 Welcome, everyone. Good evening and welcome to New America, New York City. I'm delighted everyone is here. I think we're in for a huge treat in our session of the Responsive City in Innovation and Technology and their implications for governance. For those of you new to New America, new to New America NYC, New America is a think tank, a non-person think tank in civic enterprise dedicated to the renewal of American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the digital age. We have a tremendous roster of scholars and practitioners working on a range of issues in social and economic policy, informed policy in Washington DC, and increasingly a good number of us here in New York as well. So for those of you who don't know me, I'm Georgia Levinson-Coham and I've recently joined New America this fall. I launched a program called the A New Initiative on Profits and Purpose, which is a program dedicated to social entrepreneurship, social innovation, and social investment across sectors, so in the nonprofit sector, the commercial sector, and the public sector. And I'm particularly interested in the spaces and the places where individuals and organizations from across the sectors come together in very dynamic ways to work for social change. So I really couldn't let you think of a better topic for tonight to kick off my program, The Responsive City, and really a more sort of rock star set of panelists in the civic innovation space. I have Susan Crawford, as you all know, Stephen Goldsmith, Seth Van Purh, who's a Jeff Merrick. And I'm thrilled and we will talk more with and about each of them and their work. Before we jump into the specifics of tonight's discussion, I just want to do a couple of quick thank-yous to the New America community. Broadly defined, first, I'd like to thank Anne-Marie Slaughter, the President and CEO of New America. Anne-Marie's not here tonight, but I will say her vision and her energy for what a think tank really can and should be in the 21st century is very energizing and inspirational for all of us as a civic leader. I'd also like to thank Rachel White, who's here earlier, who's now at The Guardian, and James Smith, who really helped build some of the programming for New America in New York City and gave shape to some of this. And then two more quick thank-yous for the New America folks. I think both are here tonight. First is Beth Demitzer. It's here you may... Anyway, you may all know Beth certainly by name or face and certainly her work. Beth has created and curates and runs the social cinema series we do here at New America, New York City. It's just an amazing set of documentary film screenings and discussions that follow them. We have a great one coming this Friday, which I probably it's a little too much of a tease to advertise Freedom Summer because it's sold out. But watch the space for those of you who don't know the programming. It's tremendous. And then just lastly, I'd like to give a big thanks to Tyler Bug. Again, I think Tyler, most of you know by name and face, but Tyler's really delightful of the programming that goes on in New America in New York City and really makes all the programming here happen tonight and everything. So Tyler, thank you. Tyler said to me, send an email about this event a couple weeks ago and he said it's only been an hour or two and we're sold out. I'm seeing that as a responsive city. And it was free, so being sold out. With food. Free with food, yeah. So with that, I'd love to jump in. Tonight we're going to discuss the responsive city and as I said, that's going to be a lot of discussion of data, innovation, technology, predictive analytics, but really I think why we're here is to discuss, we're going to discuss really democracy and governance and citizenship and how we might reimagine to use Stefan's word or rethink what civic life really can and should be in the 21st century. So the game plan for this evening, I asked Susan Crawford and Stephen Goldsmith to speak a bit to kick it off about the book, the responsive city, about their work. As you know, I won't go into too much of the bias, but Susan and Stephen are both professors at Harvard and teach in different capacities. Stephen at the Kennedy School where he runs the innovation program and is a professor in practice and government. And Susan at the law school in various capacities at the Berkman Center, the Center on Internet and Society. But they also both have had really interesting careers as public servants in the public sector as well in various capacities. Susan at the White House and Steve as you all know is the mayor of Indianapolis and also as deputy mayor here in New York City. And then I will ask Stefan to wane a little bit about his work at GovLab at NYU where he is the co-director, the co-founder and the head of research and development to wane a little bit about what he's seeing in cities in relation to technology innovation and governance. And then finally, we'll get to hear from Jeff, it's terrific to actually have the New York City perspective and I'm hopeful that Jeff will pick up really where Susan and Steve's book sort of leaves off and we'll get to hear about really what's going on in this city now. Jeff is the head of innovation in the mayor's office of innovation and technology. So he can really give us some insight into how the city is thinking about tools and technologies and a way to really engage citizens. So with that, can I ask you two to cut the book? For a minute, I think I heard you introduce Susan and myself as the past and Jeff as the future. I kind of resent that, but that may be true. So just a couple of comments about the book. This is loud as it sounds up here. Oh yeah, the book, which is for sale over there by the way. You get a free New America glass of wine for every book that you buy. So we started looking at the following way. I'll just speak kind of generally and then we can do more specifics later. And the theory I began with was that essentially the tools of progressive government don't produce progressive results. We have a way we manufacture government, hierarchical, command and control, a narrow set of activities, a definition of performance that also often is how fast you run in place, right? Because we're measuring activities, not public value. We have employees that are trapped in, you know, between union contracts, civil service laws, consent judgments, and swarms of city hall lawyers, right? We trap our employees and don't allow them to use their discretion. So meanwhile that we have all of these goals and it's difficult to produce them. So we started to look at kind of how do the technological tools allow the structure of government to change in order to produce better results, right? And so just quickly maybe the elements that we thought about in the book were the following. Maybe a government could actually be predictive instead of reactive, right? So instead of maybe measuring how many potholes you fill and how quickly you fill them, you might measure why you filled the same one and go in the last three months and then go solve the problem. The story in the book, and my apologies to Jeff, all of our stories are kind of Bloomberg era stories, not only because the book came out kind of that period of time, but, you know, we have a story in the book that everybody's probably read about or heard, which is, you know, the family died in a fire from an illegally converted building. I was worried, you know, I called, I knew the Daily Press, the Daily News or the Post was going to call, so I called the fire department, we received a complaint about that building. We received 50,000 complaints a year, and the fire department said essentially the same thing, which is like, get off our back, we're doing our job. And then there's a little group of kind of data scientists stuck in the back of city hall who didn't really belong to anybody, but must have come from some NSA background, and they were back and they heard this conversation, and they just give us 60 days. They came back 60 days later and they looked at, you know, delinquent taxes, foreclosure notices, 911 calls, 311 calls, code enforcement, you know, like six or seven data sets, and improve the predictability of which of those 50,000 complaints are going to lead to a real fire, right? And then we signed crews and they went out and remediated the problem, put in the sprinklers or remove the family or whatever the, you know, sighted the slum lord or whatever the case may be. So why can't government operate that way all the time, right? In terms of figuring out which child is going to be abused again, where the fire is going to occur, we direct the resources to what matters. So there's a predictive element. There's also an employee empowerment element that we can talk a little bit more as the night goes on, but instead of having our employees manufacture the same widget, regardless of whether anybody actually needs it, why don't we allow them to exercise their discretion, give them the tools, right? Everybody knows you're here because you know that all these tools exist, but if you think about what's happened, even in the two or three years since I left City Hall between, you know, the ubiquity devices, cloud computing, the power of data mining so these legacy systems can be brought together, all of those things can we can direct to empowering our employees to actually solve problems and call them accountable at the same time. So I'm about to finish with this kind of riff, but just another example I'm trying to patronize the new administration by kind of criticizing my administration. So, you know, I used to do these meetings out in the boroughs because I'm not from New York and starting to get to know people in this small restaurant, tourists kept complaining about the health inspectors, like over and over again and one complaint was that we keep getting $500 to $1,000 fines because our cheese is two degrees too high, right? This cheese would be a violation because it's been out too long, right? And so I went to the Health Commissioner, I said, you know, these are little guys and this is a pretty big bite and what's the deal? Why don't we just give folks discretion? He said, well, look, we have a history of corruption in New York City and we have rules and we want our inspectors to follow the rules and if we gave them discretion, how would you know that they wouldn't abuse the discretion? Because essentially what we've done in terms of creating honesty in government and to stop the abuse of discretion is we've made it impossible. We've eliminated discretion. So our employees have no discretion so they can't abuse it, right? Just kind of a blunt way to solve the problem. So, but now, right, we have tablets. We know how long they're in each restaurant. We know from their GPS exactly where they are. We know who the outliers are in terms of infractions written or who the infraction is not written. We know when people exercise their discretion, they give a warning ticket instead of a real ticket, et cetera, right? So why don't we just give people discretion to solve problems and manage an accountability regime in a slightly different way? So we have in the book then we think about predictability and employee empowerment and Susan will talk a little bit about I think about community engagement pieces that are really important because our goal is not to make professional bureaucrats even more arrogant. It's right to make them kind of socialize the solution to problems and we have that issue in there as well. And then finally, and I think both mayors Bloomberg and DeBlasio fall in this category and several other people like particularly Mayor Emanuel that none of this works without leadership because government is vertical, solutions are horizontal, somebody has to break through the barriers and give the authority to do that. So the book is a series of stories that deal with each of those categories and I defer to Susan on that her ability to speak slower and better and more about community engagement. Thank you very much. Well, there's no one better to write a book like this than Steve Polsmith who's really a mayor of mayors and is giving advice to a lot of mayors across the country and his deep practical experience informs the book throughout. We've been talking about the book all fall and this is one of the last events of this calendar year about the book. And so it's a chance for me to reflect on what I've learned sort of the meta lessons here. I'm carrying around this notebook because I want to read to you a New York Times headline reading a steady drip of lost pride nations confidence ebbs you know how horrible the nations confidence ebbs that was about a poll about Americans lack of trust in public institutions. That Americans really didn't believe that the government was there to help them that was going to solve any problems or even work with them listen to them in developing the solutions to those problems. And the great thing about this moment and the reason we wrote the book is that finally storage and computation and connectivity and talent all of these things are becoming more accessible particularly to local government cheaper available commoditized so that just as young people expect that all products will arrive the day they order them that in fact some company is going to predict for them what they need and get it to them before they even ask for it. Government can be responsive in that way and visibly so that trust can be built between the people who live in cities and the people who run cities because cities I've gotten very optimistic as I go from city to city talking about the people who love cities. Cities are where democracy is still working all the corrosive polarized problems in Washington fade away because the mayor just has to deliver services just has to make sure that things work and that people are happy and content. So the meta lesson here is that by having many touch points around the city many visible moments where the city can show its work can show how it's making progress for citizens how it's listening that's all possible now with fiber everywhere screens everywhere much cheaper computational products and especially talent going into city hall that understands that technology isn't just a tool that you think of at the end of a process technology is at the table it's part of making policy so it's a very exciting moment and as I talk to actually huge crowds of students out there who want hope they want to think that there's a way to serve maybe briefly in government using the tools they already understand to actually make life better for citizens in cities so that the local technology driven nature of the stories we tell the book is fascinating. So I've got some stories for you today that are actually updates from what's in the book because we finished it in the summer and even though it's published very quickly there's been a couple of administrations to turn over so Mr. DeWalzio is here in New York and Mr. Walsh in Boston so in Boston we told the story of Mermanino and his deep personal connection beloved mayor for 20 years to the people of Boston who unfortunately died shortly after leaving office he only wanted to use technology to reach more people to help them feel understood by the city and so he developed the mayor's hotline into a tool for actually using your smartphones to hone in about something that bothered you let the city know about it and then since then they developed a way for people to see the solution to the problem they wrote in about on their smartphones and soon you'll be able to actually see a picture of Al the guy who fixed the problem which again gives this sense of employee empowerment, public government these are heroes inside City Hall and the book is actually kind of a people magazine about the heroes. Mayor Walsh now takes this idea of the systems connect and the dashboard and the ability to see what's going on in the city and notices that all the systems in the city are separate performance management is one system the mayor's dashboard is another the mayor's hotline is another they're all in silos with wonderful people so the new CTO now, Yasha Franklin Hodge is working on bringing all of this together it's a big project into one system that feeds up into 311 that actually lets everybody see the same information that's going on so big developments in Boston with the same citizen engagement at the heart of it in New York and I hope that Jeff Meredith was actually doing the work is going to talk about this very exciting project just announced last week or so to make the moldering pay phones in New York into very high capacity wifi hotspots with charging stations you know so you'll be able to charge your cell phone and really importantly for the responsive city aspect of this is a tablet that you can use to learn about city services to make phone calls imagine all the things the city could push to these kiosks around the city and they're totally sleek beautiful things so taking the a Bloombergian suggestion and the pay phone but moving it into the de Blasio moment is really very exciting it shows the power of leadership and citizen connection engagement using these kiosks it's going to be fascinating we wrote about a lot in the book Chicago's leading the tale of predictive analytics very deliberate work on pilots to better prioritize how the city uses its resources but Chicago's also a story of engagement because there are so many civic hackers and community groups who are really interested in their city love their city and with the aid of foundations the MacArthur Foundation and City Hall this tremendous ecosystem in Chicago working together they're making real progress under the leadership of Mayor Emanuel so their updates on the predictive analytics pilots they keep talking about rats they're sick of that they'd rather we talked about another pilot I still can't talk about because they're not being public about it but they will be talking about many more ways of drawing in data looking across what the city knows and using that to optimize the resources and if we wrote the book today I would add the story of the city of Santa Monica I'm very proud to be from Santa Monica where the sewer meets the sea it's a lovely place they have fiber everywhere now a city fiber system and they're using the wifi hotspots at every intersection to do things like manage traffic flow understand where parking is push city services public service amenities so they really see this as an integrated layered system fiber sensors privacy protections for what information is gathered very useful information in a small city of 90,000 people that is now looking to build a well-being index of life funded by the Bluebird Foundation to measure how people feel about their lives and how they're thriving so very meta this has been a very exciting term for me talking about the book and thinking about the role of the university in stitching together students and city halls fellowships enormous opportunities as the university's business model is challenged by the internet it's pretty apparent to me that it needs to become much more of a platform and this precise kind of engagement between students who are desperate for hope and want to feel like there's a place to serve and under resourced local government seems to be to be an incredibly fertile area so the books of People Magazine we wrote it with joy there's much more going on and this is the moment to be serving local government thank you Ziflan do you want to sure well it's always hard to follow in the footsteps of Steve and Susan I always make some in the past I've made like 10 things to do and one is like never talk after lunch or dinner and so the next thing is they never talk after Steve and Susan because they can only go downhill from here but the but so let me talk a little bit so the Gulf Lab is a new organization that its mission is to improve people's lives by changing how we govern and so to a large extent we focus on how we can actually innovate in decision making but also in service delivery and we are somewhat agnostic of the sector and somewhat agnostic of the layer but cities is one of the areas where most of the activities actually happens and so that's the reason why we started cities mainly from a perspective to learn more on how you can actually grasp the activity that is there and then also then look at how can it actually transfer to other areas of governance because a lot of the innovation that happens there hopefully will also happen at the federal level and which is also happening to a large extent and so let me just reflect a little bit about a the book and rephrase a little bit about what the book which is of course anyway comprehensive and captures all the compelling stories on why you would be excited about and to a large extent I think with the book and what Steven, Susan has said is that we're living in the worst of times and the best of times and so the worst of times is clearly is that we have huge amount of challenges as a result of urbanization but also as a result of a more increased complex society that actually existing institutions have a hard time to deal with and top of that we clearly see also a loss of trust and partly that is because of the expectation that actually they should step up and have a hard time to step up and then we have something called the budget which is not really supportive of actually stepping up as well so we have a budget deficit, we have a legitimacy deficit and we also have quite often a agility and effectiveness deficit and that's not only for city government but that's actually in governance in general so we clearly have a huge amount of challenges now the good part is exactly is that we do have huge amount of advances in both technology but also in science that actually provides for new ways of doing things that provides for ways that can actually deal with 21st century challenges and there are two things that come out of that that really are new assets for mayors new assets for institutions to leverage to actually address 21st century challenges one is data we've never had as much data as we have and we also never had the science to actually manipulate the data in a manner that we can have and the second asset are people one of the biggest assets of mayors or the biggest assets of governance to a large extent are people but we never had really the tools to connect people with governance as we had today and so there's two tools and that's what from my point of view what the book is all about the two tools of the two assets of data and people create for a whole new way of actually governing and a whole new way of going about solving public problems and Julia who is in the audience as well and myself have identified which is responsive governance but there are four ways of actually going about it one is that data and people and how they are connected really allows for cities to be more connected in a way that we've never had before and so we see this somewhat peer to peer kind of urbanism emerging which leverages this peer to peer kind of platforms that exist also in the economy but apply it to actually doing public good and so examples here which are in the book but other examples are for instance this tool of post point for instance which actually connects everyone who has a CPR training and then if there is a cardiac arrest you can actually connect directly with someone in the neighborhood who has a CPR training without waiting for the ambulance to arrive and lesson learned is that the longer it takes the less chance for survival and so that connection that peer to peer kind of connectivity they currently have is a whole new way of actually dealing with problems in this case a challenge of public health and emergency you have many other examples like in San Francisco meaning Chicago New York Boston are clearly out there San Francisco is another one of the cities in addition to Santa Monica is the cities that are in the lead here in the US and so they came up with something called city 72 for instance which turns out in an emergency quite often it takes 72 hours to really be able to reach everyone in an emergency context and so the question is how can you actually leapfrog and connect citizens so that you deal with this first 72 hours and so city 72 is a platform that actually connects citizens in a way that can provide in an emergency context like post hurricane and so on to actually provide services and help to each other so anyway the first is the more connected nature so the peer to peer kind of urbanism which is a kind of responsive city the second one that we notice which is clearly in the book and much better written than I will ever be able to share is this notion of smarter cities and here we clearly see the arrival of urban sensing which is very exciting because now we really can actually sense the city in a manner that you never had before and so that's the reason why they also quite often talk about this whole notion of quantified cities we know the concept of a quantified self which you basically can collect data about yourself through wearables now you can as a city can actually quantify the city based upon the sensors but also other tools that you have around and so examples here are of course what happens in Brooklyn with Cusp the city for urban science and progress where they have this urban observatory which takes only 9000 pictures in a day to actually sense the city but also in Chicago array of things which are smaller sensors and which is going to be very interesting in New York how you're going to connect that with actually the pay phones and so on so there you see this whole urban sensing taking place the other thing is of course and that's also where Susan have worked on in the past is that you can also become smarter by actually opening up your data and so the whole open data movement that actually opens up the data that cities already have and then allows for citizens to create apps is another big movement that makes cities more responsive but also puts actually the power of data in the hands of citizens and then last what you also see happening is this whole arrival of citizen science at the city level which is from my point of view not enough used by cities is actually how can you tap into the expertise that is within cities among citizens and so the whole citizen science movement which mainly is being translated quite often in actually map creation at certain level is another exciting one anyway quickly the third and the fourth kind of transformation we see is that what we call quite often participatory urbanism we see it in participatory budgeting clearly where you actually engage with citizens in a total different manner where you actually provide decision power at the level of the citizen then just assuming that representatives know best but also civic crowdsourcing is a clear example of participatory budgeting where you actually bypass the budgeting process but find budgets and find funding through a direct kind of way of funding thing so this is another way in which you can tap into people and then the last one is about more agile kind of governance where you quite often see the notion of lean urbanism because you can't be lean now because you actually know or can measure the immediate impact that you have which is another thing that has been missing to a large extent so that you have this rapid cycle or an agile cycle of actually making policies and again predictive analytics comes into play Chicago is taking a lead in that sense and so on so those four areas are areas that I noticed in the book I'm always parochial in rephrasing them but it's a very exciting time but also a very risky time because it does require rethinking processes which always makes many officials nervous and so with that I think I provided the platform to Jeff which was my old function here that's great, thank you and Jeff you don't have to give a full state of the city but before you do if you could also talk a little bit about your background before you joined the administration I think you know in some ways a little bit of color there you do exemplify a lot of the new type of public servant that we've all discussed and addressed and would just love to know how you came to the trust as well sure so you know I didn't want to start on a point that Susan said at the very end of her she said it's an exciting time for city government right and and I really really believe that and that wasn't the case very long ago I always wanted to go into government I always thought if you're going to do public good you got to go to the place where public resources are aggregated purely to create programs and address social problems so I always wanted to go into government my first gig in government was in Michigan State government in 1996 it was the most horrible place I'd ever been and I just couldn't believe this institution that was just so rigid and it seemed impossible for individuals to make a difference there and that was only that wasn't that long ago that was less than 20 years ago I don't know state capitals I don't think have changed as much the cities but I'll put that aside and so I quickly said I don't know if I can do this government thing in the US and so I jumped ship and I went over and started working in the Balkans during the this was a post I was working in Croatia during the Tujan regime and then post Milosevic Serbia and Montenegro and Albania and Macedonia over there because that was where democracy was really exciting that was where sort of an authoritarian regime had fell down you were building it from the grassroots and I think over the years they sort of built up my confidence and was back in the US working on outside of government in what we call the good government sector right putting pressure on government and I eventually became a government contractor I don't know why the New York City Department of Education thought it was a good idea to select this small non-profit called grassroots initiative that I started to run community education council elections those are like our school board here in New York City and so we went we ran those elections we did them online it was the first online public elections in US history previously that contract had gone to KPMG we cut costs by I guess costs were 20% of what they were the previous years and the public participation went up by five times and that I think had sort of given me the confidence it actually you know this bureaucratic institution can change it just takes sort of someone taking risk and so the risk then started working this guy named Bill de Blasio and you sort of know where that led to last year the election about this time and moved into city hall so that's sort of how I got here and I would say that I do think that government right now and particularly city government is a very very exciting place you know my parents were biologists and there's a term in in when you're talking about sort of evolutionary change where they talk about punctuated equilibrium which basic idea is things are going along at a pretty slow pace and then all of a sudden it's very short period a huge amount of rapid change and I have no doubt that's where we are in government government as Steven said was created to build bureaucracy to create checks and balances and things and here we're at a point where with technology and the advancements in technology that in many ways we are the industry to disrupt right now you've seen disruption have through the finance sector and all of these different you know you see our taxis have changed and government now is being disrupted the fact that an individual like myself even could work for a mayor's office and have a title like director of innovation would be absurd ten years ago people say as an oxymoron there's not innovation in government but because of technology there's no sort of opportunity there and so I actually I wanted to just give one story here and I'm not, I was actually not going to do the pay phone story because I figured that was one that you knew and it's in the press right now and so I was going to give a story that folks might not know that hasn't been talked about and so I think one of the key parts of what is it that how do you enable that disruption what does it look like so when Mayor de Blasio came in if many of you are New Yorkers you remember the campaign our number one issue was universal pre-k we wanted to make sure that all four-year-olds in New York had the ability to go into free full-day pre-kindergarten and so the mayor from day one I mean he was committed to that there was no turning back it had been such a big issue for him during the campaign and by April he had secured some funding from the state well the plan was he had already said by September he wanted to have 53,000 four-year-olds in school so April, September right to all of a sudden you're going to have 53,000 four-year-olds and so we had to figure out how do we do that like how do you make that happen I think the first step in any type of disruption and innovation is taking is bold leadership right if the mayor had not gone and put forward a seemingly impossible challenge then this sort of next steps would not have followed and so we had no choice but to be creative to be agile all the words that Staphon was talking about here so we really quickly I went and I pulled together some folks from the tech sector I pulled together 12 different agencies that touch the different pieces of the pre-kindergarten cycle because it's not simply about putting opening up our schools and just letting the doors and letting people enroll you actually have to do a process by which the city selects community centers and creates pre-kindergarten sites you have to do health inspections of those sites fire department is a whole bunch of steps you have to hire teachers and train them right and we were trying to do this in a period from April to September so we brought all these folks together but we wanted to make sure that it wasn't just the government team we brought in folks from the tech sector from small firms and big firms and we said okay let's just start mapping this out and then we used some you know some methodologies that are becoming more and more common now user centered design and we had big I mean we just filled a room with posted notes and white boards mapping out all these systems and what came out of that is a private public partnership where we called on a number of companies we didn't have a choice we couldn't do traditional procurement so you know Microsoft donated licenses there was a company that provided statistical folks there was a company that provided developers we from the city pulled from different departments and we said okay how do we get this done well let's do what we know well let's treat it like a campaign right because that's ultimately what we're talking about doing how do we identify four-year-olds and then how do we contact the households of those four-year-olds and give them information get them into a program and obviously we have to balance supply and demand here because at the same time that we're trying to figure out where the four-year-olds are and put them in programs we got to create the programs in the right place if I put programs out in one part of the city and I've got a whole bunch of demand in another part supply and demand don't hit and then all of a sudden people say this was a huge disaster you have all these people that couldn't get into programs and you got all these empty seats right so we did we pulled a bunch of folks together we put our heads together we said let's start with the data something we learned from Steven the Bloomberg administration so we pulled any data that we could get that could find us the four-year-olds so birth records who was born in the year 2010 it was four years ago but those were the kids so let's start with that who had gone through any type of public program and at any point had identified that they have kids in their household commercial data folks out there who are tracking who's purchasing diapers and that would give us an indication of where people that were purchasing diapers three years ago those kids are probably four years old now so brought together a whole bunch of different data sources put them into a data warehouse got some outside assistant and used the team at Moda the mayor's office of data analytics to try and pull this data together eliminate duplicates we built a basically a database system in nine days pulled that information in there and then we had call centers and we were calling out to households and saying do you happen to have a four-year-old well we've got this great program that we're starting and somehow miraculously all that adds up to the between that time in April and September 53,000 four-year-olds ended up in classrooms with teachers and we pulled off what everybody thought was impossible the challenges next year I got to get up to 73,000 which is an even bigger obstacle but I think the point here is that what we're doing differently in government right now is that one we have cities where we have great leaders and you name a lot of them and it takes bold leadership and then it takes creative problem solving and it takes utilizing these different tools whether they be data whether they be the different pieces of technology out there and you sort of have to pull together all these pieces and it's a big risk and sometimes we will fail but when we succeed we can do amazing things there's a joke there was a story I saw where they were making fun of the fact that our mayor always is calling everything historic and it's true it's true it's kind of comical you put together a clip of all his speeches this is a historic moment for New York but that's what our job should be if we're going to be public servants and we're going to be in what is ultimately like the capital of the world a great city like New York everything we do should be historic and it should be big and bold and I think that finally government is catching up to that and people are realizing that and so I will end there because I know there's going to be a lot of questions but I do think it's a great day to thank goodness that we have folks like Steven and Susan who are documenting this and really you weren't the past you guys are the trailblazers we wouldn't be doing what we are today if you were not there and you're enabling more people you're enabling this to spread which is critically important thank you that was a great story did you register the four year olds to vote too? very early very early we're not entirely off the hook on the phone especially because I have to put a plug that's New America's OTI Group as a partner so we will if it's not asked I will come back to that that particular project I think I get to the prerogative and maybe the first question or two before I open it up so the first is so Mike Flowers former head of analytics the data gene is out of the bottle and sort of data and analytics and these type of technological innovations are here to stay and I guess the question I have or what I was really struck by reading the book was you know you've all said in various forms that the data and the innovation technology are terrific and they're good but they need to be good for something they're essentially tools and their means to an end and I was struck my questions are about actually apps and apps there were two examples in the book I was very struck by where a particular way of either visualizing the data a particular tool actually resonated in perhaps an unanticipated way of a particular group either government employees or the community at large something in the mapping example whether it's sort of in the slums of Rio or in India where suddenly you're putting a community on the map that wasn't where you have citizens contributing to the map and I was struck where you said people actually react much more first of all there's a dispassionate not an emotional response but also that maps versus say graphs were a very compelling visualization tool I thought that was interesting and the second on apps I think it was the Boston example where they noted that when people called in on 311 it felt like complaining but it was a very different emotional response when people were able to use their smartphones and it actually felt like they were constructively engaging so I just love briefly to hear from each of you particular tools or technologies maybe it was intuitive maybe you were surprised that really unlocked community engagement in a different way I'm so delighted you started this because for me visualization is the secret sauce leadership is incredibly important but we don't make progress on anything until we can see it and I keep learning over and over again and you put a group of different stakeholders that may be fighting with each other in front of a visualization that they trust and the emotional temperature really does go down people start solving problems together if they can see the problem we didn't have an environmental movement in the United States until we could see a picture of the earth from space because we had no sense of it as a vulnerable thing so visualization absolutely important maps work because we can see ourselves we're like babies we're looking for other things that are like us and a map we can picture acutely how that feels viscerally I think emotion is incredibly important to all these processes the idea I love the line from Boston that you're helping if you're using an app from Citizens Connect you're not complaining you're helping and to harness more and more of that energy gives rise to what Jeff's talking about of engaging lots of different communities in co-producing solutions to very difficult problems so those are two terrific examples visualization and apps I see you coming up no I don't think so but let me just abstract Susan's comments for a second the power that we are witnessing and advocating is the connection between if you think about big data as the data analytics inside the government enterprise I think Jeff's story about preschool is actually just a fascinating story and then you've got information in the community and whether you're taking social sentiment or social mining or communication tools or crowdsourcing whatever and value comes when those two things connect so if we think about visualization and open data and open performance as elements will they come together in a powerful way when you have the data and you listen to it and you listen to people who are engaging with that data just to reiterate the visualization tools are powerful because they unlock insights in the part of the community to issues which had been trapped inside the government data originally so yeah so let me focus on two tools that were not mentioned in the maps and the apps which is the huge potential of on the one hand gaming which quite often gets ignored I mean there is some examples as well especially in Boston you have the engagement lab which is doing great work where we got to actually engaging citizens in some style fashion which is absolutely I would say everything is better than surveys in the current state and age to actually get people to engage and also to then basically see solutions and co-create solutions in a manner that is somewhat systemic and in a different kind of way so there is a lot potential here as well especially given different audiences that you might reach that haven't really progressed well and where GovLab is somewhat focused on is the area in which you actually match skills and opportunities with opportunities meaning to a large extent we have clearly apps we have a lot of maps but we still don't really know who knows what in society and so from a mayor's point of view as I already indicated the biggest asset that you might have in a city but how do you know as a mayor meaning it's already hard to know who are the four year olds how do you know who actually knows what and can help you co-create a solution and that's a big challenge that we can tackle partly through network analysis and data science partly through actually creating new platforms that can profile and that's a term that quite often creates all kinds of privacy advocates to jump but that can profile expertise in society differently and I think this still is missing somewhat and there are a variety of graph kind of tools which is what I wanted to end graph type of tools that still needs to be applied in the city context so if I was to say what's a game changer in terms of a tool that enabled civic or civic engagement and I spend a lot of time in civic engagement I think often times we think that civic engagement is the end goal and we have to always put it remember that engagement isn't just good for engagement sake so often times people think about these heavy technology tools and they think about hack-a-thons and these very labor intensive processes but I actually think some of the most game changing tools are the simpler things so things like 311 system nothing changed government in New York nothing was a game changer like 311 because it was just so simple the idea was just one phone call that connected everything didn't matter what you needed you had one phone call and that's engagement because when an individual contacts government and says what their problem is they're giving data and that data then is running government nothing changed I think the function of your cities like the 311 system and it isn't a technology tool yeah there was technology under there but it was something simple it was something basic and that's the beauty is that people can engage without actually knowing they're engaging that's magic one more this is a little bit about outside of New York so we can debate whether New York or Santa Monica Indianapolis is the greatest city in the US but most of the examples in the book and you do touch on Louisville and Detroit and there's some Baltimore but for the most part we're talking about New York Boston and Chicago and cities with great leadership outsized mayors and very vibrant for the most part private sectors and terrific research universities philanthropy and sort of a lot of resources and there are some interesting examples in the book where you talk about city sharing other cities like the Chicago data right they can sort of be replicated but I guess I'm thinking about cities that in the US and globally that don't have these resources and how are these tools and these energies entrepreneurs how is all of this available to them or where are they being in well a great story along the signs is Detroit which is figured we've got nothing else to lose so let's really move forward on this front and they've got fantastic people the mayor of Detroit drove to Louisville after the CIO and Louisville refused his job offer three times he said you have to come work here he drove down got that CIO from Louisville brought him up to Detroit and they also have a wonderful citizen engagement manager they are really seeing themselves as going to be at the forefront of all this responsive government stuff because they want to understand their city better want their citizens to feel engaged in the process of government one more story which is that the big cities are not yet moving in on fiber a lot of second cities are and that's where you're going to see a lot of positive feedback loops of being able to ship around all this data use it easily and feel no delay no hesitation in using it to run the city so you could think about this as a series of modules that get plugged together and so some things cities with leadership no matter what their size can do and others are kind of escape their grasp so you could have 311 call centers in any city and those call centers can evolve like New York City is about to to become platform for engagements because they go from calls to SMSs to tweets to whatever and you can think about open data do you really have a true open data program and not just ones that put up kind of ugly public documents in PDF files but ones that actually have usable data that's up there that's called stat programs a process of managing by metrics and then you've got then you get to more sophisticated stuff can you really do data analytics and predictive analytics well probably not you don't have a resident data scientist there's not very many cities that do but could you do that as a shared service what's the relationship between the private sector and the public sector with cloud computing can you lower the cost of of doing that but in the end as you move from the simple to the complex the cross cutting theme of course is leadership because it's beating up the agency bureaucracies in the verticals and creating that environment so I think there is a very serious shortage of talent in the more sophisticated analytics stuff and some of that can be somewhat mitigated by creative app developers who develop something in New York City that then goes nationally but on the how do I analyze my data that piece I think needs a lot more help nationally well I think meaning for every city to be successful I think they need five things in place and so if they start sharing across those five things I think there will be huge success and unfortunately it's not happening one one is exactly what has been mentioned it's not leadership but it's really understanding the value of certain kinds of tools and so if someone here in the audience as a developer they should take the book and turn it into some kind of an interactive expert system in which it said for that issue give me examples that I can copy right and so you need to get a better sense about what are the horses for what courses right so what tools can be used for what objectives because it's not like every tool can be used for all the objectives so that's the first thing the second thing is clearly you need to have some kind of a technical infrastructure and again that can be leveraged by shared infrastructure to a large extent third thing that you need is that you do need to have policies in place and again policies can be transferred from one city to the other city knowing that to a large extent they are context specific but at least you can have some kind of shared policy kind of environment then you need training and that's where a lot of the training of city officials needs to change but can also be across cities to a large extent and then lastly you really need some kind of a movement in which all the chief which is already happening chief of innovations are actually connected and share and become a movement of innovation to a large extent and I think that will bring us to actually becoming more inclusive so that actually smaller cities or cities that don't have that kind of leadership also have the potential to innovate. So on this note I'm not going to be as optimistic as I was on others I think in the collaboration space in terms of collaboration between cities I think we have a ways to go I think we're probably five years away from real strong collaboration I think part of it is that the reality is in individual governments we have a lot of silos and we're technology is helping us to be able to cut across those silos however every city you talk to they're all dealing with that right now and so it's when you talk about cities and they've got all their silos and they're dealing with that and starting to get their hands around what to do and then you want them to go and collaborate with other cities which is a whole other silo right but I think that we've got we're a little ways from there I think we have to move there but we haven't figured out the sort of methods and processes yet but without a doubt I feel there's an incredible amount to be learned in both directions I feel like the small cities where I think of it like a big ship and a little ship it's much easier to turn that little ship they can do some amazing innovative things that then it's like they're piloting it for us in the big cities but they can also learn from us in the big cities because we're able to do things that just such we have so many more resources and things like that so I think there's a huge wave of opportunity there I think we're a little ways off but we'll get there I'm going to turn it over to I know there are loads of questions so please I'm Julian Zelazer I'm a professor at Princeton and a fellow here the last time there was the kind of promise of efficiency was the turn of the 20th century and kind of historians who study it study that one of the costs of new administrative bodies and bureaucracies were new forms of disenfranchisement and new forms of control and do you see some of those dangers so if you talk about data at the federal level everyone says NSA and everyone talks about the threats that have emerged from that is that not part of a problem that might emerge from this new response of government and if so what are some measures that are taken in cities like New York to make sure that's not the case not just in data knowledge but even access to all this technology I throw that out there well suspect we all have partial answers or no answers to that question so let's think about it in two different ways one I think I'd like to strike the word efficiency in my answer let's think about effectiveness or responsiveness efficiency has a little bit of a sound that we're going to do things cheaper so we'll come back to that I know that's not how you meant it so I think I would think about the answer to your question as follows one if we only have limited resources if we can redirect those resources to actually effective which providers are helpful with which kids which preschool program works more than whatever another program so we have the dollars that can be redirected and reorganized we're looking at a lot of activities in child welfare what provider what case worker is good with what sort of family you know how do they so all of that provides instead of like really expensive random control trials provides an opportunity at least to redirect the resources then secondly and Susan I just wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe about this right yes we did so I think it's a mistake not to acknowledge that there are two sides of this coin the power of data to help is the power of the technology to intrude on privacy and if you and you have to recognize it so so we have been thinking that a city that wants to be in the vanguard would have an explicit and transparent privacy policy would have what data and anonymize it would have what the archival policies are would have who could look at that data Susan teaches a privacy course I'll let her kind of finish it but I would just basically say that I think we ought to recognize it's a problem and then use that to kind of go forward lastly really quickly and Stefan's more of an expert this than I am but why don't we think also about how to use technology to increase the voice of those who are ignored right because it's not as if without it's not as if before smartphones that wealthy and the influential couldn't find the way to influence public policy right even the people who call 311 are not exactly and those who call their city counselors etc so then you say okay well if we have a huge very significant adoption rates of smartphones and why don't we kind of organize virtual marches on city hall or evaluate like Mayor Gray's doing in DC how responsive a public official is in a certain program to a certain resident so long way of saying I totally acknowledge the question I think it's a very serious and dangerous question on both sides but there's a lot of power actually to lift people up who have been ignored just to add on to this I teach the law of surveillance as well as talking about the responsive city all the time and I recognize the deep tension there and right now we have tech happy people on one side who don't think about privacy at all and aren't worried about policies and then we have the people who are so freaked out they'll start worrying and upset every government program so what we're talking about is the need for actual policy leadership as well as tech leadership doesn't exist now but there are 3 areas it's not just privacy it's also all that reform around the turn of the 20th century gave rise to some very good ideas no more nepotism in government contracts right and great care over procurement and great care of civil service rules this is what made Teddy Roosevelt's career was reforming civil service that's how it got going and now those rules the pendulum has swung and those rules are like a thick growth of kudzu on government's ability to do anything at this point and it's like here Jeff said we couldn't procure because that's hopeless you know we can't do that so we have so many policy challenges privacy is one of them and human resources are two enormous and that's why my job is to train people who understand technology you can go and work on this policy problem I don't want to take more than my share of time but the turn of the century progressive Teddy Roosevelt government assumed that the way to reduce these abuses that Susan referenced was through a very rule driven control driven system and that there was always up until recently a tradeoff between accountability and discretion so more discretion and less accountability I think that the technology tools today that lets you look broadly at how discretion is exercised which police officer has the most complaints what type of person does he stop what health inspector does what allows us to challenge the assumption that the only way to get accountability is to have these very narrow rules and I think that may be the biggest breakthrough that we see in the next 5 or 10 years inside government it's not magic though it always is backed up with the human being making policy but applying more discretion to the rules because you can see more that's what we're suggesting is this on? okay big fan of the book tell your friends absolutely this question comes from the perspective of an outside consultant who works as a designer actually my name is Katamba and I'm a strategist and designer and what's interesting is I was part of the RFI RFP process for the wireless chargers for the design of the phone booths and being in that process it was interesting to be part of having a city that has a digital officer who has a process for calling out private sector people like myself who work for Amex or Apple and I find myself designing for a city and that was a really great process it was a really fun process but then I found myself wanting to try again and working at Hartford Connecticut where we didn't have any of those types of resources and we were dealing with these kinds of micro macro and meta things all at the same time and I guess my question comes down to how do we start getting people like myself who are interested in part of this movement of wanting to change institutions change services but also don't know what are the motivations of the cities who should we be talking to at what level and how do we earn a place to be able to say design is not the genius on a pedestal but maybe more like making a sign for you to facilitate a way to build a product or a service or a process that shows you how to eliminate and detect errors over time so here's my opinion I think Hartford is going to get there and I'll tell you honestly I'll tell you how the fastest way they're going to get there they're going to get there by people like you who are getting frustrated on the outside who say you know what I'm going to look and I'm going to take a job inside government and I'm going to try and start changing it from the inside that's how it happens I mean that's the short of it that you can't just wait for things to change at some point you build up that courage you get yourself inside and you start to sort of break down the barriers and it'll also help that as you said New York City was at the the forefront when they created a position for a chief digital officer now you're seeing positions become much more common not only in government but they're in the private sector it becomes part of the vocabulary and on everything it's about someone getting the ball rolling and then that momentum builds at snowballs and then you'll get to the Hartford but obviously the fastest way for Hartford to get on the fast track is for bright people with big ideas to get in there it's hard work it's not easy but that's part of it team development, agile development service design, strategic design and some of those come from countries where they have like the Nordic model where there's a lot of homogene that makes governance really easy to do these responsive things versus Hartford Hartford Hi, my name is Brian Rich I'm a, I don't know I'm a speechwriter and a bunch of other things but sort of my side interest is disaster preparedness so the smarter and more effective city benefits the population to a certain extent or to the extent to use the pre-K example that you can reach and engage and find the right people but in something like disaster preparedness and specifically the individual completion of say a disaster preparedness plan which we're all encouraged to do by FEMA and state and local officials anything short of 100% participation from the citizenry seems to me sort of like a failure or at least a missed opportunity and there's this sort of give and take where we need 100% participation from citizens and then the data that they would generate would certainly benefit the city and vice versa but there's this disconnect that seems to prevent the majority if not the entirety of citizens from participating so I guess the question is most of what the responsive city is about is about the city and the city government and the city infrastructure improving and thus improving services by default but what responsibility exists for the average citizen and how do you sort of get over the inertia problem of most people just saying oh a disaster is going to strike and the city is going to take care of it or you know whatever seems to me that there's something missing in the conversation between the average citizen and the responsive city that needs to be figured out and I think that it's very important to build up bulk up the role of intermediaries smaller civic groups that because I don't think the individual citizen left to their own devices is going to figure out how to build a disaster recovery plan but through their you know their community center their church their collaborative Chicago in the book we talk about the role of the smart Chicago collaborative which is foundation funded and outreach with respect to technology between city hall and community groups on many levels for sort of beta testing of new things for sensitivity testing of privacy concerns and you know their motto is if it doesn't work for you it doesn't work so there's an inspirational leader of that group in Chicago there should be and there are in New York actually I'm now thinking of all the different kinds of intermediaries who can take on that role as translators as inculcators as trainers to build the link between citizen and city I think it's a very important point there's another way to think about consistent response to your question so Deputy Mayor I used to go over and kind of look at the there was a there's like a spiral notebook for every disaster you can imagine that's in New York City and there are books everywhere very detailed plans of course New York City's the best disaster response place in the country literally but they all depend on people in government anticipating and planning that a disaster will occur exactly the way they think it will right which of course it never does that's why it's a disaster I mean really right so one way to think about this would be how do you plan for resilience and recovery how do you plan where the guy is going to give CPR is located in and I think we saw in Sandy I wasn't here in Sandy but I think we saw in Sandy a lot of the impromptu activity community response made up for the fact that there were some holes in the response so if we thought about government as intentionally ceding that right and organizing that and anticipating that then we could have a much more resilient response and a lot more community participation as it relates to the event of the catastrophe itself thank you I'm Billy I work in advertising sorry I have a simple question which is what's one program or government initiative that doesn't exist right now that you personally wish existed and I want to hear every single one of you a program that doesn't exist today doesn't exist maybe some programs that shouldn't exist look we've got in Chicago and I think actually under Mayor de Blasio you have this as well which is essentially integrated data analytics effort in essentially the mayor's office right so the program that exists almost nowhere is a program dedicated to using data for performance evaluation throughout government right and that would dramatically change the way things work that's very rare it's organized to work in this administration actually more I think brought it together more than the last administration and Chicago is a pretty good example a platform that organizes data for performance I can link that to the training the talent deficit that Steve talked about earlier that if it was much easier for people to come in just two or three years you really can't do it for one year you've got to stay for a little while and lend their skills to government and then go back out and if that was easy in every city in every state easy at the federal level we'd be making a lot more progress than we are right now we don't have that and the civil service rules are really difficult it's hard to hire hard to find the resources and I think that should happen so as I mentioned I think what is really missing is this whole concept of managing expertise in society so how comes City Holders know your skill set in advertising and when they want to actually tap into your skill set of advertising how can they reach you and so if you can come up with networks of expertise that is either self disclosed or done through some kind of either network analysis or other ways of being able to actually identify expertise in society and that doesn't have to be professional expertise it can also be interest or can also be experience someone who has experience with disasters is an expertise who can make the city more resilient how do you tap into that kind of expertise should be an objective of all city halls and platforms can be built to actually allow that and that would be a total rethinking of actually the talent deficit because you can have talent in government but there is a lot of talent out of government and that requires quite often rewriting policies and so on but that seems to be the big missing part of the current innovation I'm going to give you something very specific it's not the end all be all it's something that I was frustrated with last week and I proposed to somebody I said can you figure out how do we make this so I was in Barcelona Steven was there as well a smart city's event all these amazing people from around the world and the challenge is also always there you're meeting these people they're doing great things you should collaborate the earlier challenge here how do we collaborate in an efficient way and my frustration is I can be on my Gmail and Gmail is reading my emails and it's saying are you interested in buying flowers because it's seeing I'm writing about somebody you know somebody passed away or is sick and it's saying you want to buy chicken soup that we should have a way on government to make collaboration really simple and straightforward we have the ability with data and technology now that I should be typing my email and it's popping up things and saying did you see this Harvard study that was just put out by Susan Crawford where she's got new ideas on how you could do this more efficiently or it's saying did you know that this city that this person is working on the same issues of data privacy right how do we make collaboration easy so I don't have to stop my work and say how do I find somebody who's doing something similar or relevant that's a big challenge hi my name is Andrew Fine I'm a lawyer I guess I want to ask about how you think of problems in government with use of technology we have in New York City the city time scam we have the comptroller saying that thousands of computers and tablets are missing from schools we have healthcare.gov we have contracts tons of agency contracts that are way over budget or never fulfilled so I guess you haven't talked about the difficulties of government procuring technology and using it well so yeah I just want you to see how it can improve that well the healthcare.gov debacle was a beautiful case study of all the things we were talking about not happening you know with no because technology was treated as ministerial at the very end if somebody else would figure that out wasn't part of the policy building process in grading the program and because only a very very large contractor with not that much relevant experience in running this kind of thing could get on the approved list through the procurement process to provide that website and because there was an adequate project management high levels of the White House because they're all economists they don't really think about technology because all those things happened that program did not go well when it was launched and the recovery from that is another example of leadership better procurement real public-private partnership people flew in and tried to help and fix the situation and bringing the technology question into the heart of work and that story crystallizes all the problems of working in government technology I I inherited city time after it was a half billion dollars over budget after, let me just start the story so I'm not indicted here so I think my response to your question would be the similar to Susan's but would be the following A, large enterprise programs are virtually impossible and always over budget two, that the sophistication of complicated program management does not generally exist inside city hall even in a New York-sized city so that you end up with vendors managing vendors who are managing vendors city time is a little complicated because we also had corruption in addition to mismanagement but the point is that if we could modularize more of the offerings if we could purchase more offerings off the cloud instead of kind of enterprise offerings then we could begin at least to kind of implement these things in bite-sized chunks and just to reiterate Susan's comment to the extent that and this is a story we tell in the book even the data analytics stuff you don't want to set it up as a data analytics you want to set it up to solve a number of use cases so to the extent in the healthcare example that it was run by the techies and not by the people in the program itself is another kind of failing and so if you get those things right I think you can at least reduce some of the problems that your question references so I'll answer it really quickly so I think the modular approach is right our new chief technology officer likes to say that projects are too big to succeed which is I think oftentimes the problem in government but I also think that you have to remember procurement processes were not designed for technology they were designed for example if you want to buy a bunch of pencils 20,000 number 2 pencils and then people give you bids on that technology doesn't work that way oftentimes we don't know what the technology is that we need and the technology is advancing so fast that by the time we would procure it it would be out of date and so part of what's going to happen need to happen in the next couple of years that a lot of us are working on is how do we get the lawyers in many ways comfortable with the fact that we have to switch that around and say we don't know what we're not putting out all the requirements actually we know what the problem is we know what the problem is and you have to tell us what the solution is that will fit that and then we have to be able to compare solutions and say which of those solutions is the better fit for government it's a challenge because the rules aren't set up that way but I think that's where we're going and where we'll ultimately need to be to be successful and it turns out we do a lot of training as well in the GovLab Academy that have challenges of actually defining the problem and because people tend to go immediately to the solution with actually really thinking whether and what the problem is and whether the response is adequate for the for the problem in addition to then also modular kind of approaches and more anyway applying the agile kind of methodology that is being used but that's sometimes where it starts Ted Perlmutter Columbia University and I teach on social networks in conflict and I'm from St. Louis so I have to ask the inevitable Ferguson question and to me what's striking about Ferguson was the fact that there was really nobody that the police knew to call and there was very few people in the community who could have been called and what I'm wondering about is kind of a data analytics and network issue and how can you one work to sort of set that up working for both in the government and the community side and also figure out how that scales because Ferguson is only one of 100 small municipalities in St. Louis County and I realize that cities like Boston and New York are much better at that and if you watch the news and you watch the mayors respond they were sort of incredulous about what was happening out there but so that's the question I was trying not to answer that question well such a sophisticated question I mean at one level technology doesn't solve cultural problems right so if there's an attitude in a governmental institution that is bad then you can use technology to manage it so let's just kind of separate out training and culture and attitude and recruitment and whether a police force should represent in terms of diversity it's community and all the rest of those things those are all not what you asked about but they're kind of predicates one of the ways I think a lot about networks maybe not at the level of sophistication you do and one of the ways to think about networks is the extent to which government enhances its legitimacy through a deep connection with a non-profit or community player right so because government depends on its legitimacy and maybe that's in fact one of the morals of the story in Ferguson with very little legitimacy and then there was an act and the act kind of touched off the reaction so to the extent to which we're thinking going back to Susan's comment that we have an intermediary like Smart Chicago and we have government that now is providing open data and participating and developing deep networks and I think to some extent I don't know whether it was Bill Bratton or someone else said that the car the problem was the police officer was in his car not on the street that the car itself is a barrier so if we think about physical and technical barriers and we eliminate the physical and technical barriers and we have explicit networks with community organizations and then we look at the sentiment that's being generated from that social network then I think we can actually encourage a lot more trust and we think in the book about the fact that little acts of trust and the reservoir necessary to do big things and to overcome big tragedies like Ferguson. I feel like my answer is totally insufficient because Ferguson is such a big issue so I've tried to kind of narrow down on the parts that are relevant to the book and anybody else is totally welcome to answer the question. I'm Jennifer Gore and I have a tech start up here in the city so I guess I fall into transparency side of the argument but my question actually is about employment and one of the trends that we've been studying is the movement of the U.S. workforce to freelancers and I think right now it's about a third of the U.S. workforce projected to be over 50% in about five years and so I was just curious I think somebody asked a question and you've already answered part of my question which was where are the gaps that you see are and I totally agree with the skill matching and I guess my other question is so if there are any other gaps you see related specifically to how we can be ready and adjust to this trend. My other question is what do we have that's sort of in place and who are the people, the companies the programs that are doing things right that might come to mind in cities in general that you think are getting it right. I don't know if I can you just repeat the part about the gap to tell me what you mean but what the gaps exist in I'm sorry I missed that a bit. Right so I think well one example I think that you mentioned early on was using the kiosks for Wi-Fi centers I think that one gap might be city infrastructures aren't we're not really set up in major cities for a ton of remote workers so you know I think that's one gap that I might flag and say well Wi-Fi and infrastructure is one I would say work space is another there's the whole co-working movement and I think with co-working spaces we see that happening so I would say space might be another you know you see all these sort of empty office spaces and empty storefronts and yet you see really populated coffee shops and people sort of camping out in parks in the nice weather doing work because a lot of them don't have offices to go to so those might be two gaps but you know others that you might see or again not to just well in the negative maybe things or cities you see doing it right. Yeah I didn't I missed that it was the gap in terms of enabling a more sort of mobile workforce an independent workforce I think you're exactly right I mean I just feel what you said but I definitely feel that I'm getting us to a point where connectivity is a no brainer in terms of that we have high speed internet wherever we go opens up the entire sort of city as a platform right it doesn't become an issue of it you don't have to go to the coffee shop because you have connectivity anywhere and with you know the devices nowadays are increasingly getting more smaller and more powerful so place becomes irrelevant and then what we're seeing happen is I realize think that the private sector is leading here in terms of I loved all of the co-working spaces in New York like we work is definitely one around the world that I think is leading the way and demonstrating a different way for people to work and that's going to end up coming into government and that's going to end up coming into more and more companies because they're realizing that is much more efficient to have open work spaces that aren't you know cubicles that are fixed into the ground that people can move around and collaborate more easily and so I do think that we're moving in that direction you know I would say the gap is purely it's connectivity and it's in some ways trust within the institutions trust within government for example that folks will work just as effectively from home or the coffee shop as they were well in the office and in fact I think that what we are seeing especially the technology sector is demonstrating that folks are more productive and more creative in that those environments so I think the technology part of government like the innovation labs are going to lead the way in showing that there's a new way to do work and then I think it will spread out from there. So what is really needed is a rethink of actually how you match as anyway I'm a big believer of the potential of platforms to match opportunities with skills but the third one is training and so you basically need to develop a triangle in which you have the opportunities, employment opportunities, the skills and the training that then is somewhat in sync so that you can actually quickly and more agile respond to opportunities even if you might not have the skills but can acquire the skills by rethinking or by gaining training which showcases why universities somewhat is an old business model that is not really capable of actually providing that kind of matching in an agile manner but that's really what is provided what is needed and in addition to that there is meaning partly thanks to technology there's a lot more markets out there that you can tap into and unfortunately that kind of support in order to actually export and tap into new markets outside of the local markets is quite often missing as well and then the other element we just finished an open data and small and medium sized enterprises there's a lot of support needed to actually use the asset of open data for instance and apply it to the needs that small and medium sized enterprises have because that's really what the value might be because small and medium sized enterprises hardly ever had access to market intelligence but now suddenly open data provides them with a tool much more smarter but quite often they lack the tools and the capacity to do so so there's a lot that can happen and clearly the narrative of technology kills jobs is partly true and I think it's our job to actually turn this around and looking at how technology can actually both create jobs or create a better matching between the jobs that might be out there Hi my name is Clara I run a non-profit in San Francisco and I work with startups looking to solve community problems in cities and my question is sort of the flip side of open data I think many of the most successful examples when we think about good uses of open data are actually private enterprises providing data to government so I'd point to like Waze for example during Sandy providing information about where there are open gas stations or even an Airbnb providing information about where there are housing opportunities for individuals who are temporarily displaced how should government in the future be thinking about not just pushing data out but being more thoughtful about capturing data that might already exist and making good use of it well my new passion is opening up corporate data so which I think is the real next generation of open data and I think meaning open data we still have a long way to go with regard to open government data don't get me wrong here but the real important information that is still locked up is corporate data and there are a variety of ways to actually open it up we have identified six ways that can do but there is a lot more experimentation and a lot more value cases to be built or use cases to be experimented with in order for that kind of data to unleash is that a role for government I leave it up to Jeff to I think it's really a role of corporate leadership as well and also start thinking what is actually the business case of opening up corporate data and having actually also that kind of perspective by opening up your data you might actually create public value but also as a result have a business case to do I think there is a funny example we actually bought data we bought commercial data to folks in government they were like what do you mean you're going to buy data that was such a crazy concept to them so there is this weird stigma in government that they don't realize that's actually incredible incredible return on investment that was huge because government can use private sector data to do a lot of things more efficiently and it definitely pays for itself so I think that's something that government is learning and I think you're going to see more and more government now that data enables efficiency and they realize that they are not the only sorts of data that you're going to see more and more governments looking outward and saying wait maybe we could use that data to add to our data and that type of thing oh thank you thank you but thank you all for coming and thank you for a terrific conversation thank you