 Hi, hello everyone, I'm Cynthia Smith, curator of, by the People of Designing a Better America Exhibition that's currently on display on both the first and the third floors of the museum. It's on display now until February 26, 2017. If you've not had an opportunity to see it, please do so. It includes 60 designs from around the United States that address complex issues of social and spiritual inequalities in urban, suburban and rural communities. Design responses range in scale from the entire city of Detroit to a mobile health app for expected mothers. Thank you so much for coming tonight and welcome to Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. We are the only museum in the U.S. devoted exclusively to design. The talks this evening is the first of several we have scheduled while the exhibition is on display. The next Design Night New York presented by Autodesk and Cooper Hewitt takes place January 12th and defiant jewelry with rebel mel is on January 26th. There's a couple more we haven't scheduled those and another one with IBM and if you've signed up we'll be sure to send out a notice to you when we get those dates. I'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsors. By the People is made possible by the generosity of the Ford Foundation with additional support provided by Elizabeth and Lee Ainslie, Duchamp, Gensler, the Lily Ockinclose Foundation, the Rudin Family Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, Autodesk and the Horace W. Goldsman Foundation. I always like to say that By the People was definitely supported by the people. We had so many wonderful sponsors and a very, very special thanks to IBM who provided major support of the exhibition and with whom we collaborated on the designing resilience colleague workshop that took place earlier today and who is supporting the program tonight. Many thanks. Tonight I'm delighted to have several individuals whose important work is included in By the People. They're here to help us explore how design might address mounting climate challenges. We have Laura Baer from OMA who will discuss resist delay store discharge urban water strategy, Red Hook, Wifi, Digital Stewart, Robert Smith, and Dorn Cox, one of the founders of FarmHack. And to moderate the design resilience program tonight, we have Richard Micas, the head of communication strategies for IBM's Smarter Cities initiative along with quite a number of other things. His resume is quite long. So without further ado, I give you Richard. Thank you, Cynthia. I actually did work at IBM for the beginning of what we called Smarter Cities, which was a project that stemmed from an initiative that we had around something we call Smarter Planet, which several years ago was inspired by the idea that the intersection of technology and society could change industries and it could change lives. And so as we pursued that, we realized that, well, that's lofty. It's very hard to implement something at the planetary level, so we brought it down to the city levels and we realized that with all of the instrumentation and data and infrastructure that existed, it was quite possible now that departments, transportation and water and safety and the like, emergency management, could integrate all the data they had to make much better and more important decisions. And that was kind of the genesis of the project and it's continued on in many ways now because now data, of course, is becoming more prolific and the ability to access data and glean insights from the data is what's really changing in everything we're doing in this context and around the world in industry and technology and, of course, not for profit. So it's an exciting time to really be talking about something like this and I just wanted to, yeah, because we're going to hear from some wonderful people in a moment. I'll tell you how the night is going to work and we'll keep it moving. But the thing that I noticed when I worked in cities around the world, whether it was in Detroit or Tehran or Miami or Johannesburg or Istanbul or in South Asia, they're always good ideas. The thing that was tricky is it required a couple of things. A strategy to address some of the most compelling problems that we're facing in the municipality, the community, the country. But it took visionary leaders who had the idea to not only set up the idea that there was something important to be done, but then to find something that could be started. They always used to say, you know, in the most simplistic fashion, think long but start short. And the reason for that, I guess maybe more eloquently, think ahead but act now, is because you can get a quick victory. You can get people rallying around something that you can demonstrate success and in doing so. Many times, leaders are political people. So in doing so, you have to be able to rally people to support you and you don't have a lot of time to do that. But what's really the key, you know, you're going to see here is those leaders, you know, they have to get the collaboration and they don't have to be public officials. They can be community members. They can be academia. They can be not for profit. They can be an organization that convenes people that have a common interest, such as Cooper Hewitt and the Smithsonian at large. And the trick is people care because they generally are part of the very community that they're working in. They live there. They work there. They play there. They learn there. They worship there. Whatever the case may be. And that inspires people to action because, you know, we're all in this together. Whatever it's a city or whatever it's a different planet. So designing for climate change is really not just a lofty educational egalitarian concept. It's very real and it means something to every individual. You're going to see three people tonight that will bring that home. We have Laura Baird in the Office of Metropolitan Architecture. And she's going to talk to you about a variety of things that Cynthia said, but they are demonstrating leadership and energy policy and public policy and in the design, in metropolitan design buildings and the like. And I can only say that having recently been out in Vancouver, British Columbia and seen TELUS Gardens, TELUS is a telecommunications company in Canada. They built the most magnificent building. And not only is it wonderfully and environmentally sound and it's extraordinarily economical and efficient, it's inspirational. And people come and still, I think it may be the only or the first lead compliant building in that part of the world or in that part of Canada, but nonetheless being there was inspirational. You're going to hear from Robert Smith, who not only is one of the inspirations behind Red Hood Wi-Fi and helping a neighborhood who prosper and thrive in times of diversity, but in his spare time he also was a Google intern among other things. So another world changer. And then Dorn Cox, who recognized the idea of open source. It's not just about code. It's about collaborating across a wide array of people with a common interest using the internet and technology to do that, sharing. I will let him explain what PornMap does with the idea that you can design tools for very specific needs and share them across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom. It's pretty remarkable. So we're going to be inspired tonight and I'm just happy to be here. We'll hear from each of our panelists. Then I'll come up with them and we'll have a little bit of a Q&A and we'll involve you as well. So let's begin. Laura. To Susanna, Cynthia, and those who are including us in that exhibition and inviting us here, I'm really excited to be here. So I'm going to tell you about a project that we're continuing to work on in Hoboken, New Jersey. It's called Resist Delay Store Discharge. It was initiated by, it was initiated post Hurricane Sandy actually through a competition called Rebuild by Design. And what happened after Hurricane Sandy is the trauma and the stress and the damage that was caused. The tri-state area decided we need to find ways to be more resilient. So they hosted a design competition with the end goal to receive funding from Housing and Urban Development and we participated. Having been actively affected by Sandy, so this on the left, you can see our office in Soho. On the right, the makeshift office we had to open in Brooklyn in someone's apartment because we had a deadline the following day. So the blackout we just kept on moving kept pushing forward and witnessed the aftermath of it all. So you know pre Sandy or during Sandy the hashtags were about the super storm and following and the fear that was associated with it and the unknown. Following things really started to turn and people believed in the ability to come up with resilient solutions. And we were really fortunate that Rebuild by Design is a competition and powered designers to be the ones to come up with this solution. So we participated as part of an interdisciplinary team. We were looking at building in city as well as stakeholder and audience participation. We had a firm looking at water management, another firm looking at ecology and landscape and then an economic analysis to accompany the strategies that we were proposing to make sure they were feasible in some way. The thing is about any kind of event or storm like this is that flood risk is actually a result of probably learning times consequence and it's usually the inverse of what you think would happen. We identified Hoboken and areas directly adjacent Weehawken and Jersey City as our study area. Hoboken is actually originally an island. So the flooding issues are prevalent in the sense that it's the edges of it are very very very much lower topography than the center. So the propensity to flood is much higher. So it was someone that we identified that would always deal with this problem. The idea of building a wall to simply protect the land from the water and from the coastal storm surge is a little bit out of the budget that we were considering and we were fortunate when we reached out to Hoboken to ask if we could collaborate them on proposing a strategy that the mayor and her team were very very open to this conversation and were willing to help to help us facilitate this discussion and proposal by folding some of the things that we were doing into their own initiative. So we actually had some real help on the ground in Hoboken also in Weehawken and Jersey City from the municipal body care. So what our proposal does is it addresses two separate things the flash flood versus the storm surge. So the storm surge is mainly coastal so it's what happens during an event such as Sandy which comes from the coast which comes from the river primarily as opposed to flash flood which can happen in really any rain event. So the thing about the study area that we're looking at primarily Hoboken is that it was a combination of the flash flood and the storm surge in this particular event. In implementing a resilient strategy you also need to address either or because if you only address the coastal storm surge the interior of the study area would not receive any of these flood reduction benefits that we're talking about. Two-thirds of Hoboken lies in the FEMA flood zone. So this was in addition to being about the actual resilient strategy and trying to reduce flooding we were also looking at reducing things like insurance premiums for the residents of the city. Storm surge was five feet above the existing bulkhead during Sandy so they felt a huge amount of just impact and resultant damage following the storm. 50,000 daily users go through the Hoboken train station, the PATH station as well as local transport so it was a huge public transport node and the vulnerabilities are quite extensive. So what our proposal did or what we what we tried to do was to have a multi-component system which in and of itself the components are actually quite small but the sum the whole is greater than the sum of its parts right so we have four parts resist delay store and discharge. Resist is basically your protection against your coastal storm surge so this is building some kind of flood barrier in the coastal situations where you have along the water the storm surge that comes from the from the water from the river this can be in the form of a terrace edge a bulkhead a deployable flood wall there's a lot of different solutions. Delay is essentially delaying water from entering into the sewer system so you can do this actually generally using green infrastructure either you have a park a green roof a bio soil that simply holds the water for a temporary period of time and delays it from entering into the storm system so your sewers have time to drain and you prevent the results of the flash flooding. Store is a similar strategy to delay the water from entering the sewer system but this time through actual storage tanks so a cistern or a bio retention basin um even constructed wet lands can fulfill this purpose and then discharge is simply getting the water out of the sewer system as quickly as you can so using a storm water pump or a storm drain. So as I mentioned this was a really comprehensive strategy where we attacked from these four different sides to produce a comprehensive strategy that would address the study area as a whole resist delay store discharge so what you see as a result of the competition here this is the part of the study that was flooded for example during sandy during a hundred-year storm event with resist you reduced it already quite a lot however you have the flash flooding in addition to the coastal storm surge so you still have flooding on the interior of the site but with delay that gets reduced through the green infrastructure that you implement with store through the storage basins it's reduced even more and with discharge you can discharge the water out more quickly and you come to normalize much faster. We submitted this project for this proposal at the tail end of the competition we built by design we had also approached a number of stakeholders so this is very interesting Cynthia was giving her opening remarks um she talked about a little bit and and Richard as well how how to um how designers and how others the actors right in the whole proposal so in addition to ourselves um and our great interdisciplinary team we approached a number of different stakeholders that would be really interested in this proposal that would benefit from this proposal in some way and therefore would support our bid um to turn this into a real project somehow so this range from um senatorial and federal government bodies down to municipal bodies down to individual stakeholders and community members themselves um we were overwhelmed by the support we received we reached out to them in a number of different ways so the tools and the communication tools became a really important part of this project this is in a way can be quite a dense subject that's a little bit hard to access so figuring out through pamphlets through working sessions how you can actually engage with the stakeholders is equally as important to identify who they might be um so our engagement strategies were very very diverse and very very extensive in the end when we submitted our proposal we received letters of support from over 62 different organizations government bodies etc which combined with our proposal uh when it was presented to the jury the rebuild by design jury the letters of support were included we also had a small exhibition with our kind of panels and the model which is actually included in the exhibition upstairs that you can see here where we were able to explain what we were doing so if you haven't already take a take a moment to go see the model it's really fun kind of very interactive explanation of what's happening we were awarded 230 million dollars um in federal money to build our project which was a kind of amazing feat um we were recognized by the UN well Hoboken was recognized by the UN as a kind of model for resilience on the basis of adopting this plan and trying to push it forward so that was really exciting that was um at the the tail end kind of of 2014 so beginning in 2015 we really thought oh my gosh we have to implement this now we really have to do it um so we started with a kind of new team based on the approvals the environmental process that was needed we had to bring more people on board we diversified a little bit um we've been working since June of last year on the first phase of this which is a essentially we're in this kind of two-year period which is a feasibility study we're also going through the NEPA process which means we have to draft an environment impact statement saying this was our concept the feasibility study is to say how do we make that a little bit more concrete what does that actually mean what does that actually look like in a kind of kind of concept design level um and then on the basis of that concept design submitting an environmental impact statement basically saying that we're doing more good than bad that's the shortest way to explain an environmental impact statement um it's a lot more bureaucratic than that but and it's and it's kind of simplest form so to take on the NEPA process and the feasibility study at the same time is a very unique um approach let's say but we were given a condition on the money that we were awarded from HUD but the project has to be built and completed by 2022 so we really didn't have a choice we had to fast-track um so what we've been doing over the course of this year is continuing with the public involvement process going through a stage of establishing the purpose and needs scoping the project going through the screening criteria introducing concepts whittling down to alternatives and then into a preferred bill of alternative which is the result of the feasibility study um we started this process and this uh engagement by reminding people why we needed the project in the first place after a little bit of a lull people tend to have amnesia I guess um and what happens the reason people need the project I'm going to go through this really really fast because I'm running out of time but it's it's quite obvious given the introduction and I just gave the process that we've gone through subsequently as I said was to develop five concepts for the actual concept design of the project those were whittled down to alternatives through a through a community engagement stage um and then from those three alternatives we selected a preferred bill so delay store and discharge what's happening on the interior were the same for each of the three alternatives and then the alternatives were just different in the resist component so we had one that was very protective along the waterfront one that was a little bit more inland and one that was another variation on that this alternative three was the one that was selected um it was selected through an extensive engagement with the community as well as our own kind of feasibility um assessment and the products that we made through it we designed some of the specific sites in terms of place making versus services so here's a kind of very obvious park that will be used as part of the delay and store components um that's at the north end of uh of Hoboken near um Weehawken there were also some parks proposed along the waterfront for example but these were within alternatives that were not selected for some of the other sites that were more essentially services sites much thinner not so much room to work we have a kind of toolkit that we developed um you which this slide is supposed to flip through but with a lot of different applications different things that you can apply so there's different heights um at different heights you can do different things and have different amenities such as shade by parking garbage storage things like that you can also implement different types of green applications or lighting so really trying to figure out how we could take this very technical proposal and offer a number of community amenities as a really fantastic byproduct so that's that's been really fun to kind of explore um and we're continuing to work with the community moving forward on identifying what exactly they want and need um this community engagement process is really the only thing that has enabled the project to move forward we have a lot of support still from the community and a lot of engagement ongoing we chose this uh and announced the preferred build alternative at the end of the summer now the EIS is being prepared with alternative three um and and that will be submitted the draft EIS at the end of the year and then the final EIS next march and then the final design will start so we're really excited for you guys to track as the project continues and I'm happy to um answer any questions or maybe you'll hear more about it in the context of the panel thanks a lot oh good evening uh I'm Robert Smith once again before I get started I just kind of want to set the environment I'm first my uh I myself am or I read a precedent I've lived there all 21 years in my life and this right of Wi-Fi project means a lot to me all right so Red Hook uh I'll just briefly give you guys some statistics about Red Hook uh Red Hook is the second largest low housing income of facility in New York City uh four out of five Red Hook families are um unemployed more than 40 percent of Red Hook households households are living on less than $10,000 a year uh within the medium income of like $16,000 a year Red Initiative Red Initiative is a non-profit organization that solely focuses on the development of young adults in the reddit community uh they offer a number of services through for for young adults from the ages of 11 and 24 uh they offer like educational support emotional support uh social support uh and they have this extremely outstanding model of uh higher and only more majority of the people that work they are from the community so that said 90 percent of the staff that work that's including youth leaders our reddit initiative are from the reddit community uh so this is uh Red Hook Wi-Fi coverage after Sandy um before Sandy actually hit in Red Hook uh Tony Schloss and a couple other people from the community were um talking about building a wireless network in the reddit community but right when Sandy hit we saw that like communication was completely down in Red Hook if you lived in a neighborhood you like really experienced terrible communication uh terrible cellular coverage all that stuff so right after the storm we went up and we put up a couple of um antennas you can see up here there are like a number of different uh colors those are like all the devices within the network but during that time we had about five to six hot spots in the reddit community and um after the storm and after we we uh began to recover we noticed that this was something that was greatly needed because when we had it up after the storm we had uh even outside uh resources like the Red Cross using a wireless network and had residents using it as a means to communicate to their family members uh this is our current coverage so after the storm we had five hot spots and we currently have 15 hot spots throughout the reddit community these are all spots that you can pull out your phone and access the internet um and here are like statistics from the beginning of 20 the first six months of 2016 these are all pulled from google analytics and these are all like unique users so these are people that actually like signed on to the network and actually used it for a period of time all right the best part digital stewards so the digital stewards are a group of young adults from the reddit community who actually learn about this technology and they use the skills to maintain this wireless network and that goes to speak to uh sort of like the whole reason over here is like resiliency and it's like not only building a resilient infrastructure but trying to build a resiliency within the people that live in the community because uh regardless of like for example uh reddit has like Verizon and Time Warner but after Hurricane Sandy it took about a couple of weeks for Verizon and Time Warner to actually get out there and to get some of their equipment up and running so having a task force that's actually on the ground can uh ultimately result in a more resilient strategy uh here's the digital steward timeline so if you are a digital steward here's sort of what you would go through uh level one uh support workplace uh expectations and professional development so as i stated earlier reddit initiative offers a number of things for young adults so they offer like social support uh they help them with finding jobs and all that stuff so the digital steward program not only is it like a technology learning program it's also a job training program uh level two they learn like media production and like graphic design so uh and with with us giving them give them giving the digital steward these skills uh we're allowed to like build uh content for the wireless network in-house so that we don't have to employ people from outside of the neighborhood uh then level three they learn about like management uh and then we place them in an internship with uh tech companies so that they can gain like real-world experience uh and yeah so reddit Wi-Fi expansion come 2017 and 2018 i know it's super messy but uh come 2017 2018 we plan to expand our current wireless coverage to like most of uh redhook we're doing this uh through two separate uh projects though the first is um we are we are winners of the new york city economic development corporation rise nyc project so uh with that money that we won from that competition we'll be building up wireless infrastructure along all of the commercial corridors in redhook uh and this these network this network has to go uh specifically to um like small businesses in redhook it has to benefit small businesses in redhook so and then the second way that we're doing that we're doing this is since that uh we built the network we've had um we've received a lot of press about it so we've been advocating with nature housing to have them build uh wireless net wireless infrastructure inside and outside of the new york city housing authority buildings and we'll be doing that with uh contractor names so along with building the wireless network um we began to develop some tools in house to help residents in the community uh have some type of way to communicate with each other this is tight tight pools uh we call it our splash page because when you signed on to red if you sign up to any reddit Wi-Fi access point you'll have this page that all automatically pops up it'll actually to like three terms of services you hit accept and then you will be directed to this page well in 2013 you were directed to this page and on this page we like posted up events that were going on in the community uh we had like just about every local business in the reddit community you can see there are hours that they were open if we created content you can see the location uh and all that stuff and then from now we just continue to build and help develop different means of communication in the reddit community uh here's another form of that communication the reddit hub uh we partnered up at a hackathon actually with some people from AIGA and they like they like pitched this idea to us because they heard about the reddit Wi-Fi network and then we met up at a hackathon we met some software developers that helped them to develop this web page and then they would just gave it to us like a christmas present so since then we've been maintaining it basically the reddit hub is a uh it's a place where you can post information you can do it digitally on this web page that's on the right side and then we have physical bulletin bulletin boards posted throughout the reddit community so uh those that are not tech savvy in a way they can still have a means to put up events that are going on uh inside the community uh we have all these different colors like yellow means like high priority so there's an admin a reddit hub admin who oversees all the posts that go onto the website and if they're like really high priority stuff then they'll have them in yellow posted on the website and then they'll print out yellow posters and post them on the bulletin board and in 2016 so uh from 2013 you guys saw that like little web page that was uh you know uh pretty simple uh in 2015 we we we we we reddit our splash page and now on this page it's more it's slightly more sophisticated so we're not we're not only posting uh like events and stuff but now we can promote and post the content that we create in-house so that when you sign on to a reddit wifi access point instead of being directed to that old page or directed to this page so now you can learn about the hub you can learn about where all the local hotspots are inside the community uh if you want to say you're looking for one of the best places to eat in reddit there's a good chance that that business is on this web page and we've created a video for them so before going into that place you can kind of get a taste of like what the culture is there and what kind of business it is and this is all created by digital stewards especially the that page that I just showed uh in 2017 we hope to like create applications uh and uh and uh in a ways to like increase how we communicate throughout the network um there are like we're not we're not in development currently for the application but this is like one of the things that we're kind of trying to push to and we hope can uh be very very feasible once we build the network infrastructure that we want to build so yeah with that said also with a more fully connected community we believe that reddit can incubate for like community incubator for smart technologies uh such as like open data uh open data uh sorry sorry we hope that reddit can be an incubator for uh different types of technology such as like sensing technology um like installing like cameras and stuff uh backup systems for like wireless networks and for like many other things and uh yeah we just hope that uh we can use this network to address a lot of other problems inside the reddit community and yeah so these are questions that we're asking ourselves for the future you know what what is the best financial mode to a sustained reddit wi-fi what model uh maximizes positive impact and low-income residents of redhook how can reddit wi-fi be replicated in other low income communities in new york city thank you good evening um my name is uh doran cox and uh i'm really uh happy to be here um a farmer and agriculturalist and um i'm particularly excited about this theme because it allows me to talk not not just about farm hack as a platform for hacking hardware and tools but to give you some of the more the background around why we created farm hack and the motivations because really farm hack is about agriculture and its intersection uh with society so agriculture of the field which means people it's not just about farming um hack is an interesting term that we chose very deliberately because it's about individual uh adapting the current situation to individual purposes locally but what we're really talking about is transformation of agriculture so moving from hacks to tools and that involves communicating and finding what works and adapting it and what we found is that agriculture we have a we have an interest collectively in improving the quality of agriculture and that's what i'm going to talk a lot about and uh as we understand that common interest uh i think we can see the advantages of having every farm as a research farm and being able to adapt from that global knowledge to our local production and i think the other thing and we're realizing and i think farm hack is an expression of the realization of the advantages of sharing and creating a pre-competitive space and the the pace at which we can innovate uh and how that's affected by the systems in the communities and by sharing that basic knowledge so let me just uh step in and make the link to climate change and resilience what we have here is a slide of two different soils they're within miles of each other they're actually the same from the they're the same soil the difference between the two is management management is people it's what we choose to do with that and what we've realized actually just recent relatively recently we always thought that we just degrade soil in fact the USDA used to used to they have a data after the soil conservation service was created and now here that conservation service not soil growing service not soil building service it was soil conservation it was there was there was a lack of recognition that we can actually we can actually grow new soil and if we're thinking about economic resilience in relationship to or in relationship to climate change soil is a really big piece of that and it's improving the quality of our soil the soil health because it's a living system is what we need to do to both adapt to climate change but also to mitigate the effects of climate change just to give you a sense of sort of the scale if we were to take global atmospheric carbon from pre-industrial levels and put it back into the soil that would be six inches of dark topsoil just like this across the entire Sahara or eight feet deep across all of the United States agricultural soils and healthy soils of one of us organic a high organic matter soil is able to carry 20 times its weight in water so we're thinking about again this urban rural connection with flood management and drought management agricultural soils are critical to that and we have not done a great job of that this is a man-made soil degradation map the dark being of course the most degraded soils so this is a shared climate issue but it's also a shared economic and resilience issue so open farms farm hack again is is founded around the idea that every farm has the potential to be a research farm and that we have the ability to learn from each farm and improve every every farm and that we believe that every farmer should actually have access to the best tools available the best knowledge available and that they shouldn't be competing on that basis and so our process and of building an in-person and online community is about building a process to exchange the knowledge and the observations that we make on our farms and tools being tools again are a reflection of our understanding of our environment and I'll say that again throughout the throughout because I think that's one of the most important things that were that were concerned with the tools that we create the tools that we use our reflection of our understanding of the environment that we're living and so the more we can understand the context and share the better our tools and I'll give you some examples of that as we go along but what we're creating really is a public observatory if you think about science we often think about lab science as special people in special places but what we're talking about is more of an observational science like we think about a space program where we're deploying sensors into the lots of different participants who are looking at all of the data all of this process to collectively explore and come up with better solutions and it's really important to think about this as part of an ongoing progress that the best agriculture we all benefit from it and it is never achieved it's a constant evolving process of better understanding of our environment and so what we're looking at doing here is understanding so looking at the metaphor of a tree as being for culture for our society this is a very much an enlightenment idea that agriculture at the roots we have society as the trunk and we have arts and commerce as the leaves and branches and if a storm comes through the leaves and branches may blow off but they'll regrow but if the roots are attacked the entire tree will wither and die that's the so it's a living metaphor for our cultural systems and so what we're looking at doing we you know the tools we're using are the action or we often pay attention to is the tools that we're actually using to affect the environment so the plow the seeds we plant that's the action but those are informed by all these other processes observation analysis and communication and developing those tools along because that informs this adaptive process of better understanding our environmental systems we get better data we have better monitoring tools we have better systems understanding and we have better management of our environmental systems and so we can create instead of a downward spiral of environmental degradation that we've seen in agriculture and soils we can have this positive feedback of improved soil organic matter improved production at lower cost and biological systems instead of that can substitute productively instead of diesel steel and and labor and so we have farmhack which is a process of taking that design process and turning it into a social process of social exchange of creating mixing sharing growing eating and drinking and creating a network where it's the creativity that's on the ground is is a social process and creates linkages between people at the most basic level and it's not a new idea this is a an illustration of from an earlier very movement 1918 with the community club at the center and it's a circulatory system of knowledge and inspiration I think that's really critical and this has goes back as far as the history of agriculture was this idea of shared knowledge exchange we have new tools to follow the same process this circulatory system this metabolism of knowledge and inspiration and that's what we have here and the object that is displayed upstairs is a representation of action a tool itself but also the communications tool to reach the global community and an analysis to adapt that tool and this is just an expression in process it's not an end tool it's an expression of our understanding of the problems we're trying to solve but other tools that have been developed through the open source community are things like this roller crimper so it's a it's a tool that rolls down a cover crop into a living mulch in one pass and it can do this without herbicides because of the knowledge that this crop that was planted is weak at a particular point in time in its growth cycle so it allows its knowledge that it's a tool a physical piece of steel that relies on detailed biological understanding and that substitutes for labor it substitutes for chemicals and it's substitutes for diesel and it's adding tons of carbon back into the soil at the same time and storing water so this also reflects a the observation tools are also part of this democratizing process of observation and using the tools that we now have available in the internet and drop in cost of part of the fourth industrial revolution of lower cost sensors and communication systems and so forth to create inexpensive findable accessible reusable modular tools that can be widely used and reflected in mobile apps that democratize again bring the scale down of complex systems that previously we have large industrial systems partly because the cost of these systems has been prohibitive so we needed to build them bigger part of this revolution in observation and communications technology has enabled the reduction in scale of agricultural systems and democratizing a lot of this process and environment to understand you so this is a lot of what we're moving towards is not just the physical tools that you see when you go to the pharma website but a lot of the social exchange and environmental observation tools that are really revolutionizing our place and putting things that were formerly in the hands of large governments in the hands of the individual these kinds of images are done with thirty dollar cameras and a hundred dollar balloon and open source software so we can share these uh this kind of information anywhere on earth uh and share analysis and conversations about what to do and create uh oh this was just to the point that this process of documentation is a very old process this was this image on the left is a documentation of brain threshing equipment in literose encyclopedia from nineteen uh from 1750s and they were trying to accomplish the same thing with a printing press and now we're able to replicate that and scale the equipment uh take extinct designs and cross-pollinate them turn them into 3d models re-manufacture share those libraries uh share the skills about how to reproduce these uh these are this is in Quebec and New Hampshire and New York um and in France 3d print send designs so precision seed uh seeders take the digital design and print that anywhere on earth uh to benefit so past generations can benefit from uh from uh future generations can benefit from uh past knowledge and we can take the million so we have right now the ability to take the millions of years of genetic code that has been refined just like you imagine like a memory stick an open source design that's been evolved and we've helped evolve those seeds exchange it through our tool that's just five thousand days old or internet and create a deep topsoil future and so I just just want to end before we uh before we start our panel discussion here uh by bringing it back down to agriculture as a shared endeavor and that the end product isn't better tools it's a uh it's shared process of a better environmental understanding and a uh and a process by which we all can build on past accomplishments and benefit uh future generations I'd like to just I would like to think of agriculture as a multi-generational team sport and it is the way in which we interact positively potentially and improving our environment agriculture essentially is the way in which we change the environment for the battery it doesn't have to just decrease environmental resilience and diversity it can also increase diversity it's it's really our choice so thank you I know aren't you inspired good gracious we have our sustainable models they're noisy but they call it no waste and they're very nice and designed actually before I came down here today I was at our I mean Watson research facility and I tell you that because it was a day where we had 150 students from Newburgh Free Academy which is a pretty rough urban school district of upstate your now north and they're all in a mentoring program around um engineering we call it pk but that's really not the point my point was to see 15 year olds inspiring me not just going and getting inspired by professionals who are taking time out which is a good thing to do and I'm sure you all do it but that I came way inspired and then I sit here today and you know whatever you're thinking about the world we're in today you have to feel pretty inspired after listening to what's going on here I'm just I was listening and I was thinking not knowing exactly what you're all going to say in my opening remarks we're gonna follow up the edge here the the thing that I was referring to when we were doing the smarter cities work is the idea of thinking ahead but getting going right and we saw that here that you all started something that's quite remarkable but it needs to be sustained for a significant amount of time to truly be successful so I wanted to ask wanted to ask um actually I want to start with you Lord because you have this impressive list of of advocates and sponsors and people that are interested how do you keep how do you keep them motivated yeah so um it's been really interesting in the context of this project we have a consistent communication with the federal and municipal bodies based on the allocation of the funding and how the project is actually funded and are and resourced in a way so that's inherent to the process so that's another goal um secondary to that related to the community stakeholders and the organizations that are not necessarily federal organizations but more community you know active community members and the organizations that they're part of we have a we've identified very early in this process a community advisory committee community advisory group called the CAG and we set up CAG names usually on every third week or once a month at a minimum where the CAG is invited and um within the CAG there are about 40 members which represent a wide range of interests so everything from somebody from the housing authority somebody from you know particular organizations in the study area they're very important and we make sure that if they can't be there they send a representative the fact that we make very well known um the status updates and the project updates and when they'll be shared with that with the CAG um the public is invited to those meetings generally as well it's not that they're closed but at least we're kind of covering all our bases and sharing on a consistent basis and that's actually been quite effective in terms of but it requires a lot of diligence from our side as well yeah but that's that's the key right not only the diligence but to convene local interested people which is really how all of these things all of these things succeed so Robert you're inspired and this is your passion you were kind of one of the brain child brain children of this fantastic concept right it's expanding and you're getting involved in so many other things so what are you doing to make sure that you know how do you how do you take something like this where you're putting so much energy for it to help train develop local people and to get sponsorship how do you keep that going well one of the things one of the ways that I do that is one I try to I'm definitely trying to use my internship at Google to uh because like as I stated when we got to the part about the digital stewards program like really like regardless of like whether by buying like that it's really the stewards that um really like help them to maintain this network and they are really the people that are like really benefiting from it because you know they they gain they gain work from it uh they so they get paid to be in the program and to like learn that stuff and um I mean just working with them while I was there at our child I just noticed like a lot like a lot of stuff that we were doing was changing their lives and we were giving them something that they haven't received in a very long time it's like something that's feasible you know they they hear a lot of things from uh like big government uh structures telling them you can get this if you sign these papers you know but you know they get they get let down by a lot of that stuff so I feel like uh using the wireless network and the digital stewards program we're actually giving them something that they can touch and fill and see themselves moving somewhere with what a brilliant insight thanks um so Doran I spent some time in IBM working on um development of uh helping develop open source software years ago and so when I was reading about Farmhack I was thinking about that as well and it was it was interesting because there were a lot of participants a lot of people were involved in the idea of sharing you know it was a good thing but remember that you know a company like IBM or the IT industry you know they're not they're not fallout touristic necessarily right there's money to be made and it was very confusing to people how you can sustain such a thing and the realization was well that you take away the expense that you're spending on this basic need and then you know advancing further would be would be advantageous to everybody I'm just curious you know what is the I know this isn't necessarily a business model per se but for each individual participant it probably is so how does the prosperity make its way into the system yeah it's a it's a great question and something that we had to answer a lot early on in the process but uh I think just to to to give uh to really acknowledge the work that had been done on the open source software world is really important because we couldn't do what we do without the open source software movement before and I also feel like the work that the concept of open source hardware was also pioneered before before us and I think that the key that that for our project is that we're not competing on the communications and the technology and so forth it's that the people participating uh are participating because they're trying that they're trying to find the tool that works for them they're not trying to create a business around the tool they're trying to find a solution for their local problem and that's the business it's from production rather than protection so and I think that's where the shift is and so and it's interesting right now there seems to be more and more acceptance of this in in other fields as well but in agriculture right now there's a new foundation for food and agriculture and the the head of Sally Rocky who's now heading that organization is talking about a pre-competitive space so that we're creating an environment where we can all collaborate on moving our understanding of systems further and then compete at the end and so if you think about a restaurant metaphor might be a good example right so we could live in a town where the only ingredients are you know hot dogs and eggs right and then all the restaurants they can come up with their own recipes to make them better but they're pretty limited but you know limited ingredients but uh and by the way ingredients uh recipes are not patentable right but what we're working through is to try to create abundance and diversity so that all the restaurants in the community have the best possible ingredients and then we all benefit right and so I think that's that's the model is pre-competitive space and to be competing not on the ingredients but on what we do with them how all the creativity and the wonderful outcomes we can get from that it's that's fantastic too and it always opens up new opportunities in the case of the hot dog in a community I think that somebody's going to create a cholesterol treatment model that's going to help address what might be that that's fantastic and it's truly the idea that the proprietary models are extraordinarily expensive and the differentiation doesn't occur until you get to the next level so that's that's really that's really a great insight too I want to ask you all a question about data and just maybe think about how you access and use it and the reason I do is because it's important to me and to IBM of course but only because we're in a world where many of the things that you talked about were gleaning new insights from the availability of data that here before we couldn't get at right you know we had IBM like you say we're in a cognitive world it's a very heavy no pun intended a very heavy idea but it's it's true right so unbeknownst to maybe perhaps many of you we bought the weather company and in doing so we thought it was an interesting endeavor for a couple of reasons one these people are data geniuses during Superstorm Sandy their website took 26 billion hits a day without going down which was pretty remarkable we think we're able to scale we thought they have they have a pretty good model but the more interesting thing to do is they're able to take weather and not only isolated down to a very small area because of the data and help farmers understand the effects of rain or drought on soil and what kind of crops do to plant but help feed parks you know when to open and help sports venues and help commodity traders and you can imagine distribution channels you can imagine the value of weather if you can get it down to that that you know micro location right and so we're using data for all sorts of things and that weather is just one example but every one of you is dependent on on data not only to execute your strategy to start with something that you know your arms around and then to be able to prove that you have an idea that people think is a breakthrough so so how do you how do you do that how do you how do you get the information you need or where do you get it maybe that's not even the question how do you how do you leverage it I can start I can say on in our case it's been really interesting because I'll I'll call it hard data and soft data for lack of weather terms so as a starting point of a feasibility study you know we collected all kinds of data from government from different sources about okay we have we wanted to put in a resist component that was a kind of anyway a way to address coastal storm search so what is the condition of the bulkheads can't where can we build a wall can't we put it there is it you know stable enough structurally do we have to build a new structure does that come down the cost I mean there's a lot of very technical very feasibility related issues that data you have to have that input of data to understand and be able to come up with a proposal that will float eventually within a lot of the not only approvals bodies but eventually when it's put in place it'll do what we'd say it's going to do right and then there's the kind of other side of it which is the soft data which we've collected through the community engagement process so we can propose something that has you know a kind of resist barrier that has some kind of immunity embedded in it that might serve the community and it might be a bike storage location if they come to us and say actually we don't store bikes there we would rather have an information kiosk where you can get this that and the other that's not a feasibility related type of data collection either of those two solutions will work but it's a solution around what do people actually want and what would people really benefit from and how can we do this in the most both efficient but also kind of beneficial way as a whole so it's been an interesting push and pull from our side in terms of hard versus soft data and technical versus more emotional and community based input yeah because that's a lot to it's a lot to learn Robert the the idea that you're creating new opportunities for young people who might not have the ability to get opportunities to get the necessary education to do the things that they're doing it's extraordinary and to demonstrate the success and so that people want to replicate it you must be able to show the results in somewhere other than the fact that you're getting you know more hubs and more access because it seems to me that the community seems I don't have a measure this seems to run better is that a fair observation yeah that that's pretty true like when we first started we first deployed the network you were saying about like 500 users like over like a span of a year this was only the network was like kind of small so then we were like how is it that we have this wireless infrastructure that's built there and like no one is using it they're like 10 they're like maybe 11 to 12,000 people that live in the brother community it's like out of all these people no one is using so then we rethought it and we're like maybe it's the way that we're like promoting the network so we move toward more efforts to promote the network and like really really push the word out there to like communities and community centers and stuff so that they can pass the word down to people that live in the community and then from from 2012 coming into like 2015 we hit about like we're seeing an average of like 600 users a week and we were like wow this is insane because now before seeing 500 users in a year you're like you know if our article's down you know we can take care of it you know like the next day but now it's like we're seeing these results like on the weekly basis so it's like really it's like really pushed us to like step up our game and like like make sure things are like up and running and all this it just really amplifies the the success when you see a level of commitment commitment from people who are involved in the community whether actually they're actually doing some of these interesting things and I think that's what makes it work and you're seeing everybody is convening people with a common interest and a common set of objectives and you know so um you know Darno I'll ask you the same thing I mean your your world is a wash and data and I keep making these unintentional puns nonetheless but um it probably resides in so many different places how do you make ends or tails you know it's uh managing not just the different uh data types but also uh a distributed data structure I think is one of our big challenges and and creating incentives for documentation and creating high quality data is one of our big challenges because the documentation of hardware in particular is incredibly important to be able to exchange the knowledge associated with that so a physical object I mean one of the things that we came to realize is that hardware is if open source hardware is software because it's a process of documenting the physical object describing it in enough detail so that it can be replicated anywhere and each object has a different type of description but the way in which you exchange it is just the way you would uh a code it's an assembly instruction just like the DNA and so understanding that process has been a big part of our challenge and then also creating tools to facilitate that process of documentation and a culture that values that that process um but then also putting that in action and then all the associated data so that that physical of that object that tool is in use and understanding it in context and in what context it works and what weather conditions and what soil conditions and what economic situations uh and so forth so that context that local recommendation and finding the tool the problem statement or the problem the challenge that an individual farmer is having and linking their challenge with somebody else in a potentially other side of the world that solved it similarly so that's it is a data question uh and translation of that data into a sort of common format yeah that that's that's a level of precision that we don't necessarily associate with hardware particularly any of us that have ever put together something we bought an IKEA or somewhere else where you see those levels of drawings and they don't quite give you the information you necessarily need so what i'd like to do is uh we'll change it up here uh so um what i'd like to i'd like maybe we could get two of these mics and i want you folks to took your time to come to have an opportunity to participate and think about some some questions you might you might want to ask our panel because uh goodness gracious i know i have a million and i'm just i'm just so excited about what i've heard here today and the only thing i'll say while you're thinking about that and um susanne will uh just raise your hand she'll she'll come and get you with the microphone is the thing that comes back to me from what we started or maybe i started when we kicked off the day the evening is we're talking about the third the courage it takes to do something like this this is a what did you say how much money was it 200 million 230 million dollar project this is this is taking a level of complexity in a community that has no idea how to do things like this and not only making it available and accessible but desirable and people are passionate about it and then to to talk about changing an industry right these people have courage and that's what gets things done but the second thing and this is the my biggest takeaway is everyone of these folks was very much involved in the implementation there are a lot of people with big ideas right how to get things done is equally important why you need data why you need passion why you need fortitude why you need courage and so if you're like me i think you're you're going to be uh much differently after leaving here tonight when you came in and hopeful because i know i am not that i was unhopeful before but this is just this is just fantastic so i want to hear uh so susanne do you have a microphone we have some questions we have one there then we have one up here so let's go an idea and so i wonder um if some of the commercial wi-fi uh companies give you a hard time at all verizon or time Warner saying you know you're kind of infringing on what we do if there that's been an issue and my other question is is what would how would you like to see um your project go forward do you like it to be turned into a commercial industry um would you like to start to charge people for your wi-fi uh well first and first this is not my idea tony shloss is the founder of rid of wi-fi he cannot be here tonight but i worked like very closely with uh tony i was a wi-fi administrator so i installed most of the routers and stuff and i worked like on the ground with digital stewards and like teaching them how to like do a lot of like the technical stuff so i'm like really closely made it to this project but it's not my idea i wish it was but uh uh we haven't received much pushback from like big eyes peas we when we first started the program we tried to reach out to verizon and like uh like time Warner but it's kind of hard to get to them and then we had this whole other like factor was like how is it going to really benefit them but um luckily when we started the this initiative there was a local isp in the red community by the name of brooklyn fiber and uh we spoke with him and he was really down for the idea and he he had just moved to the community and he wanted to find ways to like help in any way that he could and he had just started his company too so this is like really good for him too because we got a lot of press for it but um uh so yeah so rhi we like purchased a set a set amount of bandwidth from brooklyn fiber and rhi pays um brooklyn fiber like monthly for the bandwidth for the wireless network and um as far as like commercial i mean i would hope that it wouldn't turn into a big commercial um like business or anything but what my my hope for it is that it encourages like big structural um companies and organizations to push initiatives like this because our main thing is that we live in a digital age and access like this should be uh something that's you know mandatory uh i'm like tony always says that he wishes he wish that in the future he can like move into a new house and have a uh uh ethernet jack on his wall just like you know you used to move to and you used to move into any house and have a landline and be able to call at least 911 like the future should move in that direction that we can move into a new house and have a jack in the wall that we can just plug in and have internet access since like this is where the world is moving to this is where the world is moving um that's a great question you think about um the involvement of brooklyn fiber was a local entity who thought this is where i live work play learn worship i want to be a part of the community and that's that's really illustrative and of course the big guys always are getting disrupted right and that's what the whole nature of this open technology can bring to us we had another uh question to zone and we had one appeared wait your hand hi sorry area hi um so i have a question about the digital stewards program um you mentioned the there's like a process where they burn badges and there are different levels um i was wondering if you could explain that process a little bit more like how long in that content what happens afterwards is there like a graduation and then what do they do after they've graduated if that is the case uh so the first level they do like it support professional development for like the first two weeks that they're in the program the program is overall it used to be a year long but then we like right now we're sort of in a redesign phase we're trying to see what works because the program is still in development uh so uh so yeah it's about six six to seven months long the first two weeks they'd be like professional development and they get like very soft it skills and then following uh the first their first week we give them like different like projects and stuff so that they can pick up project management skills uh and different things like that and then in the summer we participate with another another organization in the community called dance theater dance theater etc where um they host what they call a digital boot camp and that's what they learn like media skills they learn like graphic design uh video editing and um they learn how to use like dslr cameras and all that stuff and then they get to like produce content for businesses in the red community actually i think this year they actually went beyond the red community and they did a couple pieces for businesses that were on like carol street and stuff and then after that they do graduate and they get like these nice things although when i started i didn't get to graduate because it was like the very first very first class but i still got my little pin now i wear it sometime but uh yeah they get they get to graduate and then our child will help them look for work after that so or is there something similar or not similar necessarily there's some sort of um community recognition that goes along with being involved in fireback yeah i think that's the currency in the free economy is the recognition that you did that initial post so part of the part of the process of when you post the design is that you're the you're the root of that design and perpetuity you get recognition for your contribution and i think there's a sort of social capital associated with that that's really important and we're still learning how to enhance that kind of recognition for uh for contributions but that is a really important part so what do you think we'll do one more two more any questions do you have a question no susanna we have one up here he's been trying to ask here and then we'll go back there how about that reach your hand right right here in front of you know we have uh smart cities and we have resilient cities so gloomberg has 100 smart cities and which is a knowledge information media management and then we have resilient cities and my question you know is actually to be curated because the skill set the smart skill set or the resilient skill set is missing um then you have cities on one side and then you have uh the you know the smart and the resilient on the other side so if you have a knowledge management company information technology company so they don't have the city governance skill set so where is that you know design education skill set sort of fits into this scenario so there's a disconnect between the smart you know so if you sort of look at the uh uh piece of book and and and architectural design engineering company sort of jumping into it we don't know like you know how these things work you know they may not work so there's there's probably there's no question about design education I could just start it up and then you can so so it's a good question but I think that it's a little the in practice it's a little more positive what's going on is a little more positive than that in that there are think tanks there are not for profits there are commercial enterprises such as IBM or general electric or real there's companies in all different fields and they're collaborating with communities and societies we saw this in Rochester New York with the hospitals when a lot of industries like Rochester New York the hospitals the local communities the supermarkets the people that were in charge of the parks department technology academia companies like IBM and others collaborated with like seven or eight different constituencies that collaborate to do just what you're probing at to gain that that information sharing and it all comes in in the convening the convening won't you agree yeah I was going to say so we showed our kind of interdisciplinary team for this project in particular one of the reasons why is that there was a lot of hesitation whether in architecture firms the right um what's a body to take on this challenge and we don't think that we are in absentia but we had economic advisors we had uh kind of landscape and people related specifically to the assessment of water we worked with a Dutch engineering firm called Royal Housecoming on the competition to tell us exactly the engineering capabilities and potentials for a resilient water essentially retention system which is one of the main things that we were planning so it's it requires a very interdisciplinary approach and what's nice is that the profession as suggested is really moving in this direction and in our experience so is education so I teach at the University of Pennsylvania in the Penn School of Design and there are so many interdisciplinary studios where architects are working with landscape architects are working with engineers are working with you know toward a resilient project that comes at it from these multiple directions and even collaborating with like the business school or some of these more kind of financial economic feasibility related modeling to combine with the kind of design strategies that they're proposing so that it becomes a comprehensive proposal rather than something done in a vacuum right so it's very I think there needs to be maybe more proliferation of the fact that those strategies are preferred and and being kind of deployed especially within the education system sometimes it happens on the basis of someone who's very interested in it so they'll initiate it maybe it needs to be a bit more institutionalized as such but I think it's really moving in that direction in a positive way. I wanted to add one more question. I just wanted to add a more general sense that I think one of the things that we're interested in is the general democratization and participate a more participatory design process and making the design tools more accessible to more people and I think that's kind of what we're talking about here is breaking down some of those barriers and being able to bring more people together at different parts of the process and in our case with the open source design process also lower the risk in that early stage so that you don't have to have as much return later on so that everybody's starting again at that higher yeah that's true and there is more sharing that's going on I mean you asked the dutch right the dutch has been fighting the sea for hundreds of thousands of years right and the other thing I'll add is in your presentation you had that circle chart with the different departments that chart came from us I think I might have even created that chart five years ago so there's collaboration happening organically which is very exciting now we have one last question and then we'll wrap up because I know we're out of time. Hi so in terms of implementation which is equally or more important than aviation I was wondering about the problem project how to get involved and getting on board stakeholders since you showed us a long list of them and how do you identify them and getting them involved in order to make sure so there will be a public hearing first just after the first of the year about the environmental impact statement following the submission of the environmental impact statement or a public hearing about the draft EIS then the environmental impact statement will be submitted and then we'll start the detailed design process and there at that point the the kind of engagement will restart so the both the community advisory group and then the larger public meetings all of which are published online so I can give you the website New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection is actually the umbrella under which the project is happening they have a dedicated website where they post every CAG meeting every public meeting all of the kind of moments we have drop-in sessions from time to time where you can come and hear what we're up to and they post those at least two weeks in advance so the best thing to do is just to join the next one of those that takes place and then you can speak to any of us about further involvement we'd be happy to engage on a more local level of fans of interest that's fantastic thanks Laura so we're gonna wrap up it's eight o'clock we have um three people here I don't know if you can stick around if you had questions you didn't have a chance to ask but I just want to say that uh for all of you to show it's a pretty good crowd for something like this on a Thursday night right and that's that's that's a testament to how committed and compassionate people are about the topic as well so that's very exciting and and in closing I would like to say it not just on behalf of my group reviewer thank you but to our panelist Laura, Robert and Doran let's close by giving them a round of applause