 Jorge Soto's path-breaking work to civic engagement has taken several forms. He developed CityVox, a platform used in more than 15 countries that enables governments to receive and analyze citizen reports and turn them into actionable information. And then, as Deputy General Director of Civic Innovation at the President's Office in Mexico, Jorge spurred civic participation and innovation, including by spearheading a really unprecedented move to open Mexican government agencies and their data to the public. Please join me in welcoming Jorge Soto. Thank you very much. Well, my name is Jorge, I'm from Mexico, and I'm going to tell you a few Mexican stories, and I call Mexican stories, this one starts with Luchadores. I was back in college back in 2009, and I was studying electronics engineer, and I was very concerned about my country and about all the elections that we've previously had, and we were allowed to have a mid-term election at the time. So the country was very divided in violence also and politics. So I decided, what can I do about it? I'm just an engineer. So we created this platform called Cuidamos El Voto, translated to Let's Protect the Vote, and we open it up for citizens to tweet, send SMS, or go online and tell us any problem that they found during the elections. We receive a video, for example, of a priest saying that they should vote for a specific party because if not, it's a sin. Or we receive also a picture and a tip about a candidate that is tapped on our candidate in a polling station, and we actually send that information to the media, and we received that information first. It was 2009 when Twitter wasn't such a big deal as it is now. At the moment we receive around 30,000 different reports all over the country. It was a huge success, and I remember going on the road from Mexico City to the city of Veracruz and see a big advertising with our logo saying Cuidamos El Voto, and we didn't pay for that. Citizens paid for it, and they put our website over there. When we came to the government institutions with our 30,000 different reports, very well curated, with pictures, with location, they told us that they couldn't do anything about it, that there's not a process that they can receive citizen reports in a digital format. Then we started making some research and we figured out that this is the way that they were doing analytics, real-time analytics, or the way that they are managing information, or the way they are mapping the information. So we started working with several government agencies, and we created a tool where they can store, capture, analyze, and measure different citizen reports and then act upon those reports. This platform also provides them a tool so they can visualize information with all the socio-demographic variables, and it has been implemented in several places. One in particular that I like to talk about, it's in the city where I used to live in Monterrey, in the north of Mexico, where we build the platform on top of a community that already existed on Twitter, so people, all the security situations that happened, the gunfights, or the burning of trucks, which was a daily thing back in 2010 or 2009, they started tweeting that information so people can alert. So it was very common for us when we wanted to go to the movies. The first thing we did was go in on Twitter, follow the specific hashtag with this empty white follow, and then figure out whether we can transit through the streets of Monterrey. So we decided to build the platform on top of that conversation that is completely here, a network conversation and horizontal, and connect it to the institution so they can act upon those reports and they can follow up. And also we created an NGO where the citizens can receive psychological legal advice. One specific example that I love is this person, she tweeted that there, she tweeted on the platform that her car has been stolen. She tweeted the color, the brand and the plates, and people started retweeting and replying, I've seen your car going through here, I've seen your car going through here. And it took us 11 minutes to find the car. When they found the car, eventually we called the police and they were able to recover the car. Then a few months after that, it was leaked a contract in the Congress of Mexico that the deputies of Mexico, the Congress, the federal Congress, they were spending $10 million for the official iPhone app of the Congress. So I don't know who they hired, but it was very expensive, that engineer. So instead of just angry tweeting, what we decided to do was when we angry tweeted a little bit at the beginning, but then we decided to launch a challenge. And to launch this challenge to all the civic hacker community and tell them, can you create the same app that the government wants for $1,000 and an iPhone app and an iPad? And we gave them only seven days to do that. We received around 180 different participants of those five projects with all the requirements that were needed. And then I was in Colombia doing a project when I received a call and it was the president of the Congress. And he told me, hey, what are you doing? And I was very scared at the beginning. But then he said, why don't you come to the Congress and let these guys that finish the apps to present to the entire Congress their work. And then we select the best app and we implement that app. So we came, went to the Congress. They canceled the contract and they are using this app now. And this guy is the chair of the Congress at the time. I remember that I was sitting next to him. I took that picture and he said, you know, after seeing what these guys did in just seven days with $1,000, I think $1,000 was a little bit more too expensive. So then they invited me to join the government, the president's office as the head of civic innovation. I never thought that I would be working for the government. I was there for a year. And it was a very fun experience. One day after I took office, for the first time in Mexico, in history, two hurricanes hit Mexico in both coasts at the same time. So my boss told me, what can you do about it? And I was there just one day in the office and I knew nothing about disaster response. So the first thing that we did, we created this digital brigade where we show the trajectory of the hurricanes in real time so people could see that. And also people, and we said all the needs that we have in technology speaking, an app for a person finder or to report a damage. And people started creating this community and helping us out creating the apps. Then we also make very transparent all the reconstruction efforts, all the budget that has been spent on how to rebuild the cities. But we also understood, we also saw how difficult it was to share information with two different agencies. Everything was on paper. The information was, it comes from the municipal level. When it reaches the federal level, most of it is lost. And so we have no idea. So I understood that we're giving away money to rebuild the cities, but we don't know the real damage, or we don't know how the money is spent officially. Another very interesting thing was we started working with the private sector. So we approached Telefonica Movistar, which is a mobile operator in Mexico, and we asked them, can you share anonymized data of the antenna usage in the regions of the hurricane? First, our point is, if we can figure out how people are evacuating the city, we can give priorities of which roads we should open first, and also which cities we should prepare to receive their refugees. So we were able to validate that people were using more cell phones, because as you can see, there's a spike on Christmas, and there's a spike also during the floods. And then this is a random period of how people move around the region of where the hurricane hit on a random period, and this is during the hurricane. So we see that people are actually evacuating the cities. And that way, red means they are leaving, and yellow means they are arriving. So we knew where they were moving from, and we also knew how many kilometers they were moving. So around 70% were moving around 10 kilometers from their hometown, from their house. We already analyzed where they connected at night. We assumed that's where they are sleeping. And also how long it took them to come back. Around 70% came back in a week. So we were much more prepared, and we were able to prepare also the cities that were receiving their refugees. We understood at this moment, as I've told you, the value of data, and that we didn't have any data. So we decided to create, Mexico didn't have an open data policy at the time. So we did the open data policy, and it was the first also policy that was crowdsourced. So we put it over there in a very human language, a language that anybody could understand in a very brief resume, but also you can look at the entire policy. And people could vote in favor or against of any specific paragraph, and also edit directly the paragraph. We received around 1,000 different comments for a topic that is a little bit boring, and 300 actual additions to the policy. The policy was published a few months ago, but it's not just open data, because we can do open data. It's actually trying to focus on telling the stories with data, or actually making better decision making with it. So for example, one is we're trying to understand all the variables that are around the poverty regions in Mexico, or people that are well behind in the development progress, and understand all the variables so we can better impact the social policies in there. Or for example, the only billion development goal that Mexico will not fulfill is childbirth mortality and more mortality. So this way we could identify where these people are, these mothers are dying, these children are dying, and also what is the context around this, how far they have a hospital from there, and now we're making much better decisions with that. Or for example, disaster response. Here you can see the hurricane before and after on a satellite image, and you can play around with it, and we can see where the specific resources are. You can see a picture of where the damage was done, and you can see how the resources are actually being spent now. And all of our infrastructure is open source. We created that way it's on GitHub, so not only the code, but also the methodology, also all our failures and our successes. So we're working with cities and states so they can replicate it. So now we have a network of around eight different cities and states, where they are all sharing the same infrastructure, the same data, so we can better analyze the information on a federal level, state level, and city level. So city level, things like robbery or car theft, two federal level things like education spending or health spending. We also created this project where we were thinking, how can we get more innovators into the government, more entrepreneurs, people that really want, that they prefer going to the Silicon Valley, but how can we convince them to come to the Mexican federal government. So we created this project called Agentes Innovación, or Innovation Agents. The logic was, let's put together an innovator inside the government, and an innovator outside the government, and work together in the same specific topic through an open innovation methodology, where they first brainstorm ideas, and then prototype the ideas, and then prove them. The logic behind this methodology is that if you understand the project at the very beginning, and understand where it's failing, you validate the problem, then it's learning, and you can iterate. But if you understand it, and you test it very late, then it's a failure, and it's very expensive. So we created these five different teams where we asked them to prototype, they were creating different prototypes with this agile methodology, and then went to the streets. For example, the guys that were solving the health issue, they were invited to go to the public health clinic, waiting in line for around six hours to get attended, then tell them that the medication is not there, to come back next day, and so on. So they could actually suffer and experience what citizen experience. I accompanied the people that were working in the security project, which is this. And this guy was asking a person that sells tacos in my neighborhood in Mexico, hey, do you feel safe? And he said, yeah, I feel super safe. I know you, and he said, no, but what do you feel around the city, how do you feel the people? And he said, you know, actually this morning, that's a gunshot, and I've never seen that before. And that was my neighborhood, and I feel super safe in my neighborhood. So if you start asking people, you can empathize with people, and you can better understand also the problems that other people are facing, and not just behind the desk where we are. So as I've told you, we worked five different projects, all of them are launching at this moment. We're actually finishing the project. I still talk about we, although I'm not involved anymore, but as an advisor. Another project that we launched is another problem that we tried to solve is, how can we make that not only the big companies are the ones that procure, that go into the government procurement or win government contracts. So we tried to understand where are the entrepreneurs, and how can they also go through the traditional procurement process and win. So we asked 10 different agencies of the Mexican government, a project that they were about to go into the procurement process, to discard it and do not tell us what they want, or tell us what they need. So we put out the needs out there, and we asked entrepreneurs to propose solutions. The best five solutions per challenge were funded with seed capital, so they can create a prototype. And the best prototype would be the one that the government hired. So this way, we already have a community of around 1,000 different entrepreneurs. We need that only in four months. And we democratized around $4 million in these kind of projects. We actually tried to take this as a step forward with new American-oriented institutions where we tried to create this challenge between Mexico and the US where they can do what they can do with the maker community, the Internet of Things, and around energy. And the challenge actually just finished a couple of weeks ago. I come from a country where unjustifiable things are inexcusable things are sometimes justified. This is a picture just a month ago of the head of an agency in Mexico taking a public helicopter, going to the airport because he wanted to go on vacation to bail with his family. A neighbor took the picture in Facebook and put it, I'm sick about how this is such a corrupt government, how the public services are being spent this way. And it became viral. Everybody was there. And then this guy said, hey, it's my knee. I cannot move because I have an emergency, so I go into the US to operate. And then another Twitter user said, hey, you run with me a marathon on Saturday. So you don't have any problem. And then his wife said, hey, but we didn't go to the US. So a reporter called the US Migration Department and said, no, they are in the US. So he was completely narrow, so he quit. But the truth is, this is a unique case. We still have a very long way to come through. But citizens, we are understanding that democracy, at least in Mexico, is not only voting every three or six years. We want our seat on the table. We want to participate. We want to be not only passive citizens. And we want our governments to understand that we're thinking in hierarchies. We're thinking in networks, not in hierarchies anymore. And we want our governments to be an or an oath within the network. Thank you very much.