 Well, thank you for all coming so soon after lunch. I'm Andrew Hoppin. I'm with New Amsterdam Ideas. We're called ourselves the Open Civic Platforms Company. Basically what that means is we help governments and nonprofit or civic organizations to implement open software solutions, most notably Drupal. We're part of a consortium of other organizations, many of them nonprofit, who are also focused on so-called civic technology, many of which you've probably heard of, Open Knowledge Foundation, Code for America, Open Plans, and a number of others. And so we really feel like we're part of this really vibrant civic tech community movement right now, which is really exciting for us. In particular today, we're going to talk about two Drupal distributions that we've built to help not only contribute to civic technology work for our customers, governments, but also to help to make the civic technology development process more efficient and more systematized itself. So it's a little bit meta what we're going to talk about today. To give you some context and some background, I'm going to just give you a really brief history from our perspective of civic tech platforms, or as we like to call it, in trying to make governments work like the web. The web works very well, and we want to take some lessons learned from why it works so well and apply those to making our governments work better. So what do I mean by that? Well, the architecture of the web is based on open standards, right? And that's one of the reasons we think that it works so well, and it really serves as a platform to build on, as we all know. And our open civic hypothesis, if you will, is that when you combine open standards, open source software, community collaboration, and open data, that you have created a foundation for civic innovation, which can drive better software to make our governments work better, and hopefully at lower cost as well. And in a nutshell, that's what we're up to. The US federal government spends about $180 billion on technology every year, just the US federal government alone. Meanwhile, getting better, thankfully, today in the US, but starting in 2008, more or less, we hit a real economic crisis in the US. And of course, that continues to ripple through a lot of the world. So there's an imperative to not improve government simply by throwing more money at the problem, but actually to do government technology more efficiently. And there's a huge cost baseline that we're working from. And at the same time, of course, when we're in economic tough times, government services are needed more than ever. Tough economic times are really when people and communities rely on government services for help, most of all. So better government, less money doing it. I'm going to give you three different examples of how we've seen civic tech to help to make a dent in some of these problems. A lot in the US has happened out of the White House's leadership. As you heard yesterday from Macon Phillips on video and in the Drees note, President Obama issued the Open Government Directive in his first month in office in January of 2009. And that really has been led to a lot of opening up of government data ever since. And of course, it was done through a Drupal website, WhiteHouse.gov. Our team was doing, at the same time, starting in 2009, something very analogous in a very local backwater of government, the New York State Senate. And we rolled out a brand new Drupal site for NYSenate.gov, which we like to think sort of set a new standard for openness, transparency, and ability to participate in legislatures, the bodies that make laws at the state level in the US. And then we actually collaborated with the White House, and that kind of collaboration goes on today between local, state, and federal government around Drupal specifically. We're actually sharing code on Drupal.org and leveraging off of each other's work so we don't have to pay twice to build the same government-specific functionality on top of Drupal. Another example more recently, as you heard in the Drees note yesterday, as well, is the White House We the People site, or the White House Petition site, which has helped us create a new way that US citizens can get involved in petitioning their government for change, or at least for answers, on things that are important to them. And this has now been turned into a distribution on Drupal.org, so that other governments can now take it and make use of it at very low marginal costs to re-implement it for themselves. We've helped the White House with that by creating a white-label theme to go on top of that distribution so that you don't have to strip out the White House branding and everything when you take that distribution from Drupal.org. And more broadly, Drupal is really becoming the de facto content management system for governments all around the world. We've got the agave distribution in Australia, the web experience toolkit in Canada, open public distribution, which is widely adopted in the US, as well as the White House's own 44 theme, so-called, that it's going to be using across all of its White House websites. And it's about a quarter of all US federal dot-gov websites are now running Drupal. So Drupal's playing a huge role in government or civic technology, clearly. Couple of the realms that have nothing to do with Drupal, though, that I think are equally important in terms of seeing the model for how civic innovation and civic tech can work. Right here in Portland, the Trimat Agency that we've all been riding around on with our train passes all week was one of the first to open up its scheduled data. And by, because they did that, they were able to, well, they participated actually in the creation of the General Transit Feed Specification, which is why if you use Google Maps on your phone, you're able to see when your next bus or your next train is coming in most cities in the US. And that really started right here in Portland. And over time, because it was an open standard, propagated all over the US and is now literally a standard. So a really key aspect of civic innovation is open standards. And here in Portland, people did all kinds of innovative things that the city might not have thought to do or had the budget to do, but that local developers, civic hackers, if you will, decided it would be cool or useful. Like this guy put a sign in his bakery that told the patrons inside when the next bus was going to arrive outside so they could figure out when to pay their check and get up so that they could go outside to meet their bus. This is an app that would change your wake-up time. So if there are delays in the transit system, it would wake you up earlier so that you'd still get to work on time. This also propagated to New York, where an organization that I'm involved with, and plans built a system called bus time, which is now what New York City uses to help people figure out when their bus is coming in New York City. And it was built on an open modular architecture with open standards and open APIs, not at all the traditional way that New York City Department of Transit or most cities would typically build their enterprise bus management system. So it was really different and that's enabled that technology to be reused and propagated to a lot of cities very quickly. And it's also allowed, again, specific hackers to do really innovative things. Like when this data was released in New York City, somebody called up and plans and said, hey, it's great that you could use a smartphone to see when the bus is coming, but she had a future phone and she wanted to be able to text to get the schedule result. And so within 24 hours, a developer came up with that application to enable that much lower tech, lower barred entry access to that schedule information. So again, it opened up innovation. Third and final example I want to give is Open311. For those of you who don't know, this is a new standard for people reporting to their government issues. Like there's a tree down in the street, there's a pothole over here, or even any non-emergency issue is thought of as a 311 report. And there's an open standard for that called Open311 and an open API standard that is now being adopted around the country and now around the world. And that has enabled a huge burgeoning movement of application development to use that 311 data and to contribute to that 311 data in all kinds of innovative ways. And so we've got literally hundreds of apps that are based on Open311 that are being built. Most of them not being built with government tax dollars at all, but by being built by developers who are building it for their own purposes, either to create a new business or simply to contribute to their community. So in sort of 2013, hundreds of cities that are participating in the civic tech movement, thousands of apps, 10,000s of developers, hundreds of thousands of data sets have gone into this. So that's all great, sounds really good, right? But we work on a lot of these sort of backwaters of government, the places where things are still done in a very traditional way. And most civic tech projects still look like this. Big spreadsheets, 58 page requirements, documents for one single feature, 178 page RFPs, waterfall processes, expectation of proprietary licenses, et cetera. So we're still, I think, tip of the iceberg in terms of the cost savings and the efficiency benefit that civic tech innovation can possibly deliver. And that's where we're trying to contribute to. We're trying to really create a distributed innovation cycle between government itself, industry, and communities or citizens, so that innovation can happen in any of those three realms and benefit each of those other two of the three legs of the stool. And we've seen this happen historically in a way that makes us feel really good about the future. So GPS data, of course, was one of the first government data sets to be opened up and now is fundamental to so many things that we do. Weather data was another big one that has enabled weather.com to exist. And actually, I think we heard last week that weather.com is now going Drupal, which is really cool. Transit data, I already spoke about, Open311 data I spoke about, and government content management systems, content publishing I spoke about. So we're really interested in what's next. What are the next civic tech platforms that can be reinvented in this way? And we wanna make sure that when somebody comes up with a great new idea in Portland, it's more likely than not that it is actually gonna get discovered and adopted by New York or London or any other part of the world. So how do we foster that government to government technology reuse? And I'm gonna turn it over to Sheldon Rampton to talk to you about how we think that we can help the systematize that and make that more of the rule than the exception. Hi, so the OpenCivic is a distribution of Drupal. You can get it on Drupal.org right now. And it's a generalization of some work that we began doing a couple of years ago to build an application catalog. And we chose to build it in Drupal first because we're Drupal developers. But Drupal, both as software and as a community inspired a lot of what we did. The problem that we've been trying to solve, as Andrew said, is that there is a great deal of innovation happening but not enough happening to share innovation between people, so people end up reinventing the world. So there's kind of an embarrassment of riches and a difficulty in finding things. And so we were approached a couple of years ago to build a website for Civic Commons, a nonprofit organization that specializes in addressing civic issues. And the fundamental problem we were trying to address was for people to share software, they have to know that it exists. One of the inspirations for this is the experience that Apple had with its App Store. And for those who don't remember the history, it's worth remembering that when Apple first came out with the iPhone, it didn't have an App Store. The only applications on it were the apps that Apple itself shipped with the platform. And they actually had to be talked into adding an App Store and resisted it because they were afraid of security concerns. And Steve Jobs himself had to be convinced that it was a good idea to let third-party developers add apps to their precious shiny toy. And since then, the rise in the number of apps on that store and Apple's profits from selling, or from a share in selling those apps have both skyrocketed to the point that you see more people these days walking around playing with iPhones apps than you see eating McDonald's. So the goal for this apps catalog was to create a similar marketplace only for civic solutions that solve civic problems. And figuring out how to build it, we wanted to address the problems of communities and finding the right software. And we were, as I said, inspired in part by Drupal. I think the Drupal project pages are a good prototype of a way that you find software and find out what's being used. It's very helpful when you go to a project page on Drupal. You can see how many people have downloaded it and how many websites are using it. So we incorporated some of those elements into what we built, which is the app catalog for government-to-government applications reuse, originally hosted by Civic Commons and then taken over more recently by Code for America. And it's a place where you can find listings of applications, listings of, and information about how they're being used. And the model on the home page is, let's find out what's working and where. And as you can see in this slide, you can see applications listed like WordPress or SharePoint and a whole bunch of others, proprietary as well as open source. And you can also see a list of cities and other governments that are using the software. There are hundreds of apps that have been added to the marketplace in hundreds of cities. And it ranges from very generic software like Microsoft Word to some very specific things like the adopt a hydrant app, which is an application that maps the locations of fire hydrants so that after a snowstorm, volunteers can go and dig them out and have them ready in case there's a fire. So initially when we built this, we thought we were just building one website and that it would be the place where kind of every government in the world would go to catalog what they're doing by way of what software they're using and share that information with other government software users and buyers. And our vision on this began to change when we had some conversations with the World Bank, which ended up saying, initially they approached us because they wanted to organize a hackathon. And as we were talking about their requirements for that, we sort of discovered that the data architecture behind this applications catalog was pretty similar to the data architecture needed to build the hackathon website. And we realized that applications catalogs and hackathons have a fair amount in common. They're both, you know, at least for civic software, the hackathon is a place where people come together to build applications, to solve civic needs, and the catalog is a place where people go to find applications that have already been built to solve civic needs. So with that realization, the goal became to build a distribution of Drupal that could be used to spin up multiple hackathon websites, multiple applications catalogs, so that anyone now can use this to spin up a website to serve these needs in less than an hour. The application catalog part of it contains three main components, software applications, organizations, and deployments. Where an organization might be a city government, it might be a team that has built an application, it might be a vendor that provides installation and configuration services related to an organization, and then a deployment is a specific installation of that software to serve a specific purpose. So for example, whitehouse.gov is one deployment of Drupal. And by sharing these pieces of information, people can see what's being used, who's using it, you can contact the city government that's using it, ask them about their experiences, and if they say, oh, we had a terrible experience, you stay away, and if they say, it's worked out great and saved us a lot of money, then you might want to do the same thing yourself. So the hackathon website that we built with this was a sanitation hackathon sponsored by the website, you can, excuse me, sponsored by the World Bank. You can see a map here of the places around the world where this hackathon was held. This is to address problems ranging from lack of access to clean water, to one of the problem categories that is significant in the third world was public defecation, hand-washing was another problem category, and the idea of the hackathon was that first people, there was initially a phase where people who were experts in the field of sanitation would post problem statements saying, this is a problem that's affecting sanitation. After the problem phase, then people would post proposed projects to fix those problems, software projects, and then they would break into teams and work on those projects to see what they could build in the hackathon. So here's how we see this whole ecosystem fitting together, or at least initially we saw it this way, that there would be, the big applications catalog would be where you would find working applications that are actually ready for deployment. And you could find this information about applications, about organizations, and deployments for mature apps. And hackathon projects would be organized to solve some problem in some area like sanitation or domestic violence or transportation, or any of the other thousand areas where civic services are needed, and problems need to be solved. And the hackathons websites define problems and projects and teams to solve them. They have access to the applications catalog to find existing software that might address those, but they also develop new projects and new code. And a project as we are conceiving it now is essentially an application in embryo. It's a proto application, which when it becomes mature enough, gets pushed into the apps catalog and shared with everyone else. This in turn raises an interesting question that's a standards question, which is how do you share and sync content between what is now multiple websites? And this is also one of the reasons why we felt it was important to build a distribution for Drupal, because if you have multiple websites trying to sync content, it helps a lot if those websites share some similar data structures and standards for defining what is an application and it makes it a lot easier if all of the hackathon websites have a common enough definition of that that they can do a consistent job of pushing that information up to the applications catalog and then pulling applications back down. So here's another website we built with the open civic distro. We were able to build this entire website in three weeks, including theming and customization. And it was rather gratifying to realize that we could do something pretty quickly for something that is actually hosting hundreds of hackathons in the United States just in about a week and a half. So mark your calendars. One of the things that they asked us to do with this website as well was, in addition to just posting challenges to build applications, they also wanted to be able to post data sets, because as Andrew mentioned, if you have a problem like transportation in a city, having a software application by itself is a lot less powerful than having that coupled with the data about where the buses are and when they're arriving. So being able to share data sets as well as applications was something that we were asked to do for this project and that is a recurring need that we're also addressing and that Aaron is going to talk about when he comes on stage. So wrapping up, what we're trying to do with this now is a number of things, but it's raised the question in our mind of whether the application catalog, part of this, can actually improve the hackathon business model. We've talked to a number of people who've organized hackathons, and a fairly common point of frustration is that the hackathon itself tends to generate a lot of energy and enthusiasm and new ideas and a lot of great proof of concept code that then doesn't mature into fully developed applications because after the hackathon is over, people have to go back to their day jobs and they don't necessarily have the time to fully flesh out their idea. So there are a couple of components that are necessary in order to translate all these great ideas that emerge in hackathons and turn them into projects that are viable enough to really benefit a community. One of those things is investment capital to pay people to develop the prototype into a full application, and the other is a marketplace where people can find the application and use it, and so we think that OpenCivic as a platform may be able to help create that market. The other question that has come up that surprised me a little bit is how many apps catalogs do you need? When we built the Civic Commons project initially, we thought the answer was one. We thought there'll be one apps catalog. There'll be all the civic software in the world, and then for various reasons we realized that that's not really the case. First of all, there's a multilingual issue, but there are also domain specific apps catalogs that people are telling us they want to build. The city of New York has all sorts of departments and agencies that sponsor apps contests, and they want to have a place to catalog all of the software that they're using. There are also topic specific apps catalogs because software that helps address a problem in sanitation may not really be very useful to solving a problem such as domestic violence or a transportation problem. And then another use case that we've had conversations about is a non-governmental organization that wants to catalog software for pro-democracy activists, and that's a different enough use case. They want to catalog a software, but pro-democracy activists tend to see themselves as oppositional to government, they're exposing corruption or challenging government to change, and they don't necessarily want to be using the same catalog for software that the government itself is using. They may even have security and privacy concerns. And so there's another use case where we've been approached by people who want their own apps catalog. So with that I'm going to pass the podium over to Paul McKay, who's going to talk about what is being done now with the open civic distro in Europe and Africa. So I work for an organization called Nesta, which is a UK charity that focuses on fostering and encouraging innovation. And it does this through a kind of range of activities. Its mission is basically to help people and organizations bring great ideas to life. And it does this through having an impact investment fund to support kind of new startups. It puts on challenges and hackathons and events like that. And it has a large kind of research arm that does lots of research into effective policy for innovation, how to encourage innovation in different sectors, things like that. There's some examples here of some of the types of challenges it's done. Reboot Britain was one that looked at how to support citizens with kind of collaborative technology. Make It Local was about looking at local government data and how to kind of open that up and work with digital agencies to provide better access to that information for citizens. And the big green challenge was about community led responses to climate change. So it covers a whole variety of different types of things. Another project that Nesta's part of right now is Code for Europe. And the basic model of Code for Europe is the same as Code for America, which has been running, Code for America is in its sort of third year now. The idea is to take kind of technologists and put them to work with local government in a number of cities. So there's sort of six cities participating Code for Europe this year, which is the first year it's been run. And the sort of structure there is a little bit different. So a program like this, and there's quite a lot of other programs like this in Europe, it's funded by the European Commission and it's managed by a kind of consortium of organizations, one of which being Nesta to run the program. And just to kind of go back to the transportation example that Andrew was talking about, a couple of the projects that some of the guys are working on, they're both in Helsinki and in Manchester, they're taking a lot of the kind of open source work that's been done already on some of these projects and things like the general transit specification and applying that to the data sets and the cases for the transportation authorities in those cities. And they're also working together and kind of taking that software, building the road and adapting it to the kind of local needs. So in the sort of kick-off meeting of Code for Europe in January, I mean I joined Code for Europe as a Code for Europe Fellow but working directly with Nesta rather than working for a city. And my focus then has been kind of on how to explore this area of how do we encourage collaboration and reuse. So in the kick-off meeting it was quite apparent that it will make a key part of sort of what I might work on would be looking at specific, you know, contributing towards the development and looking to launch a kind of similar catalogue for Europe. So what I'm hoping to kind of start in about the next month is a Europe Commons catalogue based in Open Civic. And that'll be a site that can be a place to put certainly all the projects that are coming out of Code for Europe, some of the best batches from Code for America, the Code for America Commons and also work that's been done by organizations around Europe, things like My Society who've done things like Fix My Street and other political transparency projects and Future Gov is another organization in the UK that does a lot around reinventing local services. And something else I've been exploring is how to then connect that with organizations that are doing kind of working with local governments. So the Local Government Association is an umbrella organization that works with all the local councils across the UK. So I've been looking to sort of say, well, how could the common site interact with their sort of forums and their kind of information portals that they provide already that are used by local councils. So I've been working with new arms on contributing towards Open Civic. One of the main bits of work I've been doing was just adding multilingual support because in Europe, unlike say over here in America, there's a problem of kind of a wide diversity of languages. So that's been one of the main activities I've been doing. And again, with Drupal, that's really easy to provide a really good comprehensive solution for that. But another aspect that we're just sort of starting to look at, again, Nesta has kind of a lot of expertise in an area in looking at sort of useful ways of gathering evidence around how effective our programs and applications, things like that. So the Alliance for Useful Evidence is a Nesta-led program around capturing and disseminating best practice about determining useful evidence for applications. So there's some examples here of different levels of how you can go about gathering evidence and different quality, things like that. So it's one thing to create a catalog of apps, but then there's questions like, well, how much money have these applications saved? How many users are actually using them? So a lot of the time, I think a lot of these civic applications, maybe that data isn't being gathered. So we're hoping to explore how more of that could be approached and kind of then maybe built into the platform. What's happening as well in other parts of the world, so in Africa, Code for Kenya has been a kind of initiating program in Kenya, but then that's kind of now leading to Code for Africa being set up just recently. And Code for Africa is looking to also create a catalog as well based on OpenCivic. Developing the Caribbean was a recent hackathon in the Caribbean. Again, they built this using the OpenCivic software, the site for running that. They're looking to create a similar catalog for that part of the world. There's activity around this, the civic innovation movement happening in Columbia. And a lot of these activities have been kind of sponsored and supported through the World Bank. And it's interesting to note kind of the differences and similarities. So one of the things about a lot of the civic innovation happening in maybe a place like Africa is that, and this is unlike in say, Europe and America where the civic software is quite often being developed for and run by government. So quite often here the projects might be actually around citizen led projects to demand greater transparency and accountability of the government in the face of kind of corruption and things like that. But also there are similarities and one of the things that's in the sort of longer term roadmap for OpenCivic is trying to build something like an investment network kind of platform in there. So it will be possible to post projects and for different organizations who don't individually have the resources to support developing that software themselves, they could pledge support, perhaps donate, provide money or development resources but basically kind of collaborate on those projects. And that's certainly needed in a place like Africa, but also I was talking to some people working in local councils in the UK and they were expressing exactly the same thing that it'll be very hard for them to develop open source projects kind of just within one council. They're very hard to get support for that but being able to kind of collaborate and do it across groups of councils would be much easier. And again, Drupal's a platform that would really can provide a rich set of features for developing those kinds of kind of community support. So that's a kind of bit of an overview of what's happening in some other parts of the world. I'm gonna hand over to Aaron who's gonna talk about kind of integration with OpenData. Thanks Paul. So the applications that we're talking about in these apps catalogs are driven by public data. An application in a civic context is useless without the OpenData driving it. So the corollary for application catalogs is OpenData catalogs that can give people access to the information that they'd need to create an application. So this is a photo of the basement of the city hall in Philadelphia. You can see that most of the data here is not in a machine readable format. Governments have massive amounts of information. Every service that you interact with on a daily basis if you think about the number of government services that you interacted with between the time that you got up this morning and came in to the conference today. That's dozens of services alone and there's massive amounts of information that governments have about those services. So the challenge right now is not necessarily that data doesn't exist but that it's in data warehouses that are not accessible to the general public. So this is something that is being addressed. OpenData portals, catalogs of OpenData are being released here in the U.S. at the federal level, state level as well as internationally. Data.gov was released a couple years ago is the federal data catalog. Data.gov.uk is the European corollary. So yeah, as a developer in a civic context at a hackathon this OpenData is what is necessary to drive any civic application. These OpenData catalogs are being provided by several kinds of software. There are proprietary options out there. Socrata is the most popular one. If you've done any civic hacking you've probably come across a Socrata portal. CCAN is the most popular open source alternative. It's really taken off in Europe and it's been deployed in a number of contexts here in the U.S. So at the heart of what this software does it has two main functions. One is to list data sets and the second is to offer APIs to access those data sets in machine readable formats so that folks that are creating applications that are listed in something like OpenCivic can have a way of interacting with that data that isn't locked in a warehouse under City Hall. So data sets themselves contain metadata about information about the data that they house and contain resources that are often in machine readable formats like CSV and are often also in blob files, PDFs that are less accessible formats. So this is an example of an OpenData set that is available right now on our decan demo site. I'm gonna introduce decan in a second but here's polling places in Madison, Wisconsin and another feature of some of the data portal softwares that you get along with the API and ability to access the data you can preview it as well. So we've been lucky enough to use decan to deploy decan ourselves for the city of Chicago. decan is a really beautifully written software. It's written Python, it's very MVC from a developer perspective. There's a lot of really things that they've done really well. We came across a couple of problem areas with that software that made us want to bring some of those features into Drupal. One is that folks want to use Drupal alongside an OpenData portal such as decan and there are integration issues there that can take a lot of developer time and are problematic. And then decan itself is part of that OpenData portal what an OpenData portal is is a CMS and from the perspective of folks that have used Drupal not being able to do certain things like add users through the UI or just going to content types and creating a new content type or architecting a new data model. In Drupal you're just used to that and other CMSs are just not as full featured. So, and this is a problem not just for us but data.gov uses Drupal, the data.gov.uk has tried to integrate Drupal and decan to varying degrees of success. So, about six, nine months ago we said, wait, why can't we just create an OpenData portal that has the features of decan and Drupal and yeah, we did. So that project right now lives on Drupal.org. Drupal.org slash project slash decan. It's still in development but it's already been deployed in a number of places. Data Wisconsin and what is now my home, well, where I live in Madison, Wisconsin, we've created datawisconsin.org which is using decan, excuse me. So it's still in development but it's gotten a lot of traction already. So decan allows us to do public data, public sector data management within Drupal. There's two other elements that I'm gonna mention about decan that allow us to circle back to OpenCivic. We've broken up the key features of a data portal into two modules that can be installed and activated, it's installed and enabled on any Drupal site and these are also on Drupal.org. There's the decan data set module which does the data set listing and there's a data store module that creates an API for files that are uploaded in a delimited form. So what's exciting to us about this is that any Drupal 7 site can now be an obit data portal with many of the features that the proprietary world is trying to offer cities as well as some of the other options out there. So that's very exciting for us and also allows us with OpenCivic to have instances that have all of the application catalog features, the community features, as well as being an allowing instances to be open data portals. So I'm gonna hand it back over to Andrew. Great, so just to sum all that up, why do we think OpenCivic matters? Well, we think that it can really not only make Drupal a great platform to build a civic application for a government but can also kind of be part of the infrastructure for civic tech development itself. And why do we think that? Well, Drupal is very open standards friendly. We all know and love that. Of course, it not only is open source but it plays nicely with other open source packages. It is a community platform at its core. It's very good at helping people to collaborate and that's a key use case for actually collaborative civic software development. And then finally, it deals now well with the addition of these decan features with open data. So we think an aggregate OpenCivic can really help to move the needle in terms of civic innovation in the US and now worldwide. And just to give you a sense of why we think that matters again to reinforce the kind of dollars we're talking about here for government software and technology spend are pretty remarkable. Just at the federal level alone, the US technology in the US alone, the technology CEO council estimated that if you could optimize sharing of software, hardware and data at the federal level alone, you could save a trillion dollars by 2020. And then you look at all the other governments that invest in technology, that buy it and build it and by and large, don't share it. You've got all the different states in the US alone. You've got all the different towns and cities in the US alone. You've got the different branches of government, judiciary, legislative, executive in the US. And you've got all the different thematic silos of labor and environments and motor vehicles, each of which by and large have their own systems, their own data standards, their own ways of doing civic technology and ways that are very difficult to share and more often than not, variance are operable. And there's huge inefficiency in that in terms of both cost and efficacy and what we're after, once again, is better government that costs less money and perhaps can even help create new, really innovative businesses and new jobs to boot. So with that, please go to the project on Drupal.org and get involved if you're interested. Ask us for help, give us ideas because we're really excited about it and it's gonna be a big investment for our whole team over the next year and we really need your help. So thank you and with that, we'll take some questions if there's some time. Oh, and we're having open data birds of a feather at 345 today. So if you're interested in having a deeper conversation about Drupal and open data, please come to that. So, any questions? Hey, so I was interested in that last slide where a trillion dollars. And I was just kind of wondering, like that trillion dollars I would assume represents an existing spend towards existing licenses or businesses or something like that. I mean, that's money we're spending now, right? So have you got any feedback from industry or some of the major players on, because that looks like a fight to me between like free market and open data, like the taxpayers basically, because what you're talking about benefits taxpayers. I mean, everybody in many ways, but I was just kind of wondering, is there a conflict between stakeholders? Some of our federal friends in the room might be able to speak to this better than we, but we don't look at it as a anti-business or anti-anybody thing at all. I mean, and we all are competing, or many of us are competing with big established enterprise proprietary platforms in Drupal content management systems, not for government as well, right? I mean, Drew spoke to it pretty at great length yesterday. The competitors from Adobe and Oracle and all the rest are the same competitors in these other software domains as well. And I think the market will decide if we can innovate better and faster and in a way that provides more options for governments to either bring technologies in-house and maintain them in-house and extend them in-house and then share those results with their peers. And if that is in fact an innovation benefit and or cost savings, then I think open source will win and some of that dollar savings will be realized. And that's not specific to Drupal. It's not even specific to software. It goes for data and data licenses and hardware and open hardware potentially as well. So I think the biggest companies will move with where the wind blows and if we can prove that this model actually works better, I think the biggest companies in the world will build great businesses around it and supporting it. It'll just force them to be nimble and to innovate, which I think is a good thing for them and for everybody else. Andrew, I just wanted to look a bit about part of the open data and the open source is about sort of changing the culture of government and changing the culture of how things are done in our society. And I think a lot of governments get excited about open data because it's flashing, it's new and they can get some media spit about it and it seems like it's something that they can do to show that they're innovating, but it doesn't get any deeper than that sort of surface level of, hey look we held a hackathon, isn't that cool? We can do something for the youth just like the skate park that we've got and they get excited to get some new media attention and nothing changes underneath the, on the procurement level, on the sort of understanding of remixing, you know remixing how things are done as opposed to just the individual tools that are used. Are there opportunities here to go off and to try and remix the culture that are of the government and to try and say what are the best practices of departments who are really innovating at a much deeper level than just organizing a hackathon? Do you want to speak to that at all, Paul, from the work that Nesta does to evaluate efficacy? Or no, I can tackle it if not. Shout a bit, yeah. Sure, so from my perspective, yeah, I mean it sounds great to build an app. It looks great when in the federal government, you know I don't have this firsthand knowledge, but second hand I've heard sort of that there was a mad rush when data.gov was launched to get all these map shape files out on there because there was a whole lot of them and it would make the number of data sets release look really good. And that's not necessarily, there's nothing wrong with that. It's great, but it also isn't necessarily, the press release is not where we're going for, nor is the, you know, there's nothing wrong with having fun at a hackathon over a weekend, but if you're really saying you want to help human beings deal with a problem in their communities, you really need to measure outcomes and need to do so longitudinally over time, right? And make, figure out if you're a hackathon funder or investor, if you will, whether it actually is making a difference. And that's actually the idea of systematizing these processes and actually having, for example, a hackathon platform that the World Bank is gonna propagate across a lot of different thematic domains and literally across every continent is so that you can have the ability to be capturing metadata from all those instances of it, aggregate that and analyze it and such, and also to connect the context where new proposed solutions are being hacked on to actual sort of app stores where people that just need a solution and need it even commercially supported may go to find it and then creating a virtuous cycle like that. So we're early days for sure, but I think the idea of having a platform and having standards that are used for that whole cycle is gonna help give us the metadata that we need to figure out what's working and what's not. So it is a lot about systematizing it. Did you wanna add anything? Yeah, maybe a couple of things. I mean, one thing that Nestor's kind of thinking a bit about along similar lines is you can put on hackathons and things, but it's important to do the preparation upfront with hackathons and be really clear on kind of what you're trying to build. But then also, sometimes hackathons are put on prizes, but there's sort of a chasm between then sort of jumping from that to say actually creating a startup and starting to build a business that's actually gonna provide a club, a new real service, a new innovation. And so we're sort of Nestor's looking at that and trying to kind of see why actually, how can you bridge that gap and what are the right kind of investments? There's another program, you know, I'm part of a coach here. There's another program called Apps for Europe, which is again a sort of similar kind of structured program in Europe, looking at providing kind of business mentoring and sort of guidance towards other funding opportunities after hackathons, like during the hackathons events, but it's part of that. I mean, another thing I think a theme we're noticing, so one of the slides I mentioned, FutureGov, one project they're doing is called Patchwork. And I think it's a really good example and this isn't particularly an open source project or anything, but FutureGov focus really heavily on sort of software services and your service and change kind of thing. And what's important about that is that they're sort of just turning the model on its head. So it's a project that looks at social care. And so right now, if you've got an individual citizen, they're gonna require sort of, they're gonna have to talk to probably a whole bunch of different people to get all the full capacity of social care that's involved and that's just expensive and time wasting for them and complicated. And so what Patchwork are doing is saying, right, let's get hold of all the different data sets that different government departments at a local level have. They're building them some software that puts the kind of the person right at the center of kind of those interactions and uses this data kind of to build some software and providing a much better picture for then all of the people who are providing those services to that individual. So I think, so what we're noticing is there's a really important service design point to this kind of work in terms of actually innovating in the sort of civic space as well as building the interesting software that can help facilitate some of that. I just wanted to say one thing because you talked about real change versus changes just for publicity. And governments like other institutions certainly have plenty of people in them who resist real change, but there are some forcing factors that are driving real change. One is budget cuts and the need to deliver services at some level, regardless. And another big forcing factor for open data is freedom of information laws. And governments have to comply with those. And if someone contacts a local government agency and wants information about crime statistics, the city clerk or county clerk or whoever it is has to provide that. And they get really tired of having to dig through paper files or come up with printouts for people who inundate them with those requests. And so there's actually quite a bit of desire on the part of governments to save themselves a lot of headache by having an open data portal so that when someone asks for something like that, they don't have to spend time digging through files themselves. They can just say, go to the open data portal and leave me alone. I think we have time for one last quick question. Sure. Going back to the data that still exists out there and the picture of all the boxes in the warehouse, the data warehouses, what is the plan or is there a plan? I know that there's a plan going forward that this initiative is for open data and open government, but what do we do with all that historical data sitting around, do they only provide that or will they ever make that machine readable in general or is that something people are not thinking about yet? Gonna say I know with the city of Philadelphia they have just volumes practically as big as that photo of old records that they're trying to, I know there is a process that they're trying to digitize those, but they're doing it very slowly, but the demand for that is increased by more participation and the more that in just civic engagements in general and use of these applications because the more that people actually use something that's being driven by open data, the more there's a demand for it and the more that there's pressure to provide that information. So I could say specifically for Philadelphia I know that they are digitizing their records, old records, but I know that they are not gonna accomplish that for a long time. Yeah, it's part of all the policies that get written and passed in New York City. One of the first sort of arguments against open data law when it was being debated back I think in 2010 was that it was gonna cost a billion dollars to digitize five years of historical records and when this local law was passed some 18 months later it called for going forward publishing of new data that's being created and left really left out historical data, but I think the again demand will drive investment in terms of what historical data is actually valuable. There's a whole emerging community practice around open data laws and how to write them in ways that are actually strike the balance between not being able to have unlimited spending to put data online but also really driving the kind of transparency that we need and the kind of efficiency gain potential that is inherent in publishing the data that government creates and uses in doing its work. So come to the boff at 345 if you're interested in that more and thank you so much, really enjoyed and appreciated the chance to talk to you about this today.