 Good morning everyone. It is such an honor to be here. My name is Michelle Lamonte and I'm a vice president at the Partnership for Public Service. We are a DC based non-partisan nonprofit and we're all about building a more effective federal government and a stronger democracy for the American people. And if you have not heard of us you should check us out because we have opportunities for your students. So including with Irwin and the new directorate tip. But we are here today to talk about partnering with government and you've already heard from three federal superstars this morning. So no pressure on this panel. We've already had a really great intro into some of the ways that you can think about government differently partner with government. But this morning we want to talk about obviously government you know there's regulatory function with government oversight with technology but government is the biggest funder in research and government often sits at this intersection of technology and social programming. So this is something that is really critical for all of you to be thinking about and we have an amazing panel to talk about how they're partnering with government today. So there are five of you so I'm gonna ask you all to briefly introduce yourself and talk about what aspect of your work is specifically connected to this panel. And Rebecca I will start with you. Thanks so much. It's great to be here and I should say that the conversations with my fellow panelists already have shaped the work I'm going to go back and do just around the edges. Fantastic to be here. No thanks to those of you in the community who helped shut down the bar at the hotel last night though with oysters and drinks that you know who you are. Maybe we'll get on a panel the first day next time but thank you for making PIT feel like fun and feel really glamorous. It's appreciated. My work that I'm talking from and thinking out loud with you all about today is on city level collaborations, civic campus collaborations on linking data science and research and sampling in water systems by university communities right students, faculty, research fellows with water treatment services teams at the city level distribution of drinking water. I work at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor that's ground zero as many of you know in recent years for what we now think of as water crises. Flint Benton Harbor the incredibly blatant betrayal of public trust that happened there. And I will just say briefly that you know the I am an anthropologist by training I have worked a lot in water rich parts of equatorial and French West Africa so the you know I'm interested in connecting water treatment services teams and university professionals across world regions which we have done we have visited utilities in cities in Gabon and brought those teams to Michigan to look at Detroit and look at Flint because these are not problems that we in the US can teach other people how to solve. They are problems that we all share public trust, how to leverage science, how to do training and what I'll talk about today as time permits is kind of the way that we started with a naive ambition to bring better data science learning tools into these drinking water treatment teams and how we've learned that there are some very simple but very important things you need to think about first. So we'll talk a little bit more about that. We worked with flushing practices, quick show of hands. Has anyone ever seen a water hydrant that got opened to flush the water out or maybe you have seen it in do the right thing or Spike Lee's film you know there's lots of images of this right. It's a very public practice and it makes water taste better and look better to people. But here's the thing water that runs clear and tastes good isn't always safe and clean so that's the premise from which we'll start and I'll tell you more about it as time permits. Thank you. Thank you Rebekah, Santi. Sure. So I'm Santi Garcia, some of the chief information officer for the city of Boston and maybe say about 10, 12 years ago I fell in love. I graduated from engineering school at Notre Dame and political science and engineering and everybody thought I was a little bit weird for studying both and I started working with an exciting mayor that had just been elected and I fell in love with the idea that there's a promise that government could work better and that if you harness and leverage the intellectual power of the universities and the human capital that was coming from them that you could tackle really complicated problems poverty, racism, climate change. So I ended up becoming the first chief information of innovation officer for the city of South Bend working with Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Then I went to Pittsburgh working with another exciting mayor and I continue my tour of duty now in Boston with Mayor Wu and I think I see the role of cities in three areas in this space. I think cities do have a place in sponsoring research and paying for research although we don't have as deep pockets as the federal government so you need to give us discounts on overhead. Secondly, I think that cities are places of research and the data that we have, the spaces that we have access to our public servants, access to our communities. We have a place, a role to play in research and I think that we're also great places for talent to go and get some of these first experiences in government. Cities are incredibly fun because you get to work in a little bit of everything. You get to work in public safety, public health, recreation, infrastructure and I think in large agencies in the federal government during this state it's a little bit harder to feel the crushing pressure of having to solve everything at the same time but it's very fun. Thank you. Amanda. There we go. Amanda Renteria, CEO of Code for America. I too am in love with government and at all levels. So what we do at Code for America is we actually partner with governments to try and help them deliver services particularly to low income communities and to people who have been left out. The work that you might most be familiar with is we partnered with the White House and Treasury on the Child Tax Credit when it came out, making it mobile in Spanish and in English and that work really did embed some changes and ways of thinking about things now that we're doing direct file at the IRS. But we're in tax benefits, we're in social safety net, we're in criminal justice, all on the implementation side. So we believe that policies are out there and there's a whole heck of a lot of policy makers who are working on that. When it gets done we want to be the non-profit who can come in and help and partner with government to actually implement it so it truly does reach people and we believe that that is how trust is built when things actually work for everyone especially those who are most skeptical because they've been left out over time. So grateful you're working on the direct file. Excellent. Nick. Hi, I'm Nick Zingali with Cleveland State University and I see why everybody says the view is so great. It's better up here than from down there. I do a few things. I'm an associate professor at the Irving College. The students that we teach tend to go in work for government so we kind of train first line workers in government and then we also do work that studies the urban environment and the overlap of the urban environment. We've got a number of PIT related projects that are happening at the university that filter through a few of our centers. Our main center is a CSU Tech Hub which is a center that was created just about a year ago and it's an interdisciplinary center that kind of filters or serves to some degree as a front door for faculty and those outside of the university to kind of funnel their research interests. And then we have several other projects that are going on. One that is near and dear that is important is something called the CSU Human Fusions Initiative. And this I'll talk a little bit more about if we have time. But the impetus of this initiative is to look at advanced technologies and what I mean by this is hyper-advanced technologies. Not just advanced technologies that allow us to crunch data more efficiently, but these are the advanced technologies that will create a new way of how society will function and how we will interact with one another. We call this initiative Society 5.0 and we're framing it as an existential phase of society where we'll be questioning where and when and how will exist and we think this has real implications for humans but also for government at large. We're so committed to this that we created a graduate degree in it. So students now at CSU can get a graduate degree and in Cleveland area in graduate certificate, I'm sorry, in Society 5.0 and we're bringing in government people to kind of work on this particular initiative. So more to come, hopefully. Excellent. Anahora. Sure. Thank you. Thank you, Michel, and thank you to Pete UN for this opportunity. I'm Ahura Zandi, Erwin and regional planning assistant professor at San Jose State University and co-founder, co-director of a special analytics and visualization institute. In terms of partnership with government, in basically my institute, SAVI, we conduct research, we host events and professional building workshops for community in partnership with government. Our research mission is to support with data informed policy and one of the work that was very influential in California in assembly build 14 and I just don't want to. So not build 28, they were focused on digital divide and they were basically, we started the work with assembly members to build a tool for looking at the broadband access gap in assembly 30, which is right south of Silicon Valley where you would expect that there is a good broadband access, but interestingly, that was not the case. So our research mission is to help with data informed policy and in San Jose State, we also, in terms of education, we are basically a hub for carrier pipeline. We have connection with the city of San Jose for our students to go directly work in the city. We also work closely with the basically government agencies in our co-op and Capstone courses that we have. So it gives us the very great pleasure to work with the diverse student body to work with them in the co-op and Capstone courses that they get a real sense experience of the word in those courses. Thank you so much. I want to direct our first question to our university panelists. What advice do you have for your university colleagues in the audience? Why should they partner with government and what benefits has it had for your university, your students, but also the local community and Hora, I'll start with you. Sure. Well, in the case of San Jose State University, we have the grant opportunities at the university and also California State System, which they are mostly defined by the research needs that the governments have. In my case, in my field, I am an urban planning and public policy expert and a scholar, so my goal is to basically fit my research into data-informed policy. For the grant opportunities, we usually work in advance with the government to identify their research needs. Then we develop our own proposal and then we go after the grant that we have available. That helps us to do a research that we feel there is a real impact on the ground and also our students, who we hire and we train, they gain the opportunity to work directly with the basically government agency. Ultimately, they would go in those agencies, for instance, housing and community development, HCD in California. The students that they work with us on the project, they go directly to internship. There are career opportunities and I think it is a great mission that universities have to help with the workforce development and career pipeline in government agencies. That's great. Nick? I think government provides a level of knowledge, experiential knowledge that sometimes doesn't exist within the university boundaries. They're working with things on a daily basis. They have messy hands. They're solving problems and they don't have the luxury like we have within universities to sort of research at our own pace. They have pressing issues and those pressing issues have to be addressed and they have to be addressed quickly. That level of experience that they bring to the table, it's one part experience with the community, but it's another part, this passion to solve and to serve the public, which is directly there in front of them. It's not separated by layers of walls or layers of research grants or whatever it might be. I don't know what that I would call that, but it's a tone. It's a sense that they bring to the immediacy of the work. I think the other thing is being Cleveland State, we're a lot like a Boston University. It's just that our buildings aren't as nice, but we're situated in the city, right? We say this all the time, like the city's our lab. It's the place that we can do things and learn about things. Now, we've got to be careful with that, right? Because then it implies that our citizens are like our subjects, experimental subject, and we don't want that either. The panel a few days ago or the yesterday talking about equal partnerships, civil service, I think that's something we got to keep in mind along those lines. But yeah, I think government's a great partner for those and probably many other reasons. Rebecca. So I think both those answers are really fun for me to think with. I will also echo Amanda and Santi's words since they're not in this lineup for this question, which is that I mean, you should as a professor, as an educator or a learner, you could fall in love working in your own city. You could fall in love. And then, of course, the thing is you have to then build that love and build that relationship. I think it was Anne Stevens said yesterday on the partnership with private sector panel, most overnight successes are the result of like 15 years of work. And that really, really resonated with me. And the project that I'm talking about brought together something I've built as a co founder and director of an open source open access platform for sharing case studies and learning tools with a decadal engagement between our civil and environmental engineering labs, students, fellows and faculty with the city. And there was for me just enormous value in joining a relationship in formation that had had its ups and downs. We've had a one for dioxane pollution problem that has pitted people in our city against other people about whether we should be a super fund site. Oh, property values are good. I mean, there's so short answer. You could fall in love and learn to build a strong relationship. It's a very human proposition. And the other thing is like for me, this platform had become very successful and it was getting a lot of users and we were building very cool data learning features and other things that were user driven. But I had never confronted how to work where I work and live. And the thing about working in a city that is the matrix and the lab for university, the shared lab of learning, not just experimentation, is that and design is that when you're asked to scale and we have scaled, thank you, PIT for the faith in our project. We've just gotten a huge EPA grant to do this at a national scale, the kind of work we've been doing and it's just getting started and we have a consortium with UMass and UT Austin to grow the project. So starting small where you work and live and figuring out what is going to where the relationship founders and where it can be resilient makes it possible to scale in a whole different way to a national level or to the global level, which PIT is also a global field, right? So that's what I would say. I love that. Amanda, you could teach a master class on partnering with government. I want to direct this next question to you. What do you think those key components of success are and what are some of the obstacles or barriers these folks should be thinking about? You know, I think I still believe and probably why I'm in love with government is because at the end of the day it is about serving people. That is the one commonality in every single meeting we go into. Now, sometimes the barriers to them are just they don't know that when you ask a question like on your tax form, what is your race? It means that a bunch of people bounce out because they get nervous and scared, right? So we get to say, wait a second, if you change the question this way, you can make a difference here, right? All of a sudden people trust the system. And so some of it is about kind of understanding and we talk about this a lot at Code for America is what is the barrier to the change we seek, right? That key piece and then going barrier by barrier and sometimes you're totally surprised. Like sometimes it's just people didn't know it was possible. So we stir up a demo and say you can do this on this mobile app and get help someone fill out that form in instead of 70 seconds in two, right? And sometimes it's actually they need some help with that other agency over there. Hey, Code for America, can you go talk to that agency and bring in together? And maybe there's a common goal. And so I'm part of what I like to think about it is it's really the art of figuring out how to get over the barriers together and we're often just a conduit of showing what is possible in order to get over those barriers consistently in all kinds of different ways. And then when people see that you can do things differently, particularly in government when they always haven't had that opportunity to see innovation, that's the magic. That's the light in the eyes to say, wait a second, we can actually bring down our casework load because we can actually now pile things in different categories and that can help me drive through. Those moments are really the magic moments that we try and seek at Code for America. That's great. Santi, you've worked in three different cities. You've partnered with many universities. What do you think is the key component to success? I think relationships and trust. We have different incentives and the realities. A lot of the public servants are not particularly keen on innovation because we've taught them not to. We don't recognize their work. The person that changed a form ever get recognized for changing a form for simplifying a process? Never. We don't say thank you. So I think that you've created an environment where, yeah, so I think that building trust and understanding what are the incentives, what are the timelines, what are the pressures and I do think, as I said, I do think that there are people in government and in cities that should be understanding of the timelines and the importance of research. There's projects for which the benefits won't come through in decades and that's still important. So in several of the cities that I've worked, we partner and putting proposals for National Science Foundation around advanced spectrum usage and advanced wireless research. Not because it's going to give connectivity to low-income residents now, but it is the platform that gives possibilities to connect people in 20 years, maybe at a lower cost, maybe enabling things that we can't even imagine. But I think that building trust, building an understanding and I think that working in, again, monolithic, we're not monolithic organizations. There's levels of complexity in the bureaucracy and even within my department and I think that having the patience and having an attitude of humility of listening, what is it that this person is concerned about and then trying to address those concerns really makes change moves at the speed of trust and I think that that patience pays off. It's a good investment. Thank you for that. You know, with the partnerships that we work with federal agencies, we work with universities and so we often hear about the misconceptions on both sides and so I would love to hear from you all and I'll start with you, Rebecca. What do you think government often misunderstands about the work that you all are doing? That's a really tough question because I think, and I'm thinking here, I'm channeling also Jamie's keynote about the legacy of the land grant and of extension work and what that might mean for PIT because I think those are really, really interesting questions and I think they also contribute to a playing field where many people working in government or universities today grew up in a world, a kind of green revolution world where universities were the place that innovation happened and then it diffused out through extension and other modalities, you know, but the knowledge was at the university or the innovation was at the university and then it was about, we use the word translation a lot in this, in these sessions, you know, it was about translating and I think there's something really wonderful, from that keynote I took this idea of public facing engagement, having eroded in some sense recently, we need to rekindle that but I'm not sure extension is the only or the right way to think about it because it seems a bit unidirectional and we have the capabilities now, we have the social and the software capabilities to do this much more relationally, much more dialogically, much more co-creatively, that's a complicated word, it's often misused but that potential for universities to, because they change at geological time scales as this morning's panel discussed, they are stable and they do have, like what Santhe is suggesting, this capability to think on a different time scale, so I think that for federal agencies to consider the longer delay that we're working with and the possibility of truing to those land-grant legacies but redefining them a bit, it's hard for people to grasp that and it's hard for them to understand that we're trying, we're really trying from within these institutions, thanks. Nick, I'll direct the same question to you, what do you think government misunderstands about maybe technology in general or about the university programs that you all are supporting? Santhe addressed it a little bit in his response, when I think about universities working with cities, I think about it in three ways, are we teaching, are we talking, are we testing things, what's going on here, what's the relationship supposed to be and each one of those has a different dimension of where you kind of engage at the university, where you work through different things but I think more fundamentally to this and this has been brought up in this group again and again is that there are different incentives that are at play. Universities, if they're doing things right, particularly in the research labs, we're in the market of creating ideas, like that's our market, creating ideas, there's a pedagogy to that and it plays out in our teaching but that's what we're trying to do. Cities are in the market of creating service and bettering people's lives. So if you really think about that connection, there's the real opportunity, right? Ideas bridge to humans and lives and quality of life and that's kind of what we're trying to do I think with PITUN but each one of those they're channeled in different ways within those organizations and to be able to surface those in such a way where you can look at the combined effect or the synergistic effects that can come out of that can be quite a challenge. So what we figured out at Cleveland State is we have to create doorways, passageways and so creating centers and university centers where we can make those connections, we can drive those connections, we can get people connected to build those relationships that are being discussed. There's these real practical things that we can begin to work upon to try to line those incentives up a bit. Thank you. Satya, you're the lone government representative on this panel. I'm sure Mina and Deidra would have something to say about this question but what do you think people misunderstand about government? In two minutes. I'll tell you, I'm an immigrant. I worked for over 10 years in government and I had never even been able to vote in an election ever. I just became a citizen two weeks ago and I'm about to vote. So most people don't understand how government works. Most people, you know like when you buy something you read the instruction manual. How many people have read the municipal code of the city where you live in? Raise your hand. So most people don't understand how government works and we are in a pretzel world where we are subject to regulations from the state, from the federal government, national standards, international standards. It is really complicated easily and when people say we're going to fix permitting and licensing you're like okay are you going to solve everything? What anyone would ever intend to do and build on how it's regulated? That's a little aspirational. So I think that part of the friction in the context of these conversations, both government and academia have different natural cycles, right? The academic cycle when your students semesters make sense. So if we have a project that you want students to work on, the project needs to be about six months. It'll take a few weeks to get the students on board and then the students will go on and never think about this problem ever again. If you want a longer term research engagement, it's not a student project that you need. You need sponsored research. You need post doc. You need a PhD. Statement cities. Our mayoral terms are four years. If it's going to take more than four years, we're thinking about it a little bit differently. We have seasonality. We have, in the spring, weeds grow quickly. There's a lot of extra trash when it gets warm. In the winter, there's snow. So just like, I think that learning to understand the rhythm of the government agency, learning to understand what their own rhythms and bureaucracy that exist in universities, and whenever we find the right harmony, that's when good stuff happens. That's great. So we've talked about universities and we've talked about government. But the other really key stakeholder here is the communities that you all serve. And so how do we make sure they get a seat at the table? Their input is taken into account for these projects. I see you all shaking your heads. This is what it's all about. So that's how I want to end. My questions hopefully have time to take one from the audience. But how do we make sure your community stakeholders seat at the table? Ahura, I want to start with you. This is a perfect question. Particularly in my case, in the research that basically I had the support from PTON, we have it usually the general answer is usually depends on our research methods. In my case, I had an expert panel that was composed of 12 different experts from local government, community members, NGOs that they were participating in a process that's called Delphi Technique. When we want to operationalize something that is very basically subjective to translate it to something very objective. So in the cases that I've worked with the Delphi Technique with the expert panel, there are a couple of focus group interviews and surveys that we collect information from them and we try to bring the whole panel to a consensus on a topic that we are working on. In other cases, most of my work has advisory committee and a stakeholder's committee and that helps to have the input from them through the frequent meeting whether it's quarterly whether it's monthly meetings that we have. And interestingly, many of the pressing challenges policies in the US are actually there existing at the global scale as well. For instance, my work was focused on digital equity, right? So digital equity and digital divide in the US is a pressing challenge because we've seen the urban areas only five percent unconnected to broadband but when we go to rural areas it's more than 30 percent. So there is a big rural urban disparities but the same thing exists at the global scale global south has more than 40, less than 50 percent connected to to broadband but in the global north we have more than 90 percent. So the challenges are existing and the community members they could be at different scale. They could be local, they could be global and that could help with the project. Amanda, your perspective on this question. Co-design, co-iterate, co-study with the people you're trying to serve. Number one, number two, have folks with lived experience. At Code for America we have a lot of folks who came from poverty and who are on these programs and they immediately tell you when you ask this question my family stopped answering, right? And we continue to do that. We continue even as every single week. We actually have a client voice. Sometimes the client voices thank you and sometimes the client voices. This took way too long and I don't have time. My kids are screaming in the background and so never forgetting what you are serving and putting that at the center of it throughout the process and ongoing has helped to serve. Make sure that we are serving who we say we're serving. Rebecca, what she said. I mean, oh my gosh. And iterate is the one I would stop on because like I said we have the technology so we can make, we have in our project work made asynchronous opportunities for people. Not just the community that is at health risk if the water isn't clean but also the community of practitioners who work to maintain clean water and who have a lot of skill and knowledge. Circuit riders, you know and a lot of our water street level water workers have a high school education at best and this is something I really think PIT like when I hear us talking about opportunities for students. We're talking about college students. Vocational spaces matter so much to the way we co-iterate and when circuit riders do get asked their opinion on our training modules, their first words out of their mouths are often like thank you so much for asking because a previous generation of university work came out with tools for them to use not questions about whether the tools were even looking like something useful. And that is really wonderful. We're in this kind of I think new era where we have the capability to co-create, to co-iterate and people are busy so we have to let it be you know it can't always be a white draped table on a long afternoon. It just can't. They have to be able to do it while they're folding laundry. There has to be audio involved or maybe it has to be multimodal. We can do this. We can do this. We are out of time. I apologize for not being able to take a question but I found this conversation to be so rich just to appreciate all of you. Thank you for your service.