 All right. Can everybody see it? Looks like it. Yes. Go ahead and get started. There you go. Perfect. Yep. All right. Hello, everybody. I am Hunter Owens, one of our two co-presenters today. I currently work for the city of Los Angeles. This is a programmer analyst for, which is a very bureaucratic way of saying of, I help and the technical lead for the city-wide data science and predictive analytics team. Hi, everyone. I'm the other part of this double act. My name is Rebecca Williams. I currently work for the White House Office of Management and Budget in the Office of the Chief Information Officer as a policy analyst. So this talk, the good, the bad, the extremely obtuse, a survey of government open data regulations and how to successfully build accountability programs in government. So we're going to start with a little bit of a double act here where we're going to go through some of these open data policies and acts that we have been involved in the implementation with or intimately familiar with, and give you the theory and the practice. Rebecca, do you want to pitch the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act? Hunter, I would love to. The Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act is basically three laws and one that solve all of our federal data problems. The first title goes over using evidence and evaluation practices at scale in government. The second title codifies the open data policy of 2013, and the third title adds a little bit more teeth to the SIPC program allowing- What's the SIPC program? Confidential Information and Statistical Efficiency Act, which was originally introduced in the E-Government Act of 2002, but let's not get into that. But it adds more to it, including a presumption of accessibility. In theory, statistical units can start accessing other government data in silos more efficiently and easily and very securely, extremely confidentially and secure for the best statistical insights. It also adds Chief Data Officers and a Chief Data Officer Council. It adds evaluation officers, statistical officials. It adds a whole suite of folks to do the work and a lot of science and evidence-based, open access-based. All right. This sounds great, but you're evaluating things in an inherently political environment. What's good, what's bad, depends on who's the political actors, obviously. Also, didn't you promise me the last time you passed the bill that all the data would be open? Isn't it supposed to be open now? You have all these Chief Data Officers, but are they funded? Do they have power? Do they have authority to go into their different agencies and get various datasets? I'm a little concerned, Rebecca. Tell me what you have. Let me pitch a local government example where we're doing real innovation work. Executive Directive 3 tells every city department to do three things. Open all the data in a machine-readable format, and appoint a open data coordinator to push data out to a centralized data repository in the city. Rebecca, I lost my double act. Did we lose your audio, Rebecca? Oh, man, yeah, we lost our audio. Maybe if she turns up her video, we can get back in. Just sent her a message. All right, this is always fun. This is going to be much better in person, as you can see. Yeah. I was just getting into it. You two are on a roll. Yeah. I really shouldn't say anything about it. I'm going to pause here momentarily, but Rebecca is trying to get back, but going into Executive Directive 3, where it stands, it's very similar. Most cities have an Executive Directive or an open data policy that they've passed like this, that basically says open up the city's data, put it on a data portal, and make it machine-readable. But they're pretty sparse. We have the presentation in the community, and I will post the link to it in the chat so you can actually read it. But it's actually only about a page deep. And in practice, we have somehow ended up with three open data portals with differing amounts of data quality, and there's really nothing about how to update the data, how to keep it at the standardized, and what data qualifies as open or not and how it intercepts with the California Public Records Act, which is our local FOIA type law. All right, so that's Executive Directive 3 in practice. We're gonna get Rebecca back at some point, I hope so. Yeah, I just re-invited her onto the screen, so she should be joining me back shortly. So get ready to jump back in. Yeah, jump back in with the data act. Yeah. I'm ready, so sorry. No problem. Different Wi-Fi. All right, I went full Jekyll and Hyde on my own open data policy and got to tell everybody about how we have three open data portals for one city. Sure, so data act, data act in theory. Data act was the first open data law ever passed in the United States. It is going to revolutionize how we follow the money for federal spending. You can start seeing exactly how tax dollars are spent, where it goes, and what the consequences of that spending. Okay, so wait, what's the unit of spending? Like every dollar has to get to counting forward. Do you have like the entire economy in this thing? Don't you have all these like crazy subcontracts in the federal government? And like, you're only capturing one step of where spending is going. I really like the focus on one particular program, but, and like data set, but like, it seems like you're only really scratching the surface of federal spending. All right, let me take you this. So we did open data at a local level, a bunch of different jurisdictions part of publishing data, but we really, we need to think about it as a statewide enterprise, like an enterprise assets catalog. So SB 272 passed about four sessions ago at the state legislative level by Bob Hertzberg. Mandates that as part of the California Public Records Act, every jurisdiction in California, from the state of California on down to the molten Miguel water district has to maintain the enterprise asset systems catalog of every single thing that collects data on our residents, all your enterprise systems, who the vendor is for it, and publish it and make it available through the CPRA process. So let me tell you, this catalog is gonna solve all of our data problems. Did the ACLU and a bunch of NGOs get together to try to find all the missing inventories because no one, there were all these missing jurisdictions that never did the inventory activity. And what are, does anyone use these inventories for anything, the ones that were done? I mean, we can't just publish them, but I guess they're supposed to be part of enterprise governance, but okay. All right. Okay. Okay, here's another specific one, Geospatial Data Act. Think of all of the waste that is going on when we are recreating maps in the federal government. There's all these GIS coordinates, different agencies are collecting them, they're making the same map in different ways. The Geospatial Data Act is going to reduce all that duplication and it's gonna standardize geospatial data across the federal governments. You'll save money, we'll have more accurate and standardized map information, it's perfect. All right, all right. Like, what's so special about Spatial Data? Like, did you even include a national address database in there and who's responsible for it in the governing agency and how everybody's supposed to use it? Did we even specify specific data sets that might be crucial to this, like flood zones? Seems overly broad still. All right, let me tell you about how we're solving problems for our constituents. California Consumer Privacy Act tells you three simple things. One, consumers own the data that they create. Two, they can see what data is collected by them by requesting it of any company of a certain size. And three, we have opt-in prohibitions against the sale of data. That sounds good. Why are we amending it already and how can people are having a hard time bringing suit under it? Like the first class action just happened, like how is this actually improving people's everyday privacy in California? All right, so that was our survey. And we kind of wanted to frame this around the question of how do you successfully build accountability programs in government? Like there's been this promise that open data will bring accountability. And hopefully through the survey, you can see that the answer to that question is a big maybe. So I think I say a lot and I think Rebecca says a lot is a good open data policy is not about data. By simply opening up the data, you will not achieve better outcomes. So if four sort of things in a checklist on how to finish up an open data policy. So the first thing you need to start with is values. What are your principles? What are your leadership? What is your buying? What is the culture? And what is the political driver of the situation? Like do not start, open data is not inherently neutral. Policy is a paper and these values need to figure out what operations and funding can be allocated. What is the accountability problem? And what constituency is this policy's values going to serve? As they always as to pull a quick tweet from Forrest Gregg, it's curious that easily accessible government data never quite has the information that you want. So without a set of values and a theory of change, your policy will inherently fail. Yeah, so not only do you need the values built in to have people that actually want to do it, but you need to be able to operationalize it. So this fundamentally becomes a problem with where legislators don't connect with folks on the ground doing the work. And also a problem due to legislative technical and expertise, but essentially a lot of these six, all the data laws are incredibly hard to operationalize in reality. So one of the ways that we've seen things, the easier to operationalize is if the scope is reduced. Hunter, can you do the next slide? Yes, this is the open data aesthetic. This is, if you actually want something to work, these are two examples. The left hand side is from Data Act implementation and the right hand side is from a USAID agency specific open data policy where they built it into their procurement and data management items. But basically saying do everything to all data sounds nice, but if it's not built in to how you actually manage things, it's incredibly difficult to do. And if you scope something at all spatial information, it's incredibly difficult to do. All right, then you need an actual use case. You need to find a constituency, constituents or efficiencies and levers of power in which you will achieve the outcomes that you want. And remember, your policy should always be tied to outcomes rather than specific data sets. A good example of this from California is the Open and Transparent Water Act, AB 1755. California, as you may know, suffering from a drought for many years, although last year we finally left drought, but this bill dates back. It turns out we had no idea where the water was going in California. So AB 1755 sets up a council of stakeholders to make sure that every ounce of water is tracked at the water aggregator level and they had to agree upon a data standard for all of them to report their data into. This is similar to the USA Spending Data Act. And then they set up a series of challenges to identify individuals and team-based to figure out where all of our water is going and identify what solutions might be possible. Part of the publication of this data led to significant changes in the state's water policy and localities. It turns out Sacramento was using way more water than almost any other city in the state unsurprisingly. That was because a lot of residents in Sacramento did not have to have a water meter. They paid a flat fee. So when we standardized the data and were able to compare how much water was being used as part of this water data challenge, which is truly another piece of government innovation aesthetics, you saw actually changes at the water agency level, Sacramento County Water Agency, reflected by this state law. So it had a really clean story of this data will be opened up, standardized, and then analyzed to change how the state uses a very specific and precious resource for us, which is water. And a thing I want to, for those of you who are ever entered government from a private sector context, efficiency is not an inherent value of government. In any private sector organization, being more efficient means you make more money. That does not necessarily act as a lever for change in government like the way you'd expect it to. All right, the last thing you need to make sure that any of these policies work. You have values, you have operations, you have use cases. The last thing is checks and balances. So various oversight mechanisms, monitoring the gains or return on investment if you want to be economic about it, and also having adjudication processes. If there's some conflict where it could go where the other, you need to have a next step on that. So next slide, Hunter. Thanks. So in terms of various oversight mechanisms, the more the better and the more flavors the better. So some examples would be you can have NGOs like the Sunlight Foundation, who used to follow up on the open data policy for the federal government. You can have government oversight mechanisms like GAO or inspectors general. You can have adjudication processes like the CCPA has or like Privacy Act and FOIA where you follow up and a judge actually says, yes, you can have that or you cannot have that. And on top of sort of these folks measuring from the outside, making sure that government itself is showing dashboards, government loves dashboards, showing progress, making sure that someone is following up. Something that I've seen in the federal space a lot is a law will get passed and then that member of Congress will no longer be in Congress and no one follows up on it. So even if constituents cared about it, if that Congress member is no longer there, it just sort of falls by the wayside and then becomes not a priority for the executive branch to do either. So those are things you need. Go, yeah, go on Hunter. This is how to build a successful accountability program in government. Both Rebecca and I kind of deeply about the subject. I think we are about out of time, but I think we will, oh, okay. I think we can probably take one question. So I'm taking the top. How do you balance the question on values and partisanship? How do you start the values conversation while staying away from partisanship? You want to start, Rebecca? There's like a couple of ways to play it. One, I think some of these values are, they're more deeply embedded cultural norms than they are partisan issues a lot of the time. But another way to handle partisan issues is at least for a lot of the open access issues, which is what I've primarily worked on in DC, both parties are into it for different reasons. So you just sort of figure out what those reasons are. But yeah, I think a lot of the values are more deeply embedded in sort of the government workforce or the way folks think about risk and they have less to do with party. Yeah, I think that's true, but I also think one of the points I want to make is you can't and you have to figure out how to compromise and how to build a coalition and how to actually get these things passed in a way. Again, just passing the bill, as Rebecca said, the person leaves Congress or obviously we have tons of legislator and council member turnover and there's a lot of ways a lot of these things become paper tigers. If you want to build something lasting, I think you do actually have to build good electoral coalitions about this. Again, 1755 is a good example, which is the Open Transparent Water Data Act. You may think that you're gonna pit environmentalist types versus central valley farmers, but it turns out having detailed information about water costs is something that is very appealing to both environmentalists and sort of ranchers who typically line up on other sides of the issue. So I think you need to frame, if you're trying to think, how do I thread the needle here? You need to think about what will make your policy appealing to many constituencies and compromise with that rather than sort of saying, this is value positive. You actually need to sell it. Yeah, thank you very much for the presentation and I actually want to also thank you for trying to do something so interactive and fun and debate format virtually. It's like very ambitious, so. We tried, we should have practiced a couple of times. No, I think it was great. It is such a crazy maze of legislation and so maybe the technical problems are part of also the illustrative of the craziness of the whole process as well. So yeah, one comment that did come in was about posting your slides. So I just remind you and other speakers that we want to make sure that all the slides are posted to Zinodo and people were looking for the links that were on your slides. So I think there's a lot of follow up people can do on the way you're exploring the different legislation maze. So thank you very much. We really appreciate it and we're going to move on. So thank you.