going to jump over to the panel. Recent surveys indicated that more than two-thirds of consumers plan to purchase connected technology for their home by 2019. That's people. Cities, smart cities made use of 1.6 billion connected things last year. That's a 40% jump in one year. And five years ago, only 10% of cars were connected to the internet. By 2020, it will be 90% of all automobiles. But here's the thing, it's all around us, but all the products that could be connected, only 0. 0.6% are connected. So we're at the very beginning of this revolution. There's only 85% of people today when you ask them, what is the internet of things? Do you know what it is? They absolutely don't know what it is. So there's an enormous gap between the challenges we see and the knowledge the public has of what we're talking about. So let's dig in. I'm going to start with Mark. Mark, you like to talk about these three waves of technology, right? Wave one, desktop wave two, mobile, third wave is what we're talking about today, internet of things. And last night I sat next to you and you scared me a bit and you said, Marta, this is like the matrix. We are in the matrix. We are living in the computer. So I want you to tell me a little bit about that. I want you to say in the blog post that you had recently you said we have to have, we have to balance progress with principles. We can't only ask what's possible, we have to ask what's responsible. Tell us what responsible is. I thought we're here to figure that out with these people. I think we are in that third wave moving to a very different moment in what computing and what the internet mean in society. In the second wave and in the first wave, but how much the digital world, the internet starts to influence how power works, how democracy works, how money works, how our social lives and relationships work, it really has come to mediate all those things in a pretty meaningful way for large, large parts of the population. And as Tony said earlier, it is large parts of the population also that don't have access. And the fact that technology is mediating so much of our lives, including jobs and the economy, means those people left out or even in a worse situation. Because so much of what happens is mediated digitally. So we're about to make a step that is much, much bigger than the first two steps, which is literally that all of those products or the infrastructure our cities build are a part of that one big computer. And it sounds like science fiction, but if you pick up that net game paper that is at the back or was on some of the chairs, actually kind of start with some science fiction writers, where they kind of seem silly when Philip K. Dick had a person having to pay 25 cents to get in the door of his own house in the mid-60s, but we are in the world where all of the things around us are connected, monetized. And so that's the situation where we're moving to. And when you move that from something that is novel and optional, which is, you think about the computers that many people in this room would have first had, if they chose to kind of bring them into their home, or our first smartphones, which were fun and exciting, moving from something that is novel and optional to an environment that is ubiquitous, that is primarily corporate run by a very, very small set of companies by and large, or at least the core of it, the big three companies, Google, Amazon and Facebook, at least in North America, something that really we can't opt out of. That's where the responsibility question comes in is if this is effectively a key piece of how society is organized, we have to figure out is it good for people, do people have choice, does it support people having opportunity, all of those kind of questions. And I think that was why Darren's call four years ago, even though we weren't talking about IoT, was just so compelling is we actually have to now, just as say we did with the environment in the 60s and 70s, treat this as something where we're asking those questions about what's responsible and what's needed and what's good for society. And I think if we don't, we really are ourselves being irresponsible, we're really going to end up in a bad situation. And I think philanthropy is a really critical part of stepping up to start that conversation. Well let me take a couple of those thoughts you just shared around opportunity and turn to Darren. Darren, the Ford Foundation is a tremendous legacy of when it looks at society, asks questions about social justice and the lens that you look at the opportunities. This is what Mark just described, this is not optional, this is the world we live in. So tell us a little bit about, you were the founding partner of NetGain and try to elevate this conversation and give us a little bit about the crossroads of this conversation and social justice and how Ford and why Ford is so passionate about this issue. Well thank you Marta and I feel really honored to be here because I've learned so much from so many of you in this room and from these three amazing colleagues. So my contribution will be small in this conversation but I do think that the question of what is philanthropy to make of the internet of things is a seminal question for our time and certainly our sector. The reason that we had that meeting four years ago was because I in my own experience in my own journey as the new president of Ford looking over our history and understanding that there were seminal moments when the foundation supported new frontiers of knowledge and leadership and institutions and infrastructure around hugely important societal transformational moments and so the environmental movement didn't happen, it wasn't happenstance the environmental movement and the public interest law movement started in part not because of Ford, Ford was a financier of it, it started because smart people at universities on the ground communities said if we don't start paying attention to our earth our planet will atrophy and those smart people came to the Ford foundation with ideas of both institutions and infrastructure that needed to be put in place and so today when we look at litany of organizations from the environmental defense fund to Greenpeace there are so many organizations that were spawned out of that movement and moments like Earth Day that's what foundation should be doing, right? I mean to my mind and certainly what I worried about in my own institution was that like many legacy philanthropies we had become in my view too focused on preservation and not innovation and I think when the three of these foundations came together part of the reason was because these foundations are all about innovation and unfortunately in philanthropy well I was going to say this is not a critique but it is a critique it is a critique that we don't embrace what we don't understand and we don't understand this, it's very complicated but if you care about cities you can't simply think that the smart cities movement is necessarily a good thing, it's a smart cities movement but it's also a menacing cities movement and if you don't understand the potential of smart cities to become cities then you really don't understand the intersection of urban development and social justice and it's those intersections at which the real change in the world and the real threats to our fundamental rights and the things that foundation should care about it's at that intersection that all of these very very dystopian actually bad bad things can happen and we in philanthropy are simply in our boxes we're in our youth development box, our K-12 box our environmental box and what we can't seem to do is to get out of our boxes and understand that the internet of things can wash all of our boxes away if we aren't careful if we aren't thinking about how it pertains to our particular box so for me philanthropy can't be philanthropy if we're not looking at this issue, we abdicate our responsibility to advance our mission if we don't engage in this conversation and I know that that has is a tremendous challenge, it disrupts the silos of all the work incredibly important and historic work but that this does flow through all of that work and has the potential to distrust it. You raised the issue of cities and I want to turn to Alberto because you are doing quite a bit of experimenting and seeding some potentially innovative work in cities, in smart cities give us a window into what are your hopes there and will you be taking on some of the challenges that Darren flagged for us in that movement? If you know anything about Darren, you know that if you hang around with Darren you are going to take up whatever challenges he's interested in It's not really an option, Chris knows that we all know that but there are a couple things that I wanted to just comment on Darren has really smart people coming to it with ideas and I think when we have a panel like this there's a presumption that we as the people in charge of the philanthropies are going to tell you what the right answers are but what he said is actually what actually happens. When philanthropy works it's when you are open to having smart people come and tell you amazing ideas you could never possibly have thought about I am, and you'll hear this in anything I say today I think, I am despite the scary introduction that was delivered as promised last night I am a techno-optimist, I am a prisoner of hope I look for, all right so yeah we were in a meeting at Aspen, John Bracken and I one time and everybody around the room was talking about how we could, the CIO from Chicago was talking about how Mrs. O'Leary and he really did use Mrs. O'Leary could walk out of her house and know that if she turned left she might be, she had a 10% chance of being mugged and if she turned right there was a 0% chance of being mugged and so she then I said well wait a second, there were people and there was you have any idea what kind of intrusive information you need on Mrs. O'Leary, on the neighborhood, on what everybody else is about minority report kind of information and I was thinking what if Mrs. O'Leary really does want to not be mugged and decides to what are the advantages to this so I think we started at night before a number of others because we have our focus has been on information informing communities so people can engage in their own best interest however they determine it, it is an attempt at what newspapers used to attempt which was the comparatively neutral presentation of a story and I say comparatively because we all bring baggage in what we tell and what we don't tell but in the presentation of a new story so people can determine their own best interest and that's how we began approaching this whole issue we had just funded ten years ago almost two dozen endowed chairs of journalism that I felt were was an effort to teach best practices for a world we didn't understand and that was before the iPhone, that was when Facebook was still in college before the first tweet but it was clear that we didn't understand what was going on, it was clear to me as a former newspaper publisher that all we were trying to do was to put the newspaper on the web and we were making a pretty dull web just like when you're faithful to a book when you make a movie and the movies are really faithful to the book, are pretty dull movies and so that's when we decided we would offer the first year was five million dollars and just say we've got this amount of money, do you have any ideas for how to deliver news and information to communities and that actually began to change the way that we approach almost everything at night and in an effort to be open as Darren was talking about to be open to those ideas when they come in, most of the time when John or Chris or any of the other people at the foundation come in and say I've got, this is the latest my technology background was taught to me at the University of Pennsylvania Law School a long time ago so I don't have one and it is a constant struggle to stay up but the idea is to stay open to the notions of empowering people our focus I would say is less to determine what could go wrong as to empower what must be done to empower even in the case of journalists I suppose I shouldn't talk about this maybe publicly but when there was an attack in Paris and there was a question about what devices were used by the terrorists to communicate, my fear was that maybe some of the devices that we have funded in order for journalists to be able to communicate we don't need to go into which ones but the things that we had helped fund develop had been used for awful purpose this will always be the case and I think we simply need to be aware and frank and as transparent as possible as we seek to engage people in what is I think inexorable development of this internet of everything I'm hearing a paradigm shift from sort of Byzantine philanthropy hard to penetrate in silos to something Mark you've been preaching this notion of open philanthropy and how do we stay open and how do we build that awareness and connect to some of the forces out there and get out of our comfort zone I guess Darren said and you in that context Chris and I think when folks think of the open society foundation they think of the remarkable work that you have all done on human rights around the world remarkable created programs like witness and using technology expose human rights violations and I was struck by the end of Julia's presentation at last side where she challenged us to think about the digital world and digital privacy perhaps as a human right and so I wonder how you as a philanthropic leader in human rights are thinking about the role of OSF in some of the challenges that the internet of things presents well so the we started with libraries and we started with photocopiers in Hungary and with information newsprint smuggled into Sarajevo during the siege it's always the open society foundation started about openness about information about communication and about access and the and it's interesting our work today on digital information is a direct descendant of that work that started in the libraries getting libraries as centers and other internet centers was then still the former Soviet Union and then Russia in the whole regions all over the world that didn't have access to internet and our grant as part of this initiative is to privacy international common are worried about a lot of the things we heard about about information not just the access to it but how one keeps control of it but for me the excitement about the internet of things conversation what I've been learning with my colleagues here is goes back to a different part of philanthropy which is not just that smart people come and tell you their ideas but it's all about like how do you get in that conversation I used to work really hard as a grant seeker to figure out how do I get to be one of those people who gets to be in conversation with these foundations and you have to work pretty hard at that what's interesting to me about this one is we're talking to whole new group of people and one of the most exciting things for me in the last couple of years is we've been trying to learn inside the open society foundations how to talk to different people how to hear from people we haven't been hearing from different set of those smart people and ideas an example that comes up right in this topic so for a lot of us the privacy worries about the internet of things are about the things we heard about they're about surveillance they're about people creating digital pictures of us because that's what a lot of us in this room are worried about when we think about privacy we probably do worry about what is the government collecting on us what are corporations collecting on us to know about us to sell us things a lot of us probably a lot of these people in the room have thought about issues of government surveillance I was once talking to a senior official in the New York City Police Department who said you know we put up a couple of cameras in Washington Square Park and we'll have demonstrations for weeks about that we put up those same cameras or more of them in one of those housing complexes where they're nice to work in northern Manhattan and a different northern Manhattan than a day and they just want more there's not a protest there's not a peep and I think it's a reminder of how different people think of privacy differently the privacy threat for some of the people who have a lost in globalization and who don't yet have maybe just getting broadband access isn't about the government spying on you it's about the car repossessing itself it's about the mortgage on your house going late and all of a sudden that lock on the door locks you out itself the internet of things is a giant automated debt collection machine and if what you're worried is not about you know is the government spying on me but how do I make my car payment on that refrigerator we're building the internet of things at the same time as we're seeing the next giant debt war about to launch in this country and around the world the connection between who owns all those consumer goods and how they're used and taking that use out of your control is a different kind of privacy issue than we normally think about because of our privacy concerns for me the internet of things opens up meanings about privacy meanings about the connectivity and meanings about the same issues that the Tony was talking about it's not just about jobs it's not just about globalization jobs about globalization vulnerability to a lot of these forces so for me the journey that started with libraries in the Soviet Union and photocopiers in Hungary about internet access developed this enormous information infrastructure for us it's about hearing from a different set of smart people who are worried about how this is going to come down Darren's point about the city and the threat along with the benefits it's not just the Tony's toaster is not only going to talk to other toasters and start spying on him it's also going to stop making him toast when he stops but it's really interesting I mean the question for philanthropy really is okay so what do we do about this right I mean and so part of what we have to do about this and there's is to invest right so all of us fund ProPublica we fund ProPublica because not just because they are writing they have great reporters writing about the internet but because we need a different kind of journalism and the work that Knight has been doing around experimentation around that question is a platform that then we can build on but that's the role of philanthropy and the challenge that I worry about with the internet of things is that philanthropy will get obsessed with the shiny new objects with the sort of things and not the plumbing I mean the notion of digital rights as human rights I mean Hillary Clinton in 1995 made this women's rights are human rights now of course today it's axiomatic I mean right but at the time that was a radical idea the human rights apparatus had yet to fully embrace that idea and so what's the human rights apparatus doing about digital rights do all of those rapporteurs at the UN agree that digital rights are human rights does all of the grantees of all of our organizations who are traditional organizations working on let's just take civil rights I can assure you that the African American civil rights community does not understand the menacing dystopian things that will happen to black people poor black people in America the people they're supposed to represent I can assure you they don't understand it we Jenny has organized a civil rights table but that has been a huge challenge because those organizations many would say are in in partnership with the big ISPs and many people who fund them to do their basic work and so along comes OSF and Ford and I say guess what those organizations really aren't the friends of a lot of your constituents we should be pushing that intersection we should be bringing together and forging for legacy institutions the new knowledge that they are going to need to protect and represent the very people their mission to serve and that's what I worry we're not doing because we're caught up in what's the new app that's going to teach K through 12 kids how to read faster which is great we need that we absolutely need that but if we don't understand the underlying infrastructure and if we in philanthropy aren't I think Tony is right no one knows what the future of work is but philanthropy in light of what's happening with AI and robotics we should be investing in those questions we have a department of labor that has a four million dollar research budget in the United States on work the department of defense has a four billion dollar research budget who's building the knowledge and what we're seeing on this question of work of this sort of dichotomy on the one hand Silicon Valley saying it's going to be okay and you know this whole idea of universal income will just take care of it but let's go back to how you get there Darren because number of you said it isn't about just the smart people inside it's about coming out it's reaching out to new people and I know some of you have been participating on this notion of we need more technologists to talk to some of our experts we need data journalists we just did a partnership with ProPublica where we crack the code on algorithms for car insurance and guess what they're discriminatory surprise surprise the black it's not based on your driving record it's based on the color of your stick again in the credit score remarkable invisible to the world so how do you do that how do you take organizations that are used to doing things one way looking at this disruption looking at a world that is very invisible algorithmic threats you've gone through it and I think one of the exciting things about net gain is actually from the very start we've thought about that question this hasn't been about our solving it hasn't even just been about certainly it hasn't been about the new app it's really been about what do you do we've talked a lot about creating a public interest technologists cohort people able to work who understand this technology in all sorts of public interest and other settings not just for the big platforms we've talked about self policing and responsibility and codes and routines and we've talked a lot about research and information we probably don't talk enough about politics and part of that is the problem of American philanthropy and a tax code that has disincentivized more political solutions but actually thanks to a lot of new philanthropies that are coming that have more flexibility to do more political work and ways of people understanding that you can do pre-political work within the C3 structure we've gotten more of that and I think on this topic you can see why Chance Williams who works with us at Open Society was pointing out to me that the politics works differently on this because of the money you were talking about that huge market opportunity in the Internet of Things the money distorts the politics in this in everything but in this topic hugely I didn't realize until Chance was telling me that the rollback of the privacy laws that we just saw a month ago the FCC regulation on the Internet on the Internet providers was incredibly unpopular I used to be I learned about politics with seatbelts I couldn't understand why requiring seatbelts which would be so good for public interest and indeed for the public purse couldn't get done and a legislator told me Chris you don't understand politics as soon as 50% of the people start wearing them voluntarily will require it and I thought like you're going to wait you're going to pay all that cost until then yeah but that's how politics works not on this topic 71% of Americans 71% of Democrats 71% of Republicans 71% of independents think the FCC rule was a good one and it's a mistake to roll it back and yet both houses of Congress overwhelmingly and the president rolled it back that trumping of the way politics is about the money and so our tools information, technologists, self-policing probably aren't going to do it alone unless we figure out ways of changing the political calculation and actually that's a lot what you do it is about the money but it's also about a lack of understanding they don't have any clear understanding of what the impact is about the impact is on them and I don't know how you resolve that unless and until you have genuinely free and universal use and so I don't think it's I don't dismiss the shiny things because they are the way to engage and to attract and to bring people in I do worry and have worried for all the time I've been at night which was right at the very beginning when we started to do these open calls and Tim Berners-Lee came and said I didn't take out a patent on the World Wide Web because I thought it should be free and universal and the biggest fear that I have about the World Wide Web is that there is so much misinformation, there is so much lack of authenticity on the Web and I said well what do you want money for 10,000 fact checkers and he said no, that's a newspaper solution I'm an engineer, I want to write code, I want to use engineering to figure this out, use the semantic Web to figure it out, we haven't and I don't know that we will but I think we might I don't know why with everything else that's happened why we couldn't at some point, I don't know how to do it but I believe it's possible and I think engaging people when people figure out that Google has pictures that you sent to your girlfriend they tend to say this has got to be shut down but people don't understand that at the FCC level or at the policy level and I think that's part of the that's an area for us to work in I want to say one other thing about this partnership or this association that we come at this from different from very different points of view I think one of the important parts of that game is that and yet none of us are required to play with each other because we were all started by individuals who are very individualistic and the tradition of philanthropy is to be independent and maybe even sui generis each foundation, you've seen one foundation and yet we're trying to figure out how to play with each other and how to do really small experiments which is another value of shiny things, trying to do small experiments that will give us experience in how to work with each other for whenever the big one comes. Well, let's open it up, Mark jump in and then we're going to open it up and engage the audience. I just want to say one last thing on that piece around understanding really does thread it together across whether it's the politicians or the civil rights groups or whatever we want to bring in, but I don't think we yet have really set the right ambition on understanding and I think there's actually some stuff in this year's net gain which is there is that we have to break into the public consciousness because even at that 70% statistic, people don't have a concept of what we're shooting for in the same way they do of why it matters and we really have to forefront that and that's one of the reasons I'm happy to have you as a moderator Marta but I'm sad you're not here kind of talking about your work because I think it's why something like what Consumer Reports is doing which is testing the shiny objects and really rigorously bringing it to mind because I have an emotional relationship to those shiny objects they are a great way into my mind and a great way into the conversation and then the stuff that OSF funded and we did with tactical tech with the classroom here in New York which is taking the shiny objects and kind of playing with them as a mind bomb which is sort of what Greenpeace did but I was kind of throwing out the mind bombs I think we really need to be investing in the stuff that does that and to me we often will list the public interest technologists and the policy people and so on, I think actually investing in artists is probably one of the things that we need to do more as this group to kind of get those mind bombs out to kind of break the conversation open Well let's jump out into the audience and see if you have questions for our net game pioneers Alright, while you are thinking about your question There you go. There's one. We got three hands. I saw three hands out there Thank you so much. My name is Anne. I work for the City of Boston Do you all have a perspective on the role you would like to see local government play in advancing the voice and the importance of pro-consumer regulation in this space Well one thing I would say is in the current environment of things like the FCC privacy rules being rolled back and that is just very much the beginning what is about to happen. Municipal government I think is going to play an incredibly important role whether that's on broadband, whether that is on security whether that's on where human rights and civil rights intersect with this stuff So I think we're at the beginning of saying that at least in this country municipal governments will be one of the places we can go really to have an impact and so I think you'll see some stuff from DeBlasio here in the next week or two where he's going to kind of step forward and say the municipal governments actually do need to step up in a way where traditionally we've left this to be a set of federal issues so I think we don't all know what that looks like yet but I think it's when this is going to go as badly as it may go that municipal governments are going to have to take on roles that they maybe haven't taken on in the past I think municipal governments are really core to the kind of understanding that we were talking about a minute ago it's the rubber meets the road kind of connection with citizens we're funding a series of different experiments depending on the interest of the different city municipal governments and whether it's Akron or San Jose or Philadelphia you'll hear some about those later on today right now I think what we ought to be doing is not just encouraging but funding more technologists who sit at the table of the people who deal with the people and figure out just as in newsrooms maybe 10 years ago when you began to have a technologist sit in on the news meeting you began to have a sense of how to reimagine the telling of the story in a way that made sense for the different medium I think funding and I mean much more than Code for America because Code for America is limited in its engagement it's so short it's so project specific I mean it has to be consistent it has to be available to everyone but I think doing it at the city level it's not just a prejudice because we happen to be kind of national a little bit but really local in 26 communities makes absolutely perfect sense for us there's also a possibility today about cities as places of participatory governance being experimented with in ways it can't be elsewhere Brazil did remarkable work in its internet Bill of Rights doing it on a wiki and having using the technology to frame the regulation of the technology but I think cities can move in exactly in a different innovative way really engaging citizens throughout the city in the regulation through participatory forms of governance we've got several more questions I'm actually interested in building on this and one of the big challenges that I see is not just the investing in public interest technologists and also having engaging CIOs at the city level but rather the challenge of actually middle management in government that I have found that it's not that hard to bring technologists to government to engage with the people from frankly the bottom but rather the middle managers who don't understand the internet of things or don't understand open source technology and are frankly I feel the limiting factor on government's real engagement and what is really a non-urgent problem for departments of city planning even though we think in decades ahead so how is the neck and partnership thinking about engaging with government in particular not just the top and not just creating resources from the bottom but rather that large cadre of middle managers who don't necessarily have a forum for engaging in something like this not only don't have a forum for engaging but probably have a real incentive to stop or to try to hold back because it means I may not have the power that I had or I may not have the position that I had for us this is at night I'm not so much perhaps for some of the others but we haven't traditionally worked with government at all my sort of going in proposition as a former newsman and lawyer is I'll sue you and or you will run an expose I want to take your pick or both and so all of a sudden I'm in this position where whoa you mean we're on the same side so I'm not I really do believe in the power of infiltration I think we ought to be looking for opportunities to take people to places where they're doing these things to figure out who the three or four not the one or two but the three or four maybe six that ought to go to the we ought to fund and send someplace what is the critical mass and educate and let them see and let them then come back and say okay here's how I would apply it's slow work but make sure you've got the technologist make sure you have the exposure and make sure you're not telling them what to do let them find it themselves I just a very fast thing to say I think the also thing is like engage them on the stuff they have to get done anyways is it one of the interesting conversations that started is around partly in New York around the sanctuary cities movement is where does privacy and security actually fit in when you're talking about actually protecting vulnerable populations and how do you engage the technologists in city systems that actually need to be have confidential information about people you're trying to protect so I think that there's a getting pragmatic about these issues as opposed to coming at them on a high horse I find works I just wanted to give a shout out and say thank you so much for mentioning artists that's rarely that's rarely done and I think it's really great for us to highlight that I co-founded New York Tech Meetup which a lot of people know but I also just co-founded Native Tech Week to highlight that confluence and I think that's not only where we can get creativity and innovation but empathy and I think that's what you all I think that's great that you mentioned that thank you Well thank you I have one more question Hi my name is Harry Plant I work for a tech company in Silicon Valley we build shiny new things that you've been talking about my question I guess is looking at over the last couple years incredible change has come through the power of individuals forcing corporations to act in different ways and you see that in Indiana a couple years ago in North Carolina and there are limitations to that recently on Fox News and I guess the idea that these kinds of changes are coming through corporations and the economic system I guess I wonder if that's a good thing or not as opposed to political changes and philanthropic changes I think the advocacy infrastructure the examples you give that progress was made because this country has a robust and vibrant civil society and that civil society has been resourced by philanthropy and individual donors for many decades the question is can the advocacy infrastructure be imbued with an understanding of technology and can those organizations that have traditionally advanced justice and social progress incorporate into their missions and their work technology and the internet and things and is it possible and for many of them they actually can't do that and so the question for philanthropy is what new infrastructure needs to be built and that's what many of you in this room really represent I mean a decade ago when we first started funding in this field many of the organizations moved let's just say met neutrality through the FCC didn't even exist right I mean there was very little information there was very little knowledge there was very little evidence and that's been the work of so many of you has been transformational to advancing an agenda for justice and so I think it is a good thing when we see NGOs and civil society advancing these issues and I think the question is not the question the imperative must be that we have them imbued with an understanding of technology and digital rights so if you think we all come at this from different perspectives but one of the impacts of net gain one of the impacts of talking to each other is that you know we at night I wouldn't have taken that approach and yet we just a couple of months ago announced a fund for the study of ethics and governance in areas of artificial intelligence in partnership with Reed Hastings, Pirro Midiar, the media lab at MIT and the Burtman Center and so thank you very much teacher and we are almost out of time and I just want to thank the panelists and thank you I hope that this discussion has given you an understanding of why philanthropy, why the Internet of Things and not only philanthropy but why many of us who benefit from philanthropy also have to transform as Darren described many of our organizations are legacy organizations and the Internet of Things has turned our world upside down and what this consumer report is about the protections and standards and rules and regulations that we help put into place to make a fair safer and healthier marketplace those rules don't apply to the digital marketplace there is no digital standard for the public interest and what a number of these folks have allowed us to do is to begin to create that digital standard in an open source way so stay tuned for that there's a tremendous amount of innovation these philanthropies are making it possible we have a long way to go thank you for joining us and thank you for leading the way thank you and we're just going to bring up the next panel and then head to lunch so if I can get Scout and Merrick and Matt and Bruce up here I will switch seats and maybe we can get rid of these empty bottles yeah can I give you those okay I'll just put them there alright come on down pick your seat sneak under here speaker bios please stand by we have one more panel let's get a microphone not the most recent never mind I'll take it us as the panel between you and lunch but I think it is going to be an exciting one we will keep it brief enough to get you to lunch but we request your attention I would like to have a conversation to please enjoy the beautiful hallway of the New York public library so welcome to the panel on security, privacy and the internet of things I rarely like hosting panels I'm not a big fan of the panel I end up on them but I have been really excited about this one because in some ways these are some of my current heroes in different ways that you will discover by hearing from them it really is over the last year or so think more about this kind of pervasive computing environment that is emerging that things that Mozilla has talked about for years around security really have started to feel for me like a huge sort of humankind-wide issue and these are people who are talking about different pieces of it I'm going to introduce them briefly but then kind of get into the dimensions of this are not just is my router secure or is cyber war upon us but it's a little more complex and I think also a little more interesting and possibly even a little more hopeful despite all the challenges we face so we have Meredith Nicky to Niskey, I can never say your last name so I will say it, my good friend Meredith who as I said earlier is a part of Tactical Technology Collective which has been doing amazing work in sort of the activist and tech and human rights space forever but really I think of Merrick and his team as some of the kind of best creative technologists in the world they just recently with OSF and Mozilla and others did a project called the glass room based on an exhibit that they had started in Berlin, the white room a few years ago that really brought to life in a very tangible way how the technologies we use every day are connected into a bizarre and sinister and corporate controlled digital world so hopefully we'll get to hear a little bit about that from Merrick and also there will be future glass rooms that you'll be able to participate in which maybe we'll hear about from Merrick and then I have Skepp Brody who is the executive director who is simply secure, formerly a product manager in Google in some of these core products like wearable devices and Android that do as hardware then connect us into this big data universe and it's taken that knowledge to set up an organization that is really helping developers and activists and researchers figure out how to do security and privacy which I think is one of the toughest challenges like actually how to make this as simple as a seat belt and it will never be as simple as a seat belt how we tackle that is really a critical challenge and then we have Bruce Schneier who was referenced before as Julia was on stage but who is an academic, a security researcher and really as Julia said somebody who invented a kind of whole field of writing about how we face these really big security threats and is certainly somebody I follow closely and then Matt Mitchell who happens to be a Ford Mozilla fellow so connected into the net game world at color of change working on privacy security stuff there but also as the founder of crypto Harlem and does a lot of stuff really at the grassroots of people taking control of their own security and their privacy in a very tangible way so welcome to all of you Bruce I want to start maybe with you Bruce but I mean it would be interesting kind of everybody's take on this is you wrote when the Mariah Botnett piece happened about the sort of the bigness of the threat as others did as well and the sort of the fact that we face this set of externalities that the company is building these devices being taken over you know it's just an externality to them they don't really care we're all surrounded by devices and this tax surface as Julia talked about is bigger how should people be thinking about the size of that threat is it climate change is it an asteroid coming towards the earth is it a little train you know car crash out in the you know the back roads it's really thinking about it in terms of the way computers work we all know how products fail if we have a car we know the parts calculate mean time between failures and we sort of know what's going to happen how often these cars will fail computers fail in a different way all the cars work perfectly until one day when none of them do and that kind of class break which is very common in the computer world isn't really known in the world of consumer products in the same way and Julia made a really interesting point talking about the fact that we're building this internet of sensors these things that are collecting data but it's also the internet of actuators the internet of things does stuff it turns on your thermostat it'll eventually make your car turn left and once the internet does things it affects life and property in a way that my spreadsheet can never do so we're looking at a different kind of risk in two dimensions this risk that these systems that are intelligent autonomous whatever you want to look at the algorithms actually doing stuff in our world and the way they can fail in classes that you just don't see in conventional mechanical systems and so asteroid earth or a little car wrap I mean it's neither those are both bad analogies give me a good one the analogies are the way computers fail and you know that you wake up one day and there's a new computer threat you have to get an update maybe you don't there are whole classes of things fail one day but most time they work just fine I mean we aren't these are not species extinction events but they are different sorts of risks right so the library they're worried about books getting stolen specifically reasonable what happens if what you know you computerize it and then none of them can stolen until one day all of them do it's just different and people who are in this library don't think about it that way this is all the backdrop against what I think is an incredibly empowering technology there are things that are going to do amazing things that we can't even think of because they're all going to be emergent properties but like the internet like all those analogies there are emergent threats as well the risk and the threat that we see from the internet of things for people today the analogy that I guess I hadn't really thought about it in this terms but as I was sitting here listening I think is like cancer and cancer is something not necessarily from a medical or clinical perspective but from a human perspective cancer is something that most people understand pretty well and even knows someone who's had cancer there are lots of different types of cancer you know that some cancer is really serious and it can kill you in a matter of weeks it can have tragic, drastic, horrible impact on your life immediately there are other kinds of cancer that you go to your doctor and you kind of get it burned off and you get a biopsy and it turns out okay and you don't have to worry about it that much it's pervasive it we don't really understand why it happens or how it happens we have some idea and some understanding we have some idea of how to prevent it you wear sun block you know that's going to prevent certain types of cancer and that's really good and that's something that you as a person can take but for the most part most people have this sense of cancer as being this kind of ominous thing that's going to strike and you don't really know where it's going to strike and you know it always might strike and we don't really understand why or how and we don't entirely know how to fix it that would be my analogy I guess. The thing about cancer is that we all feel pretty powerless in the face of it and I was going to ask Matt how does the some of the communities you work with how does the risk or the threat look like? I'm not going to go gangster like Bruce and tell you that's a bad comparison. It's pretty wild I mean how many people out here had the Wi-Fi cut off on them at home once right no no one has a computer raise your hand wake up people okay thank you right so that's not so bad you know you unplug the Wi-Fi you put the router back plugged in you get back on the internet that's cool right what if the power goes out that's actually a lot more serious so right now we have an internet where it's contained the tax service is small and the realities of it are okay I can't check the news right why are we going to blow that up to Bruce's point how computers work it's you know you say something Mark that's like just because we can do something doesn't mean we need to do it we think about responsible way to do it for me I'm more like Internet of Things horrible idea it's the worst idea if I can go back in time say people say Matt if you go back in time stop anything do anything I'd be like I would stop the Internet of Things but it's too late like it's Pandora's box you know Moore's law that it's already done people are going to put chips inside of stuff they shouldn't be putting stuff chips inside of we're going to have instead of oh I unplug the router it's going to be like the internet is down and cities are going to fall the internet is down and traffic's going to stop the internet is down and you can't do anything people are going to keel over because their pacemakers are connected to the internet so like if we could just think about this as far as like net gains I think like it's more like maybe we can't maybe we can just say look we're not going to fund this stuff if you're not thinking about the effect on society you know regular citizenry you're not thinking about marginalized groups because Internet of Things is a monster riding an asteroid a monster riding an asteroid yeah there's a mind bomb and so you guys have been you know broadly talking about the digital world in our lives in the work you're doing a tactical tech how do you think about how should the world be thinking about these issues what do you think about okay where are we between the asteroid and the car so I want to kind of comment on that because this is the binary way of thinking about technology that is either you know good or bad so it's zero or one and so forth and the car rack is bad and asteroid yes well and what's in between that's the that's the one I guess and I think that the problem we face with the Internet of Things is to follow the one is that there's very few or if any actors that actually understand the consequences of that what's going on right now with the deployment of sensors and connected objects and not only physical objects things but also virtual objects and so forth and et cetera but also we don't have a narrative for that we don't have metaphors we don't have a way of talking about it so our approach is to kind of go away from the dystopian way of talking about technology and Internet of Things is one kind of that and engage anybody at this point and the glass room was an example where we aim at people who are used to consuming technology not even knowing that they're not any more consumers or users they participate in something practically speaking that is very political and try to rephrase different narratives and see what kind of narratives they can build out of that and learn from it so I think this is our take that is very different that will be heard here and maybe just because it's probably people here who hadn't been in a glass room give an example of something that's in there that does that oh so we have to imagine that you're entering basically Apple Store a big shiny white space in which you see objects on tables that you know by heart what to do this is a very safe space if you go to Apple Store you know you can touch everything nothing is going to explode and there are nice people around that are going to explain to you you just don't understand something et cetera so we created a kind of a version of it except the kind of devices and objects we had there wearing what you would find in Apple Store and the other technical store it's not just speaking on Apple though we love the aesthetics and we use them a lot was to look at different narratives at this tables to look at the individual and our role in creating the quantifying data society the business model would not exist if all of us here and everybody else would not in some other way dystopian be living in technology and data and if we only could quantify something we would quantify don't worry about that so however you would you know turn back the clock somebody at some point would start quantifying things and that would end up where we are right now so and you mentioned before and thanks for that that some of the objects we were very lucky to work with artists where we asked them to do kind of unconventional way of presenting their work we didn't want to use art as a pure illustration of problems we wanted to use art as a metaphor that would take a different stand on how you look at the problem so for example what does it mean to have or not to have something to hide you probably hear this argument very often where you talk about surveillance technology proliferation of data that is it's okay because I have nothing to hide and everybody has been exposed to that and we had this fantastic piece by the New York artist called smell dating where they actually run the service for real where you could subscribe for 25 dollars to a service and receive smells of other people on the basis of that smells you could choose who would like to date that is interesting because the layer of the narrative is very straight forward people were like really but then what you see the next step is that everybody opens the jars the jars that you can take the piece of the cloth that people were wearing for three days smell them and then classify them what kind of smell it is would you like to meet that person and so on etc and then you have an app where you can see who that person actually was and that tells the kind of a story of where you're observing a person going to the process is that you would do it as well you would actually find a way of quantifying your environment to be able to make better choices on the other hand what the art enables in this narrative is that by the end of the day we are all in so another way obfuscating our smells we use perfumes we use fragrances we use whatever else etc and so forth we don't think about our data and data traces in the same very way that obfuscation is kind of being proposed to us as a negative activity that we're doing something unfair and cool and politically not correct if you like while treating our body and hiding our smell from others is a very different thing so maybe the next classroom is selling digital perfumes so let me I want to bring it back to the security and privacy piece of it and in this whatever metaphor we're using we are there we're not going to turn the clock back this more pervasive computing environment I guess the question I have is if we want people to have control or have more security on the global level is it actually even reasonable that we can invent digital perfumes and so you worked on the user experience piece of it are you hopeful that we can put ourselves in control in this environment or is it just time to accept the matrix and bow down we definitely shouldn't accept the matrix and bow down I think that is not the answer I think that right now we think of IOT and we think oh this is this complex thing we want to make it simple and easy to use you just push one button or you don't push any buttons you just turn it on and plug it into the outlet in your house or you plug it into the camera on the street and all of a sudden this just works and that's not okay and we have to sort of embrace the complexity of these systems on some level and do the legwork necessary and understand how to help people engage with them and help people understand them I think that one sort of the trivial or surface level understanding of how to do this is oh well what we'll do is we'll put these cameras up in the city and then we'll have them push notifications to your phone so you walk by and you get a notification that you're being surveilled or you're getting a notification about the fact that there's a camera there and this is what it's going to do with your data can you imagine like how many of you have like a long list of notifications currently on your phone that you haven't dealt with if you were walking down the street and you got pushed all of these additional notifications from literally hundreds of cameras that you walk by every day I mean this is not scalable and so I think that there actually is a lot of fundamental research that we need to do and that we need to support practitioners in doing to understand how we engage users not just in that sort of stupid you know we're using cookies do you consent to this but an actual meaningful consent step and understanding and reimagining what meaningful consent looks like I think that one of the challenges that we see with a lot of the companies that we have today in Silicon Valley and around the world is that they say oh the user checked the little checkbox and we got their consent so we're okay we can do these things that we told them told them they were going to do in our terms of service so therefore we're okay that's not actually meaningful consent and so understanding what is meaningful consent look like in the world of IOT and how do we express that and reflect that in the interfaces that we use and that we provide to users and making sure those interfaces exist in the first place is what we need to do I guess I mean I could talk about that for the whole panel the one question that really comes up from that is in a world where we have yes there are three big tech companies but you know there's we're all exposed to hundreds of devices and lots of smaller companies and cities and you know what not is it actually reasonable to think that I ever can deal with the that number of places I have to make those consent choices like how do we tackle that it's a hard problem and I don't have a really good answer to it but I think that it's something that we need to focus on and you know hey funders that we need to fund some basic research into Bruce is shaking his head I just think notice and consent can't work in a regime of pervasive computing you're never gonna get the hundreds of thousands of notices you'll just turn them off and really I think I have to figure out why we're in this world we're in this world where everyone's getting our data and using it for their own profit because we've built a world where our data is a profit center we decided that the internet needs to be free therefore we are the products and the reason that consent notice that Facebook shows you is they show it to you and they show it to you because they know that's not what you don't care and you get the box and you look at it and it says I'm in your way click here to make me disappear and you click there and it disappears right that's what consent looks like and it's not that's not done by accident Facebook does that by design because they know you're going to click this is the economy we've built if we want an economy where users have control over their devices we can get that we have to decide so right now your data is for sale and for free for free services we also have a regime when you buy internet of things devices your data is for sale anyway even though you've paid for them right I mean this device is turning into your internet of things controller hub if you have an IoT device this is how you control it this company is doing the same thing so in this free for all of no rules no laws we are all being mind for our data for profit because that's where the money is we can change this we need a lot of research but we're not going to get the products out there unless someone says you must do it this way well let's come back to that because I think that one of the mechanisms is a good one but we say we decide you and I are the gray bearded guys to work in technology Matt you kind of work with a different set of populations you're also one of those people yourself who works with technology but do that when you go out and do security training and maybe describe who you do security training with do those people feel they're deciding well yeah I live in Harlem there for over a decade I'm a security researcher so I just walk outside and I set up a little table basically at this community center and we do three hour office hours like hey anyone who wants to come to Harlem once a month for three hours will answer your questions and give you like what's going on here and I think there is to your point like you know technology doesn't affect everyone evenly but technology isn't available to everyone evenly I mean in Harlem most people have mobile phones it's a consumer device it brings up your apps and you can play with them and stuff you can learn how to code apps on a phone you don't learn how to make a web page on a phone so it's dangerous I think like when it comes to internet of things and can the public be responsible I don't think we can trust the public with getting vaccinated and washing their hands so you know there's I don't think there's going to be a way to do that I think what we and it's a problem that if we don't solve it if the gray beards don't solve it if the people of color don't solve it people will solve it for you I mean we already have things like Hajime which will like go out it's a virus basically it goes out to the internet of things and just like okay I'm going to try to make you so you can't get infected by Mariah and you can't create that botnet right or a brick or bot which is like I got one better for you I'll affect the device and turn into a piece of plastic and burn it out so it can never be part of the internet of things because it doesn't work anymore like both those are hacktivist projects but the reason why people are so desperate is because they don't trust the average person to do what they need to to protect the herd and neither do I I mean we might not be able to trust people to get like 100% vaccination but there are things that we can do to create systemic change to encourage and incentivize and entice and I mean I think I like I share your like there's always going to be a certain you know segment of the population that just isn't going to do it and isn't going to date their devices but I do think that there are things that we can do in creating these platforms and constructing them platform these platforms to help end users do a better job and help them engage meaningfully with the security of their devices. If your Wi-Fi connected was tied to how long your update process like oh you've been updating in 30 days your Wi-Fi is always off people would update so I think it's a little something like that. That would never happen without a rule no company would do that on their own it's a great idea right we're going to have some rule in that says you have to get your updates that has to be mandated and I always worry about solutions that require us to educate users. I want technologies that work for naive users they have to work for everybody we're not going to limit the internet of things computers cell phones to people who can repair them it has to be my parents have to still be able to use them and you don't want to meet my parents but it needs to work for those sorts of users and that's what we have to get and I just don't I don't see it in the current way the pieces are arranged on the board so maybe that's a question to throw to all of you as a closing question it's like how do we actually kind of move the ball what are the levers but let me just think about that let me just see if there's a couple of audience questions and then we'll kind of close with you know what are those levers and is it is regulation the only one so do we have questions from the audience questions in the middle is this bold move I know can you talk about how IOT can achieve its 1776 moment can you talk about how IOT can achieve its own 1776 moment I don't think it can what is the 1776 moment a revolution someone help me the question is what do you mean by your question thank you Bruce you talked about the internet of actuators it affects life and property then you said that we're in a free fall of no rules and no laws we're all being mined so how can IOT achieve its 1776 moment where these issues of life and property and these issues of being mined and where there are no rules and no laws can be addressed and satisfied so this is a hard question I think you're asking when will there be a moment of change where we all rise up and say this cannot stand I have been waiting for those moments for a couple of decades and no matter how bad things get it seems like they don't show up we do have the potential when you have these cyber physical systems of there being large scale either attacks or mistakes that affect life and property to an extent we have not seen computers do to date all the traffic lights turn to green at the same time all the cars speed up and go left I can make this stuff up and it's not stupid science fiction will those moments turn into let's go back in time and make this go away or let's go forward and figure out how to do it I don't know I do worry about whether there will be a defining moment because I think we're not really good at defining moments in our society it's a long way to answer but I think right now before this is so pervasive that a lot of it's too late and we're really not doing the galvanizing properly this huge promise here this is going to happen it's not going away I just need the risks to be dealt with you said we decided the internet needed to be free so we're the product it's kind of like for me it's free and so I'm also getting mass war complex are you attacking capitalism is this at the root of this I guess this is for me I'm actually not I think markets have an enormous value but they do not solve every problem there are huge externalities in this there are huge issues of group movement that a market system will not solve so we need an underpinning of government to make the market work and the same reason you have never gotten food safety or car safety or airplane safety or financial instrument safety without government stepping in you're not going to get computer safety so you do need the markets great but the market has to work under a substrate which is way more than I want to get into on this stage I was just going to say the only problem with governance and policy is borders and citizenry don't exist on the internet so unless we're going to have customs border protection say oh no in this country you can't bring in that talking doll we're going to have an issue where I think it's of the people to solve it because centralized solutions like the FDA will protect you here but they're not going to protect you there the global south is going to have this and then this other country the internet doesn't do that there's no border where I'm like oh I'm at this WWW turn around that's as far as I get with my internet passport but isn't that different man if we're talking about physical devices for me the issue is about physical devices there's internet inside of them the point where people will wake up is when there's some kind of kinetic effect of cyber war using your bluetooth enabled toothbrush and your kettle that knows what your favorite playlist is I think it will be an unfortunate event kind of like what Bruce says that will wake people up policy is a hope and I haven't given up on policy but policy is limited so even if we had every congressman and every congresswoman president and every administration moving forward totally on this they all called Bruce up and said what are we going to do next what about every other so what's your and I think we've naturally landed in this closing question what do you matter if you say policy is not going to do that we have to rely on ourselves rely on our people but you don't trust people a little bit earlier you said so what do we actually do I think like people will surprise you right so I think like we need to educate people and talk to them about what this really is and what this really isn't right like when I talk to people in communities about the internet I'm like the internet is demilitarized government technology that you now could use to communicate and do all kinds of great things but there's bad things from it too it's kind of like there's nuclear energy and then there's nuclear bombs understanding like there's a risk here there's a safety risk and there's a way I should operate and things that I shouldn't shouldn't do and it works it's surprising but it works American what are the levers question I think that there's a number of questions that we explore but I think for me first of all internet of things is not a technical problem it's a symptom of a much larger set of problems and what we're looking at trying to ask questions around is why and how it happened that normalization of surveillance become a paradigm not only for institutions public institutions public institutions but also for individuals why we believe that spying and observing others gives us some form of power we also ask why and how it happened that such a massive accumulation of knowledge and the world happened in Silicon Valley where we talk about three companies based there and two somewhere else it's unprecedented that didn't happen before that such a small number of corporations have such a massive access to something that we don't even know what it is how it can be used and what impact it will have on how we understand us being political and the last thing is about us as people who are benefiting from our mobile phones you all I mean you all benefit from that the reason you have laptops on your knees right now and mobiles in your pocket is because you benefit it's not you know the product in that sense you actually get something from it you got here and et cetera how we can change that attitude and think about data and technology as a political asset that is about our ability to be autonomous and the ability to actually act on that autonomy and so forth Scout the final word we'll go back to you Scout the second final word what are the levers we can press if we want this to work out well so I mean I definitely believe in and agree with Bruce in his sort of assertion that we need to have regulation and policy and sort of you know governance to enforce these things so I'll let him you know deal that you know touch that I think that you know in the work that I do I really think it's important that we look at the practitioners who are actually working on these platforms and these systems and by practitioners I mean software developers user experience designers I mean procurement people I mean a lot of the folks in this room work for cities and a lot of you you know are trying to do ultimately the responsible thing you don't necessarily know what that responsible thing is but you really at your heart like you're not trying to go and screw the average citizen right you're not trying to like take away their data and breach their privacy and so I think that we some of you might be I don't know but like I'm guessing that you don't think that that's what you're trying to do at the very least and so you know I think that we when we talk about you know the Internet of Things we sort of make this implicit assumption sometimes that it's well understood what the right thing to do is and that you know the problem is that the incentives aren't right or the regulation isn't there and that these practitioners aren't doing the right thing you know they know what the right thing is but they're not choosing to do it and I don't think that's always the case and I think that understanding you know for these practitioners the people who are actually building deploying selecting these systems and platforms understanding better what is the right thing what are the processes and practices that developers and designers and procurers can go through to understand the needs of the human beings to understand sort of the implications of the design decisions at an architectural level and an interface level that what those implications are going to be down the road and working to educate them you know I agree we definitely can't focus on educating users as a solution but to some extent we can focus on educating practitioners and normalizing things away from oh I'm going to hoard as much data as I can because this is an asset and helping those practitioners see data and data that they are warehousing as being a fundamental liability to their organization and helping them sort of do that paradigm shift and giving them better and more resources to make good decisions in the design of their platforms. So that's all 100% true. I mean to do this we're going to have to use all of the techniques. We're going to need technology, we need norms, we're going to need laws, we're going to need markets. We're going to have to work together. I think what we have is government abdicating and I believe that when the internet starts killing people we will get regulation. It will happen. We have no choice because government regulates things that kill us whether we like it or not. So you look at what government can do and the toolbox is somewhat limited. They have an ex ante set of things they can do. That's like licensing and testing and certifications and you can think of regimes where that works. They have an ex ante set of things they can do like liabilities so if something goes wrong there's lawsuits. There's something they can do in disclosure I think of product labeling. I think of consumer reports as a non-government way of doing that. Give people more information. And so the last thing is to affect the market funding. What you talked about is the actual purchasing decisions of governments affecting the market. That's going to be where we're going to see the levers. And to me this idea is the fundamental lesson of Edward Snowden. We all knew that you could use technology to use law. What he showed us is you can use law to subvert technology and if both don't work together neither work. We're not going to solve this unless we get the tech and the markets and law and regulation and policy working towards a common goal. Awesome. That is a very good final word. It's kept people wrapped until lunch. Actually the better final word is lunch is served. Lunch is served I hope. I think the code for not yet. Let me thank our panelists and then John will tell you about the lunch logistics. But thank you guys. Thank you. And I think the invitation from NetGain and really what was highlighted here is these complex problems do require all those solutions and this is a really good community to be digging into that. Lunch is served so have at it. Thank you. Thank you to the staff for hustling and getting it up. It's right where you're looking at it Mark. You're looking at lunch. Straight back. Hey everyone just giving you a five minute warning. We're going to start back up in five minutes. Chance can you hear me? I'm not going to do if you can hear me once, clock twice. I'm not going to do that. But we're going to start in five minutes everybody. Andrew Boucher can you hear me? Five minutes. We'll start back up in five minutes. Hello everyone. We're going to start back up now. If you wouldn't mind we've got one more set of conversations and we're going to release you back out for more social time in the back of the room. If folks in the back wouldn't mind coming down to the front Mark I see you back there. I'm going to start calling people out. Chance and Lori would you mind bringing bring your friends down. David Moore bring your friends down. Thank you so much. To kick off this panel my colleague Ava Pereira from the Knight Foundation is going to give you a little bit of context. Ava. Hello everyone my name is Ava Pereira and I work with the Knight Foundation so just to give you some context for our interest in IoT we see enormous potential for this transformative technology to shape cities and public life. But it also comes with risks. So we are in the process of making six planning grants for $1.2 million to explore the proper framework and governance models for IoT before sensors are deployed. So we've been working with Susan Crawford from the Harvard Law School to shape these grants and develop them and she's going to moderate a panel for four of our grantees today. So I'll turn it over to her. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Come on in those of you in the back the visible jointer of four foundation presidents was exciting. I have to say the visible jointer of these tremendous four public servants is also very exciting. Most people will live in cities we know that and the tremendous incentives and the collection of information by private companies is easy to discuss. There are also tremendous benefits to the use of from the use of data and technology in cities and these four tremendously gifted local government generalists they're all in technology but they have a seat at the policy table, have a lot to share with us about the potential for action that helps people's lives and the occasional asymmetries under which they operate. There are enormous benefits here. I want to make sure that we underscore that. In each of the cities that represent there are tremendous opportunities for economic growth and for social justice. Simultaneously they face deep issues of homelessness and poverty and crime that they're attempting to address every day. So let me introduce our speakers to you and then I'll kick it off with a few questions to them. I wanted you to meet Yasha Franklin Hodge, who is right on my left, who is the grizzled veteran of the group. He's been the chief innovation officer appointed by Mayor Marty Walsh for about three years now, almost three years. Before that he founded Blue State Digital in 2004 where he essentially built the backbone for the Obama digital presence in 2008 and 2012 and before that was with the Dean campaign. James Hardie two over from Akron is someone with a deep background in both education and public health. He was elected to the school board in 2005 in Akron and has also served in community health operations. He's now chief of staff to their new tech savvy mayor, Mayor Dan Horgan. So tremendous opportunity for him in that role. Two, James is right, is Shereen Santoshan, who is the chief innovation officer for San Jose which as her mayor, Sam Liccardo says may be the 10th in size in the nation, but the first most interesting, most extraordinary city in the nation. So she has a deep background with working with NGOs in other countries outside the United States, also with McKinsey and has been in office like James and like a person I'm about to introduce to you, Charlie Brennan, for about 15 months. So three years here 15 months for the other three and a lot to share with us. On my far left, Charlie Brennan, who has 21 years of experience with the Philadelphia Police Department where he rose to be essentially CIO of the department deep experience with local government returned after 10 years away at the beginning of his new mayor's term Mayor Jim Kenny, also a tech savvy mayor, to take the reins of the information assets there. So these are people who are not merely running the email systems and the databases, although that may be part of some of their jobs, they're also at the policy table working on strategy for their cities. So Charlie, I wanted to start with you where are things in Philadelphia brotherly love when it comes to the future of the Internet of Things? How's it going? Well, we're running a couple disparate projects and I use the word disparate because that's really the problem that we're trying to solve. For example, we're doing some things with sensors in the street to control traffic a little bit. We're doing something with air quality monitors the police are moving into the body cameras which are becoming a big deal. But believe it or not, that's not the thing that I'm most proud of that we're doing because they tend to be what I would call the sexy things about the Internet of Things. What I think the best thing that we're doing now is we're building the network the very non-sexy stuff that no one wants to do because it's behind the scenes and you never get any credit for it is we're building the network a first class network to be able to carry anything that the IOT applications have to throw at it. So, you know, we probably had the same network for the last 15 years. We're increasing our Internet bandwidth by a factor of 20 times over what it is today. We're increasing the capabilities between about 225 city buildings five times over what it is today. What was kind of interesting about that is that we did that as a result of a provision in the cable franchise agreement. And we know other cities do cable franchise agreements too, but there's a provision in there which lets you build and let you negotiate what's called an institutional network and we took advantage of that to its help. Comcast is a big tenant of ours in the city of Philadelphia and I oversee the cable franchise agreements and we were able to negotiate a robust network that will see us for the next 15 years. We'll see us through. Terrific. And without that network, anything from the Internet of Things is running on sand. You've got to be able to move the data around. Yeah, what we're seeing is that and I'm sure everybody else is saying this too is that we're trying to shove more and more stuff through pipes that are very small, especially video. Video is on x-rays. We're seeing our health department send x-rays over and they're pretty big. I'm not an x-ray expert, but I know they're big files, but the video files are just not moving at all. I get complaints from the police your system is broken because it's not moving these files, but they're essentially trying to push 50 gigabyte files through a straw, it's the size of a straw. We're going to make it like a big tunnel is what we're looking for to be able to move those files around. So that's really the challenge and that's really where we're headed. Now without revealing any confidences, I will tell you that all four of these people said they were holding a lot of meetings with vendors. There's tremendous asymmetry. Actually, without tremendous resources inside City Hall, a lot of companies come to meet with these cities. So James, how are things going with your Internet of Things deployments? So I think Akron is in an interesting place. I always like to say the city of Akron is your quintessential middle America medium-sized city. So IOT has to work there if it's going to be something that catches on in a healthy positive way across the country. So we are really looking at it from a strategic perspective right now. We want to take a step back and figure out a lot of our own answers to the questions that were raised even this morning. In large part because as you just noted, and we were talking a little bit prior too, having a tech savvy mayor and being sort of at the beginning although I would say on water and sewer we're ahead of the game if anybody wants to talk about water and sewer. It's that when you raise your hand and say we're ready we're ready to enter this space, this IOT space, we want to delve into it in a big way. Every vendor under the sun descends on you. And the new shiny object that we talked about this morning becomes very, I'll use your term Charles, sexy to those mid-level managers that we heard from this morning who all have budget authority. So from the mayor's office perspective what we want to do is try and take a step back, I think where Akron's at is we know we want to get into this space but we want to do it in a responsible, healthy way that looks at the investments we make really have to fit into two categories. Our mayor says often if it doesn't provide valuable data to us as city managers to actually improve services for folks, whether that's repair the water main before it actually breaks type of level of data. And if it doesn't provide some sort of demonstrable benefit to our residents, our customers at the end of the day we shouldn't be doing it. And I think that we at the city of Akron are leveraging this opportunity with this convening today and the opportunity with the grant to really take a step back with these cities and others that are in similar space and say we don't just want the next shiny thing. We want the shiny thing that's going to do what we needed to do for our residents and for city, good city government. Your platform approach and your mention of water makes me want to ask so what do you know about water? What's happened there? Talk to us about that. So without any real strategy we jumped into the IOT space through a massive 1.4 billion dollar sewer construction project that we're currently underway in the city. We have combined sewers dating back to our wonderful roots as a rubber center of the world where we're capital of the world. But we also dumped an awful lot of junk into the Kyoga River and so we want to fix that and we have a mandated project to do so. But we don't just want to fix it. We think that we can actually save money and resources and again at the end of the day build less which saves our rate payers money by leveraging our entire system as a storage tank. So we're actually I think ahead of the game in terms of water and sewer infrastructure in Smart City because we've leveraged our partnerships with South Bend and University of Notre Dame and started to look at these real-time system controls that use sensor technology to really help our city managers again have the data and the algorithm predictive modeling to know where it's raining how to leverage the sewer system and actually use it as a storage basin so we don't have to build as much which means we don't have to spend as much which means our rate payers don't have to give us money out of their pocket every month as much. So there's a real benefit there we think in what we're trying to do. Let me ask the other three cities here. Do you have water sensing going on in the same way that Akron does? You do? Yeah, we are too. You're doing all of this. Do you think you could learn from each other about how those water systems work and what they're up to? Yeah, interesting. This is a theme I want to develop here. Tell us about how things are going in San Jose. We hear a lot of talk here about strategy need for platforms. Is that similar to what you're confronting in San Jose? Absolutely and I think you know just taking a step back people often ask me what is a smart city? There's a million definitions out there but I would say it really should be technology for the people and so in San Jose we're really trying to take that kind of values based approach to this and the conversation about sewers and about networks is because what is happening now is that IoT is one piece of digital infrastructure and we should be talking about this as essential infrastructure for cities of the future and we are the largest city in Silicon Valley we're a city about a million people. We're set to grow 40% by the year 2040, an additional 470,000 residents and we don't have, government budgets are not going to grow at that rate and so this technology like IoT can be incredibly beneficial to us so I don't want to lose that part of the conversation when we're worried about surveillance and these other pieces because technology is really valuable but IoT by itself is just one piece of the puzzle you know you have to talk about fiber, you have to talk about small self, talk about IoT you've got to talk about that, how the physical infrastructure like light poles will house the sensors for IoT activities and this is a pretty grand opportunity to create and it's complex and so the way that we're addressing that is we actually decided to launch an effort earlier this year that's a digital inclusion and broadband strategy together and what this grant is going to allow us to do is add IoT to that and so we can really take an integrated approach to this very complex challenge that we face because in the absence of that I think we are getting pummeled by vendors constantly and there is an increase in information and there's at least 12 standards for IoT right now and so anyone who tells you let's go do this whole system, you've got to be pretty careful and there's a lot of hardware and it's expensive to get that up on every pole in your city and so these are massive investments and so our approach has been more thoughtful experimental but also really thinking about these systems because how we build them today is going to affect how this space is for the next 20 years because the risk is you'll end up with a lot of silos that don't speak to each other because meanwhile the private investment community is wildly excited about all this they're saying that the market for smart city investments is 1.6 trillion dollars by 2020 just keep adding zeros so their incentives are to sell separate systems and then have you guys write a check to ask a question from one of those systems and that's not your goal and actually that's all of your checks that you've written right that's what we're talking about is taxpayer dollars you're the grizzled veteran, how is it going in Boston on the smart city front? So things are going well with us but I think Boston would probably, I and my colleagues would say that we're more on the skeptic camp on some of the things that are happening right now in smart cities I think like San Jose we are trying to be very values focused and in particular being focused on solving real problems for real people when we get asked sort of what is your smart city strategy my answer which is a little flip is usually well it's just our city strategy it's about having an equitable city it's about having economic development it's about sustainability because if I'm developing a smart city strategy that isn't directly tied to those real needs and challenges we have as a city then I'm not doing my job I'm off here in this sort of technology ivory tower so we released a smart cities playbook that sort of outlines some of the values and some of the questions that we're really trying to wrestle with as we think about how to approach smart cities technology but in addition to values we're also really trying to think a lot about value in how we put together and how we do test projects I say somewhat jokingly we're in the juicero juicer phase of the smart cities movement right now where you know there's sort of this huge industry incentive to take everything that exists in the city and figure out how to upsell some technology on top of that thing and oftentimes the question is not really answered about how that technology is going to deliver real and meaningful outcomes for constituents I've sat across from very large vendors in this space who have said things like well our job is really just to give you a platform and a bunch of sensors and you figure out where to get the value out of it and then you ask them sort of like okay what's this going to cost and they're like we're thinking a 70 million dollar rollout and I'm going wait a second that is not a good place to start a conversation with a cash-strapped city so what we're trying to do is identify pilot project opportunities that allow us to really demonstrate value that are rooted in real and specific initiatives that we have we know we can get kiosks on the street in Boston but if we're going to do a kiosk project we want to tie it to specific digital equity goals that we have we're doing a pilot project right now working with Verizon that's tied to our Vision Zero initiative where we've instrumented a specific intersection in the city that's very crash prone and we're capturing all sorts of data about interactions on the roadways but with the specific goal of testing interventions to help us understand whether this kind of sensor apparatus that can tell us things like cars blocking bike lanes and pedestrians crossing against the light and cars cutting off pedestrians on turns we're trying to answer the question as to whether this technology can actually help us make the street a safer place this technology project in tandem with a larger initiative that is focused on a specific goal of the city to eliminate traffic fatalities and serious injuries on the roadways of Boston and so that's really our philosophy on this we have a project that we'll be kicking off shortly that Knight is supporting which is focused on beta blocks and that's really this idea of how do we make city infrastructure available for people to test new things in a way that is community inclusive because I think that's one of our other values that's often sorely missing from smart cities conversations is how to bring the community into the discussion about what to build, why you build it how you build it, how you address privacy issues so we're trying to create an actual living laboratory for those conversations and those interactions to take place so that it can guide our strategy going forward. It's exciting and Charles I want to return to you because you have a lot of experience in city government listening to Yasha talking about pilots and ways that Boston moving forward how do you figure out what to start with with the internet of things? Well we also are approached by pilots I would say weekly sometimes it seems like daily I'm actually very wary of pilots and we are very selective about what we do. I know this will come as a shock to the audience but there are some vendors who believe that a pilot gives you entree into the whole business of the city and you don't have to go through an RFP process and that's what we kind of watch for so we do experiment with pilots but we're very very careful when we do that as far as like where we're going to go after years of deep thought on this issue I've come to the inescapable conclusion that not everyone thinks like me I know you're all astounded by this because after hearing me talk you probably wonder how could that be so one of our plans is the reason I drop back and what we're going to do is we decided to go out and get a lot of opinions about really what's a smart city but Philly is an old city and a city is not a city a city is really a bunch of neighborhoods and I will tell you categorically that the definition of smart city would be very different in each of those neighborhoods for the poor neighborhoods in which they are worried about walking out of their homes and getting shot video surveillance is a thing that they all would love to have but then again we have kind of the richer people if you would go to them and say what's a smart city they would say I want to know where to park can you tell me where a parking spot is I want to see it on my phone and I want to go there so I don't think that we're actually going to build a plan that's going to say we're going to take this idea and spread it across the whole city because it's not going to satisfy the whole city I think we're going to satisfy different parts of the city depending upon what their individual needs are so I think that that's how the plan is going to come out but right now we have an RFP on the street and the RFP is basically saying to a consultant can you help us figure this out about what we need we've already reached out to again a lot of people don't think like me the business community the educational community the civic groups we've reached out to all of them and we said we want you to be part of this process and the culmination of that is really a smart city summit conference we're going to have an October in the city so that's kind of the culmination of the plan and the end and try to get input from everybody and I'm sure that right now if I told you what it was I would probably be totally wrong there's this idea of Internet of Things as an application almost on infrastructure but what's the basic infrastructure that you think your cities need in order to carry out your strategy let me ask James what do you need to have in place so as the non-tech person on the panel for me it all starts with universal access to the internet I mean we don't have it in Akron I would venture to say most cities don't have universal access from an infrastructure perspective every time we crack a road or lay a sewer pipe we're putting conduit in might not have fiber in it yet but we own it I think it's critical I do hope we delve into the infrastructure piece because I agree I think digital infrastructure is as important as water infrastructure but it's not seen that way because quite honestly water and sewer infrastructure isn't seen as essential anymore at least not from a state and federal perspective municipalities are bearing the full weight of this entire thing I mean it doesn't matter whether it's IOT infrastructure or your basic legacy infrastructure pieces it's all on us now and so we have to think about digital infrastructure from the same perspective where do you start I think you start with making sure all your citizens can access reliable broadband you know internet access and then from there I think we have a responsibility to protect the access almost as a public utility we were having a conversation about small cell technology fantastic technology in Ohio where municipalities are now battling a large tech giant who has worked a bill into the state legislature to take away the right of way and use it for corporate purposes to put the technology up and it's under the guise of well this is a public good we're expanding the network but our cities able to reap the benefit of that not necessarily even from a monetary perspective but from a protective role that we have for our citizens so being the non-tech person I guess I would think about it more philosophically to say it should be treated digital infrastructure should be treated like any other municipal utility that we operate but unfortunately we at the city level are on the hook for it all now the states and the feds have for the most part backed away from funding and from helping us do those certain things so there's significant challenges in taking that philosophy to its full extent I'd like to dig into that there are more than states where bills have passed or are pending that would remove from cities the ability to control their own public rights of way really remove your ability either to charge for it but also to design it and control who gets whether it's a neutral point or whether one actor can control that street light or whatever it is it's a political battle going on that's invisible from Americans now Sherene you have a lot of experience in the mobile world so if you were you know queen of the entire situation what powers should cities have and how can we work together to ensure that that city power remains in place well I think first the public right away is infrastructure that was built with taxpayer dollars and in order to use that infrastructure companies should pay rates reasonable rates on that infrastructure to be able to use it and for cities one of the things that we've seen which has been touched on is that so far with the systems that we have if we let private sector investment go forth it tends to invest in areas that are the most profitable as perhaps they should because they are corporations and as cities we incentivize full doubt of infrastructure in areas of the city that we need it and laying additional conduit and fiber and that you know should be preserved and is an essential tool for you as residents of these cities to get the infrastructure that you need and so this sort of large scale battle that is happening is going to be I think a long conversation I will say that and if we want to get the point of digital inclusion the way to do that is not to take away the rights of local municipalities and frankly local residents in determining what is best for their communities and is there now an organized city voice on this issue Yasha not yet we'd like to organize one and we need some help in doing that I think you have all these cities who are wrestling with issues of access to infrastructure in a different environment some cities own their street lights but not their utility poles some cities own none of it some cities own all of it you have different state level regulations in some places like Massachusetts cities are fairly empowered in other places cities basically have no authority to regulate these things that having been said I think there is you know as was so well expressed by my co-panelists there are some really compelling reasons why cities need to have a voice and need to be a part of the discussion of how we build the connectivity infrastructure for today and for future applications especially because we are frankly at this point the last frontier in many places of defensive values like equity and universal access and privacy and open internet rules now that the FCC has sort of abandoned their charge in that area so I think what we would like to do you know certainly I and some of the other folks on the stage have talked about this I've talked about this with and other CIO's is find a way to get cities together so that we can start to build a counter narrative to the very well coordinated well funded narrative that's being pushed by telecommunications companies that is essentially saying cities are just a problem they never all they want to do is say no or charge just unreasonable amounts of money and they're using this to ram through very productive policy changes I think cities have an opportunity and also a responsibility to build an honest counter narrative I will say like it is not always easy to do a small cell in a city and it's not just because we care about things like equity it's also because sometimes cities can be real pain to deal with like we're not efficient we take you know we will say well if you want to put a small cell you're going to have to get every neighbor on that street to say yes I want that small cell there honestly I don't think that's a realistic requirement there's a level of community engagement that we need to support but there's also a place at which you can start to become a hindrance to actual infrastructure investment that's important for the city so I think for us as cities with shared priorities to be able to develop a shared agenda that says look we're going to commit to building processes that are predictable and fair but we're also going to stand up for the values that are most important to us around promoting competition equitable access and so many of the other things that are important in telecommunications I think we can do that but we as cities need to organize Charlie when you entered in on this new job who did you call in other cities how did you learn about how other CIOs were approaching questions like this how does this work well there's a CIO group in the state that you know I've hooked into but it really wasn't very helpful and the problem with Philly as a million and a half people is that there's very little to compare us with we can't compare us with New York or Chicago and when you start looking at cities that are like us they tend to be the newer cities maybe the newer cities out west and I don't think they experienced kind of the same problems that we do so I run into that I run into that problem of you know who's like me that I can talk to and I can't quite find anybody I actually looked up the I didn't know you had that many people and also the metro there's some accurate may have just 200,000 people in its area but as a metro it's 700,000 so in fact all three of you are in fact all four of you are in a sense of a size 5 million for the whole metro area 645 or whatever it is for Boston itself you're all kind of midsize in your way and maybe could share information and organize this way because I do think well I'm the moderator so I'll slow down and not express so much of an opinion but there is a real opportunity I think like if the four of you plus let's say 12 of your colleagues known to you were able to spend a day together would that be useful to you? I think you're hitting on something important about the changing role of technologists in the government there's very established institutions for people who manage IT systems right and there's plenty of places that those folks can get together but I think everybody on the stage is in a role that has a technology component but it also has a strategic component and it has a component that ties to policy and it has a component that ties to the sort of you know how do we do business as government in the 21st century delivering digital services using data in IOT that's a really new area that the legacy institutions are not creating the right kind of support networks around and I think we have to start to build some of that infrastructure both in terms of getting people together in rooms to talk about these issues but also some of the supporting research and writing and publishing that will help support people who are doing this job in cities big and small. Yeah. Oh yes, Street. Oh I was just going to say and it is sort of organically happening already and through you know partnerships like this NetGain are so essential to bringing us together and helping us share and be able to frankly fight some of the fights together against some pretty moneyed interests and I think also there's a few organizations you know there's the MetroLab network there's Bloomberg, WhatWork Cities that has pulled together a lot of cities that have been very helpful and I think those coalitions are going to be really really important going forward. And James are silos an issue inside Akron City government by any chance? Does that ever happen? Do people not talk to each other internally? I was going to say that's a serious question absolutely. I mean I think that I mean I would echo that we have to we have a responsibility as cities to break down our own silos we need to make it easy for well-intentioned entities who want to do business in the city for the purposes of really furthering the city's goals and as partners we want to make it easier but at the same time we have this responsibility sometimes those things are in place for a reason. I don't know if anybody has heard a small cell thing outside your window. I can tell you I get calls weekly from residents with this refrigerator running outside of their house. We as cities have to respond to those to our constituents and I think it would be easier to respond to them and say yes I understand it's it might be a nuisance to you but this is what it does for the city and this is the revenue that we gain to help improve the public spaces and things that you enjoy. It wasn't just put up there because they are allowed to do it. We had a negotiation and we were able to make it happen in a way that at least you as a resident gain something out of it. But I do think as a city we have lots of silos going on. One of the things that we're hoping to do through the grant from a technology perspective is break some of those down. We don't want to have, I think to Charles's point earlier, we don't want to have one size fits all smart city technology disbursements in Akron. We want to really hear from our residents. We have the same issues. We have neighborhoods that really are asking every day for more cameras and we have residents every day who are asking for completely different things. So we can't have each department trying to fill those needs on their own. We have to have some sort of clearing house from a city perspective that isn't too onerous but at the same time protects the public interest. So earlier today Alberto Bergwitz said he used to not be enthusiastic about funding or even working with government at all and now he thinks it would be helpful to fund people who would go inside and spend a while. Like not just flit, not just do a project but spend a while. Would that be useful to you, Shereen? Absolutely. I mean I am already doing that because I do we have to find what I call creative capacity because we don't have money. So I use the Fuse Fellows which is they do national search for high talent and so we have a Fuse Fellow who's helping with our broadband strategy. I'm recruiting an HBS, Harvard Business School Leadership Fellow this year who will join in August my team and having those folks with their special skills not only helps with the technology piece but sometimes the project management piece, the strategy piece, all of those things are really essential because you need folks who can move across sectors. I mean half of our job is translating the technology into things people understand and then translating it into policy and educating folks and the more bright minds we have working together in City Hall the better off we'll be. If I could just add to that I think there's huge value in having folks with technology skills go into government partly because they can teach but also because for them to deliver things that matter they have to do a lot of learning first and it's very hard to do that learning from outside. You know we'll have people come with a product and they say oh this is perfect for traffic management and you start talking to them and you realize they've never spent time with a traffic engineer who does this work every day and they've come up with something that seems great on paper but is completely impractical. So I think finding ways to embed people with technology skills inside of government organizations where they can go and sit with a traffic engineer a fire dispatcher, a building inspector and really learn not only the ins and outs of the job but also the culture sort of tribal nature that exists within these different parts of government and then help develop and bridge that gap with technologists who can build things that have that real on the ground impact for those people. There is a fundamental and there's plenty of reasons for it from silos to talent to all sorts of other things but until we start creating those kinds of relationships in city government I think a lot of it's going to be technologists and long time civil servants talking past each other. Charlie any comments on this? Yeah I think whatever you bring someone in from outside especially who's been outside a long time you should have a defibrillator waiting for them when they come in. Because when they come in they keep saying like how can this be, how can you even function and you know after their heart stops and you shock them back you know you kind of get them back into why government does what it does because I think government is sometimes almost inherently inefficient so when you see business and I've been on both sides and you know you come back into government you really have to have a mindset and as long as somebody comes in from the outside and you prepare them for the cold water shock that they're going to have they can be useful. And if they're willing to stay for a while? Yeah I think they have to hang for a while because it really I think people come in from the outside at least in my government. I always tell them because they kind of get nervous right away and they say oh my god I don't understand any of this stuff and I tell them it takes about a year. It really takes a year to kind of figure out what's going on and after about a year then it dawns on you okay I know this doesn't work well but I gotta work within the system to try to make it work. And in fact those can turn out to be some of the most helpful voices because they spent a little time outside and are adding that inside. James have you had any experience with that kind of inner outer role? People popping in absolutely and we so my mayor is the first newly elected mayor in Akron in 30 years and so you had a long serving mayoral leadership that thought one way and now you're obviously as most politicians do you want to do the opposite in many ways and so we have a lot of interested people who want to help the city the thing that I think about too to sort of not say but rather add to what's already been said it'd be great if we could also build capacity within our communities to do some of this work within places like Akron. Data storage data management is obviously a big piece of all of this some cities like Kansas City have been successful in developing with their own tech community startups that can handle their own data. So instead of paying necessarily to have some big conglomerate come in and store your data for you or I'm dealing with us now with the body worn camera issue why can't we also build capacity within our own software guilds and tech communities and things within our cities so that if that technologist doesn't ultimately stay past four or five years we have built capacity within our communities to be able to keep the conversations moving so that we don't have this vacuum when this person leaves. We had a lot of discussion this morning about privacy and security and the need for at least one questioner suggested a need for public engagement on those issues. This is hard. How would you learn how to do that? How would you approach talking to the public about a difficult set of IoT privacy and security issues? Anybody? I mean I'll start by saying I think we're trying to at least take a do no harm approach with the projects that we do the traffic safety thing I mentioned earlier if you go to that intersection which is very well outfitted with cameras and sensors you'll see on all of these street poles at eye level a little sign that says the city of Boston is using technology to improve traffic safety at this intersection and there's a URL that gives a very plain English description of what we're doing why we're doing it what we're not doing and then allows access to more detailed information about data privacy and storage stuff. I think there's a baseline level of just being cognizant that it matters that you talk to the public about this and that you try to be open to that conversation. I think what the work we still have to do and I know there's a few folks in this room who are starting to do this is to build that toolkit to have these conversations so that it isn't just us informing residents what's happening but that we're actually engaging with them and understanding the landscape of their concerns about what they're excited about and so that we can start to integrate that kind of two-way community conversation into our planning for what projects we do and don't pursue. Right now I think we tend to take a very ideological approach to issues of privacy and security to a lesser extent which isn't necessarily a bad thing that we have people in the tech community that feel very passionate about this but the example that's been raised a couple times that surveillance means very different things in different places. People's attitude towards sharing data who they're sharing it with, how it gets used, matters a great deal in terms of what they're comfortable with and I think those are the kinds of nuanced conversations that we haven't yet learned how to have as a city. So I think we're just starting to have those conversations in San Jose and I would say this is an area where the laws are well behind what technology is and so the way that we're starting to think about it is how do we bring in academics and sort of neutral third parties to help us develop those policies, help us think about privacy by design, what does that actually mean practically when you're working with your residents and the people who populate Silicon Valley companies all live in San Jose so we've got a very interesting demographic and I'm already starting to think about because some of the startups coming to us are bringing us robots and we did a civic contest to combat graffiti and we got about 140 entries and the top four two were robots two were drones and so we're driving towards this new solution that will save the city $60,000 every time that you have to take down graffiti off the bridge but you know there's no framework right now for dealing with these new technologies and so having that conversation early and having it open because what I've seen so far what I've observed is if you don't have the conversation then people assume it's something very various so you have to be open. And James Chief of Staff it could be a sharp line menacing city or freaks me out versus keeps me safe. How do you communicate that? What do you do? By the way I loved that analogy I wrote it down the smart city versus menacing city I think it's accurate and you know the one example that comes to mind so in Akron I think we would also echo we do the first do no harm sort of strategy right now but the one example that I came to mind right away is we're in the process of purchasing hardware and software and rolling out a body worn camera program this is going to happen all across the country but Akron through a DOJ grant we're I think among the first wave of municipalities that are going to deploy these to every patrol officer and then work through the data and the file storage this is evidence but to back up the point that was just said there isn't exactly a huge standard just yet on these things so we at the municipal level are availing ourselves the best and the brightest to help us think through our own local policies what other cities are doing but there also isn't a lot of case law yet so it's not like these things have been tried you know whether we're right or wrong on these policies and these are simple but important questions things like can an officer review the video before they put right the statement or after what are those implications so in my role as chief of staff I have to look at the tech but I also have to look at the policy and the politics of it because it's a great thing I think you know you look at the public surveys enormous majority support the deployment of public or body worn cameras but we really haven't from a community perspective thought through the policy political and technological implications of just that one system and then how it fits into the overall sort of smart city strategy that might be going on so from Akron's perspective I can see where in my job I have to balance the tech the policy that goes with it which in many cases isn't written and the politics of it so it's additional capacity additional resources information sharing I have to say as I go to many scrappy cities across the country interview people many of the problems resonate deeply they're very similar but your heroes all of you have no time to go around talking to other people showing up on panels except when you have you know you've got to get your jobs done and some resources to expand your capacity seem to be a really good idea Charlie do you have any last thoughts on that? I was really kind of taken aback by how many speakers this morning talking about the privacy issue really I mean you know complete privacy but I think the one thing that we all share in common in this room is the reason you want complete privacy is because you're relatively completely safe and your works work completely safe at your homes but I would venture to guess that everyone in this room would give up some of their privacy if you didn't feel as safe as you do just think after 9-11 how quick we were to give up some of our privacy after that and as we get further away from 9-11 all of a sudden our attitudes change I agree with you and I agree with what a lot of the speakers said it's time to do some of the same work now for you know this privacy issue but I do believe that the aggregation of data could serve a public good especially if it is anonymous for example I even remember Google for a while I don't know if they're still doing it or not like they could predict kind of where the flu was going to go I remember I could see it coming to Philly and I figured I better keep washing my hands and you know I'm in my way you know so kind of knowing those things is a good thing but I do know that there's a tremendous concern about and there will be more of it about collecting data on you as an individual or identifying you as an individual but I think it's almost a balancing act I will tell you that in my neighbor in my city there are people that would give up all their privacy if they could feel safe I'm going to open up the audience in a second I want to do a little run of the table here for your top priorities for where additional money should be put so Yash I'll start with you where should go? I think you have so many great experiments being conducted all over the country cities big and small we need help elevating the stories of those experiments what worked what didn't and helping us learn from one another and Shreene what do you think what would you fund? I would say the capacity and bringing people in and out and then also additional models and codes around privacy and things so we're not all reinventing the wheel every time we try to figure this out I would concur with that I would add again cities like Akron we need help with just hard dollars to build some of the infrastructure out it's just not there outside of some siloed grants and we just don't have the resources at the end of the day to do everything that we would like to do I kind of agree with James is that we'll have money to build a master plan but I know we're going to run out of gas is that we would normally look to the state and feds for grants I mean that's where we would go I don't see that happening here and there's a great concern that I can have a fantastic master plan but basically nothing to do with it questions over there a few rows back Hi first of all thank you this has been a really good panel I think when we look at the internet of things and especially when it's paired with artificial intelligence the benefits tend to start with the privileged and end with the underprivileged and the risks do the opposite they start with the underprivileged and they don't start with the underprivileged so what is a single piece of advice you would give to each other to turn that such that when you're building these systems for your city that the benefits start with the underprivileged and the risks I don't want to say the risks start with the privilege but they don't start with the underprivileged Well I would say you know first of all I'm not sure that we engage underprivileged communities in these conversations enough and so even on the digital inclusion piece which we've been working on you know we went out and we started looking at what other cities had done and we didn't see a lot of people who went out and said into their neighborhoods and asked people you know why aren't you connected is it you know we know largely it's cost and then the second reason is that it's not not relevant to me but why is it not relevant and you know the point is you have to go out to other people and ask and so we're actually doing a street level survey in four languages and going out in current neighborhoods and engaging them in that conversation and engaging the schools through our public library and you know I think this is the problem that you have sometimes when you have technologists designing your IOT strategy because you're not bringing in that civic piece of it. I would say I mean it has to start with what your actual priorities are as a city right if you don't care about underprivileged people then they will get the short end of the stick on all of this stuff and many other things that have nothing to do with technology so really getting your policy priorities straight. I think there's a real danger with some of this stuff of what I call sort of smart washing a problem that actually needs real investment and instead we say well let's just throw some technology you know fairy dust at it and that's going to make it go away. It's like if people are getting sick with asthma in your neighborhood because the air quality is terrible air quality measurement isn't going to solve that problem right you've got to actually go build a park and plant some trees and think about how to improve things so I mean I think ultimately it's making sure that the more closely aligned if you have a progressive strategy if you are thoughtful about equity and equitable access and then you align your technology very closely with that strategy I think you can avoid some of those pitfalls. We need to stick to our guns and stick together so I mean we as cities have to fight for other cities and also share just like this wonderful idea that I want to steal immediately and go and do an acronym. The other thing is that to your point city issues are city issues and we have to engage our residents one on one in groups in neighborhoods about what's going on in their neighborhoods first if there's a technological solution that could aid it fantastic but we can't approach smart cities by saying you know we have the technology that's going to fix that we are going to fix it there might be a technology that helps. You know when you talk about the underprivileged and access group what are you really talking about you're talking about wifi right that means nothing to the rich people because they all got it and it means nothing to the businesses they all got it too so I don't believe you could ignore any constituency because the businesses and the rich people have all the cloud and if you ignore them they're the ones who have to pay for the underprivileged to get what they need so I really think that you really have to attack this at a much broader scale and not leave anybody out of the loop. I'm wondering what you're doing and how you're thinking about getting access to private sector IOT sensors and data that might be useful for some of the things that you want to do. Is that a thought for any of you Charlie? We've hoped into about 2,500 private sector cameras for video surveillance. I know video surveillance everybody cringes up when I say that but we own about 400 of our own cameras but we realize that why should we use ours when we have so many others out there so we haven't looked beyond that yet but the public-private partnership is something that appeals to me as long as we can both agree as to what the benefits for both are. We've done some stuff with data sharing around transportation so Waze had a pretty innovative transportation program a data sharing program that they've since cut back quite a bit but allowed us to get access to road speed data and run some interesting experiments we've changed policy and intersection or series of intersections. What does that do to traffic congestion in the city? I think the fundamental problem we always run into is that often what our interest is and when we try to represent the public is in conflict with the proprietary value that a third party sees from the data that they're capturing. We have a data sharing agreement with Uber and it's been helpful in understanding where and how Uber operates in the city but it has not been helpful for a transportation planning and housing planning perspective because they are concerned about giving us data at the level of granularity that would actually be useful because it's competitively sensitive to them. So it's a very tricky area and I honestly don't know of a lot of wildly successful examples of people finding that well-aligned middle ground. Yes. Thanks for the panel. I think it was pretty illustrative to understand the city perspective here. I want to pick up on something James mentioned that you mentioned that the city has done a good job of leveraging the entrepreneur ecosystem for the technology, for the smart city efforts. Now isn't the onus on the city, as an entrepreneur, I'm quite intimidated with the, for lack of a better word, the bureaucratic jungle I'm going to have to face to be a technology provider. Shouldn't cities be more transparent and provide enablers for smaller companies to engage? I mean, I can't speak to the complete Kansas City experience but they seem to have developed some of their own. And so to answer your question, yes. I think all of us have said in various ways that while we may push back sometimes on sort of the vendor onslaught of wonderful ideas, we also don't want to be close-minded and bureaucratic either. We have to find a balance. And that's where again, I think this whole conversation around technologists and a city the size of Akron, having people that can translate what you need to what a civil servant needs to provide so you can move forward is critical. I've tried and I would argue have had medium level success in doing that in my year and a half but it's proven to me that it's necessary. We have to protect the public interest but also build up entrepreneurship within our cities we don't want to hold that back. Hi, I'm Anne from the City of Boston again. I was recently in Ohio and the sort of new set of limitations on local control of the public right of way certainly seemed top of mind for many people there. How does Akron think about this and how do you see it tied, if at all, to action you might take on other things that impact your constituents as they use the internet? So definitely top of mind. I would say though and I don't know the experience of my colleagues up here but home rule in general when I say home rule I'm talking about cities ability to control their own destiny has been under siege for many a decade now at the state federal level. So it's always a concern for us when something that might seem insignificant like oh just take a piece of the public right of way it's going to be technology that everybody wants so don't worry about it. That does not go over very well anymore nor should it. I think unfortunately cities for too long didn't fight those battles and now we're dealing with it on the backside to say you know what we have a duty to our citizens that if you're going to use the public right of way you need to compensate them in some regard because again it's their infrastructure. They built it. So I think we think about it in terms of we had one word for this whole thing to be balanced. How do we protect the public interest but at the same time be progressive in moving forward. We don't want to we want to be optimists. We don't want to be pessimists in this new environment but at the same time I think we can't sell our residents down the river simply because a vendor comes in and says you don't even have to purchase anything. We're just going to put them up for you and as long as you give us the right of way you know your residents are going to benefit. I don't know that they will. How are we measuring that? Who are they benefiting because we're giving it away too much I would argue too much and it's going to be this continual balance that we're all going to have to strike between great ideas shiny new objects but also are they really benefiting real people at the end of the day. And by the way at the end of that especially in the IRT space is that they own all the data so when we think about new economies that are going to come more data is going to be a massive currency if you give that away now you can't roll that back and so we want to work with private sector we want to use our city as a platform we do a lot of experimentation we do demonstration projects with many of our Silicon Valley companies but we do that in a way that we can have equal funding. Just a quick thought to that one of the things we're running into as we think about data ownership and control is the intersection between the desire for ownership and privacy and the public records laws so we've actually found ourselves in a few places deliberately ceding control and access to data because we are concerned about it becoming a public record and therefore exposing people to undue privacy risk so this is I think for you know there's at least a couple of lawyers in the room I think an area of hopefully some exploration and some evolution of our legal structures so that we can maintain the goals of transparency that come in the private public records laws while also creating real protections for digital data privacy. So just turn to the table one last time if there's one thing you want people to remember from this panel what is it Charlie what do you want people to remember? That big cities have unique problems we may be a little different than some of the other jurisdictions you see and we'd like to establish relationships that help us resolve the problems because I know internally we will never get the funding to do the smart thing smart city things we need to do. James? Everything that was just said I would only add the balance piece that cities and municipalities are in that very delicate space right now where states have pretty much abandoned us from a certain from a policy perspective or standards perspective and a funding perspective so we're trying to do as much as we can for residents with very little resources but at the same time balancing great ideas and fostering that ecosystem that's going to make our cities thrive we want our cities to thrive I'm optimistic about that even after this morning's all good information but at the same point we are not we have to be cognizant of the risks and challenges involved in that we just know that cities know that we're trying to work through it but we also are in an environment where there's very little out there and it's really each other that we have to get through it. That's terrific, Charlie what's the take away? I would just say that you know I think one of the speakers earlier said that governments are abdicating their responsibility and that is not true at all we are on the front lines and we are fighting these battles and frankly we need your help in this process because there's a lot of sort of cards on the technology front and we have each other but we don't have kind of investment in capacity we don't have investment in knowledge and we need some help in some frameworks and I think you know I'm so thankful for these kinds of forums that allow us to get some of that help. Terrific, Yasha last word. Smart technology and smart ideas is easy. We have real problems that affect real people. Focus your energy and your investments on the space in between those two things so that we can actually make this technology deliver real value. Please join me in making these four heroes for their work. We're in the last sprint to the end. I want to particularly thank Susan Crawford. This panel wouldn't this panel wouldn't have happened were it not for the not just the conversations and meetings she put together for us late last year but I think the work that has been leading for the last several years in thinking critically about the internet and its potential and how it can best be rolled out at the city level. I thought Cherine's closing point that I think there's been a lot of kind of inside or outsider tension through some of the discussions we've been having today and through some of the discussions we've been having for the last year and Cherine's attempt at the very end to say we're in this together local government is an ally I think is particularly relevant today when so many of us are aware that public distrust of institutions across the board with the perhaps the only exception being institutions like the one we're in today being so high and local governments now finding themselves in the unique place of being government but also being trying to serve citizen needs and residents needs in a whole different way. Yeah I think certainly you see some opportunities for those bridges and opening doors that you need to kind of see one of the other closing comments was you know there's one word to describe this balance I guess my word which is a little bit more worrisome still take coming out of this we started being decided for optimist or pessimist and I kind of gone back and forth all day is that there are some very real tensions in that and there are tensions that we're having to make decisions on in real time and so like I think it was Cherine saying it in the last piece once you make those decisions for the vendors to hold your data it's hard to roll that back and so there are kind of tensions that we're deciding between civic value and efficiency and privacy between control over our own data and convenience and many many decisions that we're making in real time where there are tensions and I think keeping that in mind we are at the beginning of a conversation and a wave where being honest about the things that are going to be hard and not just saying you know by the right dialogue we can easily solve them is another part of this process because I think we you know this is a I was just talking to Mark a little bit at the end and I wish we had gotten into that panel that you know his comment really was it's a lot more complicated than that in some ways I mean it was a longer conversation than that so I'm kind of coming a little bit hopeful from comments like this but also really feeling like there's a lot more complicated stuff for us to dig in but we've started a lot of the right conversations I will stand by what I said on the president's panel though that a key to me in it is understanding and to a degree sort of blowing this up in people's minds to the point that we can have those conversations with a much bigger group of people this is a you know a tiny room the neck conversation is a tiny conversation that the set of people working on cities is a tiny conversation that set of people working on internet activism thinking about private security is a tiny conversation we really need to grow into a much bigger conversation across society because the internet becomes the environment that we live in yeah I think that's a common thread running through so with that in mind in terms of growing and broadening the conversation we wanted to make sure you guys are part of as we close this chapter of the conversation before turning back to drinks in the back so we really do especially those of you who haven't had a mic yet we really would love to hear you share maybe there's something that you're thinking about that you weren't thinking about when you came in maybe there's something you're thinking about doing here that you weren't thinking of before you came in and I know about half of you by name so I can't start like poking on folks like like Elena yeah our go to volunteer right here Peter yeah yeah for sure scary and banal Bruce Lincoln of Silicon Harlem one of the comments that was made in the last panel equated the need of the underprivileged with that of being served by wifi and that's not the case whatsoever because the underprivileged communities are historically underserved from the infrastructure standpoint actually it needs to be reversed it's those very communities where we have to put in place the next generation internet wifi is one part of that but also the gigabit infrastructure is another part of that and then tied into that is all the kinds of services that they need from a humanistic standpoint not simply surveillance or this idea that when you walk out of your home you want to have the information over your smart phone as to whether or not you're going to get shot because that's not really the case in these underserved communities but it has to be a level of equity and humanism applied to how these services get deployed and that really resonated a lot with what Josh had to say in terms of how Boston is thinking about all of this and is there anybody at the back got the microphones can actually are wireless and can go beyond the back of the cameras our former philanthropy colleague Elena is raising her hand so and I should say I should get Elena we had early conversations with Elena and she really helped formulate a lot of the pathways we ended up going on so no pressure but we're coming to close us out as well as help to start. No it's just more of a comment that I was happy Elena Harkness and with the Brookings Institution now and do a lot of research on cities and governance issues but I heard a number of times on all the different panels people call out the importance of intermediaries that can structure this conversation just as this conference this net gain initiative is and it just strikes me how important that's going to be over the long term I've talked to folks here today that represent universities, organizing groups, human rights groups you know people that are on the very highly technical side of things and I just think we have to think about that infrastructure I think Darren said this earlier for the long term this is going to be a long term problem so I just want to kudos to the organizers for pulling together people representing each of the sectors that I think need to be at the table but let's think about if we have the right intermediaries in place to sustain this kind of conversation and really work together to get there. Thanks guys. And we don't yet so it's a good thing to call out for sure. We have a couple more comments and then we'll maybe wrap and continue the more important strategic intermediary building which is drinking. Nobody from the back group we didn't get anyone from the fish anything from the laptop crowd in the back. I think there was one hand up there. Go Georgia I'm Georgia from the Open Technology Institute. One of the things that has struck me the last week I was driving over the holiday weekend and listening to Reply All from Gimlet and they added a new feature on whether or not you should be angry about the things that you're reading about online and they focused on the broadband privacy decision for their first one and they ended up deciding to make it a 4 out of 10 as in not something you should worry about and of what struck me was the two hosts for the podcast are relatively privileged technology writers telling everyone they don't need to worry about that and I was like okay we're clearly not with the conversations we're having here we're still not fostering enough larger conversation about what the impact of that really is what the impact of these problems are for the more impoverished communities for low resource communities and how do we start to change that and so thinking about it from within the tech media conversation like we all know each other and talk to each other I think we're still not really getting out to the communities that are really hurt by these things and we're definitely not reaching the tech community yet so just food for that well um yeah I just wanted to say that it was great to hear from the people who are in the organizations and foundations that are part of net games and to the technologists and from the cities it's important though that this isn't an internet of things conference this is about the public interest and funding public interest technology and with the internet of things who's going to be looking out for human rights, digital rights, marginalized communities if not net gains and the people in this room it's not going to come from the commercial sector so those who people who work for municipalities and towns and villages it's important when you make technology decisions to think about again that after effect next year five years ten years from now because you can't put the toothpaste back in the bottle so I want to stress that thank you wait Matt you used toothpaste from a bottle but I know I think you're right and this is the seed I totally applaud that spirit and appreciate that comment this is the seed of who's got to take care of that stuff. Hi I just wanted to say as a last wrap up for folks who might not be familiar there are some amazing programs and initiatives that are here in the room doing incredible work that I think could give us a point of inspiration to lead from so I'm going to put some colleagues on the spot but if you don't know about it yet please take a moment to look into ranking digital rights something that will speak to and support some of the earlier conversations with regard to what we need to know and how we support it. Greta you can say more but more importantly I want folks to know particularly who are interested in community engagement strategies that are led by fostered by supported by and are sustained by communities most affected is in New York the Rise program which is an affected digital stewards program where young people are trained along with community members to engage in localizing mesh nets right so it's not just the internet it's about internets and how communities can then own them and shepherd them so for their since they weren't in the room with us today but they're very much affected by this from community to education to workforce please take a moment to find out more. Can I pass it to you and put you on the spot? Thank you Megan. Hi I'm with New America's Resilient Communities program and as Megan was saying we work with residents in six sandy impacted New York City communities to co-design and build mesh wireless networks that are really like local internet projects so really helping people understand how their engagement works locally and Megan also mentioned Rebecca McKinnon's fantastic ranking digital rights project which really has created an entire methodology around corporate accountability and human rights and technology so I would absolutely recommend folks take a look at that. Alright great well thank you all so much I'm going to mention that you know net game doesn't stop here the projects you'll hear about are Joe Andrew did I see a hand up in the back I was shocked how quiet and reticent you were I thought maybe you had a cold or something. So if those you don't know personal democracy forum is coming up June 8th and 9th and anybody who's registered here would be happy to extend a deep deep discount because as John's about to say the conversation that is happening here is continuing in other places and we bring together about a thousand people from around the country and parts of the world and a lot of the same topics are going to be brought up there and we're going to expand the community as much as possible to June 8th and 9th and if you need any information you can find me or reach out to John or anybody from the Knight Foundation. Thank you. And what I was going to say is in addition to that the next iteration of net game that we're going to start taking on start on Monday taking on is around what we're calling the quantified society the ways I mean overlaps a lot obviously with what we've been talking about today the ways in which data intentionally often unintentionally with our awareness often without our awareness is driving the way our lives are being impacted and if you want to get a little sneak preview our colleague Chance Williams from the Open Society Foundation is in the back way back corner there he along with MacArthur Foundation and his colleagues Susan Morgan who's here too are taking the lead on that so we're excited to see where that goes for our part I really want to thank Lauren and Susan from the Knight Foundation team who got here a little bit before 6am to set up and moved with us today as we move things around I especially want to thank Alana Berkowitz who I think is still here just saw her Alana was part of this journey for us and really helped get the ball rolling in a lot of these conversations and thank you so much to the library staff and all the folks who have run this for us and then I also want to thank on the Mozilla side who's one of our senior fellows has been driving this whole kind of work around net gain as well as Michelle Thorn and John Rogers who've been part of our IOT kind of I don't know I want to say research group but really kind of crazy activists fuck up the world group if you haven't met John introduce yourself over the course of the cocktails but really an amazing team the Knight and the Mozilla people working together thank you to all of you and thank you to all the staff here at the library for pulling this together and thank you all for just adding so much value to the conversation I for one am more excited to see what comes out of this today than I was walking in this morning so but meanwhile please stay and keep talking I will no longer provoke you to stop the conversations we can have them for a while there's wine and I think beer in the back room so please hang out and they're not going to kick us out so eventually