 Hey guys, so once you guys come up a little closer it will make this a little more comfortable. Kind of being all spread out, it's like I feel lonely up here, you know? So, I hope not. And if there's enough of us here, it's like each one of us is like a 70 watt heater. So, okay. I'm sure they keep popped out for a little bit. Okay. So, we've still got a couple more people probably straggling in. Come on in. Come up to the front, you know, it's like, so we don't feel so lonely up here. Yeah. So, how are you guys enjoying Scale? Excellent, thanks. So, how many of you have been to Scale this is your first time. Thank you for coming. Please do remember, Scale is a community event. We're run by volunteers. If you guys see something and you are allowed to participate, you guys are welcome to make it better. You're welcome to go tell your friends about it. This is our first year with the Open Data Track. We would love to see this room packed. And we love to see people sharing the information. And again, it's like the idea here is we've got a great place here we can utilize. And I want us to fully utilize this to share the information. Now, if John's ready. I'm always ready. I was born ready. How many of you guys know the Hack4LA group? How many of you guys are doing any other Code for America Brigade stuff? Okay, excellent. So, we do have a Code for America Brigade booth. If you've got friends in any of these groups, they're welcome to come to the booth and provide their independent brigades. And so, I see Vicki coming in here. All right, we're kind of ready to go here surely. So, I'd like to introduce John and Vicki. They'll be doing their presentation. Thank you very much. Is this obnoxiously loud? If it's not, I could turn it up. Well, thank you guys for having us. I told them, they're like, where's Vicki? I was like, this is par for the course for Vicki. Vicki leaves me hanging. Last time we did a talk together, she strolled in about three minutes after we were scheduled to start. So, I'm used to it by this point. Well, thank you guys for getting up in the crack of 11.30. We're just getting things brewing. We got some really good talks throughout the rest of the afternoon. You want to talk about what's coming before we get into it? Oh, yeah. There's a tiny pet somewhere. I think it just goes, I think that's on. No? Mess with that tiny little button. I'm the only one that gets the Madonna mic. It's a test. Is that working? Is that working? Yeah, I took it in there. I have a hearing problem, so I can't actually tell if the mic's working or not. I think it's just so low if it's not basically in your mouth. Wow. This is uncomfortable. I know half of you already, so it'll be interesting today. Yeah, so it's an open data track, which is super exciting. It just got started. There's not a million other things happening this weekend, the data journalist conference. You know, the biggest one is in Jacksonville this weekend, so our local data journalists who are awesome are all out of town, who otherwise they would be here, and that sort of stuff. There's also international open day today, so there's a lot of different folks who are already beat and exhausted like me from Hucking Events yesterday. So it's me and John this morning keeping things off. We have Jason, who's both going to be talking also today about civic hacking and community, because that's what he does for a living, which is very awesome. And then we have a panel, Mati's going to run, where we've got four cities coming, which is very exciting. Long Beach, Santa Monica, Pasadena and Los Angeles. We're going to talk about sort of the strategies and how each of them ended up running an open data program, which is great, and it's also very exciting because most of the reps from each of those cities know me and John, but have never met each other and should have already. And there's a fourth person who I don't know. So then we're going to wrap up our talk with Steve Wong, who's going to be talking about IoT and smart cities and security issues, which as you know is a major problem that we need to be paying attention to in the open data and smart cities area. So then, Vickie, that's half of you. I know a handful of you, but for those of you that don't know me, my name's John Gravois and I work at Esri. Some of you guys have heard of Esri, some of you haven't. It's a household name amongst those who've heard of Esri. I don't know how you put it any other way. So we make a lot of commercial software, a lot of closed-source software. We make a little bit of open-source software as well, but our customer base is spread across industries, but we have a ton of local government, county, state, and federal government customers that have been attempting to share geospatial data for years and years and years and being a part of that evolution of making that data more digestible, making it easier for our customers to spin up these tools and make this data available. It's in our self-interest because the data you guys all know is when it's trapped on a database and nobody has the keys, it's pretty much useless. So we think of the civic tech space as the constituency of our customers and we're sort of actively always working on tools to improve that experience and make it easy to share open data because curating the data itself and creating metadata and making that shareable, that's the hard part. So the rest of it should be pretty turnkey. And John's a little humble about Esri's role in this because they don't just have a lot of government customers. They have complete coverage. There is no government that has staff that doesn't have an Esri license or two or three. And so I'm very vocal about my dislike for a handful of the other open data companies in the space because they're launching these new portals. They're taking advantage of sole source. It's closed source. And the way they run their business model doesn't align with open data. And a part of that is because you're adding to an individual's workload because they have to export a spreadsheet and go and upload it into some web tool that they don't even want to use. It wasn't really built for them. And it wasn't built for the customers who are downloading either or the constituents who are downloading that data. And half of that data should be or is being exported from Esri's systems. So Esri one day is helping us at our events where Sucrada is also, I know who I hate, is also trying to commerce, sponsor. They're both sponsoring. And one day Esri was like, man, what if we just did this little extension into what we are to do and let people just flip a switch instead of adding to their workload and having to export and reformat all this spatial data to fit on the subject. What if we just let them do it on our existing tools? And so now I have cities like Santa Monica coming to me being like, hey, we just realized in our contract, we've had Resu for years, we actually even have a license to their new tool, their new open data thing. Because Santa Monica has actually been leading the way with some of the stuff with exporting their data and throwing their geospatial data up on GitHub, which is great because you can access it, but it's not exactly the most intuitive way to browse geospatial data. Fine, you can get a preview if it's a GeoJSON file, but that's really not how most of us, when we were curious, taking a first glance at a particular GeoData at a particular spatial dataset want to work with it. So Esri hasn't been in this space long officially, but the best practices, the way metadata works, the people who wrote the metadata standards that everybody else uses these days, a lot of that came out of Esri. So we're just going back to the beginning and those guys are getting involved. Yeah, awesome. I've been fortunate to know Vicki for a few years now and working on projects in the LA area and some of these other cities that are on the rise, it's been really fun. It's easier for me to try to get involved on the sidelines and advocate, but I like talking with Vicki because we're both outsiders in the sense that we're not in the trenches, but we're affiliated and we kind of are in the loop on some of these initiatives as they roll out. So we have some perspective from when we were talking about thinking about what would be interesting to discuss today. It's a Linux Expo. We're not here to talk about the benefits of open data. I think everybody in the room, it's passe at this point. Everybody knows that there's value, inherent value in this sort of free sharing information. So calling that a given, we wanted to talk about the how and the implementation details. And we took a guess. We kind of assumed that you guys were going to be coming from having varying degrees of programming skills and having a background maybe in working in government or as a contractor having some experience. We wanted to create that discussion and let it go on whatever tangent it goes. What's the way that we kind of get a little mistest of who you guys are? It's been the same size crowd, but a much smaller room and no microphones typically. Because we're not, I don't know, inherently when you ask me what I do, I don't actually do anything. I don't have a product. This is the kind of stuff I do. I find people with problems and I pair them with the other person starting with the same problem or the resource or data standard that's going to help them and push their work along. So yeah, I can't tell you about what I do because all I do is search data standards with people and make them use them. So where does that leave us? I've got some slides. They're just talking points and we've got some anecdotes and some opinions about some of these things. We want to hear what you guys think too and let us know where you're coming from. Basically these are all the challenges inherent to actually implementing an open data program. Where are the sticking points? Where are the easy wins? How do you do some of this negotiating? Some of the technical stuff. We're going to talk about it a little bit but we want to hear from you guys. We can take turns wandering the crowd. I want to know who's here. I know Jason runs Brigade North Carolina. Leonard's working in the controller's office. Kirk said LAPD. I know a little bit about some of you but what's the other gap? Last time we did this we were talking to exclusively government employees but I feel like this is the opposite. I don't know if it's going to really... Does anybody want to caution the wind? Just introduce yourself as a representative of some sort of stereotype? Yeah, awesome. We're all concerned citizens at this point but I like that. And you run all the OC tech meetups, right? You've been doing that forever. Yeah. I thought you said you run a bunch of meetups. No? He's an equal opportunity harasser. Leonard? I did, yes. But why did you come? Because you know all this stuff. I might have a reputation. It's real talk with Vicki every time. 24-7. He's not lying. We're going to bike co-op behind the coffee shop where I've seen this guy spend many mornings, afternoons and evenings doing that work. Both sides of your world. So you know this probably better than I do. Where are you here? Honestly. Jason runs one brigade, coordinates three on the East Coast and works for Red Hat as a community organizer. And yeah, and Jason and I are both one of the ones who are yelling at Code for America a lot, another company. Instead of just shit-talking them and sub-tweeting them, we actually got involved and we're both advisors for their community program now as well. So we... Yeah, it's really nice to see him in person for a change instead of slack. Emojis. So I got a handful of talking points. Some of these might be duds. Some of them might be tangents that we stay on for a while. Either one's okay with me. Discussion as opposed to lecture. So I get to start with my own pet peeves first. We talk about civic tech and we talk about the sort of hacker mentality of I've got my tools, I'm used to my building blocks, I grab what I use and I don't want to touch anything that's not open source. So point me at the data set, I'm going to download it in bulk and run my analysis or share my results and spin up results. This idea of open data as a platform one, not just bulk data downloads, but also live services where if you're using some sort of a RESTful web interface where you can go in and fetch live data on the fly. I think it's beholden to the vendors to make sure that these APIs are digestible, that they're performant, that they work well. So that 80% you got an 80-20 rule where 80% of the time a developer's going to or somebody that's not a developer that they can interact with this live data as a service as opposed to getting a static snapshot, running some analysis and having that thing go stale over time. So the challenge is for the civic hacker community to spread their wings a little bit or be a little bit more ambitious in looking at REST documentation for whatever the vendor is as long as they've got some implementation of a way to pull down data dynamically. So you're not just making a prototype that is a cool wow factor over the course of a weekend and isn't relevant a week later, a month later, a year later. Building tools that are going to maintain themselves so that when the city staff updates the dataset the app reflects that automatically. So that's something that is near and dear to my heart. Does anybody have any pain points, concerns? They sort of think about this as... I've kind of heard both sides of this story of forget about sort of live interoperability, ETL. It's got to be baked into the solution all the time. I mean, what are the pros and cons? What are the real challenges? What do you say when the rubber hits the road with regard to that idea of sort of having a value proposition that puts the burden on yourself? Vicki and I were talking this morning about this idea of these unicorn-esque developers out there who are like, yeah, I see a legacy system. I'm not afraid of it. I'm not just going to talk crap about it. How do we take an old system and rethink it, pull out what works, bring it into the 21st century and build on it and improve and solve that problem in a bulletproof way? You know, I think... Yeah, maybe not 10 years ago. Several years ago, people were allergic to that and developers thought that there was no interesting work to be done in the enterprise space with regard to invoking modernity and getting that stuff rolling. And now I think we're all coming around to this idea of these complex problems. They're interesting, they're impactful, and they need to be done, and there's an appetite for procuring it and for actually accomplishing it. This government philosophy that goes into that, so this Alice Problems Are Boring is sort of this new Silicon Valley tech mentality that build new abandoned legacy systems. But when you come into government, the stuff that sells the business models, the core that created Silicon Valley doesn't work because you don't have customers. You have a vulnerable population of everyone. There's no profiles to be made because everyone has to be served. And so you can't shut down a legacy system. You can't build something that works for 80% of the population because you're probably actually going to hurt the other 20% worse by building for only 80. So that's the challenge, and that's sort of where that drives me nuts. But at the same time, my entrance point to a conversation when somebody comes in and they're like, ah, government, rah, rah, rah. I'm like, cool, yeah, government, meet my friend Leonard. Leonard is government. Leonard is doing this stuff on the inside. He's the heck, Leonard. It's just a capacity thing. It's a conversation thing. Especially if you live in Los Angeles County, what percentage of our population actually works for the government? The county employs 120,000 people in the region. If you are sitting in a coffee shop, there's one particular coffee shop in downtown Los Angeles called Demi Tauce. It's this hipster coffee shop. I would bet you that 75% of the people in that room work for a federal, state, county, or city agency, or one of the special districts, LEDWP, the water agencies, because government is us, and it's really just about sort of, the problem is when you're in this job, you are not given the tools to do your job. And it's not your fault. It's not government's fault. It's compounding issues and politics and that over the years. And so you're in a place now where you rock at your job, but your workload is 110%, and you work at 100% capacity. You don't have time to come up for air and stop and Google. Oh, in the last five years, I've been working on this problem. Did somebody make free software to help me with this problem? You know, one of the most transformative things for the planning department in Santa Monica was getting them out of an outlook task list in Excel and into Trello. And they were like, who does this without going to procurement? What? It's free? People make free software? And so open source is fascinating for them, and a lot of them, it's a mix. Some people know, some people are doing this. The city of Los Angeles uses Drupal. The city of Santa Monica just recently switched to an open source.net, CMS. So it's happening, but right now, some of those conversations in the right place are transformative because it's this, you know, what John is probably, his next slide even, is this idea of radical incrementalism. She's jumping ahead a few slides, but I've got something for her. Well, he's used that to you. But I think there's a good transition there to this idea of talking about the fear and uncertainty and doubt of anything new. And what I was thinking about driving out here this morning was there's this like, call yourself a nerd, a wonk, or whatever the hell you want to say. Like, I get caught up sometimes in this, the fact that I get excited about it just because I don't know it yet, and tearing it apart and trying to think about how to rebuild it. I'm already hooked on the problem being inherently interesting and worth expending effort on. And not everybody feels that way about technology problems in particular. Either they're afraid or they're just too busy. And the value proposition when it comes to really tearing apart and rebuilding and improving the efficiency of how government operates through open data, for me that value proposition goes back to, I used to be an environmental consultant a long time ago and I worked with a lot of geologists and they were smart cats, but I'd show them all this cool GIS stuff and I'd say, isn't this great? And they didn't think it was great inherently. They liked the way things worked. They didn't see a problem with the way they were operating and I realized that the value proposition for me was going to have to be either one, you're going to sell something on the fact that it's just overall easier and nicer to use. If the user experience of Trello is better than the Outlook pass list, you have a winner because you didn't lose anything in the crossover and there was less effort going in. That's where one easy win is. Two, harder sell a better final product with an equal amount of effort, but there's a new learning curve and you have to do something different. It's not going to be any harder than it was, but you're going to get a final product. I thought that was an easy win. That's not an easy win. That's maybe a win if you can convince people to adopt that. And that cuts away everything else. Anything that's in any way harder, you're never going to make progress. You're never going to make a dent in getting buy-in on some of these things so that reframes the way I thought about tackling any of these problems as if the onus is on me to go either equally difficult or simpler as the beginning point of having a discussion, that helped me frame what was worth tackling and what wasn't. I don't know if that's too abstract, but I think you guys will have your own individual ways where that plays out. Convincing somebody really involves putting your own enthusiasm on the shelf for a minute and thinking about their workflow, their pain points, and what their goals and aspirations are. Yes, there's a vast majority of everything that we need to work on right now. It has nothing to do with pushing the edges of the technology or data science or even using algorithms. It's really, really basic data pipeline stuff. But the problem is most of the work to be done right now in technology is people work. So you have a cool freaking new platform. But without hundreds of thousands of people, Facebook is not useful in itself. If it's you and one other person, why would you use Facebook? And there's so many tools like that out there where people are trying to sell this inherent value of something. But if there's not a community attached to that technology, especially we get in the space of open data and open government, if there's not a community consuming, creating demand, communicating, why? So most of the work we're doing right now has to do with how do we kickstart and support and sustain and create communities. So I like that. And I think it gets to this other aspect. The other aspect of the fear and uncertainty and doubt when it comes to open data is not the intellectual burden of the transition, but it's like, well, this outcome, is it going to hurt me or is it going to help me? Is the open data going to create a win or is it going to put me in the crosshairs? And I don't know if you guys saw this story, but this is, I think, the best distillation of it. When the city of LA released information, not about potholes, but about trash pickup, large trash pickup, it was at the LA Times that came out with the information. At first they analyzed this data and they said, well, you just released the data and we found that your trash service pickup efficiency is a lot worse in the poorer neighborhoods than it is in the better neighborhoods. I don't want to see that as an improvement. I think Eric Garcetti and others, certain people at the city said, oh, that's not a disaster of open data. That's an opportunity for us to own a mistake and make an improvement. We don't have to be scared of open data as long as we've got a feedback channel in place to make sure that we're interested in actually seeing improvement over time, but that doesn't happen automatically. And this reinforcement, this friction of should civic tech have an antagonistic relationship with the status quo in the institutions or a cooperative relationship. There's benefits, there's pros and cons to both. Sometimes the antagonism is warranted, but this overarching attitude of let's make progress incrementally together over time is what has to underpin. I mean, antagonistic behaviors and interactions of government are, in my opinion, the last resort. It will get stuff done, but every door to interact with government these days that exists from 5-3-1 request to go into the council meetings creates antagonistic behavior so most government employees who work in those front lines who deal with constituents are miserable because they only deal with the worst of us. And so the idea is if we're opening more doors, the idea and in these more constructive ways where we're collaborating where we're defining new types of civic engagement through open source and technology and open data, that's that culture shift. Because right now, us versus them is because every one of those doors where we talk to government encourages and only allows for antagonistic interactions. Yeah, I think that's well said. And what I think about is in the metaphorical sense or in the meta sense we want to solve individual problems but the means to the end did you solve that problem through antagonism and what did you win relationship-wise or what did you lose relationship-wise to make that win? Looking at it from 50,000 feet I always think about how do we evolve the process by which the constituency interacts with the government like nobody's got time to sit in a town hall I say nobody's got time to sit in a town hall meeting but going to the context for that is a selection bias. And so that's a lot of the problem with some of these doors is if you have time you might have certain attributes and it selects for something which selects for a single voice. And how can we move to selecting for getting more people who would be engaged if they could interact with government without spending more time than necessary in a really cooperative way where they saw the impact through using GitHub using some tool online or giving that feedback and getting a response so that we have more participation that's constructive rather than antagonistic or just not at all. That's a good one. And so the big thing that John and I we want to get back to talking to you guys is that we talk a lot about trust and that's what we see open data right now if we're doing this right open data is an opportunity for us to create new trust with government and citizens because right now potholes we cannot fill potholes. The new numbers are a lie when you look at the 99 response time because the way we're cutting those numbers are that 99% of the requests are filled within 72 hours. How many potholes are they? Because who's submitting 211 requests from their phone for potholes who's, you know, oh yes the richer neighborhoods who have time are the ones submitting pothole requests so theirs are getting filled and so we create this bias just like trash in every city service right now. So what can we do to define that base data set better and not just ask for that but how do we go out and set that base on ourselves and map all the potholes and so now that instead of 99% you're like, yeah when they're reported but actually because this stuff that's a reactionary system and the numbers are cut in a way that makes the mayor's office look good but what is the actual case? How many of the potholes in the last 10 years have we filled last year? We don't know because we don't know where the potholes are. And so if you know if you live on a street where you see these articles coming out LA Times about this 99% pothole fill rate and you laugh when you live on a street that has not had your potholes filled in years since pre-Garcetti via Rogosa you don't have your potholes filled and so if your potholes aren't getting filled and you're seeing this, how do you trust that cops can use data to prevent lives lost on your block if the city can't fill potholes? And so that's our opportunity now is to build a new pipeline and so if we're building this collaborative relationship where when you say something and the government responds in a constructive way oh my goodness thank you for reporting that pothole we fixed it or coming to you to your block and looking and surveying oh there's potholes here we're so sorry we've neglected you for so long it's been three years we're going to fill these potholes it starts to change the way you feel and it starts to mean you're going to be more proactive about submitting a pothole request a year ago wezar was awesome if you submitted a 311 request and it ended up in the other bucket somebody on his staff in the council members office would email you, would call you and if there wasn't enough details to fill it out would ask you and follow through until that case was closed now they go into the ether I get emails back, I submitted the other night fire hydrant is spritzing water leaking and I get an email 24 hours later your report has been cancelled I don't want to submit requests anymore where are they going? I just get these cancelled emails back and the pothole is still there the fire hydrant so we're going to stop interacting with government but if we can use this open data if we can change and show accountability what can we do to rebuild trust to go further to address the actual real big problems in our society because potholes they're a symptom they're a very deep problematic issue I like that does anybody have any commentary questions? yeah there's a big topic but I don't hear it on that yes and every single one of those employees has a work issue cell phone with an accelerometer like we should auto detect when that employee driving that car hits a pothole I don't work for government I don't know and I think there's a dual prong there's lots of answers there's lots of things that need to be done we need simple UIs that are digestible don't need to be trained and are surfaced to city workers and people from varying socioeconomic backgrounds we also need to sort of embed those feedback loops and product of that data where people already are this idea of restaurant inspections we did a lot of work on helping our customers provide backend data to ways so they could route around emergencies or special events so that the data ends up being where it's useful rather than expecting somebody to install another app or go to another website and those aren't either or they're both type of answers the context for all of these when we talk about what is the solution it's one of those sort of death by a thousand cuts problems because 54% Angelinos don't speak English at home so I don't know if that's not English company I don't have that data point but if our 3-1 app doesn't run any language other than English that's 50% of our population now who can also no longer there's thousands of little tiny bets where it's a question that was missing on a data collection process that's out there it's something that wasn't translated for the right people it's something that should have been automated but we were asking a person to remember to do it and a whole system depended on that it wasn't a hard task but we built in all of this stuff in, you know, unconsciously and so how do we start to apply critical thinking how do we start to get out of this Jason, you had more the baseline entry point is a spreadsheet on the Web or some raw data the next step is concerned citizens like yourself not even necessarily building something but just trying to digest it and figuring out whether it's digestible or not whether there's metadata there whether it's complete doing some legwork to try to interpret and brute force figure out how valuable it is, right? and then the information product that can or hopefully come out of that is I think you talk about co-creation and maybe also parallel creation what I talk and think about a lot now is this idea of beyond the spreadsheet you need a narrative and the narrative needs to be verifiable there has to be data behind that narrative so whether it's a city agency or somebody else you define an initiative of a priority you define a methodology that tracks where you stand and then you empirically check progress over time you publish that whole thing and the narrative is a lot more compelling to average folks than the raw data is ever going to be and it's up to concerned people like you to say well is that fair? Is that honest? and if it's not how are we going to use to get into jargon territory how are we going to move the needle on that? where can we get into a virtuous cycle where we can test applying more resources and seeing whether it makes a difference iteratively and rapidly we're still a lot of times back in the point of weeding through the spreadsheets on the web and that's not the sexiest thing in the world but we've seen as a matter of building trust getting folks involved to say hey I don't understand this data that you're publishing how current is it how complete is it with this attribute column what do these codes mean and it's not there is a bit of obbuscation sometimes of we're just going to dump a PDF on folks and check the box on this and hope nobody does engage but there is more enthusiasm than that most of the time and there's a lot of sometimes what do you call it when you're it's not malice it's just ignorance about the fact that this stuff's pretty coded and it's hard for people to digest that they just don't sit with it every day forget the word for that when you've done something for so long that you you take it for granted that it's not common sense forget that everybody else doesn't know what ETL stands for or whatever the context is and creating that environment where the civic tech community become the stewards of getting a broader base of people interested in trying to digest this raw data and let the precious few work on that methodology and work on building up the castle from there that can be done in a very collaborative way or antagonistic way of doing it reluctantly successful? what do you mean by success? that's a vicky answer oh man I find success unlike most people I talk about radical incrementalism so there's data on the web but I typically don't care if your data is on the web or not I care if we are getting better at serving vulnerable people I care about data because there's a tool for accountability and empathy and we need both those things to serve people so I don't care if anybody builds any code what I care about is walking out of that 700 person hackathon the California Health Care Foundation had sponsored and a couple of the CIO the Chief Information Officer for the Department of Public Health Jim Green had come and he retouched me and he actually paid for because we were out of money at some of the posters that day I was like oh does the county want some recognition no no no we're not ready I just want to come see and to find out after that two day event Jim had gotten a chance to talk to the Health Care Foundation because they met in one of the rooms watching kids because they're both new to hackathons and the Health Care Foundation said why hasn't your department released any open data and they're like oh we've had a hiring freeze for four years so we're behind on everything we can't and the Health Care Foundation said Sheryl Wald who's a consultant who used to work for you what if we paid her for six months to do it as a consultant and they were like Sheryl Wald was working with CPH in a matter of weeks helping them do an internal data inventory so sometimes it's that it's getting if you're on the inside and you're outside innovation comes because either you have an experience with a tool but not the problem or you have experience with a problem and not tools and when you have those two people drinking coffee or staying in the hall bringing people together often enough in the right context where they're listening that's where I start to see success who's consuming data I mean I don't know right now like Google Maps real-time bus data like that is the example that's when I try to talk anybody into adopting data standard Google created something where you had average people demanding their cities years ago published a standardized real-time data people who didn't even know what this was you know and they created every city out there last year the head of the US DOT published an open letter asking every bus agency to publish their schedules using that format so that on a national level we could understand what they were calling transit deserts places that were underserved because we'd never built a national map and they said if you can't do this we have federal funds and we're going to come and we're going to help you get to success you know but that was a single vertical and how do we take that story because that story could be paralleled in any other vertical and there's hundreds of the same verticals in government yeah this is brilliant transition I could take no credit for whatsoever but this idea of data standards right in the tech world we've kind of in the web world we've adopted I think the notion a long time ago that standards benefit everybody and we try to sort of identify individuals in the shadow of the web standards but when it comes especially to geospatial data and database architecture across the board in government everybody is a precious snowflake by virtue of just thinking that their problems are totally different than everybody else's and you know the things are set up the way they were there's a lot of inertia behind things staying the way they were and working for Esri I've got earfuls from folks like yourselves why don't you make your customers use a standard form of whatever you know whether it's parcel data or street lamps or anything else why don't you enforce the standard you know you don't really know how it works when you sell software to somebody and then tell them how to use it they're going to do whatever they want we've been publishing data models and trying to make it easy for our customers to have consistency for a long time with not much success a little bit of success I've been working data standards for a couple of years now with Esri it was like oh well you do know we publish and maintain a list of all the standards that have to do with the work that people do in Esri related to government and it's this like HTML page that looks like something from 1999 and it's a list and the documentation for all of the standards and I've never seen it and I maintain my own list and so sometimes it's most of the problems in government right now are that you ask somebody in California locally or at the state level has either an implicit or explicit call for data Prop 47 said all of the money we save not arresting people we're going to move into prevention programs we don't collect data on people we don't arrest so how do we know how much money to move or if we saved anything or if it was effective so that's the problem, there's a lot of community groups and law enforcement agencies struggling with that Prop 47 effective we have no idea because we didn't consider the fact, the measurement because we knew what that meant when you take a subject matter expert who knows this through and through and knows how to measure these things but they're not a data expert and so how do we make sure every time we push somebody forward as well and I feel like in California we passed so many laws that we're in the worst shape of anybody because we have so much of this data collected haphazardly all over the place and so what do we do? this is an entrance point for us whenever we adopt something new but it's only if you give them the tool California is the only state who's still out of compliance with the 2000 federal law that says you have to maintain a state voter file because when we issued that memorandum and that became a policy became a law in California we didn't tell the counties how so they each individually brought vendors in turns out there was about 8 vendors in the marketplace in one county that did it themselves so there's 9 different standards that voter data is published in across 58 counties in the state of California we have a beta live it's supposed to be ready for the 2018 election it took us 18 years to create a state voter file in California and when we told these counties that by law they're going to have to collect this kind of information attached a PDF with a list of a suggested data format it wouldn't have taken us 18 years I screwed up this slide carrots are better than sticks not the other way around I wish I should have just winged it and been like here's the real talk folks sticks are better than carrots so anyway yeah GTFS is a good example but figuring out where it's in line the value proposition of adopting this standard the burden is high the other nice thing sometimes is you carry the carrots around you create it so other people are the sticks and you make more friends that way sometimes a lot of people do the dirty work I'm going to blab average people go bang on cities doors and demand boss data and you just share the standard it's devious but I'm with it here's your relentless incrementalist slide and my Freakonomics podcast you guys heard the Freakonomics episode about in praise of maintenance the premise is that I guess they're saying America in particular is overly enthusiastic and in awe of innovation we're trying to buy or get for free this infomercial solution to the problem when in doing that we fail to give proper credence and credibility and reverence for the maintenance and when I think about maintenance I think about whether city staff or in the tech space through the School of Hard Knocks I've learned to appreciate how hard it is to maintain something and make it not only run smoothly but last over time civic tech I think is best thought of as a maintenance operation as opposed to an innovation operation I guess there's place for both but this relentless incrementalism in figuring out a way to do something a little bit better and a little bit better and usually starting with a non-controversial topic that's where I see the most gains yeah how so yeah I mean I think yeah I think Ezra kind of plays the villain and plays the hero in different camps as whether they're moving fast enough or moving too fast thinking about this idea of how can you bring the whole ship along you know your customers that come from local government that have limited means and some of the bigger customers with bigger developer resources but I think that's a fair distinction and navigating that landscape of we want a lot more competition in the civic tech vendor space and how do you judge other companies based on less experience over time do they have the same methodology are they going to last are they doing things that's the conversation I want to start having with government in a couple of years but right now I'm just like oh man they're struggling even sometimes to sell their data because they're like wait where is it who has it what is the cost oh we're supposed to calculate there's all these laws in the books that say that you can request all the different data through FOIA and Sunshine and one of my favorite is this woman who started a group called Reclaim the Records and she only collects birth and death from marriage indices for genealogical research and she's taken states to court in her nine months several times to get copies of microfilm that all it has is the date someone was born and their name and that's the only thing on there in 10s, 1920s and these states are telling her it's going to be oh well if we make a copy of that microfilm it's going to be you know or we can't do that sequel query it's going to be 25 cents per record so it's going to be 3 million dollars she has to take them to court and sue them because she knows it should only cost about 200 bucks and she's down to pay the 200 bucks and so that's where we are right now we have a lot of work to do before we get into the stuff that's really really important and the stuff that I want to see us push on which is yeah why is advertising you know funding you know some of this stuff and is that okay it's funny to me sometimes what are the sticking points or what are the non-starters they're different kind of than what I would expect them to be just based on legacy or just the way we've always done it yeah so we've got five minutes left I'm also worried if there's any questions anybody wants to you know or things people want to throw out there I'll do this in two seconds this was just news to me I thought it might be interesting to you guys we went to health public health sort of information sharing workshop a couple weeks ago and this idea of schools have been collecting information about absenteeism for a long time and it's not controversial to share that and saying what is the rate of absenteeism at your school it's 90 something percent like great everybody passed themselves on the back and the more recent study behind that is to say that doesn't really tell us anything what we really what we really find is that with regards to success and impact doesn't matter what your overall absentee rate is how much chronic absenteeism is there if you can track an individual student what percent of your students are chronically absent is whether it's like a couple times a month defines chronic so that is a win in that somebody thought a little bit more creatively in a little bit more complex way about how to interpret that raw data and that informed policy around that what we're going to go after in terms of success so in that case you know applying a data scientist approach to some data that's already shared you don't have to go after a controversial topic in order to see some substance to apply in a change you want to go further on that there's the data-driven justice program did a good talk about this in sorts and they talk about the average diversion so if you work in law enforcement and criminal justice sort of the and you do all these studies and you find out the thing that helps like 80% of people and if you just roll that thing out across the board and train your police and train your hospitals it turns out that that average diversion where you're finding something schizophrenic instead of resting them to get them to a hospital like whatever that individual little program is or I guess that's a bad example because it's a perfect one but if you have this sort of more broad program that helps 80% of people your most vulnerable often fit into that 20 and so what you've done at the same time you've dropped your overall rates is actually severely made the problem worse for the most vulnerable chunk and so the idea is that when we get into these super sticky problems you know the stuff that you know I only care about the data pipeline now cleaning stuff up because it's folks like that who are starting to apply super sticky problems and we learn that if you just throw counts and averages at big problems sometimes you hurt people. One of the great things about government so we have these other problems where people collect the things according to the metrics but in government operationally we collect everything we're just using the wrong bits right now so for me that those average diversions total absenteeism they actually have enough data to have for decades and decades and decades of school attendance to actually switch the data science model they're using to the one that's more impactful but it's a philosophical thing it's the right people in the right place thing right now because we have the data and the exact opposite end of the spectrum with data that's out there if there is good data trying to inform policy as it's being made to capture the right thing the first time I mean that's the grand vision that's the hope but you can do that it's hard but thinking about revising historic legislation making new legislation using data which is empirical as opposed to speculative and that's what we're all open for. The thing I focus on the most now is especially locally this is my big project I work for the California Community Foundation is that we found there's this profound data literacy problem there are program managers who are experts in this stuff schools and children or criminal justice who don't know the difference between raw data and statistics or metrics and goals and they're being asked from the top down now to roll out these programs and because it's being forced them and they don't necessarily know and they're being given bad examples so how do we how do we get in there now and I lost my train of thought I think I can close I'll just skip that one I think I can close with this idea of getting laughed out of the room for using the old statistics I like to think that when we need to acknowledge the bias we all bring to the table as there's a value in expertise technical expertise technology expertise the data science role being an actual operational component of government and thinking about how things work on the rubber backgrounds it's a divisive time out there and it's really easy to bike shed and think about the things that are the most important and that need to be tackled are the things that you're an expert in and really getting and sitting down with folks and avoiding this tendency to trivialize I've worked in government forever these are kids they don't know what they're talking about their technical chops aren't as good as they think they are this is just a vendor it's all they care about it's so easy to call names and write the story on why the person that represents some other constituency isn't really that important or somebody that you need to cooperate with and avoiding that giving everybody the benefit of the doubt and realizing that there's something that they're bringing to the table with their perspective and we've all got to work together on this that's the only way we're going to get not only get individual projects done but speed that cycle up over time yeah bike shedding is a huge danger and if you want to be a radical incrementalist that's the thing before you open your mouth or starting a conversation or answer somebody's question if you realize that that question, that context the person you're talking to has opened a door to bike shedding, just walk away because you're not going to get anything done so go more technical go work on data standards you're not going to get stuck with people arguing over which contractor, which vendor you're going to get people who are working and making change Thank you guys for coming out Were we going straight into another one? Is it lunch? I think we have lunch right now actually what I would recommend you guys do we actually have a great event coming up called Big Day to Day LA it will be August 5 my friends who are running it have a booth on the floor Vicki's booth for the Code for America Brigade it says Hack for LA because the other chapter is actually doing it but do check that out it's a free event for attendees it's a volunteer run event we get a bunch of sponsors and get a great lunch for you guys sells out every year so do check that out again if you have any friends who would like to talk about this sort of topic especially on the data science side or the data engineering side really into the math and the hardcore technical stuff do check that out it's called Big Day to Day LA with that I would like to thank Vicki and John for a great presentation we could chat more over lunch you can hit me up it's John at Esri.com but thank you guys so much for not only coming and listening but contributing a lot of great great stuff yourselves remember guys we don't feel too lonely up in the front so if you're back here Mike check one Mike check two so it looks like we're about ready to start here so of course it's like a Jason Hibbins that is one impressive list of resumes so to speak openthrust.com you don't have to go through all of them wow damn I'm impressed I am truly impressed so this is our first year of doing an open data track here I'd like to invite you guys to do this as part of your event so if you're welcome to go out to your friends and say hey let's make this stronger and better so we have a lot of potential here a lot of great stuff happening now I just wanted to do a quick poll how many of you guys would like to see this on Thursday? how about Friday? we would like to see it on Friday how about Saturday? Sunday? cool so the real question always is what day can we grab from the organizers and what can we grab so we're going to be doing some planning if you'd like to help me out feel free to get a hold of one of us and we'll try to figure out how to make this beam stronger and better in the future can I make a suggestion? I would say Thursday or Friday this is really loud because if one of the goals is to get government workers here it's easier for them to save the week than a weekend day the trick is I want to get a mix so I want to get everyone talking with each other I'm not sure what the best option is but anyways take it away Jason thank you did I break my mic? John any tricks to this? just talk so welcome everyone thanks for sticking out for the afternoon session of scale I get the after time lunch slot so hopefully you had a light lunch and we'll keep you awake I'm a community manager at Red Hat I work on our open source.com project hopefully you had a chance to stop by the booth and talk to Ricky and Jen but the quick commercial for that is we're an online publication and community talking about how open source is having a positive influence in the world and we welcome your stories and welcome contributions by night I'm a self-proclaimed civic geek I help organize Code for Raleigh I help organize an event called City Camp North Carolina and I might use the handheld mic can I have the handheld mic? because Brittany is annoying okay I think we're good so by night I'm a self-proclaimed civic geek as I said I help organize our Code for Raleigh which is a Code for America Brigade one of our main flagship events which is City Camp North Carolina and recently over the past few months I became a member of the Code for America National Advisory Council so there's nine individuals on that that's basically playing an advisory role and kind of a working role to help Code for America advance to the next level I'm going to be talking a lot about Code for America in my talk so I figured I'd just tell you what it is up front if you are not familiar with it basically Code for America is an organization and a network of people making government for the people by the people in the 21st century so that's kind of their kind of mission statement so my mission for the last five or six years has been to improve the citizen experience and I use the word citizen here but what I really mean is kind of like people it just kind of sounds that's how I made the slide and for me what that means is that making government more engaging and participatory for everyone and so what I've learned that I'm really good at over the last few years is I'm really good at creating an environment for people to do amazing things and as much as I want to be a part of those amazing things and jump in a project and maybe do some code or get on the hackathon team I just find that as an organizer that never happens so I've kind of just taken notes of that and made that part of what my role is and so we're going to basically go the way I've designed the talk today I'm going to walk you through three models of civic hacking and then we're going to talk about the power of an event and how it works in public ways. So through my work at opensource.com I basically discovered the open government and open data movements I found a way to blend my passions my passion for open source my passion for civic participation and my passion for my local community where I live which is Raleigh, North Carolina. And so when I think about the world that I live in from open source and I think about the world of open government three pieces that I'd like to bring over from open source for open government is transparency, collaboration and participation. I think that's kind of the foundation of what we have here for open government. As I alluded to earlier, I'm not much of a coder I do know how to code, I just don't practice it I found that I'm much better my role is much better as a community organizer so what that means to me is I find a way to blend to match volunteer skills to the needs of the community and like any open source project that needs contributors I found a way to bring my skill set to the table as an organizer. And so I think I love this slide because I think this is how most people view government you put taxes in and you get services out services like building roads and policing fire protection and trash collection and fixing potholes and those type of things but I like to view government like this it's us all of us being actively engaged in your city, your county, your state wherever you want to participate in government I think I've seen definitely over the last few years, few decades this kind of us versus them mentality and in our current political environment it's even more heightened so how do we change such a slow perceived slow moving system like the government so with every revolution when enough people get frustrated we can hack the system and so a few years ago I don't know exactly when it started but I think we saw a lot of people that wanted to start hacking on government big quotation marks and so we started here in terms like Gov2.0 open government and we saw events like transparency camp come to play and we saw organizations like the Sunlight Foundation and Codes for America and other events like city camp and then we saw we're seeing those rise of open data and so I think collectively right now I feel safe saying that we can collectively call that civic tech and where we're at in the timeline of things so with that in mind I wanted to go over three models that I've seen kind of come to rise above the rest from a civic hacking standpoint hopefully you've probably seen and or participated in some of these but I think it's kind of good to walk you through each one. The first one I call Greenfield there's probably a better name for it but this is kind of like the brand new project the thing that you make at a weekend hackathon or the thing that you're kind of thinking in your head that you want others to contribute to the benefit of this it's attractive, it's new it's that shiny object you can kind of pick the staff that you want to develop on the language and kind of you kind of have this kind of green field the screen pasture to work with and what do you want to build there the risks is also you get to pick the stack and pick the language of what you want to do and sometimes it can be hard to get contributors if it's the weekend hackathon it's easy to kind of get to the table and get people around the table but then when you leave there's all these distractions that we have and it's hard to make those sustainable from one of our events was an application called our greenway this is basically a mobile app that uses open data from the city of Raleigh so basically open parks data and helps people navigate our greenway system which is the multi-purpose trail system that connects all of our parks together and it's really interesting the way that this came about we do an unconference which I'll explain a little bit later on but basically like a mom gets up in front of the room and says I love using our greenway system except I get lost on them all the time and this group of really passionate people came around and basically made this app in the weekend and they still maintain it and the city of Raleigh helps us endorse it as kind of they would have coded it but you did it so you saved us a bunch of money the second type of kind of model that I saw is kind of this reuse or kind of clone projects and so this would be like projects that come from Code for America a project that's coming from a Code for America Brigade or maybe it's a project or a product coming from a civic tech group this is basically kind of open source at its purest form you can take a project and because it's an open source and has an open source license you're free to modify it, you're free to enhance it you're free to kind of make it what you need so the benefits of this is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel someone's already kind of established the baseline they've picked the language, the stack, all that stuff and basically the power is you can join an existing team and help them make the project even better one of the potential risks of this is customization and so the way you can avoid this customization is to work with the project leaders and understand how you can make contributions and how they accept contributions and how you can get involved so that if you're making those customizations for your piece of what you need that they'll be accepted as we call it upstream and open source so here's an example how many folks are familiar with the Adopta project? just a few? awesome so this started out as a Code for America project through their fellowship program they basically send like a couple fellows to the city of Boston for a couple months and the problem that they tried to solve was the city of Boston said hey we literally do not have enough staff enough people power to clear out the snow and ice around fire hydrants after a large snow event so at a high level let's just think about this concept as a way for citizens to adopt civic infrastructure so things like how you would adopt a stream or adopt a highway so that applied to park benches and in this case fire hydrants so in this reference here the red ones are adopted and the green ones means they're up for adoption you basically go through a very quick online process you fill out your name, email and say I want that fire hydrant and then you're signed up so because this has an open source model behind it the app was Adopta was able to go to Seattle apparently it rains a lot in Seattle and the storm drains get clogged with trash and tree branches and debris so citizens sign up there, hopefully their local storm drain this went all the way to Hawaii and the city and county of Honolulu launched an adopt a siren program a tsunami siren program citizens volunteer to help with the monthly testing of the tsunami sirens apparently there's batteries in the sirens and people steal the batteries and sell them for money so this is actually a really important thing that citizens are kind of helping with and since we're talking about Hawaii I threw in a picture of my wife and my son and I at the top of Diamondhead so this is going to be our moment of zen for the presentation so I saw an opportunity in the city of Raleigh where they were basically doing the traditional government pen and paper program to adopt a bus shelter so the folks, our civic hacking group went to the public utilities folks and we basically kind of did like a start a pitch so then we said hey this whole program that you're designing we can put a technical front end on this for you for free and they were like that's awesome we had no idea this existed so making that connection was a really critical step in kind of building some trust with not only kind of the IT staff through the city but also other departments now this example isn't all like sunshine and roses so we had a great beginning and we had a great pitch so we decided we actually had a person from the city IT staff on our civic hacking group who got the software up and running on a city server so it was on a .gov server and then he became the single point of failure and we did really plan for sustainability and what happens when there's new data that comes in and what happens when there's an update to the program so we learned a lesson I called this giving your city a puppy because if you give them a puppy it's puppies are great and they're cuddly and they're soft but they require feeding and maintenance and care and walks and all these things that we did not think about because this app is so cool you've got to have it right so we really got caught up in the moment luckily this actually app went down for probably a few weeks maybe a couple months but the IT department reestablished the app and they maintained it and we have a better sense of kind of what that maintenance schedule was like so lesson learned that they were able to pick it back up so that's the power of open source and modifying and so forth. The third model and this is the one that I'm really interested in because I feel like we can do a pretty good job at the second model I feel like the first model is good for things that need to be new but again the first model I think is really hard to sustain. I like this concept of augmented projects and the way that I define this it's a vetted and supported project that has a project lead or a project champion from a city county or state agency this enables volunteers to support their development activities and they can support it in a variety of ways maybe it's user feedback maybe they can help them increase user adoption maybe they can assist in testing and of course we would always like to help them assist in coding so let me tell you how I kind of came up to this does that make sense to everyone I see that happening now because this is if you do I'd like to get feedback after the talk so how I kind of like saw this come to fruition my coach for Ali Brigade we're having one of our monthly hack nights and the open data program manager approached me and says hey we're going from v1 of our open data portal to v2 and one of the challenges I have is we have over 200 data sets that don't have any metadata and I was like okay well how do we help? he's like I need metadata so he brought that to our hack night we had between 20 and 25 people show up and in the course of just under three hours we added metadata to over 200 data sets it was really cool because we got temporary admin access to the open data portal no one abused it though because we have that trust factor and so when I saw this happening I was like this could be a really interesting approach of how we can kind of take civic hacking because one of the problems that I kind of see in a lot of through a lot of brigades a lot of civic hacking groups is that kind of sustainability piece and if you don't have someone who cares and wants to maintain that project then it usually just falls flat on its face and it's news for a while and then it just kind of goes off into a black hole so last year we actually prototyped this model because I did a version of this talk and the CIO for my county came up to me and was like I think I have an idea for you so we had a team from our county IT department come up with the project idea they wanted to John mentioned Yelp earlier and so actually the Wake County team was really instrumental in working with Yelp to get health inspection scores they actually helped them co-create the API to get health inspection scores in Yelp so when a person is using Yelp to find a restaurant they can actually see that restaurant score, the A, B, or C or maybe there's a D's out there I'm not sure in Yelp so they actually wanted to take that to the next level and they wanted to get health inspection risk factors as part of that component as well so they formed a team and through how we organized our events went through the course of the year they came to our National Day Civic Hacking event in June and kind of initially pitched the idea and started building up their team to our city camp event in September and did a pitch during our unconference and extended the team even further and then over the next five to six weeks they participated in our open data competition and actually placed within the top three for their efforts and of course I took a screenshot of one of my favorite places in Raleigh so if you're ever there they have 80 beers on tap and some pretty decent food alright and so what we're doing this year to even take that to the next step is our county commissioners come out with these strategic goals and objectives and they just came out at the beginning of February so they go off to some retreat and they kind of get, I think it's like 75 goals and already my leadership team with the brigade had two meetings with the CIO and his team and we're looking through these goals and objectives and it's really hard to see it's highlighted at the bottom so for example we've picked initiative we've got one because that's how government labels things I'm just kidding and so we're looking to see how can some of the efforts that we want to do match to this goal to hold us accountable for this we're going to our plan is to do a co-presentation in front of the way county commissioners and outline what we'd like to do for the remainder of the year and then present back to them at the end of the year to show them the work that we've done so those are the models there's been a lot of talk here about creating communities and I want to walk you through a little bit how we've done that in our area and then we'll get to the takeaways so some of you know this but a lot of my work in doing this, and by the way this is all volunteer work I do not get paid to do this so this is totally a passion project for me all this work inspired me to write a book it's called the foundation for an episode city I'm not making any money off of it by the way I get like a couple dollars checks every year but the source code is available online it's available under a Creative Commons license I wrote it because I kept getting asked the same questions so I decided to write them down in a format that people might want it so it's freely downloadable and I really encourage you to take a look at it if you're interested in that so what I outlined in the book is really I talk about the culture the culture that you need to make some of this stuff accessible I separate government and data policies and I kind of lucked into this because a few years ago it was all about open government, open government, open government and we're getting all these policies that's kind of helping do that now the trend is kind of open data, open data, open data and we're seeing a lot of turnkey solutions from vendors and startups that are enabling governments to have almost an instant open data portal just really depends on how clean their data is internally I think those are interchangeable you can start with open data and then go open government or you can do the inverse of that supporting user groups and conferences like this is also key to that community aspect and then if you want to get the attention of your politicians and your elected officials you can ring your little magic economic development bell and kind of if you can map out how some of this work can map through creating startups creating companies and creating business in a good case to get support there so for me and my personal story things really took off when I got to interview our former mayor for the city of Raleigh and we talked about kind of applying open source to a living and breathing city I got to publish that article on a platform I have access to at opensource.com and one of the unexpected consequences of that was people reached out to me and said hey Jason I want to help you do that and I was like well I don't know what I'm doing so let's figure it out together so this is kind of like the nucleus of kind of forming this community around open government around open source and around open data and so the catalyst for us was an event called CityCamp and we discovered this movement and for those of you unfamiliar with CityCamp I like to describe it as an international on conference series that's designed to bring open source thinking to local government through technology and citizen ideation. There have been CityCamps all over the world I've been to CityCamps in Denver and Kansas City and Honolulu. Don't ask me how I pulled that one off but I got to go and I've helped organize over at least 6 CityCamps in Raleigh and we've got another one in the works this year. It literally started with a tweet. This is the top tweet is one of our CityCouncillors saying hey I just talked to GovFresh is Luke Fretwell and then K.M. Curry is Kevin Curry key figures in kind of the early kind of Gov2.0 movement of the founders of the CityCamp brand. So we figured out what it was and then apparently I was in Chicago or something and I was like yeah let's do it and so now because it's on Twitter it's a total commitment. So basically a group of, this is the group of passionate citizens who came together to do the first CityCamp Raleigh. We basically did it for on a budget of like $5,000, $6,000 probably $8,000 and then like you know it's a volunteer time. So this group eventually turned into our Gov2 Raleigh Brigade. And so I talked about the big part of the format is the uncomference. And as organizers what you do for an uncomference is you plan the place, the time, all the logistics. The only thing you don't plan is the agenda. It sounds like a crazy concept. I like to describe it as organized chaos and you have to trust the process and once you trust the process it's magic. And people come up to me all the time and say I didn't believe it was going to work, but after I went through it I'm sold and I love the idea. Really what this does is it creates an environment for people to come together to solve their own problems. If you can get the right folks at the right table at the right time some really cool things can happen. The key for us was to do a lot of outreach to make sure that we had the right folks in different agencies and government roles at the table. And I won't lie to you that is a very hard thing to do particularly if there's a lot of resistance and they're strapped for time and they don't get what you're trying to do. But the folks that get it they are all over this. And if you can find those folks they're going to help you. They're actually helping us now. I've got Wake County folks coming to us saying we want to make these projects and we want to help you lead them. And so we evolved over time. We started a city camp rally. We held two events under that brand. We saw there was a lot of interest coming from other areas around us and other parts of the state. So we rebranded a city camp North Carolina. And then during some of that time was when Coach America was forming the brigade program. So it was kind of this weird moment a few weird moments where we were kind of like the city camp people and then we were the coach for rally people and then we had some, anyway we made it work out. And civic hacking is very, as you probably well know is gaining popularity across the United States and the world. And in North Carolina we have several brigades across the state. We have brigades in Raleigh and Cary which is a small town to the west of Raleigh. Durham which is a town to the northwest of Raleigh. And then across the rest of the state Asheville, Greensboro, and Charlotte, our friends in Charlotte. By the way Raleigh and Charlotte are 20 minutes apart, as is what most people tell me. They're two and a half hours apart by car. Sorry, I always get asked that. And so my vision for our city camp and C is to be the gathering of the tribes. It's a way to bring all of the code for North Carolina brigades together to share what they're working on to maybe work together during a hackathon. But it's a time for us to come together and understand what everyone is working on as a person. So as we get to the conclusion here, from my perspective I'm seeing a lot of positive impact from the open government movement through civic hacking. It allows people who are really passionate about technology to volunteer in a different way. It provides a way for people with various skills, whether you're a designer, a community organizer, or whatever skills that you have to participate and re-engage with our government. That was a thoughtful word. Oh, you are our government. It is our government. Although sometimes it doesn't feel that way. So I'll leave this up for a few seconds here. These are some of the lessons that I've learned through doing events and just kind of going around and seeing the things that I get to see. Having a code of conduct and enforcing it is a really important step to creating a safe and friendly environment. We had this saying in some teams that if you didn't write it down, it didn't happen, which leads us to getting organized. We use a combination of Google Drive and Waffle.io. So Waffle.io is a kind of a Trello style interface to GitHub issues. So we want to alleviate we have a lot of folks who aren't technical on our team who go, what is GitHub and why do I need to use it? So it's basically kind of this Kanban style board where they can create issues and participate in our planning process on our GitHub accounts. Again, I talked about playing a matchmaker matching skills to assets. Don't reinvent the wheel. So figure out ways that you can partner with people that you can find other groups that are doing something similar and don't recode things if it doesn't need to be recoded. My story about the Bush Shelter that's just kind of recognizing an opportunity and seeing like, hey, there's something happening over there and they don't know about this, well, let's bring them together and let's kind of, you guys talked about the carrot and the stick in the last session. So figure out what the carrots and the sticks are and carry a lot of carrots with you. And then I kind of alluded to this earlier as much as I want to be sitting at the table and hacking on some code and working on a design or a solution to a design. It's really hard to lead and organize at the same time. So that's just kind of something that I've had to learn and recognize that if you're running an event there's always something, some sort of housekeeping item you've got to go meet the pizza dude. You've got to make sure the trash is taken out. There's all these things that kind of get in the way of what you want to do. So if you are leading and organizing, just know that you probably have to carve out some time to do one or the other. And then kind of the big takeaway here is kind of the three keys that I found. And I've hopefully stressed this throughout, but creating an environment for success. And the other thing I was thinking about as I was developing this that we're trying to be more cognizant of this year is to focus on outcomes. And so it's not just, hey, we want to have an event to have an event. We actually want certain outcomes to happen and we're developing kind of what that is. And we're actually kind of developing it in partnership with our friends at the county. You can't do this alone. You have to partner with other people. If you do it alone I think it's going to be really hard. So figure out what the other organizations are. Partner with them. But don't partner with them if it doesn't make sense. If your goals aren't aligned then it's okay to say no. And then we have this thing at Red Hat. We say default to open. So this simply means, and I kind of brought this mantra to the civic hacking leadership area, there are certain reasons why you maybe want to have something that's not open. The two biggest ones that come to mind are legal and confidentiality. So this kind of default to open communications, default to having open documentation, and default to having open decisions can really make you successful. So everyone got all their pictures of that? My slides are already on GitHub so it's not like they're going away. So I want to end with this quote. It's from a person called Margaret Mead. It says, never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people could change the world. Indeed it's the only thing that ever has. So I find that very inspiring particularly in our times. So what I challenge you to do is to discover your passion, make great partnerships, and together let's improve the people's experience with government. So thank you. I think we can do questions, right? I want to do that really fast. Go ahead. So the question is when we do a city camp day what do we do with all the open issues? So there's a couple of things that we try to do. We try to get folks that have the good ideas to come to our monthly meetups. So we do have kind of a venue for them to do that. It really just depends on the number of projects or number of ideas that are coming out. So if there's like 10 ideas, it's really hard to track them so that's something that we can do better at. But we do try to foster them to keep working on it. We've actually kind of with our event structure, our city camp event is at the end of September. And our Data Palooza, which is our open data competition event is at the beginning of November. So we've tried to make that runway a little bit shorter. We used to do it over the summertime and we just found that that didn't work. So our city camp would be in June and our Data Palooza would be in the fall. And we just had so much drop off during the summer that we're like we've got to solve this problem. And so we actually moved City Camp back to the fall created kind of that five week window where, you know, someone's going, oh, I've got to commit, you know, about four to six months for this thing. I've got other things to do. Where they go, I can commit five weeks of this thing. I think it's a lot more easier to do that and get people involved. So with that, and we're actually trying to get better at kind of highlighting the projects and doing better at storytelling. And that's, I think, kind of across the brigades overall. I think that's something that a lot of us could do a lot better. Other questions? So the question is, if you're starting from scratch, should I go to a brigade or should I go to a government? I think it really depends on your situation. If you have a brigade that you can go to and kind of see and talk to, I think it's great because you can just ask a lot of questions and you can learn a lot just by observing. If you have that tech geeky person on your city council, like I would go talk to them because that's kind of one of your ways in. But otherwise, we're starting to see now there's a lot of cross-collaboration between brigades. And so we're actually, particularly in North Carolina, we used to meet every month and just kind of like a lunchtime hangout that was like, hey, what's going on? And so that kind of fell off the calendar so we were going to restart that. But yeah, I think it really, it kind of depends on your situation, but so where are you looking to start from scratch from? If you don't mind sharing. And where at? I don't think HB, all right. Yeah, maybe there's some folks in the audience that can point you in the right direction since I'm on the other coast. You have a question? Yeah, so the question is about kind of long-term relationships with city councils and kind of the dynamics of people rotating in and out. That is a huge challenge. One of the ways that we, that City Raleigh attempted to solve that was they actually created a technology and communications committee. So that way it's kind of a permanently established fixture that can survive the election cycles. I thought it was pretty clever. I didn't come up with the idea, but I was like, I'll support it because that's really smart. Because it is. It is a lot of relationship building. And I will tell you in the early days it was me sitting down with one person at lunch or in the evening and like talking to them and making them understand what all this stuff is and what the benefits are. And that just, it was a grind. And then as you get a new person in, you're like, maybe they'll get it. And then it's the same thing over and over again. So there's no magic bullet to that or magic beans. So I would say, you know, the one thing I've seen is kind of, if you have that technical technology committee, that could really help surpass the election cycles. Yes, it was the technology and communications. Technology and community or technology and communications? I think it was community. I didn't have to go look it up. It was tech and calm. And I forget what the rest of the calm was. Any, yes, sir? Yeah, so we work with whoever wants to work with us. So yeah, so they work really well together anyway. So it's not like it's them, it's county versus city. Right now the county is very forthcoming to work with us. And so we're like, all right, well we're working with them. But you know, our city sits in the county so it still benefits the entire community. We've worked with the City of Raleigh. They're aware of what we're doing. We just got some momentum with the county and that was kind of the latest things happening. So that's what I was sharing today. Anything else? Yeah, so the question is around are there stories and case studies we could point to? I don't have anything specific off the top of my head. I know Coach America is looking to collect a lot of that storytelling. I can shoot you a follow-up email and see what I can help you out with. I think I saw a hand over here. Yeah. So the question is how long does it take to build a relationship with the city? Again, this is going to depend. So my role in the community before that, I was very involved in my neighborhood community. And so in the city of Raleigh we have these things called citizen advisory councils. And there's 19 different CACs throughout the city. And they act as a liaison between citizens and government. So I was involved in that structure already. So I actually already was having a lot of face time with a lot of our city councilors and some of our department heads throughout the city. I went through a course that they offered called it was basically kind of like a citizen 101 course. So you basically go through this eight week course on a Tuesday and Thursday night and you get to meet all the different departments. So that was really effective for me to just kind of understand how the city operates. Because once you understand how it operates then you can hack on it, right? Then you can kind of go around things and you build the relationships and you can get stuff done. So for me it was probably a shorter ramp up time because I was already involved and engaged. If you're starting from scratch that's probably going to be a little bit harder. So maybe try to find someone who is kind of like defines kind of that profile that I just described and partner with them. And there's already other groups that probably have some of that. So definitely find a partnership that helps you get on board faster. One more question? How much time do we have? Yeah. Alright so we're out of time today. So the question is around greatest challenges. Is that just like greatest challenges period or a question mark or like greatest challenges? Yeah. Thanks for giving me time to think about the answers here. I'd say one challenge I didn't personally have but I saw in other places was kind of the rogue hacker. That's like I'm going to do it my way. I don't care what they want because I have a need. And so kind of piggybacking on what John was saying is that this is a partnership. You've got to understand how they work. You've got to understand that there's – the other challenge is that there's cycles. And for good reason. There are public processes for a very good reason. And you have to understand that the world we live in and open source in a lot of the business community like we can just go get stuff done. We don't have to like ask for permission. We don't have to wait to vet this whole public display process and city council process. So that's somewhat frustrating to folks who come from this background that's like I just want to go get it done. I'm really passionate about it. So that's a huge – well, I don't say that's a huge challenge. That's just an obstacle that you need to be aware of so that you can plan accordingly. We talked about the relationship building. It is – I mean this is – we're all people, right? And we're not going to get done unless we talk to other people and we have a common understanding. And then the other one is like a lot of people like to lead with technology. And so sometimes that could be a huge mistake and you've got this great technical solution but it's not going to solve everyone's problem. So you've got to understand that technology is both good and bad for what we want to accomplish. I'll kind of say something I saw in the last session on open data. There are a lot of challenges within government. Organizational challenges depending on how they are organized. There's a lot of silos. There's a lot of resistance to creating open data because of the fear that it's going to expose certain things. I heard someone say one time that the government doesn't look good naked. Right? And so it's like it's humorous but it's also very true because I mean everything's public. Everything's fully exposed and that's like both the good and the bad pieces of it. So just kind of like the other important piece of that is if we could assume positive intent, I think that is a huge game changer in making progress. So if we can assume that we are trying to have a positive outcome instead of I want to expose all the bad things from the budget or all the bad things from the – we were talking about potholes in the last session. All the bad things are what potholes aren't getting fixed. So if we can assume positive intent I think we can make a lot of progress faster. So I'll end on that note and I always forget this is my obligatory cat photo if you ever go to an open source talk you have to have a cat photo so there is my cat photo. Thank you everyone for attending. Thank you for all the work I know a lot of you are doing in civic hacking and government. So we're going to get through these times and I think we're going to end up better. So thank you. Z, D, E, F, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, U, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z. A, B, C, D, E, F, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, U, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z. We're at 104, right? Yeah. We're at 5. Okay. So, hi. I'm not hearing anything on this side. You should be hearing it in the room. I'm going to turn it all the way down. Because I can't hear in here and the room at the same time. So why wouldn't I be getting it on the software? Try it again. And I got it on audio too, right? We should ask somebody to knock to take a look at it. Yeah. Call them. They're in there at some grand old time. Just to A-B knock. Hi. Hi. Hey. Hello. Hi. How are you doing? I'm good. How are you doing? I'm good. How are you doing? I'm good. How are you doing? I'm good. We need to monitor things. We're sitting on room 104. We're going to follow up with you. It's hooked up. Here we go. We'll take a closer look now. Go ahead. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Oh my gosh. There is another my dog. Check. Check. Thank you. Hold on. Wait a second. So far, it's just in my opinion. Maybe not. Maybe not. It's all in it. Yeah. Okay. I'll give it a hand. Yeah. Okay. I'll give it a hand. All right. I'll give it a hand. All right. I'll give it a hand. You can. You can. Yeah. Give that a call. I'll give it a hand. Do you have a microphone. We're going to be using a microphone. And have the same time as these are on. I do, yeah. I'd like to go with the audio processor. Oh, it's a big five. Now, can you have a microphone. Can you have a microphone? Here. Okay. Can you have a microphone? All right. Can you have a microphone? So you're going to be getting back happy with that. Yeah, I might as well just like thinking I touch the audio. Okay. I'm just downloading it, that's probably it for today. I just hear too loud. Well, why can't I hear anything on my software? The exact same program that they're using up there, we used it for everything. I can't do it from down here, I need a person with half a brain upstairs to tell me what does it sound like. One, two, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Sorry, I thought you said stop. The reason why I'm asking you to do your ABCs is because it's longer than you. It's not discreet, it's easy to keep running until I can play with names. Please sit in a way that's similar to how a paneler, you know, a person who's got a panel like this, so that we can adjust for that. So a person is going to sit here like this, is that correct? So we're assuming the mics are going to be about like this, right? Or closer. They might have a laptop. I can. She's going to have a laptop. So they're going to maybe lean in, you're probably going to maybe lean in. Probably. Is it directional or is it phone? I think they're omnidirectional. But just do whatever your weight feels comfortable. You guys can both. Okay. Do that if you need help. Okay. Now we're just going to make sure that it doesn't move for you. Okay. And then you just keep running and I'll make sure that it doesn't move for you. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, P, Q, T, U, V, W, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, A, B, C, Z, E, F, G, H, Y, Z, A, B, C, D, E. Yeah. What do we, what do we can do? Okay. This one right here. Okay. This one right here. So I have it in there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This interactivity is open and enables greater insight into the inner workings of their local, state and federal agencies. Currently, the portal houses 100 different data sets, but this is just the beginning as the portal has been designed to evolve as needs and opportunities change. So one good example is measuring. People might want to know where that tax money is being spent. It's having 5% of the amount of data that's being collected from the portal. I'm not sure if that's the right answer or not. Are we finding the answer? I'm not sure if that's the right answer. So we're going to go on the data map, see that information, look on the specific site, see what's proposed to be done there, and rather than just get the data, we're going to go on the data map. So you just have the video from right? I don't, a website. Hello. Alright guys, we got a small crowd today, so feel free to come up a little closer if you like. Now when the room in the back starts talking, you will hear them if you're in the back. So it's always going to be a little forward of the halfway section if you'd like to come. I'm not going to be able to move this because of the wires. Let's have all you guys come over here so you can see the panel is a little better. Maybe perhaps this kind of aisle here works pretty well with these slides and whatnot. Normally we don't have a lot of panels in this event, so a little different than normal. So welcome to the Open Data Track. This is our first year doing Open Data Track for your scale. I'd like you guys to think about this as a chance to help make this track even better and stronger. At a volunteer run event, we've been running for 15 years since the 15 acts at the very end of scale. Started 15 years ago with a bunch of USC students working with the Linux user group community when they found out that they didn't have any space for their install test. They said, hey, we got a basement here at USC. Since then, we've gone into a larger event and we'd like to make sure that you guys are welcome to participate and we're going to have an Open Data Track with our panelists today. We're going to start with Santa Monica with Veronica. If you'd like to come up or actually use your desktop or come up or use the hand mic, it's up to you. Good afternoon everyone. My name is Barang Abadi, Web Development Manager with the City of Santa Monica. And thank you so much for joining us, giving up your Sunday afternoon to talk about Open Data. Before I talk about what Santa Monica is doing with Open Data, I want to talk a little bit about why we do Open Data. And I want to share with you a story about a comment that was made just this week by someone who I have a tremendous amount of respect for, someone who I view as a leader in the world of government. This person said that Open Data was really great and it was cool, but its importance is waning. And of course, I think personally, this is my baby, this is something that I'm really passionate about. And I told the person that I disagreed with them and I took some time to think about it. And I think this person was right. I think maybe the terminology wasn't right though. I think that a few years ago governments stood up Open Data portals and then washed their hands and said we did civic engagement, we did transparency, we did innovation, done deal, high fives all around, time to go home. A lot has happened since then though. So no longer can you just stand up an Open Data portal and assume that you've done everything you need to do in order to deliver the services that your constituents now expect. That said, the value of Open Data is still very much there. 2015, Pew Research put out a poll that said less than 20% of Americans trust their governments. We're supposed to be this beacon and bastion of freedom and trust in the world and less than one in five people trusts our government. It was 2015. What do you think is going to happen when they run that poll for 2016 or even Q1 of 2017? When you look at the national elections, when you look at everything that happened between officer involved shootings, particularly in minority communities, what do you think the numbers are going to be? And then in 2017, I mean we're in a world where words like alternative facts and this whole issue with Russian meddling in our elections and now wiretapping and come on, more than ever are things, is empirical data needed in order to drive public conversation and discord. And so we in Santa Monica, we believe in Open Data, we believe in its importance and we believe in doing it right. We have a number of Open Data portals, all of which are available at open.smgov.net and we believe in not just putting a whole bunch of data out there, but we believe in putting valuable data that our residents care about out in a timely fashion. So one of the tenets of our Open Data program is automation. So we didn't start with what data sets we put out there. We started with an automation strategy or a strategy of how can we automate everything we put out. If a crime has occurred on your screen or if you see a police car or a fire truck on your screen, you don't want to wait until next quarter or next fiscal year in order to find out what that event was. You want to know as soon as it's cleared what just happened, what are the outcomes and that's what we do. We've invested a ton of resources into automating our processes. We also believe in putting out raw data. We don't want to tell you a story. We want to put the data out in its rawest form and we want to allow you to draw your own conclusions. And lastly, we really endeavor and this is an area that we can really stand to improve on. We really endeavor to always put out open data sets whenever there is something that the public is talking about. For example, yes you may have heard we're going to be shutting down Santa Monica Airport. We'll release the data set showing how many landings there were from that airport just to help drive the dialogue. So a lot of times it is easier to speak with emotion and not necessarily with the facts. As I mentioned earlier, open data is still very much important but there are other avenues for us to connect with our constituents and to deliver service. We're looking a lot more into private public partnerships and we've done that under the Hack the Beach umbrella. We just had another kickoff event this last Thursday. If you're ever on the west side, I encourage you to show up and take a look. What we're trying to do is open the doors of City Hall. Last year our focus was local small businesses but now we're trying to bring in more people. Students, namely, as a group that we're really trying to engage. We're looking to engage the public to co-create opportunities for us to create products. We know the government, a lot of the owners falls on us to deliver services and value. However, we know that we can't do it alone and if there's some private sector know-how and best practices that can help us better serve our residents, we're all for it. Lastly, we don't just contribute to open data. We contribute to the world of open government. Most rooms I go into, no one has any idea what GitHub is. I'm so happy. I don't have to explain it to anyone in here. I invite you to check us out at github.com slash city of Santa Monica. If there's something there that you wish to contribute to, be more than happy to have you join us. Thank you again for joining us after you. Good afternoon, everybody. Today I'm going to talk about Data LB, which is the city of Long Beach's new open data portal. We went live with the portal about in January of this year. The portal is designed to implement modern citywide practices for sharing data with the public, staff and policy makers. Long Beach is one of the first cities in the country to combine data with mapping technology. With that, I'd like to share a quick video about this initiative. Anytime soon. Other games always. We announced that Long Beach is one of the first cities in the United States to provide a portal, Data LB, where open data can be shared with the public, staff and policy makers. This is really, really important. This ensures that we have really a lot of transparency across the city, and that we're putting information that residents, visitors, entrepreneurs can use. It's a good use, and it's public so that everyone can access it. The development of this innovative portal has been in the making for two years and allows users to analyze and combine open data layers using a map viewer, as well as providing the ability for users to develop new web and mobile applications. You know, I think the mayor in the city felt it was important that we not just have a portal and information, not just a database that's basically a spell sheet up on the internet. It's something very rich in terms of visualization, the mapping, it pulls in information from other jurisdictions, county and council governments. It's not just about Long Beach and a bunch of numbers. It's really about our community and the issues that are shaping that and really an invitation for our residents and our businesses and our nonprofits to come in and understand more about what's going on and how to shape our future. The type of data includes information and statistics on a variety of topics, such as where and how taxpayer money is being spent. This interactivity and openness enables residents to have greater insight into the inner workings of their local, state and federal agencies. Currently the portal houses 100 different data sets, but this is just the beginning as the portal has been designed to evolve as needs and opportunities change. So one good example is measuring. People might want to know where that tax money is being spent and what's being done. They can log on to the data LV, see that information, look on the specific site, see what's proposed to be done there, and rather than just get data, they're able to see it in action. To see how Data LV helps explore, visualize, build and share data, visit datalv.longbeach.gov. What's unique about this program is that we wanted to develop an open data program that was from the community's perspective, so from the community up rather than from the city and the legislature down. Our initial focus was on the community and civic engagement. We held three community forums, one in City Hall, one at Long Beach City College, and then CSU Long Beach. And after almost a year of civic engagement and revisions, we drafted our first open data policy. And then we didn't want to just stop there. One of the other areas of focus was that being, that was led by our CIO, Brian Sustokis, has been the evolution of a lot of the C-suite positions. So rather than hiring Chief Data Officer or CDO, we decided to create a virtual CDO. This is our commitment to civic engagement while providing city access to educators, tech community, entrepreneurs, and anyone that had interest in open data. So in a way it was kind of crowdsourcing and letting them prioritize the data sets that they would like to see. It was a new way of thinking about deploying open data with using a storyboard and geospatial data technology. And residents, entrepreneurs, nerds like me can download public data to innovate, solve problems, and create any kind of tech solutions. We can download this information in multiple formats. So far since our launch in January, we've had about 81 data sets. I think one of our main challenges was not knowing what the community wants and by engaging the community now we have that dialogue that's created. And I think that's about it. Can you join the conference so far? Good weekend. So my name is Jean Holm. I am the Deputy CIO at the City of Los Angeles. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about the work that we're doing there, but the work is actually part and parcel of a lot of work from other people. So I just want to, first of all, before I get into it, give a shout out to the amazing team for Hack for LA. Yeah, that's you Nina. Okay, everybody who is involved with Hack for LA has ever shown up to Hack for LA? Would like to show up for Hack for LA? Stand up. Come on, come Vicki. Come on. Go on, go on, go on, go on, go on. LA is an amazing, amazing volunteer team that got recognized by our city council on Friday and got a big certificate and all the city council were going with a great idea. Open data was an innovation. Like, can you imagine your city council getting up and saying this? So it was great. And every Tuesday night at our LA Clean Tech Incubator in the East District downtown from 6 to 9 p.m., you can join us as we are on a year of civic hacking. So go Hack for LA. And so we think of open data as an ecosystem in Los Angeles. It's not just about sort of, as Boeing said, putting the data up, but it's also about getting people to use it, to get insights into it, for journalists to publish things, to investigate reports about it, to help keep transparency actually active in the city. And the most important thing is of course that, you know, we're hiring. So if you guys are looking for a job, if you want to come work for the most awesome city on the planet, no offense, then really LA is an amazing place to be. We are having a massive turnover just because of a weird little age bubble. So we are actually hiring 24,000 people over the next seven years. So if you want to be part of a dynamic and amazing city with Data First, just come join us. So we have a variety of things that we do in Los Angeles. One is, of course, we have an open data portal like everybody else. And you know, I have to take a little exception to the idea that open data is on the way. Like, okay, all right. Previous jobs was the evangelist for Open Data for the U.S., a government for the White House, and helped to build data.gov. And so that's when like the conversation was really important to have open data as a distinction. What I think we're starting to see is that open data is now an expectation. So we don't have to talk about open data always differently than the fact that we have data. So, well, maybe not so much this year. But previous years, the idea was that we want to have this conversation about openness and transparency. So here on the Open Data Portal in Los Angeles, we have about 1,100 open data sets. Some of those data sets are updated actually in real time. So our 311 data, which is like all the, like, six things around the city, 311 data is updated every 20 minutes. And so you can see the status of when that pothole is actually going to get filled, when that graffiti is going to get removed, when somebody is going to come and pick up your trash. All of that is updated on our Open Data Portal. We also have a lot of GSFacial data. So we actually have created Shoutout to Esri. There you go, with all of our GSFacial data. So there's some data on both. But this is nice because it gives all of this great Esri tools and other tools to be able to put layered maps to start to get insights, delve into it. And for people who might not be super tech, then it gives them an easier way to start to map and understand what that data means. We're also really important to look at government transparency. So our first Open Data Portal was actually put up by our controller. So he's all about fiscal transparency and fiscal conservancy. And so he puts up real-time data around a variety of things to track, like with the overtime in the city and how much money are we spending and is it equitable across the city. And so this is really important, again, to understand why we even want to talk about Open Data, but more importantly how to make it meaningful to anybody. You don't have to have a PhD in computer science to be able to understand that we are in the green or the red on a certain project. This comes down into looking at issues that are really important to making LA a more livable place. So you might have noticed that there's this thing called traffic. So unfortunately one of the byproducts of having lots of people on the roads and byways is that we also have fatalities. So we really started to dive in looking at Open Data around pedestrian, well, vehicle safety first. So like why are we having all these car accidents and why are people dying? And we realized it's not car-to-car interactions. Like when we looked at the data, it was a car hitting a person, or a car hitting a bicyclist because that's the biggest physical trauma. And then we said, well, we have 22,000 miles of roadway. Like how are we going to be able to make this all safe? This economic nightmare of trying to figure out how to make the road safe. But then when we looked at it, and I shouted to anybody from USC because they helped us with this, was that 60% of the fatalities occurred at 6% of the intersections. So suddenly that becomes an actionable thing. Suddenly you can start putting police officers out there during peak times of commuting. Suddenly you can put green bike lanes and make it really obvious where the bicyclists are. Suddenly you can start to make changes in the infrastructure, the policies, and the transportation corridors to be able to get people to the places more safely. And part of that, again, back to our ecosystem, is not doing it all just as the city, but working with partners. So ways is an amazing application if you haven't used it, you should. Get you across the city fastest routes. And you get to see the most amazing, crazy neighborhoods. If anyone's a waste user, how many times have you seen these different places in Echo Park? I've lived here my whole life, and there's parts of the city I never knew existed. So what we do is we share urban data back and forth with Waze. So we get information from them about things that are important. And we share out public information about street events. Like we had a closure around Hollywood with the Oscar ceremony. The streets are closed for a week. But we wanted to get ways to direct people around those closures. There was a festival down here today that got a little rainy. But 17 miles of streets are closed for Golden Streets. Four people to bike and walk and skateboard and to get around in different kinds of modalities. And we also have an app that helps with that called GOLA, which finds the greenest, the cheapest, and the fastest ways across the city. So this is a great way to, we integrate with Uber and Lyft. We integrate with our metro, county metro, and county transportation as well as city transportation. And so we can find the fastest way to get across the city. And we can also use that open data to be able to find ways to fix things around the city. So we have about 100,000 users on the MyLA 311 app. So this is an area that I particularly run for the city. And we have call operators. They can call the number 311, like just 311, like 911 on your phone. And you can get stuff fixed if you see something broken or you want to report something that's not an emergency. But more importantly, the data from that becomes really interesting for people. Like how often are streets, people doing illegal dumping? Where is there heavy graffiti? Is it equitable in fact that how fast we go and repair things broken across the city? You know, where are people having difficulty with getting access to the internet? People call for all kinds of reasons. We have one and a half million phone calls and service requests a year on 311. And all of that data becomes something that we can put together in a really interesting way. And part of this too becomes issues around homelessness. So 28,000 people every night sleep and sheltered on the streets of LA. I mean, that is a crying shame. And so what we're doing is looking at things with, stand up Hunter. Hunter ONs, who is our data scientist in our Information Technology Agency. And it's helping put together a data science federation, which I'll talk about in a second. But part of it is looking at not just what the data is around homelessness, but what we can do to predict and prevent it. So how can we tell when someone first touches a service at the city or the county and be able to understand are they at a risk of falling into homelessness? Maybe now they're not homeless, but are they a veteran? Did they come out of foster care? Are they somebody who's had sexual abuse in their past? Do they have a sick family member? Do they have a lack of a social network? All of these are risk factors. If we can identify some of these, we can give them more services early on and help prevent homelessness happening. Part of this is a new way that we're looking at innovation across the city. So last summer, we did the summer of... Something happened to my slide. We did the summer of innovation with Google and really tried to think differently about homelessness and emergency management and business. And we created this thing called Angels Lab, which is an inside-outside innovation hub, and then the Data Science Federation. So the Data Science Federation has connected with 11 local universities from LA Trade Tech, CSUN, Cal State LA, USC, UCLA, Loyola, Pepperdine, like you name it, I think we reach out to them. So these 11 universities have a variety of programs, either in architecture, design, or data science or statistics or economics. And those students and the professors come and work on real problems at the city. So each quarter and each semester, Hunter helps to put those together into really marketable packages, and we get real products out. And then the city has a champion, real data, and then a commitment to actually making a difference with what the students' insights are. And we make a huge difference that way. And then finally, data scientists are everywhere. So how many people here feel like a data scientist? Feel like you could be a data scientist? Feel like you want to be a data scientist? So I teach a class for UCLA in South Central LA, and these are my data scientists. So some of these kids are homeless. I completed high school. Some of these kids took one semester of college at the community college and decided to drop out. And part of my job is to make a data scientist out of everybody. So everybody has the ability to have insight in how to make their community better and how to make Los Angeles a better place to be. Because it's really about making those better decisions by understanding, getting data-driven decisions behind everything to become the data heroes I know that you all can be. My name is Philip LeClaire, and I'm the chief information officer for the city of Pasadena. And thank you for sharing the last couple days here in our city. I really appreciate having you here and hopefully if you're not from the area and not from Pasadena generally, that you were able to enjoy some of the exciting things that the city has to offer. As my slides come up, I'd like to have a couple questions for the audience. Number one is how many of you have actually used open data? Okay, good. And then the flip side is that the rest of you, are you still trying to figure out what open data is about? And how it can work for you? Maybe? Okay. Well, I was just listening to some of the other presenters so I don't want to repeat anything because I think a lot of the information that has been brought up already is actually really, really good information and it's actually complementary in terms of what I have to say. So I'll speed through some of my other... Thank you. So, I wanted to start off with open data for the city so we started our open data side back in 2014 in conjunction with a hackathon that the city we had sponsored. And through that, we create our own open data and open data portal. But what I'm not showing you right now here is actually also using ESRI. So we, for sure... We also use, for sure, in a lot of our data visualization tools. And so the one that I want to show you right now is what sits on top of our RGS data, which we have a number of applications that are embedded in lots of different service points that we have with our community in order to get information from our RGS database. But all the GIS information and all the data around GIS is really about things that exist in a spatial element. So something that's like a bus stop, something that's a community center, something that is a bus shelter. It could be where manholes are. It could be anything that's actually physical, that exists in the city, is available and it's in the system and it can be accessed through a lot of ESRI tools and embedded in anyone's applications or any data discovery or analytics that they want to accomplish. And so this is just a sample that we have publicly available. And this is another public map that we have created that actually kind of illustrates just all the different kinds of data sets we have. And this isn't exhaustive, it's a neighborhood community services tool where people can look up things of where can I get free Wi-Fi? Where can I visit a library? Where are my schools? Where are the community districts? Where are my council districts? So this is a layer of information that's really important that can be embedded into anything that someone could be using, but it is accessible through our ESRI Open Data Portal on our GSI of the house. And like the other cities up here, we also have our own Open Data Portal and this is just a little splash screen. And what's important about here for those of you who haven't been using Open Data is that it really captures a lot of operational data that the city has. And through that operational data, we are inspiring and helpfully other people are trying to utilize our data to help us get insights into how we are operating as a city. And I think the City of LA's version of it, especially from the Controller's Office and the Mayor, has all the metrics and statistics and something for I think all of the cities to aspire to. But one that I think we're really proud of in our city is our wealth of transportation information. So transportation includes our transit, our parking, our traffic operations here in the city. And so this is just a quick dashboard that kind of shows some of the types of data elements that are up there that will fit into the next thing I'm going to mention. We're talking about where intersections are in the city, how the traffic signals actually work in their timing, how the traffic counts, how many cars are coming through different intersections at a time. Also, parking information in terms of where are all the parking meters? What are the payments and information that's being collected about parking in the city? Where are all the different parking zones in the city? And so why we're at the transportation one on purpose is because one of our best collaborations that we have had in the city launched our hackathon and something that hopefully will inspire some of you are some real tangible examples of what you could be doing with the data that could actually help the city. And so we have worked a lot with Caltech over the last couple of years, and we're about to start our third class where there's a Caltech data science and analytics course. And this is a group of, well, it's a course at the university, and the students actually have to take, have to do a final project. And a lot of the students pick city data to do the final project. And so the city leaders who come together come up with some problem statements that we shine light on some areas where we think there's issues. And then we also share with them all the different data sets we have available. And in turn, they are residents of this city and they actually interact with city operations all the time. And so they actually come up with what they're trying to solve in their own city here and actually use different data sets and talk with city leaders in order to make a difference and make an outcome. And so there's a four up here that I thought were really interesting that I just shared quickly. One is that a student group took a look at all the passing and transit, looking at ridership and loyalty, information and profitability per line. And that also interacts with tap cards and with Metro. They also created a parking meter availability prediction model. They're using parking meters plus payment data plus other statistics about traffic patterns in the city, also where businesses are located and they were trying to come up with a way of how could I predict where I could actually find a parking meter in some more congested areas. Another one is a parking garage utilization model helping us figure out what's the right price point and validation should go into a city lot that is attached to the gold line so that we have enough parking spaces and get circulation of people coming and going and utilizing public transit. And then one which I thought was quite amazing but someone really wanted to take a look at where there could be potential biases in the issuance of parking tickets. And so they actually looked at all kinds of data around who the agents were and what time and where and what was the violation activity to see if there were certain inherent biases, car color, maybe an individual or maybe it was a certain neighborhood. The results of that were actually positive saying that actually there weren't very many biases at all that could be counted. And then another thing that we're really proud of back into our transit and traffic area is some public and private partnerships. And so one of our data sets that we have out there is we have a lot of information about the various major corridors within the city of Pasadena and how traffic flows, how long it takes at certain times of the day. And also we have models of traffic signals and timing for, especially for major events since we have the Rose Bowl here and Parade once a year. We want to know and see how we get traffic into and out of the city quite often. So we have these models. However, as you see on this map, which is a typical Google map with traffic, in city, on actual city streets, all the information about traffic patterns and what you see that Waze uses in Google Maps is actually all their algorithms. They're made from various points of data and then they're pulled together in a way to give you as best and accurate of a trip from point A to point B. But we're working right now as a public-private partnership which is going to take our model data and actually aggregate over almost 300 traffic signals throughout the city of Pasadena and make them close to real-time. That's going to help our city enable our traffic engineers to change traffic patterns and signal timing in order to move traffic through the city, especially at those congested times. But it's also going to allow other innovators to take this data and actually do something with it. And one for certainly will be probably the Googles and the Wazes who want to actually absorb real-time information and have even a much more great and specific prediction model. So two quick things to end on for me is that there's lots of medias and events and those of you who are close to Pasadena just want to let you know there are a couple that take place around here, but also those of you who are inspired by the data and working for a greater group of government, you know, start your own group. There are people around who can see them in this room who would like to do things and do make a difference. And please stay in touch with me. Continue to enjoy Pasadena. The night's not over. Old Pasadena is just a couple of blocks away. Thank you very much. We actually decided not to do hackathons. What we did was nothing against them, but we did something called Hack the Beach the Contest last year, which was a three-month-long hackathon. What we really wanted was a usable product, something that at the end of the contest could be turned over to a city department and actually be used. After that, we gave all of the finalists a series of city mentors. I met with them once a week to help strengthen their product. And shout-out to Vicky over there. Her team, City Groves, won our contest. They have a product that does online forms and workflows that's currently in use in production and accepting payments for our Planning and Community Development Department. And the outcomes have been so favorable that they have gotten two contracts or three contracts now with us. Oh, my God. Okay. Something that gives us a little more visibility in the contracts then. That's your next job. I got a lot of the problems. I basically did user research for nine months as an intern, because I got to every single person in the entire department. And I did this guy, Steven, and he's a young guy who's a coder at the next startup I worked at, the first startup I've done, only startup I worked at. And he was like, if the city would just give me access to an API. And I was like, Steven, that's me. I'm here in Excel spreadsheet. And he was like, what? And so we built this thing where we were like, oh, okay, this is a system where we collect the kind of data we want from the city. And then Bureng launched Hacks of Beach. And he's like, hey, Vicky, can you tweet about this from Hacks LA and send some people over? And Steven, they're like, well, we just kind of wrapped this up. Nobody's using it. It was just a side project. And those three months where, you know, this is me trying to convince Steven from my experience working with the city how to do this, but what's one of the problems is where Steven got to meet Bureng and that whole team and work with him and build, prioritize the features and experience their problems for three months. Our pricing model is based on that experience. Everything we built into the product was based on those three months. And within a matter of weeks of winning that, we're already talking to other cities. We raised angel funding. We got press in the LA Times. And now we're alive with City of Los Angeles Department of Power of LA. Hacks of Beach is going to take their submissions this year on City Grows. Sacramento is taking their Rails grants program. But I had this idea. I used to joke from one of the planners that I was going to put her in the city and go make planning software. But none of that would have actually happened without that experience that Hacks of Beach was. Thank you for the kind words of the key. The check is literally in the mail. Five of them evidently. One more quick note. Another, you know, the positive aspects for the businesses that they get to learn about city processes and they get to do something really great and make money, which is awesome. But on our end, we really wanted to see if there's waves for us to change our procurement processes. You all remember healthcare.gov and what debacle that was. That's because all the same players who apply for government contracts applied for that did. It happens at the federal level, at the state level, and it happens at the local level. And there were some great providers like Esri out there who provide great software. But then there's a lot of others who just know how to get their foot in the door. What we really wanted to do was to provide opportunities and avenues for people who haven't had, who don't know how to deal with the city to come in and speak to us on their own terms. So we wanted to take the procurement process to them and let them wow us. So that was a little bit of experiment that we ran. It was success one up that we're going to get again this year. Wow, that's impressive. So thank you for the question. The product is maintained by one of their mentors who is in the Planning and Community Development Department. It's not maintained by the IT department. So it's customer-maintained. I'm sorry, could you repeat that? For the open data, we did not do a hackathon. Instead, we went out to the community. We did more of a civic engagement. We have held three community forums at the city of Long Beach, Long Beach City College and then CSU Long Beach as well. And part of that was to kind of get sort of a hackathon, but it was more on the civic engagement, the community side of it to let us know what is it that the community was looking for. We just didn't want to put out open data and data that wasn't of any use to them. So that was our engagement. Thank you. That's very cool. So I've done a lot of hackathons and I've done a lot of hackathons and I think there's so hackathons are great to get energy going and sort of bubble up ideas, but I think that idea that Rang and Vicki kind of resonated with was the fact you really need to make things sustainable. So I'll talk about two. Well, hack for LA, I'm obviously giving a lot of love to hack for LA today, but they just have a food oasis hack that came out looking at ways to find and get access to healthy food. There's some spin-offs around that with trying to get like snap people who aren't food stamps to be able to get access to healthy food as well. So I think the idea there is that we've got this year-long hackathon going really. So every Tuesday night at the Civic Innovator we're able to bring people together and it's sometimes the same faces, sometimes new faces. It really exposed them. The one that I think is the most practical last year was just before I came to the city. So I've been with the World Bank Africa data. So we've got a bunch of open data events going on throughout Central Africa today. And they're what we don't know where they don't even have power. We did an eight-week hackathon and trained the kids and young people on like, how do you use a computer and what is data and like very basic stuff. And the winning team was a hack into the legal system because it turns out that the legal system in Sierra Leone had no ability to actually figure out if anybody in jail was supposed to be there because there was no data. And so within two months of it was a very straightforward, like it was just a database. Sorry guys, let's not overstate this. But it was way before the legal system and the legal area to be able to put together like who had gone in, what they had been charged with, did they ever get a trial and were they ever actually convicted or were they just languishing in jail. And it turns out that they were able to release 169 people from jail. Wow, that's about a lot of people. I'm not sure, but do you want to turn it up? So hackathons, well I think that the most important thing about hackathons, at least for Pasadena has been about building a community because there is a community of people who want to engage specifically. They want to volunteer in certain ways. I think a lot of you who are probably here fall into that category. So you find out who they are and then you start up your own meetup through your own engagements that are hopefully specifically minded. But then another part of it too is that some of the ideas that come out of either hackathons or these meetings sometimes they do need to flourish and somehow cultivate. And so one of the ways I think that we're doing now on the city side is that we're trying to create the problem statements to then help the community figure out what it is that they need to how they can help participate in what the issue is. So I think for years I think we've gone through the brainstorm versions of hackathons which sometimes some ideas popped out. A lot of times things just fizzled away. And I'd rather, and so now through at least my caltech example is that we prompt the students just like I would say we prompt in a future hackathon like what are some of the problems we want them to actually to take a look at. And then it can spin maybe a whole different solution or have some insight that city staff may not have seen but I think that it needs to be a little bit more directive in order for it to have a true outcome. Now this is actually very cool when you start your astronomy experience through maturing of hackathons so to speak and follow this experiment that we're seeing. I recommend all four of you for beautiful presentations. So I'm a physician responsible for health and somatic Ministry of Health Jamaica. I'm here on my own pennies. So two questions really. The hackathons and in terms of a little bit more on the sustainability both in terms of funding and interest. And then the second question is obviously being in healthcare Government of Jamaica did launch an open data portal last June but it's just the initial data sitting there. Health data. Any comments on types of data and how that can be improved. Thank you. If we can follow up afterwards I can get you connected with some of the world bank people working in Jamaica that might be able to support. Oh great. Okay. So the health data is so important. There's a couple of issues when you start getting into health data. One is the anonymization of data so you want to make sure that you're protecting people's privacy. But if you do too much of that if you protect too much then it's very hard to start to get sort of algorithms about what are the outcomes. So it's a balance between making sure that you keep things anonymized but giving a large enough population to be able to find out what the most effective outcomes are for certain treatments for certain populations. So I did a lot of work around Ebola in Sierra Leone and kind of looking at the health informatics. And what we found is that the data from the government sometimes it's incomplete sometimes it's not there sometimes it's biased and we got really creative about who else had data. So some of the clinics maybe like with Doctors Without Borders we actually used cell phone data to track the routes that sick people with Ebola because it's highly contagious had taken to get to the clinic. So we used a lot of different kinds of data to start to put together the model of how to like stop Ebola. And I think it's really important when you're working in an area where you can't always get the data you'd like to get access to or maybe it doesn't even exist in any kind of normalized format to be able to get creative about what else will give us indicators about this. That's something too. We do have a public health center for the City Pasadena and I know one of the biggest challenges that we have it's very similar to privacy information it's about sharing. People don't want to share the data because a lot of times it's either incomplete or it has personal information or they don't know themselves what piece of it is personally identifying or not. So one of the recommendations that we have we have done because we also have other regulated kinds of data sets too like in the criminal and justice also in utilities like electric and water utilities customer information all those can't really be released well so what we try to do is have at least a catalog of what kind of data is available and who may be a point of contact because while you may not be able to publish something open data because of some of the limitations if you have a one on one conversation sometimes you can get maybe a subset or something that removes the most personal identifying information and then you've created a relationship that maybe can help anonymize it enough so that it can become public. So I'm trying to do something that way like some type of an exchange that just really has all the different types of data sets that are available even if the data itself isn't available. So at Long Beach we get the raw data we scrub it to sanitize it and make sure that any kind of personal information or health care information isn't published. But we also put information out there like mosquito surveillance trap locations or housing and health services or vector control stuff and data out there that doesn't have any kind of personal information. Thank you. So the short answer is I run away from health care information it scares me no matter how much we sanitize it. We do give some highly highly anonymized and not at all raw information as part of our well-being index and I want to because the city of well-being and health care is one of those dimensions into the science of what makes a community resilient and have well-being. But beyond that we are looking to engage our local hospitals. We have UCLA health and we have a fairly large hospital within the city boundaries on perhaps doing things like hackathons. I know I said that we're not fans of hackathons but we do realize that they have their place and health care is one of those industries that we do hope to tap into. And we hope to be a bridge between tech firms that are located within Santa Monica because usually when those two interact it's when the tech people are sick and they're going to get health care from the health care provider not to do business. First I should say that I have a big interest in GIS and I use QGIS and I have a Postgres database on a Ubuntu server. So no disrespect to ESRI but I'm very much a fan of open source. So my concern is this is that I'm not, and I'll admit I'm not that familiar with your sites but I'm more concerned about not necessarily relying on your maps I want to make my own map. So I need data that is already GIS compatible whether it's in a shape file format or maybe it's CSV format that has already the geographic information like a geometry column or something but do your sites have or portals have all the underlying data in a GIS compatible format to download or that anyone in the public could download Yes, most of these sites well if you're using an ESRI product by default chances are it's got I have to interrupt you real quick because one thing is that I'm not going to pay a license to ESRI to get to the data so I want to make sure that if I went to the city of Santa Monica I can get a shape file of the layer I want without having to go through ESRI unless it's free. I won't speak for my colleagues but we have open data modes of open data portal. We have one by a company called Secrata who's not open source by any means a company called ESRI who you're familiar with and GitHub. We have a lot of our data on GitHub simply because it's free. All three of those provide multiple means so CSV, shape, GeoJSON as well as API. So if you go to open.smgov.net you will see all of the open data offerings that we have including but our largest open data portal at data.smgov.net has a bunch of data that we've actually gone in and added a lot along to just because we do realize that geography is a big part of the value of the data and just so you know, even though we're an ESRI shop our developers actually do use QGIS behind the scenes for a number of reasons so we do use the best of the worlds. So you have it on your portal? Yes, we also so we have GitHub behind it so we have a lot of the algorithms and material that we're doing and Hunter's Data Science Federation projects are all put up on the LA GitHub site and we have an open Slack channel as well so you can communicate there and we have the data file they can't promise that each and every one of them is but if there's one you want that isn't in those open formats GeoJSON or an API then we'll make sure that it's put up there. To echo the same Long Beach does have different formats spreadsheets KMLs and shape files. I'm a data scientist in the UCLA healthcare system and I'm also approaching middle age and have a family and a home and all that to take care of so I've signed up for Hack for LA and it always seems like it's like 5pm on a Wednesday in a warehouse down by the LA River and I get home and I'm just like there's no way I'm going over there and I do see a trend here where you guys have this bottom-up approach that I think works for young, motivated people who have the skills and the time but the people who run your governments and make the decisions are none of those things they're old people who don't have the skills and don't have and they've developed their own way to do things so looking right now in West Eller we have I'm in CD5 we have a council district election and there's a school board election that has like a phenomenal amount of money going into it and I've been to the candidate forums and the discussions on these things and there's no use of data or concrete facts in any of the candidates presentations and any of the discussion it's all very sort of like anecdotal and emotional and we do have data I've tried to like pull it in and look at it but it takes a lot of time for people to understand that to understand data even if it's in a simple like chart I have to show people it's several times so it just seems like there's bottom-up and there's top-down what is the approach other than bottom-up that you guys have with the data how does it go all the way to the top? so okay so I am one of those middle-aged, late-aged government people I was announced 32 years before I came to the city last year so I find that in the city of Los Angeles so I report directly to the mayor and so I think from the very top-down at the city of Los Angeles that we are a data-driven organization now that doesn't mean that all 48,000 people get that message so we do two things with our data science federation one is that we're bringing two programs for UCL actually UCL expansion and UCL statistics to programs so Go Baroon and so we bring those kids and the professors in to give new ideas and to give them real data to kind of turn on and build their resumes but more importantly that helps to convince and makes them middle managers of the city and the general managers and more data savvy so we are working with all of our general managers which are the top-level folks on the day-to-day side and our council districts in fact Hunter just yesterday I think published up to our council district one of our council districts in the 311 map and dashboard so they could see like exactly how fast are your potholes being filled and how fast is it in CD5 have a little competition here to get things done faster and so that kind of idea of how we can make it transparent for top-level managers that they can actually see how their job is getting done how the people are supporting them and how the folks out in the city are perceiving that to be I think is part of the conversation that we're having so I mean it's a big government and we're working to make sure that it changes in very measurable and dramatic ways so you've raised something that's an ongoing issue with us when do you bring people in when do you engage them at five or six at night you're going to be too tired on the weekends you're going to have things to do with well either your kids or these bunch of people there's always something going on we find that after hours or on the weekends we can bribe you with beer and pizza by the way we've partnered up with the Chamber of Commerce because we can't give you beer we're the government but they can so they host you and you're on the west side find your calling but that's something that we really struggle with you're not going to come during the day because you're doing your day job and at night you're tired and you have other obligations so how do we reach you and so far we don't have a better answer than beer and pizza we can try it online or a virtual community but we know how those go even if you have a really engaged community manager it's just not the same for phase time so it's something that we in Santa Monica are definitely wrestling with we're all ears the other thing to your point about the data being hard to read yes you're absolutely right we try to do everything we can with metadata and we try to give people a little bit of a nudge by creating all visualizations on our own charts what we've done recently I have no dog in this fight, UCLA or USC but we've actually been talking to USC some of the folks in their martial school and they put together some really cool visualizations and they've been focusing around public safety after the expo line to the beach what's completed so they're looking at crime trends after expo came to Santa Monica and they're doing it all geography based so they're doing it map based and it is even to a layman I think pretty simple to understand but you're right that's another issue that we're going to have to wrestle with because government has a lot of data and a lot of it doesn't make sense unless you understand the nature of the data and or the nature of government itself one more point on it is for those of us who kind of live and breathe it and want to make a difference and change all the time we are in an uphill battle but I think that speaking for all of us that we are looking at it from the long run perspective because the people who have been operating a lot of our government services for a long time data to them poses some challenges but the common challenge is that they have to do the business differently and so whether you agree with the data you don't want to see the data whether there's risks in the data or whether you appreciate it you're confronted with doing something different and that takes a long time to change I think that I've seen in our organization as we've hired people from the private sector of all ages as well as we've started to hiring millennials who've come in who can whip up a pivot table like in any department it's amazing how much they can utilize use some of the tools and things that they have differently and they want to look at it differently that they're pushing reactions and so I think all of it from all angles will help us to really take advantage of what is really going to be a huge gigantic game changer but it's going to take some time government doesn't work as fast as we would like it to the city of Long Beach has done something different in that if partnered with geospatial technology so we have on our portal we have the map and then we have the story on the data that's being published so it just makes it easier it's not just a bunch of spreadsheets and data that is sometimes difficult for a non-geek person to understand I think that's one of those differences where we're trying to reach out to the community to make it easier to understand what the data is like everybody around here said government has a lot of data but how do we push that data out to everybody in a way that's easier to understand and so Long Beach has done that go to datalb.longbeach.gov thank you wow it's like way out of time I wish we had some more time on this one so quick show of hands as we ask this question I'd like to know how many of you guys come here I'd love to do this again next year it's like if you're here before the volume Kenny, David, give me a thumbs up if you can hear me I'm going to try to get to a quick start here since we're the last slot and it might rain on us so I'll try to get you home early but I think it might be worth sticking around to listen to this talk here is smart cities and IoT Internet of Things with opportunity comes risk who am I I'm a first time scale presenter so I'm a little bit nervous but I have I have spoken in public at a few other conferences in the past year but bear with me because I am the first, this is my first time at scale I am currently employed by Dell as a software engineer working on open source and of course the scale conference is all about open source but I just want to disclose that not because I'm speaking on behalf of Dell but because Dell makes some hardware related to IoT and you know you should always treat a speaker skeptically so I just want I want you to know that I think as you watch what I'm about to present the relationship is probably remote I do have a background I would contend that this whole term IoT Internet of Things has been around it seems like a cool new thing but I've been working in the field of industrial control manufacturing automation even home automation for decades this stuff back then it just wasn't called that I have worked as an industrial control system engineer and done the SCADA systems the control systems for the pipelines between El Paso and here in California between Houston and Tennessee I did a system for a Ramco that controlled every oil gas and water pipeline in the nation of Saudi Arabia here in California the McKittrick oil field near Bakersfield which is I think six or seven thousand wells so I went on after doing that as a consulting engineer to be one of the initial four engineers building Wonderware which is down in Irvine and that's a factory automation toolkit I'm no longer affiliated with them but I believe that their system controls 85% of the world's factories and it's now part of group Schneider and Brandt due to acquisitions but like I said I'm now with Dell along the way I actually practiced for a short time as an attorney as well so I have that because some of my presentation drips over into the legal realm so I just want to mention that I started out as an engineer got a degree in law, tried it a few years and actually went back into engineering so with that said we'll move on so what am I talking about when I say smart cities aka the internet of things it's maybe a slightly different context from the speakers who were in the private the prior session talking about open data in the context of city government in that I'm talking about the data collected by various sensors related to energy, transportation water, power, public safety buildings, weather conditions and this data is something some of these sensors you've had road sensors in the freeways for a while but they're being deployed with far greater density than they have in the past and you're getting more of these sensors kind of like proximity sensors at parking meters and things that are networkable and collectible remotely so when I say internet of things these are the kinds of sensors I'm talking about they can be government, commercial, residential many different categories these devices can be tiny that picture on the top just shows one of these integrated circuits that's the size of a fingernail but just because they're tiny doesn't mean that we're talking a small amount of data they're tiny so these devices themselves are going to hold data for a long time but they're likely to forward this data to internet connected data centers ultimately these are going to reside in clouds and it will enable cloud hosted analytics to take place to draw inferences between these how much data well I don't even think it's fair to characterize the amount of data we're talking about here as a fire hose this is more like a dam overflowing the spillway compared to the data we're dealing with now and as this data gets in the cloud the utility of it follows what I'm going to predict is a Metcalf law phenomena Metcalf was an engineer who was involved with the invention of the Ethernet the wired connections well if you're old enough you use them and wifi maybe is displacing it but Metcalf contended that the value of the network goes up with the number of things connected to it squared because the more things that are connected to it then you as an individual mode can reach more things and get more utility out of it and I'm going to contend that these networks of sensors actually don't go up linearly in value because if you get more of the measuring different things you can do better analytics and predictions based on correlations or anti-correlations between these things what are these going to be used for well at at the close in view I'm going to say that these things are used for control systems and I'm a control engineer or at least I used to be and the description of a control loop is this where you measure something you have an idea of where you want it to be a thermostat is an example of a control system I want the temperature in this room to be 72 but I put a sensor here that measures what it actually is it could be that the temperature is only 65 but I want 72 I make a comparison send a signal if it's 65 and I want 72 the signal is light the fire in the furnace and this is a closed feedback loop that ultimately achieves the 72 degrees and what justifies the initial deployment of a lot of these is applications in control loops but in aggregate when you put these out there at scale in a city in a whole nation these things will indeed be driving the control loops for utilities, transportation government services you know what is it essentially this is like the central nervous system in your body where these things once they start driving things like your city's traffic lights maybe even the routes your emergency services take they are indeed like the central nervous the central nervous system is with your brain as a control loop is a key element in this and they become critically important what happens if your central nervous system is disrupted a severed spinal cord this might give us a clue as to what might happen to your city if there are disruptions in these IOT networks when your body has a severed spinal cord the symptoms might be loss of feeling loss of motor control localized seizures dementia maybe even paralysis I'd like to suggest that if the same sorts of things go wrong with the IOT networks in a city or government installation we could have the equivalent of that now why would anything go wrong it could be because of design flaws component failures intentional attacks why would a person engage in an intentional attack well could be financial gain either criminal or somebody trying to get a competitive advantage if you look at the pictures there it could even be a scenario like says old war games movies where it's just a couple of kids trying to entertain themselves that have learned how to hack into a system people might engage in this in acts of vandalism political unrest, terrorism even a nation state instigated war bottom line is there's a long list of reasons why you might need to worry about this not running along happily on autopilot you know what's the big picture here I would contend that this control loop idea is an idea where you control the small detail but in aggregate don't forget these control loops are used to feed up into the open data reports that some of the speakers in the session before were talking about LA has their open data website the highlighted section there is that it's from Mayor Eric Garcetti says that it was done to increase transparency accountability in the summer service I was at an AT&T developer summit at the beginning of last year and a keynote speaker there was the mayor of Atlanta Jason Reed and he gave a speech impressed me where he stated that he believed in open data because we have to be first to the future think of all the data with the ability to analyze it and improve people's lives and do this are going to be the leaders not just domestically but in the world it can raise the efficiency and thus GDP and that's the key to a better quality of life well I believe in that but if you believe in that maybe there's reason for concern that this stuff be reliable the same kind of data effectively just like the speakers in the session before showed are used to power dashboards that measure and monitor the effectiveness of government this is basically a report card on your government is what these dashboards amount to why I think there's even historical precedent for this I would compare this to the world's first public library was erected in the city of Boston in the year 1848 and that building stands to this day and it has one of my favorite transcriptions and it's a ball print there so let me read it to you it's inscribed on that Boston public library built in 1848 they were the first ones to do this so this was a big thing in 1848 this was comparable to the first city to go open with their data and build out sensor networks and the inscription on that building the commonwealth requires the education of the people as the safeguard of order and liberty why am I believer in this when you get down to it I would contend that democracy is another control in industrial control like your thermostat you have an idea of where you want things to be you get a measurement of where they are now and you get to send a signal there's nothing to change well democracy is just like that as it turns out you have an idea of where you want it to be these smart smart cities dashboards the open data dashboards are there to tell you where they are now the controller in the control loop is actually you you get to send that signal and it's called your vote and you know the bottom line is as we enable this open data this becomes effectively the foundation of democracy if that data is not reliable yet this is what you're forced to use to send that signal to move things in the direction you want to be this system doesn't work the foundation of that Boston public library was to educate the people give them free access to newspapers to tell them what's going on and in today's society things have changed a little bit and gone high tech but that free and open access to that data is going to essentially be and the key element to keeping democracy functional now it isn't functional unless that data is trustworthy as you see highlighted in yellow I'm not happy that somebody just publishes the data if they've got their sum on the scale and you know control filters own the kill switch that can turn that off when things happen it could change into something like this you know I don't know how many of you have kids but even if you don't have kids you've been to school before and perhaps some of you have had this experience I found this on the internet how do you hide a bad grade on the report card from your parents how do you tamper with the report card well if these portals these open data portals are indeed the report card for a government you know I'd hope this wouldn't apply to any of the speakers from the cities in the session before but there could be somebody somewhere who might have a temptation on the scale now am I paranoid about this well exhibit A it's happened before Flint, Michigan I think you've probably heard about that incident where they changed their water treatment mechanism there there was a doctor who was treating people and with a lot of hard work determined that these people were exhibiting symptoms of poisoning went to the trouble to spot a pattern of correlation where they were coming from particular neighborhoods and the initial reaction of the government both at the city and the state level in Michigan were to accuse her of provoking hysteria well ultimately she was proven correct exhibit B distressed in authority Fukushima the reactor incident there there was a lot of distrust of official reports of the need or lack of need to worry about the radiation being released I was personally involved with this safe cast initiative which was a guy who founded that maker space down in Culver City crash space and I was in there on weekends where we were building drones with radiation detectors the government of Japan seemed to be recalcitrant to actually publish any data and this outfit safe cast went and built their own fleet of drones with radiation sensors that flew a grid at various altitudes were about to release the results of their data collection strangely enough hours before the government of Japan released what they had I'm not sure it was even in the level of detail equivalent to this crowd-sourced initiative but once again here we have another exhibit of the public taking the initiative to go do some data analysis even data collection on their own because of distrust in government and in this case a commercial entity bottom line is here that we've got a number of people both inside and outside these institutions who have incentives to tamper I just don't think that anyone could possibly contend that there aren't people who are going to be prone to engage an intentional act of tampering with this data either denial of service or manipulating the numbers to publish or corrupt the results what could we do about this if we accept that there are going to be evil people trying to deny us access to this data or corrupt the data is there anything we can do about it well in criminal law one of the things I learned in law school are that there are three essential elements of a crime the motive will accept that people have the motive to do this but it also requires the means and opportunity for the crime to take place what if we can do something to remove the means and opportunity so that people can't tamper with this data now I don't think it's a good thing that people have distrust in government institutions anyway and if we can remove the means and opportunity to make this to impose an inherent confidence that this stuff is press worthy that would be a good thing what do we do in other context to build about this kind of these kinds of reliable systems in aviation people use redundancy you see here a jetliner but I don't think anybody gets on a jetliner with one engine because if that one in these jetliners today are built long ago they might have had four engines instead of two built to be fault-prone and this concept of redundancy is used over and over in fields not just limited to aviation medical devices anything that is critical scale brings in a lot of computer industry people and I'm sure anybody who's been at a commercial data center is familiar with things like raid discs and redundant power supplies so this concept has proven to work how do we carry this over to data collection well there's another historical precedent and that is double entry accounting there's a guy named Charlie Munger who is like Warren Buffett right hand man he may in fact be the smarter the two guys he often speaks here at Caltech and he's made a statement that creative accounting you know you have dual column ledgers and for undetected corruption to occur you would have to change it in two different places and it isn't impervious to fraud but it may be it may be it may not be it may not be it may not be it may not be it may not be it may not be it isn't impervious to fraud but it makes it a lot more difficult and it isn't good just for fraud I mean just playing errors if somebody was tired that day with the transcription will be caught by this double entry accounting another thing in the financial accounting field that's similar was the invention of the cash register the cash register was a technology invention of about a hundred years ago it was promoted by this guy Patterson who went on to fund MCR his salesman was a guy named Watson who went on to found IBM but the initial cash register was more or less a simple mechanical device that had an internal paper tape that printed transactions inside a locked box on the cash register so that people got a receipt but it was guaranteed to be recorded in box so some clerk couldn't take the money from from an item handed to a customer and stick it in his pocket without it being detectable at the end of the day people have argued that this is what enabled modern commerce that before the days of the cash register you could never grow a business above a family scale where every employee was inherently trustworthy you know it enabled you to do things like hire people scale to multiple outlets and have some some level of ability to keep honest people on it other context in the technology field that we're familiar with regarding redundancy or wifi you know these days most wifi devices unless you buy the very cheapest one utilize multiple simultaneous channels for redundancy so that if somebody walks in front of this antenna on this side of my laptop there's a signal coming out the other one and it does cost extra money but as witnessed by this deluxe wireless access point in many contexts people consider it worth it and spend the extra money so what else can we do there is something that takes place in the context of bitcoin bitcoin is a modern method of creating an electronic form of money with supported transactions and blockchain is effectively a distributed database that maintains multiple ledgers concurrently and these things are cryptographically hashed to detect or prevent tampering they compute checksum on the first transaction abut it to the next one abut it to the one after that and it builds a chain and anybody who wants to can subscribe and start keeping their own ledger to these blockchains and I don't know what details in the back but these chains of cryptographic checksumming would mean that in order to corrupt these systems you would have to not only break into this transaction chain but as many people who care to keep their own ledger and you'd have to find potentially every one of them and corrupt those as well I'm not saying it's impossible but it certainly reaches the level where most people believe that it's unlikely to be practical for anybody to take it on certainly with today's computer technology so what I'm getting at is I'd like to propose that in this internet of things these devices that collect the data should immediately fork out a funded channel to multiple destinations that hold the data and as this moves to these multiple destinations it should be blockchain what this will do is the equivalent of a dual ledger system where somebody who wanted to corrupt this data would have to take it out in most places and even if they wanted to do it if blockchain was superimposed with this anybody else who wanted to take on my contention is the minimal standard should be too but you should enable anybody else to join in this and keep their own additional ledger so there should be no restrictions on anybody who wants to spend their own money to do this to keep triple column ledgers on this stuff and I'm not saying I have all the answers here because just to say let's use blockchain that potentially is a one hour at least session on its own or maybe even a whole conference but this idea that we come up with the equivalent of a dual ledger will make this stuff resilient just like having dual engines on the aircraft are it provides a level of protection and I think ultimately the economic cost of having dual copies is either trivial or maybe not even there at all the context I'm suggesting here is that when this data goes to these public clouds potentially let's just say it goes to the Amazon cloud if it only goes to the one source in the long run when the day comes when Amazon has all of this data what's to stop them from price gouging you on access and it's not just your ability to read these one at a time I'm going to contend that when it gets there this is going to enable things people haven't dreamed of before let me just throw out a couple ideas of what you could do just with traffic sensors I think people think oh traffic sensors that would allow me to do a service like Waze or Google Maps helps people drive to work a little quicker but I would contend that if I had the vehicle speed sensors in the freeway complex that we have here in Southern California I could turn an AI on that and have it tell me the weather perhaps more reliably than the National Weather Service because you're going to be able to spot patterns you know where it's 50 degrees it's raining maybe even in some of the higher regions it gets a little icy but there are going to be repeatable patterns of people slowing down in cloverleafs to where with that traffic sensor network around you could deduce the weather well that's interesting but we already deduce the weather why do you need that well I contend you could do other things with it if I had those traffic sensors measuring every vehicle coming out of the port of Long Beach in other words the traffic the cargo containers being unloaded and the streets going into every Walmart every target I could turn an AI loose and I think that I'd get a better measure of the economy than the Department of Commerce turns out you know I don't know about you guys but I swear that I've seen some of these economic forecast predict nine of the nine of the two last recessions and they give GDP forecast but my experience as an investor is that those things can be all over the map you know the field of the field of economics often gives these reports to three significant digits but ultimately the origin of where they're coming out with these forecast are poll you know they call purchasing managers how are these things going for you well I think we can see from the last election that sometimes polling isn't reliable well if I had these road sensor networks all over LA all over the country I would contend that I could turn this into a better forecast of the current state of the economy than anything we've got today a lot of the things people will be able to do with these sensors are things you and I can't dream of but by make an open access to this data it could be that some 14 year old high school kid is going to come up with some remarkable inference based on this and I want to enable that to enable that the data has to be open but I would contend being a software engineer now with the amount of the data being as large as it is the compute capacity that analyzes this data has to be placeable close to the data if I'm going to do this in my home with my own laptop I can't be pulling the amount of data we're talking with over a wifi link down to my house every time I do a run I think this this data ultimately will reside in public clouds and these public clouds today whether it's Amazon, Google AT&T has one that most definitely IOT they also rent you analytical capacity or compute capacity and taking this back to my proposal that I want dual communication channels coming out of these things that would result in it being in two public clouds so you've got price competition if it goes into Google's cloud plus Amazon's cloud first of all it's redundant so if terrorists take out one the other one is there and it's still got the data if the proprietor of one of those clouds has a bad quarter on Wall Street and wants to engage in a little price gouging the fact that it is all that same data is available in that second cloud is going to put a clamp on that so that in a nutshell is the kinds of things I am talking about but I don't have all the ideas here you know I hope I've convinced you that this data presents an opportunity but there is also a risk and this being a technology conference I would contend that people in this room are part of the solution it isn't just me I'm not telling you all the answers I want you guys to get involved now why do I want you guys to get involved can't we just trust governments to take care of all of this well I don't think we can and the reason is as I've mentioned before I think potentially people in government have a conflict of interest you know the bad report card issue you know they might I don't want them to own the kill switch to hide bad news like what you saw in Flint Michigan in order for the administration to win the next election I think that if this stuff goes up to clouds with blockchain we won't even have to discuss those kinds of issues and anybody who would accuse a government of tampering would probably be viewed rightfully as somebody with a tinfoil hat but if it goes out like some of this stuff is today with no check summing arbitrary controls somebody more or less keeping this information in a private computer only letting the information go in the form of pre-calculated reports there are going to be allegations of tampering and there's probably going to be some tampering I think that we already have a precedent maybe not so much in the US but look at China, North Korea they pretty clearly already engage in censorship planted one side in information delivery I don't think that's right I would like the systems to be built so that it couldn't possibly ever happen here the I think there might be people who would contest the idea that there are going to be people who want to own the kill switch and one of the things they're likely to bring out in favor of the need for the kill switch is fear among greens, the enemy could use it I think it's time to call PS on that kind of stuff I mean if you go back maybe I think this audience might be at least half as old as I am but I remember the day when people in LA used these Thomas Brothers printed maps to get around before the days of Google Maps and the same thing of the enemy could use this information they could find this critical infrastructure could have been used as an argument to make Thomas Brothers maps illegal well, be it I mean, yeah there is a risk but when it came to road maps we lived with it and I would say with this type of information we could live with it again the other reason I think that you and the audience need to get involved with this is that the government has limited resources, you know technology moves really rapidly you know I coach a high school robotics team and kids get enamored sometimes kids come to this wanting to learn computer programming simply because you've heard that programmers right now are making a lot of money well my response to them is that look this field moves so rapidly that I can guarantee you that unless you like this you're not going to keep up because every 10 years things change so much that what you learned 10 years ago has been reduced almost to nothing in value and I think that the people in this room perhaps are out there more on the leading edge of some of the IT departments and government agencies to use a basketball analogy the bench strength with government IT might not go three player team and if we're getting this kind of thing started we could use that kind of thing the third reason I think that it's important to enable public involvement with this is a principle of basic fairness you know to a large extent our own personal lives have become open books to governments and corporations to an unprecedented degree I showed the quote there from Scott McNeely the founder of Sun you have zero privacy get over it the premise of the NSA has been more or less let us have access to all your data and will relieve your fear you know are these good or fair bargains well it didn't really get a choice it came about like it or not and there's nothing you can do about it but the fact is that in the current society the government already has access to a lot of your own personal information I think it's a principle of basic fairness that if the government is paying to harvest this information through sensor networks with your tax dollars that you are entitled to open trustworthy access to that data so where do we go from here I think there is a problem and that you the people in the audience are perhaps better prepared to understand these issues contribute ideas in solution I don't want these systems of the future to be built just like they were in 1990 you know we've got potential technology to do this better and if we do it better these things will improve our quality of life the productivity of our civilization if they raise the GDP we're all going to be better off so thank you I'll admit once again in 40 minutes this wasn't like a super deep dive into the technology but you know it is what it is at that point here's my contact information here's a link to the slide deck on SlideShare and if anybody has any questions good night everybody welcome to you guys so actually this is pretty cool I'm sorry man the CIO the language took off man he had a great cheese you could be making a lot of money and mine just took off that could solve all sort of budget issues so thanks everything you say really makes sense in terms of the technical details and I think as open source advocates of this conference we would all agree on everything to do with the data and the technology the other part of the open source is the community and the sort of trust within that and we have methods for that block chaining is kind of like an expansion on sort of the web of trust and all that but what if you flip what you say around like everything you say there's this cautionary tale is sort of what is used to dissuade people from using data we had all the advocates for open data from like all the big local communities and only channel guys stayed around that represent second best but the I feel like in the tech community we constantly have this thing of the conflict between the sort of technical and the human or the community and whatever commercial or just code I think it's likely that we as individuals I think one of the things that seems to be happening I mean even listening to the prior session commercial entities are getting involved with government to milk this stuff out and I'm not saying that's a bad thing because it helps build bench strength but what I don't want to see is commercial entities go there and kind of take over this data and trickle it out in little oracles that they choose to on a pay-per-view basis you know with essentially ownership of the data in exchange for putting this infrastructure in place and I think people like us at scale need to keep an eye out for those kinds of one sided transactions for taking place but it needs to go to these dual sources that will compete with each other and I think it would be helpful because putting this stuff out there is going to cost money and potentially there are going to be commercial entities that offer to subsidize this and subsidize it in ways where effectively they're usurping the data itself you know I don't want this stuff to be kind of going through the equivalent of money laundering except that this is data laundering of realm into the private realm just because these guys put up the seed capitol kind of got free access ways to public property put the sensors in place and then take over ownership of the valuable data you know I really think that things like that analogy I gave of using road sensors to deduce the state of the economy well I think investment banks might be able to make a lot of money off that instead of publishing the forecast of GDP out to the public they engage in commodity future trading or stock market trading in their own back rules there might easily be enough profit in that to justify them putting in place the sensor networks but we as the public won't get to take advantage of that this might not be an open data question but what about the security of IoT devices on that scale well security of these things now like I've got a lot of these whole automation things and I would contend that a lot of these consumer rich things right now have security worse than things made in the 1990s simply because I don't think the typical buyer has any appreciation for being able to tell the difference and there might have been entities that put things out that were a little more secure but they were put out of business by the guy who had a few pennies out of the price and found that the public couldn't appreciate the distinction when it comes to industrial control security you know outside the consumer realm having been involved in that industry I think a lot of that legacy stuff predated the internet and was inherently designed in a way that was appropriate for a world where the internet didn't exist where somebody too conscious of way is able to get in there and tamper with it I don't think that answers your question about security of IoT give me a follow up maybe whether I for security of IoT security let me just give you a slide security cameras the recent attacks we had I noticed that security is sometimes always an afterthought with these things and I guess that's kind of what I thought you were going to address in this talk when you talked about IoT devices in like this sort of thing because I went to DEF CON last year and that was one of the talks that they gave where these two guys were able to hack into this bike thing and they were able to get some free bikes and go around town even still is an afterthought and there are so many different devices out there made by different vendors that I don't think it's fair to say they're all horrible and none of them have two seconds of thought put into security but there are a lot of them that are like that as an engineer I'd say that what I'd like to say but I'd like to hear other people's opinions as well I think on a lot of these sensor reporting things I would make them unidirectional so that they're really capable of reaching out on their own and publishing their data on some public cloud that is able to have enough network and compute horsepower to reject denial of service attacks and if these little IoT devices really are only emit only they only publish data they don't even support logging in or anything like that that eliminates a lot of the potential problem and I think I might go a step further is saying that let's just not even make some updatable because anytime you allow them to replace their firmware on their own hackers can tamper with that if you made them write once devices where there simply isn't a way back in there and they are set to permanently transfer their sensor readings out to two different destinations I think they could be made pretty resilient if you are going to support remote updates of the firmware on these devices I think there might be an argument for requiring physical proximity to do that that disables the ability to do that over the network connection and make somebody utilize physical access to the device in order to pull that off but you know I don't know that you need to come up with legislative standards that go in great detail as to how you build these just broad principles that they should go to two different destinations that have their communications checks on them while they are going to vote I think we will make these vastly more tamper resistant than what you got out there today and I think part of the problem is that a lot of the people potentially acquiring these don't even know what to ask for or that they should ask for things like this if they realize that they want they want to order 10,000 road sensors it might not even occur to them that there be a security aspect there and that you might have some options and I hate to see the guy who just chooses the vendor based on being two cents lower than the next guy I think I heard you say that you would like other input on that and I think it's only appropriate that at scale we could mention another way to make things more secure is to make them open source and to prefer things that are open source and so when you're a part of a government making a purchasing decision if you are going to buy one of these devices if you prefer someone who's either actually using open source in their code or supporting open source I think that's a great way forward I'm talking about the data that's in flight from your sensor to the remote master collector what is your opinion of clear text versus encrypted well if it's going to be open anyway I don't you know there's two issues if you check someone it can't be if it is tampered with or corrupted just because of hardware fault it will be detected if it's ultimately going to be deemed open I don't see any reason to interpret it any more questions? so thank you so much for coming to scale again this is a volunteer community event so if you see something I think this could be a community event as well as mine and fellows and Steve and Lawrence back there so thank you so much again we'll try to make it a big group by asking the captain to go to the house