 I'm Susan Crawford. I'm a soon-to-be-announced co-director of the Berkman Center, and I'm at the Harvard Kennedy School where I'm teaching a course called Solving Problems Using Technology, which is basically an open government course in concert with the Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics, and it is my great pleasure to do this, Alex. Sometimes there's a case where you have a word which matches a person. In this case, the word is indefatigable. Alex, under the Twitter handle, Digifile, for O'Reilly Media, is cornering the market on open government writing in America. I mean, there's no question. You're it. He's making sure that everybody understands what's going on in the open government movement of 2.0. He's been with O'Reilly Media for a while. He was a Boston resident between 1999 and 2009, right, and was very happy to arrive in Boston this morning. Cambridge for the last three years. Cambridge for the last three years. Graduate of Colby College. Avid, just watch him, just follow him. He loves to take pictures. He loves good food. He loves hiking. And right now he loves writing story after story after story about what's going on in open government around the world. So, Alex, you have us for about an hour, and we're very much looking forward to what you have to say. Well, thank you very much for that. And thank you very much for coming. It's a gorgeous day outside. So I know coming and sacrificing the middle of the day to come and listen to someone talk about this means you must actually want to be Harvard Stanford, they decided to be financial advisors, and then they decided to take some of the knowledge that they had from their work and grant back and to feel scrappy, to feel entrepreneurial. They knew that the Department of Labor had data specifically on 401k fees. And so they went to the Department of Labor and said, hey, do you have this stuff? And they said, no, we don't. And the legend goes they got around the desk somehow and showed them on the computer where this data lived. Found it. 50 Freedom of Information Act requests later, they started to actually get the data in digital form and then started to be able to build a business on top of it. The story didn't end there, though. White House liked to talk a lot about Bridescope and how data was creating a business. In this case, it was data that they'd liberated from the Department of Labor. Gigantic, really institutional, crazy looking place in Mass Ave in D.C. What they then did is they went to the SCC in FINRA, which are two more abstract regulatory agencies that people don't necessarily know about, but are very important to their regulator of financial advisors. And these guys actually went and said, hey, can you give us data about financial advisors? Because right now, if you want to know about your financial advisor, you have to navigate to a specific page on their websites and then hit a button, enter in the exact name and get it back and they didn't do it. So they used some automated methods that are familiar to civic hacking people to liberate that data and then put it online so it would be searchable. So the data became open and now people can Google someone's name if they're a financial advisor and find them. They made things more open. iTriage is something I ran into literally at the South by Southwest festival. They've got a guy dancing around in a suit and said, what the heck is going on here? Why is this software? And I look back at the news. Interesting, it started by two ER docs. They figured, why couldn't we combine the community health data that the Department of Health and Human Services is releasing with the data we can get from hospitals and clinics and make it easier for citizens to get information about their health conditions, their symptoms, fine local clinics, fine stuff from the palm of their hands. And lo and behold, iTriage has been downloaded five million times now and now it's been relaunched under etna's considerable number. And then this uh, that's an open source gager counter. Now the need for that became pretty clear in certain parts of the world after the tsunami last year. You could not buy one of these, which became very, very difficult. So people got together and combined open source technology, both the hardware and the software side, some creativity, some crowdsource data. And lo and behold, we're able to make our prototype device, which Savecast I think is going to be able to start offering it to people this year. So what do all these things have to do with each other? Well, they have the openness connecting to each other. When things are more open, people could do more generative things. If Jonathan Zittrain were here, I'd give him a shout out for that word. Um, so back to O'Reilly. I joined O'Reilly in March of 2010, and I'm glad to see that Andy Orham is here. He's one of my colleagues from the Cambridge office. And O'Reilly's taught me a lot about open. The editors have, or readers have, readers are constantly teaching me things, or experts have, or speakers have. Certainly my boss, Tim, has to. And Tim has really focused me on doing this thing. Finding people who are doing the work and then spreading information about it so other people can replicate it and scale it. And we've been doing this technology publishing thing for a long time. I always say, do you know any geeks? Have you seen these books on their shelves? Because believe me, in DC, the famous O'Reilly is not the one that I work for. I work for O'Reilly Media to say, oh, Fox? And I say, no, no, actually the California one. We do technology books, and then I have to do this long discussion. But we also do conferences, and we do integrated media. And we do online publishing. That's my world. I'm on the editorial side at Radar. I do analysis, reporting, video interviews. I kind of, I help make Radar into the place it is now working with my colleagues. So that's O'Reilly. This is how Tim describes what we're supposed to do. You know, we find interesting people and technologies, people who are really innovating at the edges. We try to spread their knowledge and then thereby change the world. And we've had some success with that as a company. Something I'm really proud to join myself to. It also intimidated, because the legacy is pretty good. But O'Reilly's books have been spread everywhere. Whenever I talk to people, virtually I end up running into readers. One of the most surreal experiences I've had as an O'Reilly employee was when I was working and living in Maine for a couple months. And I had to report on this open data portal that Kenya was putting up. So I started following the launch of it. And I picked people off the Twitter stream and I got in touch with them via Skype. So I was Skyping with people from Kenya, from Cady National Park. And this guy who I picked out, he knew who O'Reilly was. And so, yeah, I watch your videos on YouTube. He was a software developer who lived in Nairobi and was interested in working with Android. And he said, yeah, you know, checking out your stuff, we're learning from you. And that reminded me that there's a global conversation as a global context. So that's O'Reilly. So back to the power of open. I cribbed this directly from Creative Commons. Creative Commons knows a thing or two about open. This is a book that they published early this year. Things wanted to connect together. So when the internet popped up, I remember logging on for the first time. I think it was in 1992 through a bulletin board in like a high school computer room. And it was purely text based experience. But when I went to college a couple years later, I could suddenly go on with a web browser view source and start to make things. And my friends started to make things. And knowledge started to spread through it. And I got me excited. And then the next decade, you know, the kind of a tougher one a lot of ways, social networking, mobile phones connected this together. That got me more excited. And now I'm trying to follow what's happening in the big data world because that's shifting the context again. A lot of that's powered by open source software. That's the first open. Now, if you follow O'Reilly, you know open source is something we've been pretty big proponents of. And it's, I think, fundamentally changed the world in a lot of ways. Many of the computers that we use now are, you use open source in some way or another. The web servers that power websites use open source. And the next big thing, big data, open source is critical to, right? The amount, the, you know, petabytes of data that are being passed back and forth. The current systems for using it aren't scalable. So people are cobbling together and increasingly refining systems that are based on extremely robust tools for doing that. Not such a small, not such a small thing, slow down. And open source is also creeping into government here and there. If you're interested in seeing what an open platform for a legislature can look at, look like, look at the New York State Senate. This is a system that, with a million dollars, every single one of our legislatures could adopt. They could, they could pull it off the shelf. I've not seen the political will to do that quite yet. But it is there. And if you ever want to talk about what open source and legislation can do together, especially when you think about architecting APIs that you can then pull an iPad app on top of, right? Talk to Andrew Hoppin, who is the CIO there. And now works with, see that. This was, this is an iPad app that was built on top of the New York State Senate's platform using their API. And the, that's the codes all available online. If you want to check it out. Open mapping, big theme for this year. How many people heard that Forest Square moved open street maps? That's going to be a significant tipping point in a world where geolocation and location services are very important to more and more technology startups. The fact they're choosing to use those maps instead of Google's more expensive ones, I think it's going to be significant. That was created of Port-au-Prince, geez, two years ago. So people could create and share these maps in different ways. And you also get interesting combinations. Open source plus open mapping plus open data. And all of a sudden you can put together an Afghanistan election map that's lightweight that you can see on any device. And that's free and accessible to its people and to researchers. So I mentioned big data. There's a lot of it. Some of it is going to be useful. Some of it is not. Sometimes if you can group it together and make it into heat maps, it can become more actionable. So finding structure within the unstructured data. That's kind of the secret sauce for no matter what area it's in. In this case, we're looking at Brisbane and Australia. So this is Esri software. And what they've done is they pulled in unstructured social data to try to understand where citizens were saying there were problems. They haven't completely gone over to Ushihi. They haven't just gone with the Esri solution. They pulled the two together. And they're thereby giving people who needed to understand what was happening a little bit more of a leg up by using what citizens were telling them. And then talking about big data, the World Bank is opening itself up. If you go to data.worldbank.org, you'll find reams of data. And they're adding more and more to that space. That's actually getting pretty interesting if you look at the kind of transparency that that can bring to how aid is spent. And they're fairly serious about it. So it's going to be interesting to see how that works out. And then there's the fun combinations of these things. The open government world, which has been around as an idea since the Enlightenment, formalized in the 50s. The open data world, which is now, I think, fast expanding. It's becoming something that people pay attention to. And then government data, which government's been collecting since there's been government in the pyrus. And governments are trying interesting things. I think the British government is about to lap us on this one. They're going to release a dramatic amount of information about their health system, about their transit system, about their weather system. Because their government, a right of center government, we should mention, has decided that doing so is going to stimulate economic activity. The EU commission thinks they're going to do the same thing. They think there's a lot of money there that can be used to stimulate their economies. This is something that the current administration has advanced, but not been able to completely follow through with. For a number of reasons, we can go into later on. But this is certainly part of the story. And the reason that's part of the story is because when you release this stuff, and then you have people like civic hackers, you have programmers, you've got data journalists, they can do things with it that the government may not be able to itself. Either for a technical reason or for a cultural reason, for a regulatory reason. But it allows citizens to be generative in different ways. It allows them to bake it up into services and to mash-ups and to apps, to make businesses from it, to hold each other accountable, to hold government accountable, you name it. And there's some interesting ecosystems growing up around the world. One of my favorite is in Portland. Portland is a bastion of open things, open source and open data. They're trying to think through an open government means to them in the context of their stresses. Portland Organ is very pretty, but it has all kinds of challenges, as do many of our cities. But they have a real ecosystem of applications. Someone would say there's some redundancy, others would say there's a marketplace, some will win, some will not. But you can go to civicapps.org and see what they've been able to create working with their development community and open data. Here in Boston, there's a great story, real-time apps. The MBTA released its data, combination of public and private partnerships, a lot of companies were involved in getting it to be real-time, but now you can download an app and figure out when the next thing is. That's pretty interesting. It provides some opportunities for entrepreneurs. It also unleashed a lot of creativity in the development community that the city might not have been able to do to tap into itself without that action. And then I mentioned Aitchouyage. That was kicked off back in 2000, geez, 10 now, when Todd Park, then the CTO of Health and Human Services, now the CTO of the United States, his first day was yesterday, started to try to release health data in a way to get people to use it. We marketed it directly to developers and the companies, the institutions say, come and use our stuff. We've got lots of it. And there have been some results. Aitchouyage is a very successful one, but there's been many other since. You get other kinds of results. Who here is sort of the open 311 standard? Okay. That's a 311, if you call it as a means to report a non-emergency problem to a city. The open 311 standard in theory is a way to do that technically. If you have lots of cities that adopt the same standard, you can have the same app that reports to it. In this case, here's 311 calls mapped out in New York City. And if you haven't read the great article by Steven Johnson about what mapping 311 could tell you about the city, I highly recommend it and wired. Because it turns out that in aggregate, all of our calls that are about non-emergency things can tell us quite a bit. It's not just about, of course, our calls, right? I mean, there's complaints. There's the data that the cities themselves collect. And as more of that comes online, you get a sort of networked accountability that's both brought up by the citizens. And it's also enforced by the city itself if it releases the data itself. And here's the case where the New York City Health Department is releasing more of its inspection data. And fun things happen when you do that, especially with New York City's creative community. You can do things like this. Think about it. You use the, you know, Foursquare, you know, it's a New York City app. Let's be clear. Like, and it's still got pre-low penetration in terms of the entire world. But in a place where there's high concentration, where people really do like to check in and share their information, share where they are, talk to their friends, here's a situation where just in the course of doing something they would do anyway, data, data from the city is being pulled in by an entrepreneurial person to let them know something about the place they're in. That's leading edge. There's going to be a lot more of that. But it depends upon that whole ecosystem of open data from government, crowdsourced citizens, or crowdsourcing through citizens, and then people talking to each other. There's a problem here. When I talk about open, it's not just me. There's a lot of people talking about open. So open's a brand now. It's something you want to be. It's something that sounds good, whether it's open government, open data, open science, open access. I'll go through all the opens as we go through. But it sounds pretty good. The trouble is when you say you are and you're not. So the term I like to use that is, is, uh, f open, right? You say you are, but you're not quite. And you glom on to the idea of it, kind of, and in the same way that businesses might say that they're a green and they're not. They're green washing, now they're open washing. There's a lot of that going on. And governments do it too. I have to say PDFs are a good example of this. One of the more interesting experiences I've had in Washington is when I was invited to the open government consultation on our U.S. national plan for open government. We actually have one of those. And I went into the executive office building and I sat at a long table, not so unlike this one. And on the other end was Cass Sunstein. And Cass Sunstein sits in a wire. He used to be here at Harvard Law School. And he's in charge of regulatory affairs within the executive branch. And he said, what could we be doing better about open government? I said, well, how about actually releasing the data in, in open machine-readable format? He said, well, we did, we're, that's in the directive. And I said, yeah. But there's a ton of people in government who I'm talking, talk to. And I've been, been, have kind of responded back to me. You said, yeah, PDFs in open format. Right? We put it online. It's digital. It's open format. And I had to say, well, I, okay, great. I, I, you know, you're releasing it. And Tim Berners-Lee will give you one star for open government data if you release a PDF online. That's great. But all the people that you want to use this stuff for accountability, for transparency, for civic utility, for economic generation, they're all going to get to that PDF and go, crap. Couldn't you give me a .csv or a JSON file? I don't, I mean, I don't even need the API, although that would be nice, right? So I could write an application again. Just give, give me the data in a way I can use it and make sure it's clean. Don't give me a PDF. That's where data goes to die, as some people say. So now there's some interesting discussion going on between people who are hacking on things, the people are using it for transparency and accountability, the people who are releasing it. There's some real ruckus happening between who's doing what, where, and what they call it. And I think there's going to be a lot more foment on the digital media side. My gut is, is there. And I'll get into that in a little bit, because I think that more people, like Javan Muradi at NPR, are seeing, there's an opportunity here. It's not just to find and scrape data, not just to ask government agencies to release it, but to make it, to use Scraper Wiki, to work with citizens, to pull it all together and then combine those data sets, clean them up, and have something that's then of more value and then be able to bake it into applications and services. And there's going to be interesting ways this works out. So one of the cool things that happened in DC that probably wouldn't have happened here in lovely Massachusetts, was that when there was a snowpocalypse, my first winter down there, a little did I know that I was not escaping the wintry north, right? I moved down to DC and we had feet of snow, and then more feet of snow. It kept coming. It was really kind of surprising to everybody, not least to the city residents, because from what I gather, that was 100-year snow. Nobody had experienced that. So naturally snow removal became kind of a big deal in ways that no one anticipated. And DC government, which was then running under a fairly innovative chief technology officer, who is now the chief innovation officer for the state of Maryland, decided to do something interesting. They said, we'll put up a map of where stuff has been plowed or not, which is pretty interesting. If you know residents who say their streets haven't been plowed, they're putting in requests, they're saying what's happened, they're saying to the city this data isn't right, they're engaged with the city in their governance process, and they're feeding back to it, and they're using an online site. This is kind of a leading edge of that. What's interesting now, though, is that other cities are taking this up. Everyone knows this year was a pretty light year for snow, so some of these experiments just didn't get the work out they could have. But Chicago Shovels has an interesting situation. They actually had data that the city released about where things were plowed or not, and these guys went out and then mapped it and put video up. This is a bunch of open data hackers who's trying to start a business around open data in Chicago. So this is no longer just about the city putting up a map, it's about the city putting up data and people building stuff on top of it. Other open, open innovation. Some of this space is really interesting. This is one of the things that I'm incredibly intrigued by right now, the idea that you can get people doing distributed work to help create things with you. If you release your data, if you release your ideas, if you work with them, you can get better results. The idea's been around for a long time, the internet's changed in what's possible. Top Coder is a great example. Be able to get to a better data compression algorithm. Get to a better way of sequencing DNA. Innocentive is being able to incentivize people to help with huge problems there. And drug discovery, right? Eli Lilly has tried to work with this process. Every single gigantic industrial age institution is looking at these things and saying, wow, we have an opportunity to try to tap into the collective intelligence of a lot of experts all over the world to help them to get to hack on our problems. Some real cultural problems there and there's some real significant struggles around who owns the stuff, right? The intellectual property's not a small issue there. But that's where the trend is. So that's the idea, open innovation or crowdsourcing is another word for that, right? The idea that we try to get everyone to help work with us. And here in Level of Cambridge is a great example of that, the MIT red balloon challenge. One of my favorite things I think I've ever seen a university do is able to find DARPA's red balloons in nine hours using the combination of distributed intelligence and social media. Holy crap. Believe me, people in Washington looked at that and got really excited. People all over the world did. And so now there's that idea of citizen sourcing, right? Can we get citizens to help report things? This may be the most famous possum in the open government world now. Seriously, Jennifer Palca, who founded Code for America just gave a TED talk and you can title it a possum problems. It's a great story. Here in Boston, somebody used the Citizens Connect platform to report that there was a possum in their trash can. What do I do? And because Citizens Connect is open, everyone else can see the reports to it. Someone else in their block said, oh, there's a possum down the street, went down the street, tipped it over, possum ambled out, closed the problem, right? Solve the other person's issue. Interesting story, right? But that's something that if systems are architected in that way, is really important. In the sense that if you create systems to help connect people to one another, then they can help solve each other's problems. You don't have to look very far to see that given the context of societal issues, given the context of budgets, giving the complexity of life right now, that enabling people to help one another is something that a lot of governments and NGOs probably want to do better. And there's some context for the idea of open innovation and challenges in government, right? It goes back to the Longitude Prize or the X Prize. There's been a lot of success with that. Yes, that's the reason that the Congress passed a Compete's Act, which allowed all the agencies in the federal government to try this. It's for the reason that there's been explosion of apps contests and civic hackathons and all this foment around this country, in fact, the rest of the world, increasingly, in pockets, to try to work with lots of people to figure out how to solve for a better solution. And sometimes you get things like this. This is DARPA's next generation vehicle. The last US Chief Technology Officer bounded all around the country talking about this, how it was made by an immigrant. We came up with a better idea. I think it was a $20,000 prize. And DARPA's vehicle came from his brain, not from the drafting table of someone at Caltech. Open science, the culture of open access, of sharing your research, of sharing your data earlier on. Something that's very interesting to watch right now. There's huge cultural barriers to that and, in some cases, regulatory barriers to that. The academies, like this one, may want to hold on to this kind of information, make sure it's completely peer-reviewed before published. But my sense is that there's going to be a lot more people who are going to be opening the stuff earlier on because they want to get feedback from their peers earlier on in the process and combine their data. Trent, see what happens. The principles of open are out there to be found from opengovdata.org to opendefinition.org. And then there's the Pantone Principles as well. So this is kind of my world right now. Whether it's open-source journalism or open-government journalism or for data journalism or just journalism, right? It's kind of opened up right now. I don't have to tell this group of people that, of all people. We live in a time when we can see more about who wrote something, when they wrote something, after they'd talked to someone in what context and what everyone else wrote, than they never before in history. It's dramatically broken up the process and disrupted things in ways where I think we're still getting our heads around, although many journalists haven't gotten tired of writing about it. So this is Alan Russ Bridger's quote from The Guardian. They just advanced their version of open journalism. And it's basically saying, listen, we're not the only ones looking at something. If there's a fire, if there's an issue, if there's a crash, if there's a government problem, lots of other eyes are on it. It's on us to say that you're also looking at it and we're going to work with you in reporting out the story. And this is kind of the world we're living in with that respect. This is the set for Al Jazeera's show called The Stream. It's really interesting. And it wasn't is, I think, a show that was pitch-perfect of the moment. Run by two incredibly well-trained journalists who would interview people via Skype and in the studios from the museum, pulling in live streams from around the world. This came up while the revolution was still very much happening in Northeastern, Middle Africa, in Northeast Africa, in the Middle East, and ongoing. Would pull in social media, would incorporate all of these elements into a real-time discussion and actually really work with the audience. If you follow AJ's stream on Twitter, you can see how engaged they are. They're living in this world, even if the rest of broadcast media isn't. They understand the power of a live stream. They understand the power of a tweet. They understand the power of an engaged audience and they're using it. And then there's this other world, of data journalism. Or as they used to call it, computer-assisted reporting. And it still is called car. There are lots of people who call it car. And I've even had these wonderful, semantic arguments with people that it is car and data journalism is something else. And I say, all right, you're using the computer to report. And we just call it that. You use clear language. But the reality is that there's stuff happening here that wasn't happening before because now you've got people who are hacking on the news. They're hacking on data. They're hacking on cities. This is Nick Bilton back when he was working in the research development lab at the New York Times. And they're making the same sorts of stuff that the civic hackers are. Here's a Roach map that came out of hacks and hackers. This uses open data from the city that maps it out and shows you where the stuff is. Okay, not maybe not the most useful thing, but it's really interesting. And you can see where this sort of thing goes to. And you can see what some of the problems are here, too. So the issue is that, for good or real, a lot of people in the journalism community are still not numeric. They're just not. And I hear this from people in newsrooms. I hear it from local papers. I certainly see it and hear it. I hear it on NPR. And it says, I'm a journalist and not good at math. I've read it in political newsletters coming from outlets in D.C. There's an issue here, because these tools are more important towards the future of journalism than people, I think, realize. They are hugely sticky of when you get together data and making it together interactive. They can be used to build apps. And in the context of the newspaper industry, losing tens of thousands of jobs, it's not a small thing for open government. The Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism just released a new report yesterday and just drove home the fact that for every $1 revenue coming in for print institutions, they're losing 10 in print. There's a right-size issue right now for all of these papers. And the amount of money that they have is not going to be enough to sustain the kind of civic accountability journalism for local and state government that needs to be there. And if you look at the way that it's broken out in terms of media, the profitable local media covers sports and traffic and crime and weather. They don't really cover City Hall. They don't really do the tough stuff on the local council. They don't do the tough stuff on zoning changes. They don't do the long pieces on the contractor. That kind of work is not being supported by the local TV stations. And unless the newspapers merge their investigative people with the profit engines, we're going to have a real problem on our hands. Some efforts are being made like NPR State Impact Project. That's what they're supposed to be doing, giving journalists at the local level a platform to be able to report on their communities. But there's a real crisis here. So this guy thinks that data journalism is the future. This idea that all the data that's coming out needs to have people who can better interpret it. And I tend to believe Tim Berners-Lee in a lot of things. And this guy, David Herzog from Open Missouri, who works at the Reynolds Journalism Institute there, reminded me that it's not just about car. There's the trend that I broadly cover, the open source software world, and the agile development practices that have come out of modern design, out of modern development shops. That's all changing this intersection a lot. So people are making things that are bigger, faster, better, smaller, cheaper, which is a good combination. The New York Times put up its times machine, 70 years of New York Times archives, timesmachine.NewYorkTimes.com. Derek Willis told me it cost a few hundred bucks. It's hosted on Amazon. Fun. Clean Water Act. Not as agile, but really important. The story mattered here. They're able to map out information about where enforcement actions have been taken on the Clean Water Act all around the country. Great example of how data can inform better storytelling. And storytelling is really important in this context. We're still humans, right? Until we've got robots who are sneaking in and augmenting our knowledge about things, we're still going to want to know why this matters to me, who was involved in it, who did it, the what, when, where, why, who. But remember what I said about data being important to the future of journalism? Data sets for 75% of the overall traffic to the Texas Tribune. I think they had something like 20 million page views and three quarters of them came to their data sets. Now, this is an institution that got a lot more attention during the presidential campaign because they had all the goods on Texas Governor. And for a while, their people were really interested in the Texas Governor and they could come to their data. And then this is an institution that's nearby. Me and Washington called Homicide Watch. It's by a husband and wife team, Laura and Chris Emiko. It started as a spreadsheet. Years later, it's a platform that they're looking to license to other news organizations. And their goal is to map out every death, remember every victim and follow every case in the city. They found a lot of unreported murders and they did something that was really interesting. They looked at their search engine in bounds and found people looking for someone whose death hadn't been reported yet. They were able to use search data to inform their reporting. That's an idea that now everyone else around the world can scale and think about. And then there's this interesting intersection I mentioned, right? People are thinking themselves as different tribes, but they're actually doing very similar things. They're using the same tools. They're showing up in the same places. They're trying to get the same data. And in some cases, they come and hang out in the same spot at city camps, at conferences, at hackathons. They are learning that they're after the same sorts of things, maybe with slightly different goals. Someone wants to make an app that does civic utility stuff. Someone else wants to make an app that crowdsources someone's expense reports. There's an intersection there. So what's next? Well, this is the fun part, right? I couldn't give a talk unless I mentioned William Gibson. If it were a night talk, you all would get to drink now. So the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed. This is one of the most important things I always think about, right? Is that as cool as some of these systems are, not everyone has access to them. So as cool as they are happening in this part of the world, what are the barriers to being adopted here? Some things are clear. If you can afford it, odds are pretty good. You have a smartphone in your pocket. You may well have bought the new iPad. You probably want access to information wherever you are. You want to be able to call things. So let's just say this is an old stat, right? I think this is now, no, a relic. I think that by the end of this year, we're going to be not only past 50% smartphone penetration, we'll be going toward 60%. Because everyone who can afford one is picking them up and the Android devices are getting cheaper and cheaper and now you can pick up an iPhone that's subsidized by your carrier completely. It's not the same in other countries where carriers don't subsidize these smartphones, but the Android devices can now be had for $98 in some places. That dramatically increases the ability for many people to go online in ways they weren't able to before. Second big trend, we're all going to be living together in very big places. There are the stat that I found from IBM. They're highly invested in their Smarter Cities initiative. So believe me, they're interested in giving these stats out that there'll be at least 27 megacities of 10 million people compared to 19 today within our lifetimes. And a lot of them will be in China. Some will be in India. Maybe a couple more of them will be in this country. Certainly some of them will be in South America. But the reality is that we're becoming urbanized, which means getting a lot of this stuff right is going to be very important. Some of the systems are pretty interesting. This one uses the same sort of authentication you'd use for banking to allow citizens to get together and write a petition in Latvia. And then actually there's a accountability hook where it then would get voted upon in the legislature. This is a very wired country. It's not something that I think our current House or Senate would go for here. But it's a leading edge of where some of these things might be going towards. In Andhra Pradesh, I learned something pretty interesting when I was at the Barcelona Smarter Cities conference last year. Apparently they have an issue with people cleaning up the streets so they have a contractor do it for them. Issue those. The contractor doesn't always do it. So what they set up is a system where citizens using their smartphones could send in a picture to the city government. And then if there was an issue, the contractor was fined. And those fines actually funded the program. There's a loop there. And that more and more and more I think will become a very important part of different cities as people are able to report issues that they see right where they are and let government know about them. That goes back to open through in one. Fun things like firedepartment.mobi, an app that actually lets citizens help each other. This app is for iPhones. They're busily working away and making it work on other platforms. The idea basically though is, and as a former EMT, I like this one, you have about 10 minutes when someone has a heart attack where you can really make a difference to them. And one of the most important things that you can do is get them to an automatic electronic defibrillator, affectionately known as an AED. You've probably seen them on planes, you've seen them in airports, you've seen them in lots of public places. And the idea is basically it will zap them, right? You have to be a little bit trained, but it'll zap them, their heart back to a better rhythm. And the survival rates drastically go up when you can do this from a 10% to like 80, 85%. The issue is getting a trained person to the AED to the person has the problem. So this system which came out from the San Ramon Fire Department, the fire department did something innovative with tech, uses the 901 system and geolocation technology. The idea being here that someone says, my husband is having a heart attack, okay, where are you ma'am? They send out a pulse to everyone who's got this app, who is certified to use an AED and then gives them a map of where the nearest AED is and then where they need to go to help the person, right? So they'll find people who are nearby and say, here's the device, here's the victim. Now that, again, leading edge, right? These are faint signals we try to pick up to understand where the world might be taking us and how these things could be scaled. This is an app that I know they're hoping to scale all around the country. San Francisco is interested in it. Once San Francisco takes it up, then it creates opportunities for other big cities to do it as well. Augmented reality is always a fun one to talk about, right? The idea that you can hold up your phone, you've got a layout browser or something else that gives you information about who's been there and maybe what they've said. Now, if you're at a government institution or a media outlet or a national park, you can sort of see some of the opportunities for that to come together. Right now, I have to check in or I have to go to the Yelp page or I have to do other things. This might make it a little bit faster to show things up. And that'll lead to some interesting opportunities too. If you can browse through your local government systems with these kinds of things and mash data up into them, you might get some fun opportunities. This is a mock-up that the Sunlight Foundation did of recovery.gov data, which is not the best data in the world and this doesn't actually exist, but it gives you an idea of where things might go. And then this gets us to scary places. Because it's not going to be just the governments or media organizations, it'll be the marketers. And anyone who's looked at the fact that Google might have glasses by the end of this year, I mean, think about the fact that one of the world's largest advertising companies wants to put its glasses in front of your reality. I have an inkling that that might put us into some interesting places that won't be that unfamiliar to people who like Philip K. Dick. So that world means we'll need better browsers for it all. And one of my favorite words in this space is spying, right? The idea that there'll be trackable objects. We're living in an Internet of Things, so people can create trackable things and then move them through systems. You can understand more about how people are moving and where they're moving. The cities of trackable objects create some interesting opportunities for lots of different areas. In that context, one of the things that I'm watching really with great interest at O'Reilly is open-source hardware, not just the Arduino board, but all kinds of electronics. If you look at the work of Adafruit in New York, if you look at the SafeCast Geiger counter, right, there are opportunities for people to hack on things together and there are places where they're going to do it. They're called Maker Fairs, so O'Reilly is helping to host them and find people who like tinkering ways to learn more about it and connect to one another. Here's the map of crowd-source radiation data that was put together using lots of Geiger counters and then released a combination of the government data and citizen data, gave people a better picture about where radiation actually was after the bet. Talking about open transparency comes up a lot. Transparency is a tough word in this space. Some people will never get enough of it, some people are tired of it, other people think it's the most important thing ever. We have Brandeis gets quoted a lot in this context, famously sunlight is the best disinfectant, but there are some challenges to it. People use it as a bludgeon. They use it just against their political opponents. They use it to radically make some things transparent that perhaps should not be. The reality though, and this is something that Ellen Miller from the Sunlight Foundation, I talked to about this stuff, said she said it's not going back in many cases. People try to make systems closed again, but in many cases transparency is simply not going to be reeled back unless you absolutely knock out all the electronics in the country, unless you knock out the printing presses, unless you go back to anarchy or totalitarianism. I mean that's the famous dictator's dilemma. And you can't think of a more quintessential example that pulls all of these things together. Open data, open journalism, hacking, open government, open source, then WikiLeaks. This is the Guardian's map, putting all that data together into a form that people can get to. You can download the dataset, you can browse through, you can get context that they added to it, but they took it and they mapped out all the war logs from deaths in Iraq. So that bit though about the future being unevenly distributed, I can't think of a better picture that shows it than that. And this gives us the picture of urbanization too, all these bright dots of the Earth at night that shows us where the big cities are. You can see how lit up East Coast is and Europe is. There's an awful lot of darkness there, and there, and there, and there, but there's many people living there. So to talk about all these really interesting opportunities around the digital space, I have to always remember and keep grounded in the fact that many people do not have access to them and that one of the greatest risks that we run as we get very excited about these spaces is that you create new divides. You empower the empowered through open data that doesn't actually help out those who are least amongst us. I really believe in that, that a society is only as good in the way that it treats those least in it. If you don't think about the fact that you're just making a smartphone app as opposed to something you can access, see people can access on their mobile website or through an SMS gateway, you're doing it wrong. You have to be able to think about access for everyone. There are blind people as well, right? There are people who are hearing disabilities who may have other issues around accessibility. If you aren't designing the systems for them too, you are leaving people out. There are some interesting ways that that can be helped. I happen to like this one because it comes from here in Massachusetts. The idea being that you take real-time transit data and you just display it in LEDs. In Africa, the one idea is to do data murals. Instead of an amazing data visualization that uses cutting-edge technology and Node.js and open data and HTML5, you write up what the budget was for this last month and how it was actually spent and what's left and go through. It creates huge privacy challenges. I think that probably almost goes without saying, but you have to bring it up. Other countries will be approaching this in different ways. China's approach is not ours, right? Let vast amounts of people going online, but architect the systems they seem open, but perhaps are not. Their censorship is baked in or built in. Russia, I believe the Berkman Center's own research shows that it's actually more open to the internet than we thought it might be, but not using our technology necessarily. And then I wanted to just kind of get to this last bit because I was talking with a friend last night about this talk and about the tensions that are involved here. I got into it with open data and open washing up with PDFs around open government versus open data around this world where you've got lots of people who want to open up government, some of government who wants just to open up the parts that are comfortable. There's going to be a lot of clashes in this space between open and closed. I think it's one of the defining themes of the 21st century. Societies that are fundamentally more open create more opportunities for their citizens, for their journalists, for their advocates, for their academics, for almost every single sector. But there are risks that they run by being open. There are risks that governments run by making themselves more open. There are risks that doctors make by making health records more interoperable. There are risks that lawyers make when they are more open about their discussions or create access to their files, some of which may get them in trouble. So the tensions are there. I'm looking forward to seeing how the people at the Berkman Center continue to explore them since I think this is one of the best places for that. And that's what I got for you. Let's know again we have a blizzard, a blizzard of ideas here. Otherwise I think we can talk about it. But who wants to ask a question? Quickly. Have you, are you familiar with smart disclosure and tell me more about it? I was supposed to speak that in a couple of weeks. Okay, so smart disclosure, the best reference to start off is probably a memo that Cass Sunstein released last September and he defines what he thinks it is. But it's an idea that by releasing data that government has in a given area, often regulatory or about a given vertical, that the data itself can be used by those regulated, whether it's the industries or people, to basically correct the market a little bit. It's an interesting notion. The way that parts of government have chosen to approach it is by giving people more control of their own data. How many people have heard of the blue button? The blue button was a public-private effort made by the Department of Health and Human Services and the US federal government to allow veterans to download their personal health record. And then they extended to more veterans and now they're trying to extend it to all federal employees and the thinking is that by creating a standard by which something could be downloaded, you could allow people to have more control of their health record and also correct a wrong. In this case that you are asking veterans who may be disabled, may have significant issues around cognitive problems because they were disabled, to stop having to repeat their filling out the forms every time. So if we give you a record, you can bring it from office to office to office. That idea of a blue button has been extended elsewhere. Now there's something called a green button. This is one of the last things that Denise Chopra did, which is to basically try to do the same thing for energy data. Allow people in California, from the three biggest utility companies there, to get their data back from it, so then they could put it into things and understand more that was happening. The thinking is that if you give people more control over it, more ownership, more transparency into usage, that they'll change their behavior and it'll add more transparency to the industries themselves. Whether that happens or not, we'll see. But it's certainly something that I would watch what the Treasury Department is doing and the new CFPB very carefully. The Treasury is going to ask for the talk. Uh-huh. They're trying to convince other agencies within the government. So you've been talking to Sophie Rassman? Yes. Yeah. She's all right. Thank you. Do you want to comment a little bit about the danger of people trying to bias the system one way or the other, either by putting a false very negative report on something for competitive reasons or by suing or threatening to sue someone who, for example, posts a legitimate consumer complaining against a corporation. So this is an issue that some people with a legal background might also have some. It's both a technological issue and a legal issue. I'm not a lawyer. So it is a little intimidating to come here to the Harvard Law School. To be asked that question, I will say that if you make open systems, people will put false reports into them. And they will use them for purposes that they are not intended. If you look at what's happened recently in Hawaii, where they have a 311 system, one of their city officers just said that they're frustrated because it's being abused. People are putting in parking violations. I'm sorry. They're putting in reports of abandoned cars to the system that aren't abandoned. And what they think is going on is people are upset there's parking challenges. So they're reporting people's cars as abandoned, but they're not. So they're clogging the system with false reports. And I don't think there's any question that that will continue to be an issue. With any kind of citizen reporting, the same way you have issues with use-generated content and copyright, there's going to be significant challenges. And the people who architect the systems and moderate the systems have to keep that in mind. Sometimes that works. I mean, if you look at how the common threads at really well-moderated blogs work, that's a good example. If you look at how certain boards at Craigslist are handled, that's a good example. If you look at the sorts of really strong communities that really combine their online world with their real world, then you can find those bad actors more by the consensus of people to not put up with it. But there's no question. You cannot get rid of that if you have a fundamentally open system or even partially open system. The only way you can avoid a false report is by forcing people to go to some station in person, submit all their credentials, attest to it, do an affidavit to the DA. I mean, that's the only way you can get that side. And that's probably not scalable across society. One of the leaders of the Tor Anonymizer Open Software Project gave a talk. And one of the things he mentioned was that they were getting anonymous software patch contributions from organizations that they thought might have been foreign intelligence agencies. And those were things that they had detected. But it's a danger when you're very dependent on large communities like that for software contributions. So why was the unclear side one guy for Snow Megadon here in Cambridge last winter? And I did an experiment in activism trying to shame the city of Cambridge into not doing a better job about open data but doing a job about open data because everything is locked in silos. And while it was a popular success, it had no actual impact. I'm wondering what thoughts you have about motivating municipalities or any government into adopting open data. Cambridge does now have an app for an app where you can report unshuffled sidewalks directly from your... It's a closed API. The data isn't live. You still have... I mean, I had to make four or five four-year requests. You still have to do the same thing. The one thing it has done is that the enforcement officers no longer have to copy the request from the complaint system to the tracking system. Okay, let's get out this response and then one more question because we're running out of time. Sure. Shame. Try shame in competition. Well, that actually, I mean, is about right in the sense of the discussion around social media is actually a good example of that, right? We don't want to do that. But we don't want to talk there. And yet, if you search for a given person, given topic, given agency and show them that the conversation is happening anyway, what do you do? If you're a city and you see that there's been an issue reported on your block, what do you do? If enough citizens get together and say this is a problem, they may get together and fix it, or they may get together and keep raising their voices. A lot of the problems that exist in communities are often failures of collective action. One of the things I think it's become pretty clear about the internet can do is allow people who have similar issues to collectively act using mobile devices, using social networks, using data, using their local accountability outlet. And there's a lot of civic startups that are very interested in that. And the shame side of it is very powerful. The political side is too. I didn't mention politics very much. Part of that is because I came up north to Boston to hang out at an academic institution. I live and work in Capitol Hill. So I used to follow the Red Sox on Nessun and talk about New England sports. Now I follow the government and C-SPAN and I talk about politics. That's what I've changed up, so I didn't want to bring it up. But the political side is, I think, very clearly that. And the instigation is shame. If you can get good press from being more open than that. And also economic, I think usually economic grounds. You can save money by doing it this way by getting the problems earlier. If you gave us two big things, more, more, more, more, more things. What was your third thing? My third thing? If you had a third thing. Probably more social. More social. Speaking of more social, I think that Alex would be willing to stay after to talk to anybody who wants to talk to him. But why don't we end on time so people can go on with our lives? And thank Alex very much for that. Thank you.