 I'm thrilled to be with you today. It is my great pleasure to welcome you to this inaugural session of transformation. I am the director of the Digital Impact and Governance Initiative at New America, and I'm coming to you from the very elaborate broadcast facilities located in the Tillerman household. We are going to embark today on one of the most important journeys that any of us will ever set out on, and that is to figure out what we want our world and our institutions to look like on the other side of this crisis. We have with us some of the best people on the planet to help answer that question. We are extremely fortunate that they are spending some time taking time out of incredibly busy schedules and crisis response in many cases to think with us on this critical subject. I'm going to introduce them in just a moment, but before I do, I want to take this opportunity to introduce all of you who are joining virtually and welcome you. I have the advantage of having seen the formidable bunch. We have Secretary-General's of major international institutions. We have CEOs. We have an incredible array of talent from state, federal, and local government in the United States and around the world, and key leaders from multilateral bodies like the United Nations, the Community of Democracies, and the World Bank. We want to take this moment to create some community, because this is a time when we really need community to solve these problems. But for a variety of reasons, it's harder than it normally is to cultivate that community. So if you are willing, introduce yourself in the chat, let folks know that you're here. We hope that you'll be able to interact in the chat alongside the conversation. And we're looking forward to your input and your questions as we talk today. I want to begin with a necessary but painful acknowledgement, and that is that we are in the midst of a pretty unprecedented crisis. The death tolls that we are experiencing right now, if you look back through much of April, exceeded what we saw at the peak of the D-Day invasion during World War II. We had a dear friend that we found out last night, lost their father. We've had members of our family on ventilators. This is a disease and a crisis that is hitting many people all over the world, regardless of where you are or your circumstances. It is, for that reason, an unusual event. We don't have that many truly global crises that hit people all over the planet. And this one falls into that category. What we have seen historically is that when such an event occurs and you really do have to go back to the Second World War to find something of comparable magnitude, it tends to have a profound impact on the shape of our institutions on the other side of the event. If you look in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, we have the creation of the Bretton Woods institutions like the World Bank IMF, the United Nations System, and global architecture that really defined the way our world has operated for the last 70 or so years. We don't know what is going to happen on the other side of this crisis, but I would suggest it is almost inevitable we're going to see some big changes. And to talk through those changes, what they will be and what we should aspire to as we are thinking about what we want our world to look like, we have some of the top technologists in this country and on the planet. Beth, I'm going to start with you. And Beth was previously the deputy chief technology officer of the United States. She is currently the chief innovation officer of New Jersey. New Jersey has been a hard hit by this crisis, certainly within the US, one of the states that has had the highest caseload. But you also have responded forcefully using technology and innovation. And your team in particular has developed about a dozen platforms, I've lost count at this point, that are being used in crisis response. Tell us a little bit about whether my framing comments are accurate. Do you think this is a change? This is an event that's going to prompt big change on the other side? And to the extent that is what we're going to see, what should we hope for in those changes? And how should we utilize technology to get there? So Tamika, thank you very much for having me. And let me agree with your assessment to begin with that no matter how much we do, we should not be patting ourselves on the back. Last night I had an experience I never thought I would, which is that I attended a Zoom funeral for someone in my family who died of coronavirus. So that was quite surreal, I have to say. And we are seeing so many people suffering that there's nothing we can do that's enough to alleviate what's going on. That said, there are definitely, in the midst of flying the plane and re-engineering the plane as we try to fly it, as they say, there are some key lessons learned, I think that are beginning to emerge, at least that we're seeing from the work that we're doing. The first is definitely that the perfect is the enemy of the good. And agility, especially in moments of crisis is really crucial. We were able to execute, in many cases, a very rapid response. So for example, not just standing up an information hub around all things coronavirus, but also within 72 hours creating the first jobs hub in the nation to post now what's over 50,000 jobs in essential businesses so that those people unemployed can actually try to find some work and some response. So doing that key was repurposing technology that already existed. Key was setting up a very fluid content creation process across agencies to ensure that we had the fastest way possible to post content that was actually accessible. And I would just quickly cite a couple of other, I think important things that went on here. Key to this was also collaboration. Collaboration, first of all, across government. So right now we're working with the federal government, with the U.S. Digital Service, for example, and the State's Department of Labor and Workforce Development on fixes to the UI system. It's also about collaboration across state agencies. So working between our office, for example, and the Department of Human Services to actually make fixes to the SNAP system so that we can more easily provide food benefits to people virtually and fix what are otherwise paper-based requirements in an environment that now needs to go completely digital. It's also collaboration with the private sector. We worked with a company called Yex to stand up the information portal, covid19.nj.gov. If you take a look at that covid19.nj.gov, you'll see, and then you look at covid19.alabama.gov. Actually, I'm gonna have Jordan put up a side-by-side, Jordan, if you can help us on that. We'll come back to that. In a state of 8.5 million people, we have 5 million users for that website. So it's really been kind of an incredible effort to get those things stood up, which we couldn't have done without that collaboration. Partnership with universities has actually been key. So it's working, for example, with NYU and a variety of other universities on robust data analytical and predictive analytical responses. It's working now with the State University of New Jersey at Rutgers and its School of Public Health to stand up public tracing efforts. It's working with Princeton University to help to develop the content for these websites and edit it and rely on students and faculty from around the, it's not only the state and the country, but also around the world where we're pulling in rapid expertise. And finally, the last thing I would put on the list is also the importance of responsible and rapid data sharing. So the ability, for example, across a Department of Health, an Office of Emergency Management, the Innovation Office to be able to share common data about what is the state of our PPE? Where are the masks? Where are the ventilators? Where are they needed? You can't get things from A to B if everybody's not working off the same page, doesn't have access to the same data. It's sharing data among economic development and the Department of Labor and the Treasury Department to ensure that when we put out grants or loans for businesses or for individuals, that we're doing that in as responsive as way possible. So I think what we're seeing in terms of innovations by way of better uses of data, better uses of collaboration are things that I hope don't go backwards because we've seen really tremendous productivity as a result of those innovations today. So let me pause with that. Fantastic. Jordan, we can go ahead and take the slide down, but I want to, in turning to you, Brian, talk about this theme that Beth raised. First, one thing to get out of the way of the outset, 18F is a really unusual organization. You guys are kind of the pointy end of the spear when it comes to digital transformation for the US government. Tell us a little bit at the outset about what 18F is and what it does and your role as director of that organization. But then also I'd like you to dig in on this idea of open source and reusable code that Beth alluded to. And we saw there the side-by-side something that was built by New Jersey, a really useful platform that was creating value for their citizens was then taken and utilized by a totally different state and saved them a huge amount of work because they were able to adapt the open content that New Jersey had created and deploy it much more rapidly. 18F has been a leader in that approach to developing government technology. Tell us a little bit about what that looks like for you. All right. Thanks again for having me. Great to be here with such an impressive panel. 18F is a part of the technology transformation service within general service administration. It's about six years old. And our mission is to develop partnerships with agencies to help deliver exceptional digital experiences. Part of that is not just being, let's say, first responders to a failing system, if you will, but more so to help that organization build capacity, right? So work with them side-by-side on agile practices, the benefits of open source. And for a while we're there in the driver's seat and they're with us in the passenger and then we switch, right? So we're there really to build capacity. Right now we're working with a variety of agencies, state and local governments as well, through a discovery, right? Validating that the problem that they're trying to face is actually a problem and making sure we validate that first and then doing some experimenting and iterating and prototyping to make sure we can get them some value quickly in response to that problem, right? And actually bringing their organization and their engineers and their designers along with us as we go. In regards to the importance of open source, it's extremely critical, especially in a time like this. AT&F has had their hand in creating open source solutions for things like the college scorecard and we recently released an eligibility API for SNAP programs as well. And some of the benefits to this is that you can make a solution once and use multiple times and these APIs can integrate with a variety of different solutions no matter which one that a state or local government is utilizing. So it really allows for a good use of the taxpayer dollar, right? Rather than creating the wheel multiple times, industry partners or even these engineering organizations in these state and local governments can hit the ground running with a common foundation. So just like the great example that Beth showed between the state of New Jersey and Alabama and their common use of a platform to get COVID information out there, that's just a true example of the benefit of open source technology and code. Fantastic. Well, I'm gonna turn to Sheila in just a moment. Before I do, I wanna ask our audience to weigh in on something. As we think about open source solutions and again, both Brian and Beth gave us great examples of what these look like. We've started surveying the landscape around the world and trying to figure out what an open source government stack would entail. How could you redesign the way our institutions operate in order to give them the best possible chance at assembling the right mix of services to deliver value for citizens and frankly ensure that they can respond much more effectively to future crises. One of the things that we have seen in the case of the pandemic is that almost without exception, the governments that are doing best right now, places like South Korea, Estonia, Taiwan run their institutions on world-class digital infrastructure. And so we're interested in hearing from you in the audience what you think the priority should be for digitization as we get to the other side of this crisis and we're gonna put up a poll now. If you can take a moment and let us know what you think government should be focused on, we will come back with the results before we wrap up today, but we'll also take your input and factor it in to our planning for future discussions so we can make sure we're focusing on the right things. Jordan, while we are turning to Sheila, I'd also ask if you could share the blueprint slide that we have so that people can get an understanding of what we're talking about because it's crucial for people to think not just about a specific system, which is how we've tended to deal with these issues in government in the past, but more holistically around how different pieces fit together. How can you use identity and payments and data wallets to create a foundation for a whole suite of services that will work together more efficiently in the future? With that as backdrop, Sheila, you have one of the most challenging and fascinating portfolios of anybody I know. You work with the World Economic Forum, which is kind of the pinnacle of international bodies charged with solving really complicated multi-stakeholder challenges and getting government and the private sector and civil society to all work together on big complicated issues. What are you seeing as it relates to the use of technology to respond to this crisis, particularly around decentralized technologies like blockchain and data, which is the portfolio that you lead for the West? Thanks, Tamika, for that. Yes, we are certainly seeing an increase in the deployment of technology in a very rapid way to address this crisis. And there are a couple of things I want to talk through. One is we are really faced with a critical challenge when it comes to balancing safety and surveillance systems, privacy and thinking about some of these individual rights and how that's fitting into the need to do more active surveillance of certain populations. And in this case, this population has been dramatically expanded. There was a note someone gave to me that said that basically in the city of London, even before the pandemic, there were maybe four feet of space outside where you were not being recorded by a camera actively. I'm not sure if that's a true statistic, but it's certainly in the ballpark. In fact, I believed it. I think it says a lot right there. There's no question that's happening with more and more frequency increasingly around the world. Whether it's something like location data being shared by a phone carrier in order to effectively do location limitation for tracking trace, all these things are coming, I think a little bit too ahead. But what they're fundamentally about, I really think is data. How do we think about data in this new world? Is data as private as we ever pretended that it really was? What would it mean to kind of open up massive pools of data to governments or even to private sector players to facilitate ending this pandemic, which is something everybody wants to see happen? So in those places, we're seeing less friction than you might think because of the need for urgent response to this crisis and the concern is what the implications are over the longer term. So on that topic, if you look at the technologies that are going to get us out of this, obviously you have vaccines and antibodies and there's amazing work going on in that field. But immediately below vaccines and antibodies, it's contact tracing, it's digital identity management. It is more effective use of supply chains, as Beth mentioned. So a whole host of core digital tools that a while ago, a few months back in ancient history, would have been seen as amenities and now all of a sudden they are necessities. Are you and the West seeing a drive on the part of governments to adopt those solutions? I was having a chat with Beth a little while ago and she said, all of the self-censorship that governments normally engage in is gone when it comes to the use of these tools. What's the trajectory going to look like going forward, Sheba? You know, we certainly are seeing more interest in technology for sure. Now I would say that that was always a little bit under the surface. You know, I don't think that that is necessarily new. I think that there's just the people, those voices within governments shall we say are getting more attention now because of the need for this. And in some cases to be fair, you know, they were proven right. I think having more advanced technological solutions as you noted in certain countries, having a more robust digital infrastructure has been helpful in combating this crisis. I think we can take that as a sort of gospel at this point. And there is certainly a feeling that there's a need to catch up for those who are not in that space. Now we issued very recently out of my team a responsible deployment of blockchain toolkit focused exactly on what Beth noted on supply chains. How might a ecosystem wide blockchain tool have really facilitated all kinds of changes that we could have needed? How could we have made our supply chains more agile, more flexible, more resilient? I think there are a lot of these questions that come up. We, I will emphasize that what we do think is really important is that technology needs to be deployed very thoughtfully and that is not easy to do. It takes a careful consideration, particularly with something like a blockchain or a distributed ledger, thinking through what players ought to have what access for how long to whom. Some of these decisions are very hard to undo. And it's certainly the case that even things that may be very responsible in the short term have longer term implications, again, like I noted, and they can become these embedded default positions that really were not what we intended. But we're seeing, to answer the question, interest in certainly in blockchain and blockchain architecture, in new data architecture forms like data trusts and different ways of holding and managing data, particularly our digital identities, certainly facial recognition technology is becoming a lot of interest. And I would also add in virtual and augmented reality. I think there's a lot of interest in public education at the university level and some of those tools and how they might, if they were able to be engaged with chiefly could actually facilitate and sort of a more of an in-person feeling learning experience. So Beth, I wanna pick this up with you because one of the big challenges we find and Sheila alluded to this as well is that governments, at least in the United States, and I know you've advised other very privacy conscious governments like Germany as well, are not really equipped to share information effectively across agencies in those cases. And that is a challenge under normal circumstances. It means that a lot of people don't get access to services and benefits as easily as they should. In many cases, it can cause some pretty substantial inconvenience because we're left to fill out the same form seven or eight times, but right now it's a matter of life and death. And the fact that we are not able to share information responsibly and appropriately across government agencies is having devastating implications for not just the economy, but for lives. Do you think there's room to look at new models? Sheila was alluding to this. We have seen, for example, some countries in Germany is experimenting with this around contact tracing, but there are some even more elaborate models on the horizon where individuals own their own data and they serve as the hub for that data and they're able to share it across government agencies. So that's one way of doing these things, but what are the solutions that we have not deployed in the past that we should think about using in the future? Oh, so I think you've all mentioned a number of instruments. I mean, I think it has to start first and foremost with the cultural change that you're alluding to and I think the experience that we're having now, first in terms of more use of data and more public use of and reliance on data than ever before is a very important step in the right direction towards actually identifying the governance mechanisms and the underlying architecture that we need to do these things. So I think the fact that the public has come to demand daily doses of data in terms of the reports that leaders are displaying every day, whether it's the sad cases of deaths or hospitalizations or a number of people on ventilators, the acculturation towards predictive analytics and the understanding now of the need to predict the flattening of the curve and what's gonna happen tomorrow. I mean, I don't think we've ever seen an occasion in which people have come to rely on or realize the public benefit of data and data sharing. And I think the transformation of attitudes is gonna be extraordinarily important. Sheila's named a number of the mechanisms, whether it's now we're seeing things like what we at the governance lab called data collaboratives or public private data sharing across organizations. We've done a lot of work with the WEF actually on exactly this topic of private sector companies supplying data for public good, whether it's their predictive models, the aggregation of data across states, showing transportation and movements, showing spending patterns, all of that's coming from private companies. Also again, the sharing of data across agencies, to be able to answer questions like what's the impact of the virus on people of a given race, of a given socioeconomic status, of a given category that often requires looking across agency data sets. And people are coming up frankly with very quick and dirty ways to do some of this work. And that often involves again, another key thing which is sharing talent, not just sharing data and sharing infrastructure because to do that work and do it quickly, we would not be able to do the work in New Jersey that we're doing today. If we didn't partner with a huge team frankly of data scientists who are actually able to do that work, I should say data and social scientists who are able to do the work of looking at a whole variety of factors on a daily basis. I mean, the talent, we had some great talent in our epidemiological team, but everybody's flat out in the need for just more people and more eyeballs and looking at more models, even to come up with what the right models were in this case, that was not obvious from the get go. And we saw a lot of challenges with some of the models that in the first few days, people assumed to be the de facto model for predicting the curve didn't turn out to fit the data, didn't turn out to fit the progressions that we were seeing in the US and there was a need to develop new models. Anyway, so sharing of talent I think is as important as sharing of data and creating the infrastructure for that but the cultural change we're seeing is I'm hoping, going to put things in the right direction and has created the awareness that we all need to be working from the same playbook and to Sheila's point that we are going to have very hard conversations about the need to share data with public health authorities, especially in order to solve some of these problems. And one of, let me just wrap up my two long remarks by saying that one of the things that's getting lost in my view in a lot of this discussion about privacy is the question about, yes, we're worried about the hacking and yes, we're worried about the abuses but we also have to be looking at responsible and ethical uses by public health authorities, for example, by epidemiologists to actually do the work we need them to do and how do we actually create those protocols and develop the governance for doing that's a hard question. So Brian, I want to dig in on here and I'm hoping you can assist us in making this really granular because this is crucial. Aleem Walgy, the former CEO of the Aga Khan Foundation sent in a question and he said, what should we be applying from the Cambridge Analytica crisis and then scandal as we think about these issues? How should that guide how we think about personal data and how we balance the need for digital surveillance with personal privacy? You're in the trenches on this stuff. You're actually building solutions. Your team is doing this work in real time. What should we be worried about right now and what are you telling your teams to worry about right now so that we don't have another Cambridge Analytica crisis in a couple of months? Because I think that is a real concern for a lot of people that the data and the information that is being provided is gonna end up being misused in ways that are gonna have devastating consequences alongside the initial impacts of the virus and the economic fallout. One, that's a really tough but also a great question and something that we consider and think about often, right? I think foundational to how we operate, we really take a human-centered design and a user-centered design approach to anything that we build or any solutions or recommendations that we make and not all data privacy and data governance is created equal. So depending on the agency we're working with and the organization, really getting to know them, their needs, their mindset at the time, how much data that they're willing to share is the solution so critical that speed is like their preference over privacy or something like that. I think really taking that human-centered design approach and getting to the understanding and the needs and the concerns of the people that are actually going to be utilizing the service and the solution is key to really answering those questions. That makes good sense. Sheila, I want you to help us zoom back a little bit because you have a very global perspective and certainly Beth and Brian both deal in international realms as well, but for you, it's your bread and butter. The US, when it comes down to it, is really bad at this stuff and it's kind of painful to admit it but we are nowhere near the front of the class. What lessons are you seeing from other parts of the world that we should be applying right now both on questions of data privacy, but more broadly, what are the things that other places are getting right, that we're getting wrong, but we can fix if we make some adjustments? You know, I get asked this quite a bit by different government leaders in different countries about what are the portable lessons and I want to go back to Beth's point which is culture is such a critical component to this. Measures that were easy to implement for good or bad, but they were easy to roll out in places like China, even Taiwan, South Korea, for example, they are measures that I think we can see. The reasons why they would be very challenging with the American population. I think you're seeing a certain jurisdictions within the United States that are more, let's call it compliant or more willing to put faith in government institutions than others and this divide is historical to a large extent, right? It's nothing that we all couldn't have seen coming. So it's quite challenging to imagine how a solution that was working in another country could kind of be ported in. So I want to start with that frame and that goes not just for the United States, I think it goes for really any country taking into consideration the cultural understanding about things like privacy, about the willingness to act in a collectivist manner, I mean, just as a political philosophy are really important not to mention just the ways that people think about transit are very different, the way people think about the employer-employer relationship are quite different in different parts of the world. So when you can control for that context to the extent that it's even possible, and that's for others to weigh in on as an eye, but to the extent that you could control for that context, I do think that what we're seeing is to Beth's point also is the need to invest in talent for ongoing maintenance of systems. Because one major problem that we've seen and this is far less publicized than other successes as you might imagine is putting into place, let's say in the municipality, a great digital infrastructure, but there just is not the budget line to maintain that infrastructure. So the upgrades don't happen. This is when things like hacks often take place, not exclusively, hackers are very creative, but oftentimes it's because suddenly a budget line got cut and then the maintenance around a particular stack, element of the stack suddenly went away and the next thing you know, right? So it's thinking very long-term about how you're going to keep up whatever it is you roll out. So those are sort of two, they seem very not really responsive to your question, but I think they're so important to think about. And specifically, I would say, I think that one of the things that needs to be done immediately is thinking about this data architecture question. Immediately experimenting with things like data collaborator, data collaborators, data trusts, et cetera, because if you don't have that piece fully in place, and if you don't have the ability to securely hold, process, analyze, synthesize the data that you haven't, we'll call it a data lake for the sake of being as broad as possible, the rest of it is kind of meaningless. You can't really run a meaningful machine learning algorithm on junk data. So how are you ensuring that what's going in is accurate? What's going in is actually device sensitives. You really understand where it's coming from, and then you have the ability to hold that securely and deploy it, slice and base it the way that you need to. So everything else comes next. We're gonna come back to the data question in a moment, but I wanna pick up on something you said with both Beth and Brian. Beth, you mentioned this earlier as well. It is impossible for New Jersey to do what it needs to do with the work force that you have available. There are just too many challenges that need to be addressed. We've had a couple of really insightful questions about how you create the right partnerships and the right forms of collaboration to build these solutions, because this is a skill set that if we're honest, and all of us have at various points spent time working in and around the public sector, is not native to a lot of our public sector institutions right now. You are a master at this. How do you leverage the capabilities of civil society, universities, the private sector in order to build this stuff quickly and build it right? And is there a playbook that others can seek to emulate based on the work that you have done so far? Brian's smiling. Is that because you have the playbook? If you've got that checklist. We're gonna ping Brian on this next. So we'll be in the hot seat momentarily. So let me just pick up one quick thing to add to what Sheila said before, which is that this also requires moving everything to the cloud. So from a tech infrastructure perspective to make these governance decisions, and especially if you wanna talk about collaboration across whether it's agencies or with the private sector or whether it's with universities. If we don't have a ground source, ground source of truth and the ability then to fix those problems with the data, clean the data, be working from the same data to ensure privacy permissions and security, but also to be able to decentralize control. Public health for us, for example, is a highly localized affair. So we need to be able to work with local health departments, but we all still need to have the same data. And so the problem of legacy systems and old databases coupled with lack of talent is one of the things that impedes the collaboration that you're talking about. But to your point about collaboration, it starts of course with a willingness and the ability and willingness to say, we don't know and we don't have all the answers as we all know. And in this crisis, frankly, there's so much need that I think people have been very willing to put their hand up and say, we are thrilled for the help. So when a US digital response comes along or a US digital service or an 18F says, hey, we're here to help you, people are super eager. But I think where to the extent to which you can deem it any kind of success is having what I would call a broker, a broker. So whether it's an innovation office like ours, whether it's a new America, which often plays this role and does Shirley in work that we're doing in many ways, whether it's something like the work they've been doing in the city of San Francisco to essentially literally write the playbook for brokering and connecting the demand to the supply. It's not enough to say, hey, here's a bunch of engineers or here's a bunch of data scientists because the people on the government side have to be able to shape the demand. You have to be able to shape the project to say, these are what the milestones are. These are the deliverables that we need. This is the timeframe. And then it helps everybody on both sides of the equation. If you have somebody who essentially serves what we might just call a project management role to kind of define and scope the project in the way a good product manager product or project manager does and somebody to serve that function is extraordinarily important. And especially with academia where I wear two hats, we're wonderfully lucky that the data scientists we're working with are people who have worked with government before and understand that we need things in 24 hours, that we need things in a certain way, that we need them how to deliver and that we need the things that we're asking for as opposed to the things that will lead to the academic paper that you want to publish. And it's not self-evident for everybody because there's a lot of cultural divides to cross, a lot of vocabularies that are different. So having a broker somewhere in the middle is really important. And I think that's where in 18F, a USDS, a USDR, a New America comes in. Brian, help us a little bit to understand this translation role because this is something we encounter all the time. The communities that you need to mobilize to solve these problems speak different languages. And part of the role for an organization like yours or an organization like ours is we are oftentimes literally translating the vocabulary between different groups that want to solve the same problem but don't know how to talk to each other. Tell us how that is playing out in your experience and how do we accelerate that process going forward in a post-pandemic role? That brokerage role is key, not only from translation of language, but also from the perspective of scoping a project as well, right? Scoping and prioritizing. I actually had a virtual coffee yesterday with a colleague in the Colorado Digital Service and he spoke to about different collaborations and partnerships and one of the challenges that actually arose there is, hey, we have so many different projects that we can tackle. How do we scope them and align them to the skill sets that we have readily available is one thing. But also when you have so many volunteers, there's a key hurdle that I think also needs addressing and that's the clearance, right? There's so many folks that are interested and have the skills and the talent and the desire for that mission oriented impact in their local community, but the clearance is a hurdle for them to be able to get access to the systems that need fixing or need scaling. And by clearance to be clear, you mean security clearances. 100%, yes. Yep, so there's a couple of things that I think we can look at in this regard in terms of getting government, state and local agencies the help that they need. The thing that I've been seeing is these organizations sometimes have both, but one or the other. So either they have a great functioning HR organization where they can hire the talent that they need to address the concerns or oftentimes they might have a great acquisition shop that can scope a document and put a contract out there and get some support in. But I think what's critical on both sides is coming up with more so a modular fashion to do this rather than specifically on the acquisition side rather than a multimillion dollar contract to do a thing. How do we scale the scope down so that we can get value quicker and prioritize what the most urgent need is right now that needs to be addressed and fixed. And I think you could sort of do the same thing on an HR talent search sort of perspective, right? Rather than trying to get all of the skill sets, what are the core functional skill sets that you need right now to address your most pressing concern? And yes, I was smiling before Beth because this is something that 18F practices and we even support this on the state and local level in regards to agile acquisition so that they can get the support that they need quickly rather than taking an approach to sort of boiling the ocean and doing a multimillion dollar engagement. We often say that in these projects the technology is the easy part and the hard part is everything around the technology. How do you get the right people? How do you get the right practices in place in order to ensure that your beautiful tech platform is actually gonna do what you want it to do and help people in the way that you want it to help people? Sheila, to that end, you and your team have been hard at work and we know because we've been fortunate to help you a little bit on something called the Presidio principles that are gonna be appearing shortly that go to some of these underlying questions about how you build more responsible technology solutions and how you can create decentralized systems that are going to avoid some of the really crushing, devastating shortcomings that we have found with the two existing models that we're stuck with right now. One being kind of an authoritarian model where government has panopticon surveillance powers and can see everything. The other being kind of the vagaries of big tech where you have a single company or a handful of companies that hoover up everything for monetization purposes. And what we're finding in the context of those two paradigms is that citizens and individuals are often left by the wayside and their concerns aren't being addressed. Tell us a little bit about how you have rethought some of those challenges and what we should look to incorporate in the systems that we build going forward on the other side of the pandemic. Yeah, thanks to Micah. I'll talk a little bit first about the general work we do out of the forum in this area. And then I want to speak about city of principles and thank you for your unbelievable support of these, not small by any stretch of the imagination contributions. So the forum really looks at this exact question. How do we think about tech governance in ways that are going to lead to enhancing the positive impact on society and what policies need to accompany any sort of technical deployment to ensure that we are embedding in those practices, making those practices habits, making them defaults so that these deployments wind up mitigating risk but also accelerating benefit. And the city of principles are an instance of that. So we have a global blockchain council that has been meeting now almost for a year, actually almost exactly a year, I believe. And that is comprised of leaders such as yourself who are thinking about the use of decentralized systems from government perspective, from the protocol perspectives that we have people there working in some of the major protocols that work in Bitcoin, that work in Ethereum, that work Zcash, things like this, but also from big companies, banks and others that are considering using these technologies, whether for payments or currency or for data, for the transition of data, supply chain purposes, for example. And when we met for the first time, we were really thinking about what would be valuable output of a group like this, a group that highly opinionated people from different sectors, different countries, strongly held views on what blockchain should be for, what it should not be for, what it's capable of doing, what it's not capable of doing, views that were deliberately selected to be in conflict with each other to surface consensus, which as you know is... Make your job really easy, yeah, sure. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So pretty quickly, we had this notion of the blockchain Bill of Rights because to your point, with these emerging technologies, with opportunities that we didn't really have, we have opportunities to learn from some of the things that happened, whether deliberately or inadvertently, around that kind of shareholder extractive type of model and think a bit more about what the form calls stakeholder capitalism. How do we embed a bit more of a participatory model into some of these technologies? And of course, blockchain, for those who are familiar with it, is really almost uniquely designed for exactly that. So the principle is a layout of set of values. These are values-based document. They have 16 principles and they're oriented around four categories that I'll quickly run through because I think they're applicable even beyond blockchain deployments. Transparency and accessibility, agency and interoperability, privacy and security and accountability and governance. And in each of these four areas, we're launching them tomorrow, I should note, they're actually, we're very excited that they're finally gonna get released into the wild tomorrow. And within each of these four areas, we focused on what ought to be participant rights. What should we, if we really build in a user-centric fashion, what would that look like? They're aspirational, they're meant to kind of provide a North Star a direction for build. But we think that things like this are gonna become increasingly important to think about, to build into your design sprints, to build into your QA process if you're a technologist, to ensure that at various points in time, you are really testing against an externally set guide in a way that's gonna help you ensure that you're thinking as holistically as you ought to be about your deployment. And I'll say one last thing on this, which is that we think that the reality is that you can have a loftiest set of whatever you want, but it's individual decisions. It's a mindset and culture that every single day, it results in these decisions being made. This is why people are so concerned about bias and develop our communities and things like this implicit bias because you only really do what you know. So we are encouraging individuals, not just institutions to sign on to these principles, to remind themselves, to hold themselves accountable to ensuring they're thinking about user centered systems. They're thinking about particularly with blockchain for this particular set of principles. They're thinking about the fundamental promises of blockchain technology and ensuring that whatever they're building on top of that technology is not basically bulldozing away all those benefits in favor of a more familiar system. Well, and the idea that individuals should own their own data, control their own data, they should understand how their information is being used in systems. A lot of these are at some level really basic and things that you would assume would be kind of the norm and yet are truly revolutionary in the context of the existing platforms that we're stuck with right now. It's an exciting moment and we're eager to see the launch of the principles tomorrow. Beth and Brian, I want to pick up on some of the questions that we have heard from the participants and there are two big baskets that I'd like you to help us work on. One has to do, I think they're related with disinformation and the fact that there is a lot of noise both around coronavirus, but more broadly right now. How do we design technology systems that help us separate noise from signal and especially as it relates to government's use of technology? How do we ensure that we are guaranteeing accuracy in the information that governments are utilizing? And then the second piece of this is how do we carry that into preparations for an election in November? How do we ensure that our systems are going to be protected? What is happening right now both at the state and federal level to keep our institutions and our electoral processes safe and secure? I realize those are two challenging questions but Beth, would you be willing to start us off on this? Sure, well to the first question about disinformation or at least just coherent and consistent information. I mean, I think that gets to the point back to your first question or very early on the discussion about open technology. I think the importance of open content and content sharing is as important. In this crisis we've had to make do with technology whether or not it's open source, frankly, in the interest of time but really important has been open content and content sharing. I think establishing a process for ensuring that we have a consistent place where content is kind of collected, edited, frankly just for accessibility so that it's written not in legalese but in English and making it available to people has been really crucial. We created a project and this is the way the first project I think we did was not a thing we did initially for the state per se but a project we did with the Federation of American Scientists called ASCA Scientist which is COVID19.fas.org. That was a collaboration with FAS and a network of now easily, you know, six, 700 scientists who are helping to read, vet, fact check, research, answers to scientific questions about the virus so that there's a people have again a good source of information. We then took that ASCA Scientist feature and put it into the state's website such that if you're asking a question about your unemployment insurance or when your child's school is opening you're getting an answer from the state. If you're asking a question about whether you should take hydrochloroquine or whether you should drink bleach, you're getting an answer from Federation of American Scientists who are in a good position to answer those questions and again to do so in a way that has high quality standards and research, everything is sourced, foot noted and dated in terms of the answers. So I think it's, you know, on the one hand there's a kind of centralization that we were able to effectuate that helped us to coordinate that we were speaking with common messages because again, things were changing very fast about where are test centers and who can get tested. You don't want different information on 10 different websites and people having to go look for that. You want a centralization, but at the same time you want the bottom up benefits that come from things like crowd sourcing scientific expertise in the process. So the combination of a governance process to enable this to be decentralized I think has been really crucial and ensuring then that we push that information back out using a widget so that other people can or an API so that other people can pick up and use those same features and disseminate them through their websites. So I think that kind of open content creation process is kind of as important as the open source technology. It's, you know what we might call open source content that's equally has all the benefits of lots of eyeballs, lots of bottom up creation but some coordination as part of the process. And maybe I'll pause with that and give Brian a chance so we can come back to the voting thing. Yeah, as Brian is getting ready I'm going to ask Jordan to put up a repository that we created at New America in collaboration with a lot of your organizations that takes open content and open source solutions from all over the world that are being used by institutions to respond to the pandemic and makes them easily available, makes the code available, makes the content available so that people can share them and benefit from that process more readily. It's a great resource that hopefully some of you will be able to take advantage of. But Brian, please go ahead on disinformation and voting. Yeah, I'd say one critical piece to add on to best statements about governance and coordination and that open content strategy. I think one piece of low hanging fruit that could be a source of information and what sort of disinformation is out there is really that search analytics, right? What are people looking for? Are they searching for time and all in response to COVID? And like Beth said, are they searching for bleach? And I think that gives the subject matter experts an opportunity to really dispel or even advocate for an alternative, right? So I think looking at that search data seeing what's really on people's minds which frequently asked questions are being hit the most will allow the subject matter experts and that coordinated response to really take hold and shine light on what the truth is and the best practices. Fantastic. We are nearing the end of the hour and Jordan had put up the URL for the repository on GitHub for those of you that are looking to take advantage of that. And I should note, Brian, that the source code for the repository itself comes from 18F, so we thank you guys for that. It's been a very helpful resource. But I wanted to come back to the poll that we took at the beginning and post the results of that poll because I think they're instructive both in guiding us as we wrap up this conversation but also in shaping our discussions going forward. There's a big focus in these results on digital identity management. This is something again that in the US we don't do a very good job of. There are other countries like Estonia and increasingly even places like India that have come up with some interesting solutions imperfect but still really intriguing. There's also a huge focus on benefits. One of the most exasperating elements of the last couple of weeks has been looking at people as they're told that they need to file for unemployment using a fax machine. And the gap between our existing government processes and the tools that most people take advantage of and take for granted in their daily lives. And also a big focus as we were talking about a moment ago on voting and civic participation and tax infrastructure. I will notice for the tax geeks in the crowd we have an amazing event coming up on the 27th in partnership with the World Bank, MIT and our friends at EY looking at next generation solutions on tax. We have an array of central bankers, finance ministry folks, really, really smart folks from all over the world will be participating in that and hope that some of you will be able to join us for that. We also encourage you to use Twitter to nominate individuals and topics that you would like us to address in future conversations. I have learned a lot from this discussion. We are hoping to keep them going in the months ahead and please let us know who you would like to take part as we move forward. As we wrap up Beth, Brian and Sheila we are very grateful for again the tremendous insights that you've shared. I'd like you to hop into your time machine and move ahead somewhere between 12 to 18 months. I don't know exactly how far into the future. When some subset of us are gonna be sitting in a room full of governors and presidents and prime ministers and leaders from all over the world as they think through, how do we change things so we don't have to deal with this again? This was really awful. We don't wanna do this anymore. How do we change things so we're not gonna end up here again? What is your one piece of advice to that room? What is your one piece of advice when you are called on to speak to that audience that will help us land in a better place on the other side of this crisis? Easy question, I know that Sheila will go to you. Yeah, I had a feeling it was gonna be me first. You know, honestly, this seems so basic but public health infrastructure. There are technical components to that. There are non-technical components to that. You can't defund the public health and then be surprised when a pandemic catches fire within your borders. You can't have all those things at the same time. So investment in public health infrastructure, please is what I would say. Ryan. I'll go with investment in public services. How do we make sure that those services are able to be accessed through digital means? How do we ensure that they're scalable and who within not only federal but state and local are who is accountable for that experience? And Beth, take us home. I'll say responsible data sharing and use. That means unwavering executive support to all those prime ministers and presidents in the room for using data to govern in a more evidence-based manner and ensuring therefore that we build a cloud-first infrastructure and the governance principles but above all the culture for data sharing and data use and sharing of talent, the twin government and academic and private sectors to allow us to make use of that data in order to create the public health infrastructure that Sheila was talking about. So that means focus on data. I've been reminded of watching all of this unfold over the last couple of months of a quote from Charles Darwin who said something to the effect of that when you're looking at which species survive and thrive, it's not the most intelligent species. It's not the strongest species. It's the species that prove to be most adaptable. And I think that is going to be true for our institutions in the world that we face going forward. It's not necessarily gonna be the biggest or the strongest institutions that create the value for their citizens and endure. It's the institutions that are going to prove to be most adaptable and most effective in deploying the array of new solutions that are available to meet the needs of people around the world. The three of you are making that happen. You are helping to make our institutions more responsive, more adaptable, more effective. We are grateful for the work that you do in that regard. We are grateful to all of you who have joined us to participate in this conversation from around the world. Amelcar Bull, a former cap minister from Tunisia, just dropped a note into the chat. And she said that ultimately we need to ensure that education is part of the effort going forward. And I think conversations like this are gonna be integral to that effort. So with thanks to you, with thanks to all of our participants, we will draw to a close now, but we hope that all of you will be able to join us in the future as we continue a conversation about how our world is going to transform and how you can help transform it in the months ahead. Thank you.