 as a cyberspace officer. Thank you Major Ronald. Next we have Chris Conway. Chris Conway is the director of city services for the city of Montgomery, having spent 15 years with the city. He's worked in everything from transportation to public works to neighborhood services, but my favorite tidbit about Chris is the fact that he's a college football referee and he's actually refereed for the Clemson Tigers so I like him a little bit more. But he's also an announcer for Auburn basketball. Thank you Chris. And last but certainly not least is Laura McClendon. She's the vice president, strategic initiatives and federal affairs with the Montgomery area chamber of commerce. She spearheads everything from economic strategy for technology and innovation, but she also does a host of other special projects. But Laura has a wealth of experience and federal affairs and from her time working on the hills she brings the wealth of knowledge and policy and government affairs. She also happens to be a USC grad, but we still love her. Please. Now that you know a little bit about our panelists, let's talk a little bit about what we want to get into today. Montgomery was recently awarded a smart city readiness challenge award winner and what that means is we've been recognized as an area that's really taking initiatives to push their city forward. It's huge for us because now it gives us not only a stamp and some credibility to some of the initiatives that we've already been doing, but it opens many doors for a lot that we can do and that we want to do within our community to not only improve our diverse economy, but also to improve our educational systems and then also use technology to improve everything that we're doing across the city. So a couple of questions I want to start off with and I'll start with you major Brian. Can you give me an example of a project that you may be working on now or have worked on in the past that will be considered smart? Most obvious answer right now is the Maxwell Air Force, can you hear me in the back? Maxwell Air Force Base is involved in Enterprise IT as a service so we're working with a lot of commercial partners right now to better streamline the technologies they're bringing on and bringing network services to the Air Force on Maxwell and on Gunter Air Force which is a great example. How about you Chris? Yeah so the city of Montgomery I'm forced to use with the city of Montgomery so we've tried to apply technology to our sanitation service. We partner with a company called Rubicon. They basically turn those trucks into roaming data centers because they drive every street Montgomery at least three times a week so why not use them as kind of an additional eye and ear for what we do in public works. We've used artificial intelligence to grade our streets through robotics another program that we've had and so through machine learning it takes kind of the human bias out of rating those streets gives us a number gives us a benchmark to go by to say okay we've got 15 million dollars worth of need we only have three million dollars to spend so how do we make those choices and so this gives us some good information to make those choices and that's been really one of the things that we were initially recognized for in terms of just being able to go out there and embrace innovative technology to see how that might apply to some mundane things that you wouldn't necessarily think about. How about for you Laura? Yeah so as Cherise mentioned I work at the Chamber here in Montgomery and one of the things that's definitely important to us and hopefully that you've had a good experience with while you've been here is kind of the user experience with our city and our community. So one of the things that we've done specifically as an organization is work with several partners throughout our community to provide a free public Wi-Fi system in downtown Montgomery. I've done a couple things I mean obviously that provides kind of an added amenity for the end user that's walking through our downtown area but we're also kind of testing some things that might be helpful to us like using it as a platform to reach additional visitors just this week we're actually through a simple glide app that uses Google Sheets we've actually put a system in place that allows people to directly engage with us once they connect to that free public Wi-Fi system they can either submit a direct inquiry or they can actually reach directly out to our staff members that's a test that's certainly something that has only been up and operational for about 36 hours but hopefully we'll learn some things off of that and then we're also kind of using some some data that we're getting off the access points to understand where some of the the traffic flows are you know our how much connectivity are people using in certain locations versus how many connections do we get in another location so as we continue to look at downtown as an area that we sort of refer to as a living lab what can we learn as an economic development agency a business association but also an organization responsible for that visitor experience here at Montgomery so Laura and Chris you both mentioned the living lab and you mentioned some other initiatives that have been deployed locally in Montgomery last week we actually held a smart city workshop anything that you would say that you really learned from that workshop that you can actually deploy and or implement as you're executing what you'd like to do from a smart city aspect well I think we learned a lot of things from the workshop we definitely had a good forum to have stakeholders in a room not just from our local community but some additional stakeholders from across the state in the region from the living lab perspective I think one thing that that we learned in our session was who your end user is I think it's about identifying problems and then deploying solutions we kind of got a little bit of criticism for what we meant by living lab I think in the beginning stages it was big organizations trying to deploy solutions to learn something about a solution they're already providing or a solution they want to provide I think feedback we learned is that that end user you know is it that organization or is it the individual citizen and so I think we really learned we have to maybe target different solutions to different audiences and get feedback in a more streamlined way so I mean that's that's what we did kind of that's what we kind of learned from our feedback in our individual session I think it's more just who are you trying to serve with a solution and how are you getting how are you getting to that end result I think that was probably the biggest takeaway for me yeah I think that was the same thing for the city of Montgomery because when we try to put a solution out there say our open data portal or any of those types of things that we have out there on our website or on an app that we might be trying to think of we're just trying to take a best guess most of the time in terms of what people might want to see and so what we did kind of learn from sitting around the table with the stakeholders and the end users is to really get a hold of what it is they actually want it turns out it's much simpler than we thought so the information that we put out there is you know it's it's a ton of information and they really only want small pieces of it so I think that's you know what we learn is that we have a lot of information and we certainly want it to be transparent and open to everybody but sometimes it can be a little bit overwhelming and so we need to simplify that to some extent and then they can kind of ask questions as they go thank you another question and this is for you major problem as we look at military installations that are in given cities and the communities around them other than enterprise IT as a service what are other areas where you can see we can leverage what's happening inside the gate so what's happening outside the gate so back in 2017 we restarted it was the first one that we have had since 2010 and then we're planning for the one that's coming up in 2020 so in 2017 we were able to use facial recognition technology partnered with AT&T we were able to mostly use it in that case for an accurate crowd count I can see that being leveraged a lot with the city and facial recognition potentially with the police forces as well as if there's any any other partnerships that are going on potentially even someday being able to use it at some of the gates so as we have installation access knowing that we can trust the technology in the future to to have gate access would be certainly a manpower savings and then like I said partnering with the city potentially in the future another thing that we talked about is in 2018 the base used a partnership with IBM to use drone technology to fly over our airfields and map some of the runways and identify where we needed construction crews to go out and that was a lot of manpower savings to look at that imagery as opposed to sending people out and and identifying every step of the runway so partnering with some of the things that the city is doing to look at their streets and their technologies is definitely a potential savings of a potential area that we can can cross over thank you so now that we've talked about some of that crossover from a public private partnership what would you say are some of the biggest barriers to actually putting a project in motion being able to implement that Laura I'll let you tackle that one first yeah well funding I mean funding and expertise are always your two biggest barriers so I mean for an organization our size you know we're we're kind of a small non-profit I mean we're not small but when you look at something as big as the Air Force we're small so you know looking at how do we leverage the staff that we have the expertise that we have to go out and do some creative things and innovate when it may not be something that's our core business or it may not be something that's exactly our primary mission but it's something we see as furthering that mission and how do we kind of align our staff and the expertise we have on hand to go and do some of these things that may get us somewhere down the road but in the immediate day-to-day it doesn't seem to totally be clear what that immediate benefit is going to be so I think um I think you have to kind of figure out all right how are we going to take these incremental approaches to solving some of our big challenges or going after initiatives that are going to get us information that we might not have gotten if we didn't take that chance um but you know we don't really have this robust you know IT department in-house that knows about you know AI or knows how to architect IoT or you know any of that stuff so when you're looking outside of your organization and I could see this being something the Air Force might struggle with too to some degree is you know where do you get that expertise how do you trust the solution how do you accurately accurately vet um kind of who's bringing that solution to the table and then um how do you fund it and so we've gotten creative with partnerships and kind of leveraging resources from various different organizations that can bring different pieces of this to the table and uh we haven't really done a lot of pilot projects but I know that the three of us have talked about the use of pilot projects and I know earlier in um the AFITC conference it might have even been I don't think it was journal homes but there was a speaker earlier in the conference that kind of looked at pilot projects so it's maybe not the best way to get to a solution but I think it is a way for organizations to at least try some things and then learn okay what do we need to look out for when we do this again or how do we need to kind of adjust our approach on this so funding and um expertise and um I'll say expertise on the technology side but also expertise even on the contracting side um some of these things look different than things that we've done as an organization in the past so how do we pivot as an organization to support some of these things that just look totally different than what we've done before same question Chris uh probably the barrier that we have is you know we're a local government so we have a built-in bureaucracy in terms of how you how quickly you can make a decision and where when you're talking about uh technology and uh smart initiatives and those sorts of things the technology is moving so rapidly that if you take you know too long to make that decision then you may have missed out or you may have not gotten the backbone of the infrastructure that you needed at that time so uh just kind of strategically working through that and that's really what the smart city readiness uh challenge was all about for us uh was really setting a roadmap forward in terms of what we needed to have in place to be able to react to some of these things that are changing uh because uh you know what we do today is probably going to be significantly different than what we do a year and a half from now so we just need to be prepared for that all right now you spoke about some of the challenges uh that you have to overcome in order to put a project in motion major brawn i think we could say that the air force has taken some strides in being able to overcome some of their usual challenges that they have in implementing projects they move the needle forward but where else do you have to go in order to really be able to implement some of the things that you all are trying to do so the the really great thing i think about maxill air force bases that our leadership team for the last few years has been willing to take some risks in areas that other bases and other air force and military installations haven't been able to or haven't been willing to so um so like i said we're we were willing to bring in atn t and ibm and try out some projects i think that's the right way ahead you know there is our pilots the correct way to to go about doing things it's tough to say we certainly have our our own bureaucratic challenges within the air force and the federal government as well um being able to try some of those things and taking some risk initially um acknowledging it and then and learning from that can still be challenging so i think that's the place that we really need to to look to overcome those things and that how do we how do we learn fast and fail fast and then spread those lessons worldwide so we have 108 installations in the air force so if there are things that we can try here um and then we need to roll back and then try again and do it the right way that's one of the reasons enterprise it as a service is coming here to to max well because we were able to to leverage some of those lessons learned um roll backwards and then roll forwards and spread those to the rest of the air force as we as we move out so that's probably the biggest challenge um is funding in different ways and then taking what we do on one small installation and then spreading that around the world thank you so the city and chamber and then our military community here has always had a strong partnership in being able to not only execute several events but also executing several initiatives as we look upon what we're doing from a smart community and smart city standpoint what would you say where would you say we are from a collaboration standpoint and i'll let you take that chris uh so i've been involved with you know some p4 initiatives with the air i think in terms of where the city sits and where the air force sits in terms of being willing to collaborate you know we've put all of those people together uh in the disciplines that that that mesh together and so uh i think that's been a really good thing for the city of Montgomery and max well air force base and so just continuing that open dialogue so that you know right hand left hand right foot left foot everybody knows what's going on uh so that if there is an idea out there uh oh well that's that's something we were also working on and we can all partner with that uh i think that's been kind of the way we see it yeah or yeah i mean i agree with chris i mean chris and i have worked together extensively for the last year and um feel like we know each other well and i feel like we've got great partners in our community that are engaging on this topic it can be a little bit nebulous at times because what's the end goal so we've tried to put some structures in place that help facilitate the conversation um as chris has mentioned a couple times the the grant that we won or that the recognition that we won from the smart cities council back in april that was a result of a process that the city helped put in place formed a committee to help plan around that brought in i mean everything from our public school system to participants from the 42nd air base wing at maxville to you know the chamber and various different corporate partners and so it was a very collaborative intentional effort and i feel like to really share best practices and experiences and understand how you know we can all move forward together i think some of those things have to remain in place and so um i think we've made a lot of progress in the last year on that front and just have a really great relationship and line of communication with the city and all other entities involved thank you laura and major brawn um as we talk about collaboration from a private public partnership standpoint see it as though your only base hasn't been Montgomery and you've been in other communities and we'll continue to go on to other communities as well where do you see how the city and chamber can really play a part in that type of collaboration to not only replicate it at other installations or other communities right so so like they both mentioned i think that we're we're partnering better here in Montgomery than any other base that i have seen certainly i mean as the members of the military we are absolutely part of the community and interested in the success of all the school systems in the success of downtown we live here just like everyone else we pass through and have shorter sense of time but we're certainly interested in in good schools for our children we're interested in a safe downtown we're interested in making sure that both the city and the state and the country are set up to to move forward and and keep the leading edge wherever we go so i think that this is probably the best place that i've seen partnership for comparison my my previous duty stations are in Colorado Springs which is also a very military heavy community uh Dayton Ohio also also very heavy in the military community so there's there's just a lot of really neat collaboration that's going on here and so i look forward to taking that to wherever i go next as well thank you so now i'm going to open it up for questions now that you have an idea of kind of where we're going from a smart city and smart community standpoint what questions would you have for any of us that are here today so i'll ask one so uh you you mentioned how the military cares about education obviously that's a big issue for Montgomery so how can kind of the smart city the tech fleet piece the military player role in in helping solve that problem that's a great question so i will off the top of my head say that i know there's only one junior rotc in the Montgomery high school systems i think that that's a way that we can leverage some of the military experience um mostly junior rotc instructors are retired military but if they're willing to come here and and take their 20 plus years of experience and and bring that in the the nine through 12 grades i think that would be helpful there's a star base which is a um i may be around this in middle school but elementary middle school science technology research area that the local schools come on base it is field trips and the teachers there are exclusively doing stem things for some of the local students i think there are there are other ways that we can leverage some of those partnerships i know they brought some students from local universities on to the base recently to talk about what happens in the airfield um and flying technology um and then we also sent people down to the biscuit stadium when they had a big racket launch a few weeks ago so i think that there are things that are going on i think junior rotc is one area that i can see a lot of growth happening i know y'all have mentioned some of the the projects that they're working on in stem and in different technologies for the local high schools and i think that's something that we can continue to support and hopefully grow that support in the future yeah so one of our tracks at the um smart cities workshop that we just did last week on tuesday of last week um the focus was education and workforce and so there were several initiatives that were part of that that approach because we do understand it's a critical area in this community in particular but things like um you know spreading cyber patriot cyber patriot programs to additional schools in our area um looking at some things that we can do to continue to infuse stem but also one of the things from an infrastructure standpoint that alexa smiths who's with our public school system worked on um was access to connectivity for students who don't have access to broadband or other forms of connectivity to do their homework or do some additional um learning exercises that they may be assigned in school so we've worked with the city i believe to get some additional resources out to community centers and look at other critical locations where students can have access to some of those resources that they may not have access to otherwise um so it's a little bit of a too pronged approach it's infusing additional programs into some of the systems that don't currently have some of the programs it's utilizing um partner organizations that can provide experiences and expose students to things that they may not otherwise be exposed to and then it's an actual you know access to those connectivity that connectivity that they need basically to to do their homework and to kind of engage in a in a higher way obviously there's some institutional things that we're working on as a community as well but when you look at how can smart community play into that i think we're definitely taking a look at how that works i'm not the expert on that necessarily but there are definitely people in the community that are trying to be there great question oh um going along with what you just said i was stationed in south korea for a year and they were just ahead of the game when it came to wi-fi and um oh goodness how did you guys come up to that conclusion try to provide a free more accessible wi-fi do a focus study group because i think that's a great idea and i'm just curious about how you guys got that focus group or just came back conclusion like wi-fi you know it kind of evolved over time um very early on i mean this was probably three and a half years ago that seed got planted by just several very engaged members of our community and um i'd like to say we came up with it on our honor you know realize that that would be something that would be kind of this platform for so many other things but really it was just um we engaged a lot of different people who had ideas about how we could make Montgomery better or some of the things that were missing that could actually provide an amenity to people visiting downtown and so we really kind of listened to that feedback held on to that idea and realized okay if we do that there are several other things that we could use it for or things we could layer on top and um i just i think it was really i think we've got a community that that is engaged and that listens and um i can't tell you who actually came up with it i think it was just several different citizens that came forward so any other questions season is there a discovery process that like the three different entities share to like understand like the desires of say like airmen citizens and you know business leaders and then cross-bond to see what the you know commonalities are is there a reason that or is it just the its kind of a shared discovery process y'all are both looking at me so that's not yet we have created um what we call the smart community alliance in Montgomery and so it initially uh was several different organizations who specifically were working on particular projects that sign in the mo you and kind of created this charter of sorts that this would be the forum of collaboration between all these different entities so i think the goal would be to continue to grow that out and bring in additional partner organizations to that conversation because it's not a contractual obligation or anything like that it's it's really just really a loosely constructed forum for these conversations so far they've met quarterly the groups met quarterly and so we're actually due for another meeting but the whole planning committee around our smart city workshop that the city spearheaded kind of played that role as the forum for a while until we we did the workshop so i think that the beginnings of that are in place but it definitely needs to be um kind of flushed out more and it definitely needs to kind of grow legs to a certain degree so the the framework's there but i i don't think we're quite there yet as far as um being a well-oiled machine on that front yes if uh you mentioned that you had some resource constraints if you didn't have those resource constraints so well from the city standpoint you know when we talk about the living lab concept and just having a fully connected uh Dexter avenue and commerce street and entertainment district uh in our mind there's no reason that the entire city of Montgomery wouldn't be fully connected like she said there are you know pockets and holes that don't have the same access to certain amenities that others do and you know just if you're dreaming yeah we would love to have everybody completely connected and able to use all the technology that's out there so do you have a dream project made to run on Laura i've been rocking my brain so the mission primary mission at maxwell is air university and so having a fully dedicated access to the dot edu system without some of the air force um unique ades if you will to to some of those um educational resources i think that would be huge um putting on a gunter hat and being able to to leverage technology and and move forward at the same paces microsoft or google or amazon would be phenomenal i know that they just changed one of their models to delight the customer as you know that's their vision and and that would be amazing and so um i look at finances is one of the biggest constraints to how are we utilizing technology and making sure that everything is connected within the air force and yeah that's probably our biggest constraint and if i could if i could have it my way everything would work all the time yeah same i mean i think we're really blessed in in Montgomery to have this incredible relationship with the air force and we have these kind of two cornerstone emerging projects that are happening inside the community outside the fence line with the mgm works project and the best-been project that's coming out of the peo at gunner and so as an organization that directly tries to support and um will support those activities but also just general economic development and well-being and quality of life of our community i mean i think i'd have to echo the connectivity and the um systems working properly all the time um echo you know it may not always be our role to provide a certain solution as the chamber of commerce of course but i think just dreaming for the community writ large i think having all those things be able to interconnect so that we can better deploy resources to you know some of our education partners or some of the areas of our community that haven't been as well served for one reason or the other um but then of course our air force neighbor um that's that's the goal that's the dream is having that infrastructure in place to be able to do that affordably any others so from a parting shot standpoint you all talked about some of the challenges that you've had what you've had to overcome but you've also talked about it if you could have your dream project what would that be when you think about your most critical area for not only the organization in which you serve but the community that you're within what would you say is that number one critical area of need from where you sit in your one do you have an easier question i think that was too hard i'll jump into it and then go in so i i think more than technology relationships are what really make a community a community so using technology to create a smart city i think that's fantastic but it it's only going to be as good as the people who who are behind the scenes and how strong those relationships and those partnerships are not just between you know the team of commerce in the city and the base but all the other companies right hundai that's here getting there buy-in it's it's about all of the partnerships that happen within the community that really make it worthwhile and making it better for the future generations so it's not really a technology answer but i think it's a personality and a relationship answer no understand completely laura um probably um well expertise is is big you know we're we're kind of figuring this out um you know i see joe green from our team is sitting here and i think joe's learned more about this in the last five years anybody but you know that's not this isn't my background this isn't something that i intrinsically know so you know when you're going out and trying to get to a solution that solves a problem or that makes sense for your organization or you know that represents a risk you do have that doubt of well am i understanding this solution enough to really even know how to ask the right questions or do i really have the right people on our team that know anything about what else might be out there you know is this technology five years old and i'm just hearing about it or is this really something that makes sense to go after and use and so i think i think expertise is certainly a challenge and from everything i understand that's a challenge across the board with many different organizations of many different types in many different places i think you know human capital is huge but also you know having having people that you know have kind of are willing to experiment but also have that knowledge base i think that's a challenge i think the biggest challenge that we face uh as we deploy i'll talk about open data and information that we have is uh misinformation so we're trying to get out true information you know the correct thing you know all the all the information that we have available to us and we are just forced to basically react to an onslaught of misinformation you know because everybody out there thinks they know exactly what's going on and as soon as they tweet that as soon as they put that on facebook as soon as they do whatever now that becomes actual information that is not correct and so now how do you put that back you know how do you put that back into right how does that toothpaste get back in there because now it's out there now everybody believes something that's not true and so from our standpoint you know as much as we try to put good information out there we're just faced every day and every minute of every day with that's not true and here's what's really happening and all that sort of thing so i think from our standpoint we think oh this is great we get this information out there and people you know know the real story behind what we're doing they'll appreciate it so much and uh but their skepticism and all these other things that we have to deal with so that's probably our biggest challenge is the more information we give the more you know we actually create controversy with it thank you thank you all as we wrap up today i think everyone that really needs to realize that as a major defense community we have a wide array of mission partners here in Montgomery but we're keenly aware very aware of our need to include our military counterparts as well as how we plan for being a smart community hopefully you'll have an opportunity to really walk away with some key takeaways today on not only what Montgomery's currently doing but where we're trying to grow and build from a smart community standpoint we look forward to you not only participating with us in the future as we continue to build out and to grow those programs like Laura discussed uh TechMGM did release a glide app please stay tuned to that join and connect with us uh Stephen talked about the ability for everyone to really have an active role in how we grow a smart community that's how you do that by connecting by having the relationships and by leveraging those so stay tuned for more to come from a Montgomery smart community standpoint and we look forward to connecting with you through TechMGM thank you for coming this afternoon