 Hello. Thank you all for joining us this afternoon. I'm Alyssa Black, the Director of New America's California Civic Innovation Project. I'm usually out on the West Coast exploring ways that municipalities in California can innovate with technology, new programs, and policies. So it's really nice to be here with you in New America's D.C. offices this afternoon. Over the next two hours, through some shared stories by our panelists and participation from the audience, you will be participating, and from Twitter. I hope to illustrate civic innovation in practice as a way of framing its meaning, exploring its limitations, and better understanding the potential impact in the way that we interact with each other and with government. Civic innovation really is a buzzword right now. I realize that. And to broaden our understanding at the California Civic Innovation Project, we interviewed 20 practitioners in the field, kind of people that we identified that work within that system. And through those interviews and through our research, we really started thinking about civic innovation less as a thing or a concept and more as an ecosystem. So I'll kind of refer to it throughout the evening or the afternoon as an ecosystem. It's really more than just, and it's an ecosystem, sorry I should include, that we really think about is made up of government, civic groups, residents, foundations, academics, and civic hackers. It's more than really just a compilation of projects. It can be a process as well, which can inspire institutional change. This really is an important point to consider because the spread of civic innovation throughout communities and government will require a culture shift that reframes our current processes. So for example, leadership that encourages experimentation or allows for some risk taking or allows for a space for ideas to germinate within the system can really be helpful and important in spreading a culture of innovation in a large organization like government. So we'll hear from some of our speakers today about how that shift in government is happening and whether it's enough to save our democracy. In the work that I focus on at the California Civic Innovation Project, I often think about the local level municipal government and really think about how that's central to civic innovation, but I realize that that's not the complete story. We have at least two speakers with us today that will share stories where government is not central. And I ask this panel of wonderful women to join me today, one because they're awesome, and two because they'll share their unique perspectives and maybe tell stories that broaden your concept of civic innovation and what you're defining as civic innovation. The goal really should not be to develop a single kind of coherent consistent definition of civic innovation so much as it should be to understand the different models and how they might engage one another and the types of investments that are needed to promote institutional change. So this event really is just the beginning of a series of conversations about civic innovation where we can continue to talk about what it means, the potential impact, its ability to have sustaining impact and long term change, and ultimately continually redefine the field. So thank you again for joining us today. And for those of you that are viewing via live stream, you can use the civic innovation hashtag and we will answer some of your questions towards the end of the event. And when we do our next activity, you can also participate using that hashtag. So before we get to the speakers, I thought that we would start with a short interactive activity to get you guys thinking about how you define civic innovation for yourselves. And so I'll first explain the activity and then I'll demo it with my colleagues and then you'll get off your feet and participate. We'll spend about 15 minutes actually doing this exercise and then we'll get back and listen to our panelists. So it's called the spectrogram and basically what I'm going to do is make a polarizing statement about civic innovation to get you thinking about it. And on one side of the room, we'll do totally disagree. So back by the beverages, that's a totally disagree and up here is totally agree. And so I'll make a statement and you line yourself up along this imaginary line down the aisle as to where, how much you agree or disagree to the statement that I make. And then I'll go and ask a few of you via one sentence kind of why you stood in that place so that you can defend your position. And it's, and if we had more time, what we would do is kind of listen to each other and kind of hear each other's positions and why you're standing in that place and maybe even move as we hear each other talk about what civic innovation is to them. We won't have time for that today. So just stand in your spot and kind of I'll come to you with the microphone and you can tell me why you chose that spot. So I'll demo with my colleagues right now and then we'll go ahead and do it. So this is totally disagree down here, Bowtie and Kirsten. And this is totally agree. And this is Georgia and this is Preston. So my polarizing statement for this activity is that DC weather rocks today especially. DC weather rocks is awesome. This is the example. Yeah. Okay so Georgia you're over here. Yep we have a mic. So why are you in totally disagree? I mean agree. So naturally I operate very warm so cold weather is perfect because it means that I'm not really sweaty all over the place everywhere we go. Great thank you Georgia and Preston. Why are you all the way over here? Well I'm from Alabama where it's oftentimes really warm and it's like Ronnie Van Zandt from Leonard Skinner said you can take a boy at a Dixie Land but you can't take Dixie out the boy. Thank you. So okay if everybody will stand up I'll make my statement and then again this is totally agree and totally disagree. And you don't have to be at the polar ends. You can be somewhere in the middle. So the first statement is that technology is central to civic innovation. So technology is central to civic innovation. This is agree at the podium stage and disagree at the beverages. Yeah again the statement is technology is central to civic innovation. Okay I'm going to go on the on the extremes first and you totally agree over here. Why do you totally agree? One sentence because I'm going to get a lot of people. Well I think that civic innovation in terms of its impact on technology is critical for communities to get together to come up with new ideas of transformation of communities. Great thank you. Okay somebody that's a little bit well is in the middle. Let's go with you. So technology is obviously very important but if you don't understand the community that you're working within or the government that you're working with you can't really use that technology. Great. Okay we're moving down towards disagree. Why do you disagree? Or kind of in the middle. Kind of lean towards disagree. Well just to build off of what she said just a moment ago I think that context is really important and sometimes technology inhibits some of the context that we have with face to face. Great. Okay I'm going to get a totally disagree and then we'll move on to the next statement. Contrary to popular opinion technology in and of itself is never central to a major decision. It will always be shaped primarily by the political will. Great. Okay ready to get moving? The next question is again agree at the stage disagree at the beverages. Civic innovation can save our democracy. That's agree at the stage. Disagree down here. Civic innovation. Okay middle person. Contribute to improving our democracy. It's not the total solution but I think it will have a positive effect. Great. And from our panelists Rachel. I think that oftentimes municipalities have a lot more flexibility to experiment and hopefully provide some scalable ways that to address larger more systemic issues. Yeah great. Okay I'm going to get a totally agree. I think it's the main thing moving us forward and I'm glad to hear about today. Great. Okay the last statement that we'll do is the Occupy movement is a form of civic innovation. This is to test how you're defining it for yourself. So this is agree. Okay agree and disagree at the beverages. Ask you where you would stand on the spectrum. Okay perfect you're welcome. All right let me go down to totally disagree that the Occupy movement is a form of civic innovation. Lorelei. I think the the gap between their revolution and our governing institutions was never adequately filled and therefore won't have a long-term impact unless that changes. Okay I'm going to move to the middle ground. Let's get you sir. Well I think that the Occupy movement was a positive contribution in raising an issue but fell far short of a way to actually engage the larger public in the issue. Great thank you. Okay moving along and you you're kind of moving towards agree you're leaning on agree you're in. Okay I just couldn't get far enough. That's okay. I think it was an important innovation. I think it called attention to a major problem. I agree with my colleague who happens to be my husband. That was not planned. That it didn't have as much lasting power as it might have and if it had a way to get legs we'd see more from it. Great thank you. Okay I'm all the way with the agree. Scotty. I don't think that you can say that something isn't an innovation just because it didn't work or didn't have a lasting impact. I think that in fact that's one of the natures of innovations is that many of them are going to fail at least to do what they initially set out to do but I think that it was innovative is pretty indisputable. Yep great. Okay I lied last time we have time for one more. So the last one is there is no civic innovation without government. There is no civic innovation without government. This is agree and that's disagree by the beverages. I think it's going to stay put over here. You're very agreeable. I want you on my team. Okay the statement again is there's no civic innovation without government. Okay I'm going to stay down here with the agree since I'm closer here. Well it's probably actually not true but I had to someone have to stay down here and I think to build off the occupy point if you don't have government buy in you're inevitably a voluntary movement and that's not going to last because people won't volunteer forever so you need government to institutionalize innovation. Okay I'm going to move along here. Here you're almost in the I don't know but you're towards agree. Yeah yeah I mean for me civic innovation occurs in the context of the civitas of the ordered society and in order to have that kind of structure you need a structure to work with. Great thank you. I'm just moving along the spectrum now. Yeah I think that's a civic innovation or the government plays more of a role of providing a structure and you know allows for people to participate but I don't I think it's more of a tool rather than a means. Thank you. Okay go here. Towards disagree or in disagree. As we saw with Occupy you had a group of people engaging with their world and their society and it didn't necessarily coincide with what the government was doing so I think people are finding their own ways. I'm not advocating for anarchy but it doesn't necessarily have to it's not really happening within our government now it's coming from people. Great I'll get another disagree. I agree with what she said. Yeah a plus a plus one okay back here. Revolution was the greatest technology to give it innovation in history and I think it was not a government tool. Thank you all for thank you all for joining in the activity. What we'll do is if you get seated again I'll introduce the panelists and we'll hear from the panelists for a little bit and then we'll do a moderate Q&A. Okay I hope you guys enjoyed that. It's called a spectrogram a facilitator that I've used quite often. He works in between the tech policy field. His name is Gunnar. He's done that with groups that I worked with before and it's a really fun exercise so I thought it would get us excuse me you guys are interacting with each other. Yep yes and so what we're going to do now is go into the panel stage where we'll hear from our panelists and then I'll do a moderated Q&A with them and then we'll open it up for questions and answers from Twitter and from you. So starting on your left we have Rachel Black. She's a senior policy analyst in the asset building program at the New America Foundation where she provides research analysis and public commentary on federal policies to increase savings among low income and moderate income households and her specific areas of focus include reform of asset limits in public assistance programs expanding access to college savings and initiatives to increase savings at tax time. Moving along we have Kathy Pettit is the senior research associate at the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute whose research focuses on measuring and understanding housing markets and neighborhood change. She's also an expert on local and national data systems useful in housing and urban development research and program development. She directs the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership which is a collaborative effort of the Urban Institute and local partners in 37 cities who help communities use neighborhood level data in policymaking and organizing and she's currently working on a project to explore the intersection of open data with other community information and action groups and an edited volume with the Federal Reserve of San Francisco on the use of data and community development. And then we're moving on to Hilary. She's a Presidential Innovation Fellow working with my USA project at the General Services Administration. Hilary has been working to make government more accessible and available online for 15 years starting as a web designer for Arkansas.gov in 1997 and her most recent role as Director of Integrated Marketing for an e-government provider, NIC. Hilary helped NIC's 29 state portals embrace new technology and concepts for 21st century government. She speaks at events across the country educating and evangelizing Gov2o and social networking best practices for government. Then we have Michelle Koth is a lawyer by day and a civic hacker by night as the Code for America Brigade Co-captain and core developer on several open source web applications for local government. In 2011 Michelle was an inaugural Code for America Fellow which ignited her passion for local civic web development and prior to Code for America Michelle worked as a patent attorney for a private law firm and as a web application developer and serve administrator for a global health corporation. And then we have Ryan Gherty. She's a computer scientist turned social scientist. Ryan has worked at the intersection of communities and technologists domestically and internationally. She's a senior field analyst at the Open Technology Institute and works internationally on community technology projects. Most recently she traveled to Tunisia with the team to help launch a community wireless network. And during the beginning of the Syrian uprising she lived in Damascus and worked with human rights monitors and nonviolent activists. In the U.S. she's worked for social compact on developing alternative neighborhood indicators that would counterbalance the traditional market indicators that discriminate against underserved inner city neighborhoods. So you can tell we have a broad range of women and stories that they're going to share. So I've asked each one to maybe share with you a story about civic innovation so you can get an idea of what it is in practice. And we'll start with Rachel and then move through and then we'll go into a moderated Q&A. Great thanks Alyson. Thanks for inviting me to be here and talk about civic innovation through the context of our experience partnering with the city of New York on their pilot SAVE NYC which was intended to connect low-income residents of New York with opportunities to save at tax time. And I think this is a really great example of how cities in partnership with think tanks like ours can use some of the innovative strategies that they're using to address local problems as an evidence base to inform the development of federal policy. So I'll start by talking a little bit about what brought each of us to the issue of savings at tax time and described the SAVE NYC pilot itself and then talk a little bit about how each of us are leveraging that experience to move further towards advancing this larger federal policy goal. So to start out let me give you a little background on the asset building program and why we focus on savings. Our basic our operating principle at the asset building program is that a little bit of savings at the right time can make a big difference and using the savings especially among low-income families can not only help produce poverty but over time can also help increase economic mobility and if you think about it when your car breaks down or when you have an unexpected medical expense you know most of us feel fairly confident and secure knowing that we have the money in the bank to cover it but low-income families have very thin financial margins so when these kinds of events occur oftentimes it creates these very undesirable trade-offs either you have to forego something that you need immediately like paying your rent or meeting your utility bill or it means that you have to find some other resources to cover it and oftentimes this means seeking out some kind of alternative financial product like a payday loan which can be incredibly expensive so this is why we focus on building opportunities for low-income families to connect to basic savings products. The U.S. also agrees that saving is an important goal and we invest about half a trillion dollars each year primarily through the tax code on helping Americans save but there are a couple problems with this approach the first is that for the most part the beneficiaries of this policy are already wealthy they're already high income high wealth individuals think of things like the home mortgage interest deduction or exclusions for retirement savings so not only do these resources not get to low-income families but the activities that are supported really don't have anything to do with that very basic emergency savings need so it's with these considerations in mind that we tried to think of a way to help connect to low-income families to just really some of these really basic flexible resources and even though the tax code itself doesn't help meet these needs the tax filing process is actually a process is a platform that engages at least 26 million low-income households every year who are trying to access the earned income tax credit and this is the largest anti-poverty program which for working families it basically functions as a owe wage supplement and for a lot of these families this can be the largest check that they get all year so something that we think of when we're trying to craft policy is it is really sort of modeled on if you build it they will come principle right most of us aren't inherent savers most of us aren't necessarily inherent anything but for instance if you're in a room with a donut you're much more likely to eat that donut right if the donut is not in front of you you are much less likely to actually eat that donut and this is very much how savings occurs you know if you work for an organization that offers you a 401k you're much more likely to save especially since there's typically some kind of match associated with it so these are some of the ideas that we apply to this policy that we developed called originally called the savers bonus which allows a low-income family through the tax filing process to be able to just sort of check a box if they want to direct a portion of their savings into or a portion of their refund into savings if they don't already have an account they can actually do it directly on the tax form so it's integrated it's easy and it's also valuable the credit would match their savings for 50 cents on the dollar so that's hopefully enough to give a little nudge to the families for whom parting with these resources can be very challenging this turned into it took a legislative form in 2008 when Senator Robert Menendez from New Jersey introduced it for the first time as the savers bonus act and it was really around the same time that the city of New York was establishing their Office of Financial Empowerment and this was in response to or with a mandate to respond to some of the challenges that the their Department of Consumer Affairs was sort of seeing on a day-to-day basis and something that they were frequently observing was that struggling families would come in and would be in some of the situations that I described earlier I mean they'd be falling short on their rent they'd be missing utility payments they would have high levels of debt high levels of very costly debt and they're sort of charged with seeking out some innovative strategies to help these households so it's sort of in in their process of consultation that they arrived at this idea of the savers bonus and launched their their pilot in 2008 called SAVE NYC which was very much the savers bonus in action and and that was that was by design it was uniquely it was their assessment that the solution to the problems that they were observing were accomplished through a federal policy they certainly understood their limitations their limitations as a municipality and providing both the scale and the depths of the resources that was necessary to meet this need on an ongoing basis they thought that the lack of emergency savings that families had was a function of a deficit on federal policy so they are very much sought they saw their role as a city to be able to sort of affirm this proof of concept and for them to do that they thought it was really central to satisfy two basic research questions one with low-income family SAVE and two would it would it matter even if they were able to save were they shifting money away from more immediate essential needs were they able to even maintain those savings for the entirety of the program very much sort of in dispute I mean even within communities that fully subscribe to the idea the savings are important are really whether or not low-income families should be saving to begin with don't they have more immediate needs that they should be addressing so is this a worthwhile policy goal so these are some of the ideas that the SAVE NYC pilot was designed to assess so in 2008 the pilot was launched and administered through their system of volunteer income tax assistance sites and it went basically something like this you know if you showed up to file your taxes at one of these centers the person who was filing your taxes would ask you if you'd like to set aside a portion of your savings or of your refund to save if yes they would set up the account on the spot if you made a deposit over over their basic threshold and you maintain that amount for a year that would be matched 50 cents on the dollar it was intended to be a very easy streamlined process so at the end of the three-year pilot I think it's safe to say that it was it was successful both of those questions were answered in the affirmative so there are about a little over 2,000 accounts total set up it sounds like a very small amount of money a small number of counts considering the population of New York but it's important to say that this was all a privately funded endeavor and that you know the monies that were set aside by the foundations for this program were exhausted almost immediately so there is demand foreign access of what the actual take up ended up being so there are 2,000 people who open accounts they saved on average a little less than $600 and keep in mind this is probably the average refund for households in this income bracket are a little over $2,000 this is a very substantial portion of their tax refund and the average income of the families who were participating was around $18,000 and this isn't just middle America $18,000 this is New York City $18,000 so I think it really speaks to the importance of the families placed on participating in this program and not only that about 90% of the families were able to maintain their deposits through the entirety of the year not only that but a lot continued to participate in the program maintain their their accounts even after the conclusion of that first required savings year and surveys conducted afterwards indicate that families who did participate were much better off than the people who didn't end up participating they were much less likely to be in debt in fact they're much more likely to be paying off their debt they felt more confident about their financial futures feeling like if something bad happened they would be able to respond and that helped them think much more in a long-term context planning for the future instead of just trying to get from one day to the next and this I mean psychologically has a big has a big impact so all this we would I think we would stick our flag in and inside business success so at the end of the three years the city of New York was heavily invested and sort of spreading the gospel of this to other cities they thought it was really important to make sure that it was possible to replicate the results that they were seeing in New York outside of the city in order to expand the base of evidence and of data to help support the advancement of the federal policy objective so SAVE NYC turned into SAVE USA through funding through the social innovation fund at the corporation for national and community service so it's currently in New York as its original as its original city as well as Tulsa and San Antonio and New York and the program has been funded through at least the next couple of years ideally though as I said on the onset it's always been the objective to have this to have this program reach scale through a national policy and to that end this is something that we have been working on communicating the results of SAVE NYC to demonstrate that this is successful not only a concept but in practice and educating policymakers on its potential and last July representative Jose Serrano of New York introduced a revamped and refreshed version now called the financial security credit and right now we're working on on introduction on this Senate companion bill so I think for us this really has all the markers of being a very successful collaboration something that house has allowed us to have a validation for an idea that we've developed and something that is given the city of New York in this instance you know platform to be able to elevate the work that they're doing and see it potentially take shape on a national on a national level. Thank you Rachel and we can move on to Kathy. Go ahead. Great thanks. It's great to start with a policy innovation. I was said I was the I was told I was the skeptic on the panel but I think everybody's pretty much on the same page it sounds like but you know when they asked me what civic innovation was I paused for a second trying to think and I think you know the innovation is really a break it's not an incremental change it's doing something really different and the civic means towards a public good so I was I gave some examples of from my experience what that means and the technology I think comes to mind first and is sort of the sexy part of it but and others can speak about that too and during the questions but people can innovate through different means and policy is one of them the work that we do really focuses around institutional innovation and in the as one example in the mid 90s some community groups that had been working against persistent poverty started to assemble local administrative data which was quite a chore at that point vital stats crime education health and really work with the low-income residents and organizations in those neighborhoods to what does this mean for directions is this right what are we missing and not only did they find that having this really geographically specific information result in better decisions but it actually gave the organizations and residents a new place at that table it gave them some voice and some power in what was happening in their neighborhoods they were really excited about this and the they the innovation was that they decided as organizations some universities some foundations but that actually assembling and sharing this neighborhood level information would be a part of their core mission and part of their mission around social equity so the I think that the innovation could not have been possible without technology so GIS was just invented at that point personal computing was becoming more common so we needed the tech and the tech in the government to automate the records but without the decision by the institutions to actually take this on nothing would have happened and I think more recent examples have been playing this role between technologists and the civic world and the smart Chicago collaborative is one example that's trying to bridge this gap on our partner in Minneapolis just announced Kira tech which is a McKnight Foundation funded project to organize to organize the neighborhood folks and organize the civic developers and play as a broker as a translator I think for them so these organizations are really important without any technological improvements so I think the I have an example to show rather than talk more conceptually and I think you might have heard about it recently because the Camden Coalition for healthcare providers won a night foundation grant a couple weeks ago for their work and it started more than a decade ago with a real innovator Dr. Jeffrey Brenner and he was a physician that started to look at health hospital records to map out violence in the city so not just crime but what are the gunshot wounds and looking at data different data sets together and started to talk to other primary care providers about how difficult it was to serve the Camden folks and so he began this this coalition that began at the same time that there are three hospitals in Camden which is quite a lot for a small city and they were getting worried about the rising cost of caring for the uninsured and really hadn't been using their data well to understand who they were serving so that three hospitals agreed to share their data not with each other because they were competitors but with a neutral party which at that time was our partner Cam Connect and the Camden Coalition working together so the this hospitalization data had address what the diagnosis code was the age demographics and so for the first time the hospitals could see that they were serving the same patients they could also see that it was they were touching half the population in Camden had actually been to the emergency room or to the hospital in that past year so it was a really they were having a huge impact and there was a lot of money being wasted they did maps by block about folks with chronic disease like diabetes or preventable incidents like falls of elderly folks to try to just see what was happening in the city and what this led to was both a community level intervention and an individual level intervention and at the community level they looked at where the diabetes prevalence was and a foundation they had 7,000 individuals that had come to the hospital for diabetes over a six-year period charging over one billion dollars in medical charges so a foundation stepped forward and funded the city-wide diabetes collaborative which created some courses about how to better manage the disease to avoid hospitalization before it got to a crisis point and what these maps did was show them where the people were there where they need to do outreach so instead of doing some bus ad everywhere or general radio spots they actually knew where they were they knew where their focus was and could put more energy into the into the courses and into the education then into sort of generic advertising and on the individual level which i think is more popular the new yorker article calls it the hotspotters it identified individuals that were superutilizers so depending the the number changes what number i mean depending on what article you read but you know 20 percent of the visitors generated 90 percent of the visits or costs that were there so what dr. Brenner thought is that this is really a failure of healthcare system this is not and it wasn't about money really it was about sort of how do you get better you know better health outcomes for people because these emergency room visits weren't doing it so they both did home visits so they figured out sort of what it's the environment the social the family issues around causing these health around the health concerns of the individual and they gave them an individual nurse practitioner's number so they had a contact somebody they knew and trusted to go to for medical advice and within a short amount of time they drastically reduced the hospital visits and made really huge progress the i mean the coalition is advanced then so that was you know five years ago five plus years ago they now have real-time data they're adding in new data sources they're expanding to other places but i think that the lesson is that the community improvement required one the creation of this neutral home where the primary care providers and the hospitals could come together a safe place where confidential data could be protected but the insights could be shared with the public it also created new data obviously these shared data sets with hospitals sharing data showed them patterns that they wouldn't have been able to see elsewhere and then it really required these primary service providers in the hospitals taking a huge risk and doing something different a really innovative practice that i think was uncomfortable for everybody involved so the coalition is now working with a network of cities trying to replicate this model some with federal funding some with philanthropy and the night grant when i spoke with them last week they're very excited about really pushing this more out to the public so what the night grant will do is allow them to create an open source portal so that different communities can load their own data in and use the analytic tools that they've used but you know i think the technology will be fantastic and it will lower barriers but it will only work in communities where they're willing where there's an institution willing to pull this together and where there's folks that are willing to actually change their practice so i'm happy to share other examples from nnip during the conversation but i will end with that thank you kathy hi there thanks elissa for the invitation um just as a recap i'm hillary hartley i am currently a presidential innovation fellow and uh was formerly with a company called n-i-c which is egov.com and i just want to wake everybody up for a second but also just say like ask a few questions um i'm curious uh who has ever renewed your driver's license online can you raise your hand all right who's like paid income tax or property taxes online who has uh checked into four square at their polling place location that either would be a few um you know these are all examples of civic innovations um who's been to a hackathon civic related or maybe otherwise so so you know a lot of us in this room are are are um participating in various ways um and i think my spot on the panel is pretty much to uh address the woman at the beginning who said that's not happening in our government um i'm here to tell you that it absolutely is and uh maybe it's in ways that are not quite as visible um and maybe in ways that we take for granted now in 2014 it sounds weird to even say that 2014 um but uh so n-i-c has been around for 20 plus years they got started as a as a text only bulletin board system 22 years ago doing dmv stuff and uh kind of grew into the web nebraska of all states was the very first website to go uh to make the move to html and just embrace the web and to put their their content and their services online way to go nebraska.gov um and n-i-c state um but uh you know so this is this has been happening and percolating for a very long time and again i think we take a lot of it for granted now um and we just expect well why can't i go to the website and get a hunting or fishing license online and why can't i go and immediately see my uh you know the the alternate side of the street parking like that should be easy to find and congratulations congratulations to nyc.gov for doing that recently um they're redesigned it addressed a lot of this little simple things that i think a lot of us just expect now um and uh steve rustler is many of us think of mr govloop the the founder of govloop you know he told me uh a while ago he said you know and i see is such a cool story because they really are the very first civic startup you know they started doing this and they're around so there is a model for sustainability and there is a model for for making money even and i think that that is really one of the things that uh with my i am a federal employee right now but with my my government hat off i mean that's one of the things that i see as the biggest um the biggest things that we need to tackle kind of as a community really is empowering the the uh the really cool projects that come out of gopher america and that come out of the brigades and to help these people uh that are that are boring their souls and to maybe these these these little software wedges or this this this little thing is to figure out how to empower them and help them you know make these projects sustainable uh repeatable again you know code for america and the brigade and everything that they're trying to do is really addressing that on some level uh the repeat repeatability and getting it in your city but i i do think that there's some foundational elements missing and that's that's part of the story that's really intriguing to me um but so now kind of going back and putting my federal employee hat on um at n i c you know we we operate as a vendor but it is it is a public private partnership it was possibly the very first public private partnership and um and that you know is one of these models i think that can push that sustainable thing forward um but it also is coming from within so things like the presidential innovation fellows things like the hhs innovation fellows even code for america you know they get embedded for a month and then they're working with with locals and now states um and as elissa alluded to at the beginning i think that one of the fundamental things that happens with fellowships like those um is that culture change element you know the thing that that is half of if not more of my job as a fellow working inside the federal government and with the general services administration is is to to kind of figure out where we can push buttons and where we can kind of cut some red tape and what bureaucracy we can cut through or maybe root around um and you know i say that very specifically you know absolutely um because there there are ways to get things done um that are still completely fulfilling all of the all of the requirements that we need to do to get something alive um that's not to say there's not bureaucracy but i i do think that that the energy that that things like fellowships can bring into uh into the culture and into the into the government be it federal state or local uh that really is that that that spark that it can ignite and catalyze and and lead to change that last beyond my fellowship or beyond my six to twelve month tenure that that gets the other people there that might be you know the career uh the career people that i'm working with and working side by side with to say wow we can keep this going and we can you know we can really kind of keep these keep these gears going um so just very quickly uh about my usa so the project that i got assigned as a fellow is called my usa you can go to my usa.gov and sign up for um an announcement of when we go live it's in super super alpha mode right now which means if you have a dot gov address you can sign up and kind of immediately start playing around with it but if you don't i have to wait until we open the floodgates in a couple of months um but uh so to kind of go back to something that i i almost even cringe now when i say it because it's been said so much but it really is true that sort of government 20 as uh you know the the platform you know government as a platform and to me my usa is kind of that platform so that's what's been really exciting for me is is we're working on kind of almost platform as a service software as a service uh a platform for innovation within the federal government and hopefully states are going to want to fork that code and take it and locals are going to want to fork that code and take it uh we've already had um hawaii hawaii.gov actually uh kind of i don't know if they i think they forked my usa and they're starting to play around with it but they're kind of using that same concept whether or not they use the actual code or not but um you know we're building we're hoping that it it uh it helps agencies build these new effective tools to engage with the public so my usa is kind of a single sign-on platform so an agency can come and say i want to build on top of my usa like you would build an app for facebook or like you would build an app for twitter then you log in with my usa and you can interact and do your business at benefits.gov or do your business at business usa but then things they're able to do things that they weren't able to do before like certain information or certain tasks or bookmarks or profile information to your my usa profile so that's a little bit about my usa and as i said we're kind of rolling that out on a slow boil uh we've got a few customers we're kind of on a tipping point in terms of uh rolling it out to to those few agency customers first and then it'll eventually go public over the next few months but um i want to just come back to that that notion of innovation within government and civic innovation and i was i was i can't remember which was agree and disagree but i was i was definitely leaning toward disagree in terms of needing government for civic innovation i don't think you do but i also just want to keep hammering home the fact that it is happening inside and that fellowships like mine and like cfa with what they really are doing is is uh kind of just really getting people who are the the career people they're excited and you know understanding that they can kind of keep this stuff going um so i guess the bottom line for me is uh the thing i've been doing for 15 years is changing the way that people interact with the government and to me that is the foundation of civic innovation thank you well earlier today when people were talking about you know whether technology is necessary for civic innovation i kind of felt like how could it not be but at the same time you know a lot of what the esteemed panelists here have been talking about is how policy folks are kind of like the the impetus for that change in the very beginning and some of the stories that that i want to share with you today about the code for america brigade um of which i'm a co-captain for the code for america brigade in northern virginia uh it's kind of a lot of the more successful projects that we've had stemmed from passionate policy folks with an idea that kind of took it forward with uh tech platform and when i think of um kind of how the brigade fits in with civic tech innovation the big picture the big ecosystem i like i like this concept that was brought forth by clay shirky called cognitive surplus and um why i like this term so much is and i didn't hear about it actually until i was a code for america fellow um our executive director jen palca really follows um clay shirky's ideas and loves the concept of cognitive surplus and that is basically that um people are going to have some free time eventually and what brings about this free time and their schedule well okay they they get free time they get free time because of efficiencies that are built in and and i think that uh technology has afforded this collaboration this kind of like efficiency to collaborate online and to some extent that's also maybe made uh some of our thinking through collaboration more efficient freeing up more of our time making us more productive maybe uh more efficient more productive so um you know if you have if you have a interest in volunteering in your community to begin with um how and you have technical skills how would you necessarily best use that well here comes the web here comes the here comes the internet all of a sudden now people even before there was uh gov 2.0 you know we're learning how to share files learning how to collaborate you know just using the internet this is a great tool well now the web the web and the internet provides technicians a way technical folks coders a way to collaborate with policy folks and understand a little bit more about their world and see that they can make a difference through their through their uh through the recording efforts and um you know at a basic level we develop technology to streamline and enhance citizen engage engagement with government um we currently work with Arlington County and Alexandria on different types of projects and i want to share a couple stories in that vein um in particular one of the very exciting projects that we had was the alexandria community indicators project which was started by uh reddy russo who's in the audience and um he used to work for the the um urban institute also and had an interest in community indicators and as it turns out um there just wasn't a whole lot of data on alexandria community indicators specifically and so he took this as a project he heard that there was a technical there was a brigade in northern virginia there were some interested techies and coders that um you know wanted to give back to their government but maybe didn't know didn't have a project to work on just was like hey i know i know ccan i know how to set up a data portal but i don't really you know what what can i do with that so randy came along and he had this this fabulous project which really you know once people started to learn about it maybe they weren't necessarily policy people beforehand but once they started to learn about what community indicators were it became more than just a satisfying geek out coding project it became more of a i can make a difference i can actually impact my local community by getting involved in this project just by being just by you know being a server administrator and setting up a ccan instance i can make a change and um and randy also has an interesting side story here too because he came from the policy side of things but then um he was pursuing a master's degree in information technology and so this this project of the communicators was rather the indicators was a way for him to kind of develop his technical skills and like the crossover between policy and technical development so i see um i see the brigades the brigades kind of position within the whole ecosystem of civic technology innovation is being a way for being kind of also like a way for policy people and technical people to come together and there's skill sharing that goes on so we can learn about i can learn about community indicators and their significance the policy significance of this and at the same time there is a technical literacy aspect that i think um goes on as well where policy people are are learning more about the power of technology and how they can leverage that to make even more exciting efficient empowering applications for citizens um and that and that's sort of a focus that you know that's a side benefit that we get out of our brigade too is is education you know so in addition to developing civic tech innovation projects we also provide a platform for people to learn and i'm humbled to be on this panel today because before i started Code for America i actually didn't know so much maybe about all of these wonderful projects that go on in our country to help people to help people save money low-income people save money and all the thought that goes on behind that and um and people really trying to look into their communities and understand what goes on there and uh the way that government is trying to be innovative who knew you know i was just a lawyer before i came to Code for America and i didn't think much of government but i learned so much that a lot of things are changing and i think that that's kind of the bottom line i mean civic civic innovation happens in many different ways it happens through technologists it happens through policy people i feel like yes um to some extent technology can civic innovation can save our democracy because it's the next big platform that's allowing for this cognitive surplus to come forth and be very efficient and productive but you know in the end it's always going to be passionate policy people that are going to be bringing forth these ideas that make them a reality hand in hand in in cooperation with uh with technical people to make it happen that's about it thanks so much so there's just one more story left and then we can get to some questions from you guys um i my name's ryan garity i work upstairs at the open technology institute with alissa and alissa asked me to come speak about civic innovation projects that we see in our international work um and i'm going to focus this story on the aspect of civic innovation that's really about communities coming together to redefine models of governance and about self-governance and innovations and self-governance and the story really addresses one fundamental question which is if 50 children can come together to plan a communication to plan their communications infrastructure with paper markers and pictures of routers so remember that question so the story my story starts in detroit with a project called the digital stewards which oti the open technology institute developed with allid media projects um which helps neighborhoods plan organize build maintain and govern community owned communications infrastructure so in that program these digital stewards learn how to build community wireless networks that link rooftop to rooftop and allow people to share local information on the network uh communicate internally between themselves or share internet access um and the basic premise of that work is that communities should be able to participate in the governance of their infrastructure now like generally that could be around roads land use commercial developments but in this case new technologies make it possible for communities to build communications infrastructure relatively efficiently so in december to carry that work forward i traveled with the team from the open technology institute to a place that i think can really define the intersection between civic innovation and the formation of democracy and where people are standing up to demand that they be allowed to participate in governance decisions particularly in communication telecommunications and internet policy in a place that had been extremely repressive in that area so uh myself and my team we traveled three hours south from tunis to a small town on the Mediterranean coast called syeda now syeda is really important in tunisia because they are at the forefront of civic technology and civic innovation that's happening in tunisia particularly at the municipal level so immediately after ben all these stepped down in 2011 civic technologists in this small town decided to start working on open government and open technology and issues so they published the municipal budget on the town website they published the council meeting notes they have a wiki media site that allows local people to contribute knowledge about the community they conduct trainings on open source technology and they've really become a model for the rest of tunisia to follow and and it's possible in syeda because these civil society groups can work with the municipality that is very encouraging of those efforts and our local partners see libre have been the leading members of that effort in syeda and in the summer last year they formed an organization to cement that work and carry that work into the rest of tunisia to ensure that communities have access better access to their government and that governments have to be open and transparent so see libre came to us wanting to build a community-owned wireless network that would serve as a platform for their local content and to encourage the kind of civic innovation that they were hoping their open government work would do and and really they wanted a network that the entire community could build together and govern together and that would ensure the community had a say in their digital media ecosystem so together with see libre we conducted a four-day workshop in this small town in tunisia and the community learned participatory planning methods using a simple visual language that we developed in detroit they learned basic wireless networking principles they made ethernet cables we climbed on rooftops and we installed routers we we worked together with a group of small kids teenagers adults non-technical people technical people people from nearby towns people from far away towns came and many people wandered by to see what we were doing listened for five minutes and then stayed for the rest of the workshop and started identifying new places where we could expand the wireless network so we really think of this especially that event was really kind of barn raising where people with different skills came together to build something for the common good there's really the interesting thing about networks and wireless networks is that you really can't build them without community support so we didn't get the community to participate because it would be fun we got them to participate because you need rooftops you need people to go out and find households that are interested in hosting routers on their roofs you need sys admins to work on the community server you need people graphic designers to design portal pages so it really has to be a community effort and similarly the municipality in this case was a good partner and they provide bandwidth to the network and access to municipal rooftops so in the end of the four-day workshop we had a wireless network with 11 rooftops and a local community server with wikipedia in french and arabic with a collaborative editing tool with open street maps and a secure chat so the entire network was about local information and not sharing the internet which is a really different model than what we're used to and it's really part of their greater work to encourage civic innovation or civic engagement in a country that has just recently become a democracy so the four things that i think are really interesting and powerful coming out of the work are that this small town's going to have to develop their own methods of governance for this infrastructure and that's i think a task equal to the tasks of many very difficult community organizing projects and i think their model will become something of their own the second thing is that there are towns across tunisia that are really interested in also building their own network so it's something that we could see transform the telecommunications landscape of the entire country and then third you have local developers developing local applications for those networks so it's really about local innovation to solve local problems that could transform the community media environment there and then the final thing is that these projects in tunisia at the moment like community wireless community radio they will transform the regulatory landscape of the country for the foreseeable future as they are grandfathered in to new reforms that happen as as the democracy takes shape and new laws are passed so if we actually step back and think about tunisia as a country and civic innovation and the concept of civic innovation and democracy i think tunisia is a really interesting case because it's a place where people organized and stood up and said that they should have a role in participating in the governance of their country and that in a way is the first civic innovation of a democracy that people organize themselves and demand that they participate in governance and that is something you really see happening there for the first time you have civil society groups that can have some impact and can legally operate within the country and they are thinking about radical new models of participatory democracy and they are talking about projects that we really wouldn't hear in this country talk about they are talking about a complete reform of the sort of representative democracy that we're used to and you know maybe none of that will happen it depends how skeptical you are but the thing that's interesting is how the possibility that it could happen how that drives people to think of new ideas so i just will leave you with three images of what innovation civic innovation in tunisia looks like one is two teenagers a brother and a sister standing on the rooftop of their high school overlooking the sea with a pvc pipe and a router attached to the top trying to connect their school to the cultural center to the town hall to all the houses around them the second picture is of a 12-year-old girl who was sitting with us around a map that everybody had drawn of her own town and she was going to place a picture of a router on a location indicating that we should expand the network and she looked up and looked around at all of the adults sitting around the table and she said are we really going to do this or are we just talking about it and everyone sort of looked at each other and smiled and then the third is of 50 kids sitting around maps that they drew themselves of their own towns thinking about how the community wireless network should be built thank you ryan so i'm going to move into a moderated portion of the afternoon and then we'll open it up to q and a to the audience let me just get my time here okay um one of the things i think a lot about at the california civic innovation project is um how do i take examples or stories that i hear in one city or one country or one town and replicate that and scale it and and and how can i do that in my capacity and so i heard a lot of scaling conversations here you know what the work that michelle's doing at the brigade i think is a great example of how things can scale with local activists the example that ryan just gave of taking something that had been tested and tried out in detroit and using that in tunisia and then rachel you described save nyc is actually becoming saved usa through different replications in different cities and then kathy the camden example um with some night funding kind of testing that out um so i guess i'll direct this question to you kathy and open it up for others to to kind of add in but um what does it take to scale or replicate um civic innovation and and are there things that we should watch out for or these aha moments um to look for i think um there's obviously a lot of pieces and it can start in different ways i think that the replication does not happen automatically and i think that the innovators are not necessarily the people that are the right people to spread the innovation um sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't um i think for our network having um it's actually been really difficult sort of to get the tech part replicated across our network but i think that's changing a lot with brigades and with these places where we can cross fertilize and i think there there does need to be more um i think funders don't like to to fund replication they like to fund new things um so we really need storytellers in the media and journalists have great um role to play on this about um about telling the story of what it takes to replicate what does it take to adapt somebody said context matters like how you know does the system in detroit translate to tunisia or camden translate to los angeles or and we just need to learn um more about how to do that process and and really value and recognize the second user and the third user the fourth user in addition to the great entrepreneurs that came up with the idea in the first place i'm sure others have ideas yeah does anybody else want to add in scaling sure we just say based on uh our experience working with new york i mean something that's really important is uh is partnerships and making sure that the stakeholders um involved in the process um are able to sort of maintain that buy-in and communicate its value to other people uh is something that was challenging in expanding the save nyc model to the other cities is um getting financial service providers uh to engage actively in that process um it is not attractive for most banks to offer a lot of very low value accounts this is why there is part of a reason why there's historically a very strained relationship between low-income households and the formal financial sector um new york was able to negotiate this process um fairly easily getting other banks to buy into that was harder but i think part of the pathway was partially um was partially laid um by seeing some of the outcomes of the save nyc trial seeing that uh these families were maintaining their bank accounts they weren't just turning over seeing that they were building balances um so having that experience reframe uh i think in their minds and potentially others who may um sort of move into this space in the future that this could actually be a higher value prospect this could be something that uh in the future um opens the door to more customers stable customers higher balanced customers yeah go ahead one of the things that we run into occasionally with the brigade projects because there's a big push for us to reuse other applications that are already deployed in other cities a lot of times we have uh questions such as well we have different branding in our local locality you know or we have different our data is done differently so to some extent um one of the roadblocks i think towards uh reusability and scalability for local tech projects is is this um it's standardization around data and i understand that um there's efforts to do this kind of standardization especially around community indicators so those kinds of efforts help i think with scalability but that is definitely one of the big roadblocks that we run into that's great hillary did you want to add something yeah i'm just gonna say i think also on the flip side um i used to end some of my presentations with the with the slide that simply said technology is the easy part you know at the end of the day there's a lot of people in here that can can can figure out the you know the sustainable way to build something with technology um well we'd like to think there are anyway um but uh but you said a word that just always comes back to me which is stakeholders and i and the stakeholders i think are the key to sustainability and scalability and it's it's really finding those those those right buttons and the right people in the right levers yeah i think i mean in our work what it would be easy for people for the lesson to take away is oh people should build a wireless network in their community which is i think the lesson that a lot of towns take away and i think that's the problem of replication of a lot of these problems that it's not actually the thing itself you want to replicate but the process of how you got there that's important so if you're building a local application it may be that the process of the community coming together and deciding what their core needs were is the actual transformative part and that the tech you get at the end is not as are networks the network is actually a minor outcome i think compared to the community coming together and deciding to take on this really difficult project and that everybody should have a voice in it what actually came out it wouldn't actually matter if that was replicated or not but the process should be replicated and i've seen the power of that in the fellowship programs i think Hilary you're description of the presidential innovation fellow and kind of going rogue um is is interesting and and it describes a lot of what you're talking about that it's really the process it's not the output and so i'm wondering maybe Hilary and ryan if you could describe what tools for lack of a better word do you leave behind to help with the sustainability of that so in a fellowship right you're there for a year or six months and in tunisia you're there for a shorter period of time what sorts of tools do you leave behind i think you're right on in terms of the process and that at the end of the day you know we we like to stay away from as much documentation as possible but you know and really focus on like building a pilot and getting things out that people can use but but i do think that that that process is is is really the the key thing to under to making sure that all the people that you're working with in your small small circle that are that are inside at least in my case inside the government and wanting to make something sustainable are understanding how how we got to where we are and how we got to the decisions that are being made i think sort of fleshing that out a bit is is key the way that we are trying to benchmark it in our work is that if community members can train other community members who can train other community members then we know we've at least left behind a fragment of that process and that's what we focus on that community technologists or community members can go through a participatory process with the community to figure out what the core needs are and then address those needs i think just you know leaving behind documentation probably wouldn't wouldn't get us there at all yeah i mean sort of just going back to the stakeholder comment i mean uh stakeholders we often think of as you know the people at the end of the day that are on the bottom of the contracts and sign on the line but but to me it's turning the it's again it's turning that small cohort of people that you're working with turning them into the stakeholders and them into the champions that are going to carry it forward to the next round of fellows that might come in or to the next team that's going to carry it on because you know we we might come and go where the people kind of working on the code might come and go but but if that you know if that group of stakeholders and they really are it's it's turning the people that are working on it day to day into the champions of the service that you're trying to get going we heard one gentleman during the spectrogram exercise say that government was important because it needed to be civic innovations need to be institutionalized for sustainability or something along those lines i'm wondering michelle when you you just you described working with Arlington Arlington and Alexandria um how how did you guys approach that relationship and how so how do civic activists work with government and and can you kind of walk us through maybe one example of of what it took to build that relationship um i think probably the you know we i have a lot to thank to tracy facility who's in the audience as she she had been in the community already um kind of as you know through her nonprofit and like reaching out to government and working in partnership with them and i think a lot of it is just kind of recognizing folks that are already in the community that are already kind of have that dialogue going with government and um and trying to um get a sense of what what that government is interested in what what kinds of projects are going to appeal to them how you can get their attention how you can plug in and make a difference because i think every city has their own kind of needs and wants and um trying to approach it from that angle in fact one of the projects we have ongoing right now is a playground mapper application and i guess i personally wouldn't have necessarily thought that a playground mapper application would have been such a very desirable project in alexander but it is and um so and these kinds of um this kind of information this kind of needs and wants that cities have and how to dialogue with them can be found through existing nonprofits already that are interfacing with government and is that a role that your group plays kathy i noticed in um that you're working with cities on data capture um and kind of opening up that data what role does does the institute play in that and and are you in an intermediary or how does that work so the urban institute um is a we coordinate the network of the local organizations that are locally run and do some um so the the data warehouses and the relationships are all at the local level um i think what you said i think is the right and we're the local partner of dc at the urban institute so we work with the washington area i think finding how to be useful to the city agencies in their day-to-day life so we were the first people to geocode the dc schools data and see where their kids were in relationship to charters and and sort of bringing that innovation to them um i think that they're they really welcome it and it does sort of shift Brett Goldstein tells a story about how when they used to release data and people would find mistakes and data in chicago people would attack them and be like oh the data is garbage and um in a really hostile environment and once the government started to open things up and be available it was a little more collaborative it was like oh look there's mistakes in the data well let's fix them you know and um and really work to have a more constructive hopefully a two-way relationship um between the government about what they need what they hear what you hear from the citizens what what tools are out there to help them and eventually it might be that you don't need a map or you need more money for playgrounds you know i mean what's the policy question what's the resource question when it gets down to it so so rachel we you talked a bit about save in my C and i'm wondering what role so when i think about the civic innovation ecosystem i described the people that kind of i've come to recognize as people and actors and enablers in that ecosystem and one of them is our think tanks um can you describe the role of new america or think tank in this civic innovation civic innovation ecosystem well i think a couple of the roles that we were able to play during this collaboration and this is i mean something that a couple other panelists spoke to spoke to as well as just sort of embedding an idea right i mean that's something that we do we think we see a policy problem we think of a policy solution um but to actually make that is to make that actionable really requires having a relationship with somebody in a position to implement that so i think having that partnership opportunity with municipalities um who are maybe less in a position to be to really take just sort of the 30 000 foot look at what's going on within their communities and to sort of construct those individualized solutions is is a value i think something that's also helpful is figuring out ways to leverage their effort and commitment and that's a function that i think we were able to play through just sort of our role as a convener among other other actors within this space you know the city of new york is not an asset building organization i mean this is sort of they're crossing a threshold into a new area so being able to connect them with other people who are much more experienced and have sort of thought through some of these processes before help reduce some of the risk that they assume when they undertake this kind of endeavor and then distilling some of the findings i think of of that work um into into policy applications and being able to sort of go back to our original concept and refine it based on what sort of the the lived experience of this program is is is another role that we play and then extending that further um i guess what role when you guys um ryan we're working with the residents and civic groups in tunisia what was your role in that or not your personal role but think tanks kind of role yeah i mean i think sitting here in dc we all face this a problem of not wanting to be people who go and intervene in a place um which is actually almost the opposite of civic innovation um and i think that makes us all think a lot about the role we should play and i think you know the other panelists said this quite well that you know as a think tank or as a research institute we can convene people together we can provide um general resources um for different community groups to utilize that should be shared but i think it's really it is very tricky to work uh with a community and let them guide the process and i i saw that when i worked um at social compact which did a lot of neighborhood indicators work but we were a dc-based organization that would go into other communities and when we did that once or twice a year we worked very deeply with the community and let them guide the process and when we were funded to uh replicate that across a lot of towns we we couldn't do that and we weren't actually encouraging the community voice um that had been the driver of the work to begin with and instead we were the people going out and doing the work and then leaving behind a report um so hillary this i guess i'll i'll ask you a question hillary and then one last question then we'll open it up for the audience and twitter um so in what ways have you seen civic innovation change the way that residents and government are interacting uh maybe through your work or through the works that your cohort of fellowship of fellows have done yeah i think it's a it's really a broad spectrum i mean my work sort of with state and local government over the last 15 years has been kind of just changing the fundamental nature of how we think about government and and interacting with government and being able to do the business of government online like i said you know being able to go and renew your driver's license online and being able to go and get a hunting license from my mobile app while i'm sitting at the stream fishing you know like uh i mean that kind of stuff it really is kind of revolutionary um and and i and i do think that as more and more of those things happen in more and more apps enable us to to take a picture of our check and deposit in our our bank we expect government to keep up and so um there are there are there are companies and there are states that are that are kind of ahead of the game and really working to make sure that government feels the same way feels like you're interacting with your bank or with you know with with mint dot com you know or something like that um so i you know i think that they're kind of in fundamental changes on that level and then there's kind of the other the flip side of it some of it we've alluded to it a little bit with open data and standardizing and things like that i mean you know if you think about what um another group of of piffs i hate that acronym we all do but um presidential innovation fellows um it's right another group of presidential innovation fellows is working on right now it's called the green button uh is anybody heard of the green button initiative so there's the blue button and the green button and there's probably more buttons also but uh blue button is focused on health data and being able to download your health record so that it's you know you can take a any doctor and any provider and you know have you have your health record green button is kind of doing the same thing but for energy data so uh as a california resident i can go to pgne ostensibly uh and wade through their website and find my green button data and then there are lots of services that that some of the fellows are building and that other people at hackathons are building there's actually there was a an energy hackathon this weekend um uh this past weekend um so there are lots of things kind of being built on some of those things like open data so i can go and grab my green button data and then you know ostensibly be able to to compare it to my neighbors or compare you know and kind of see where my energy you know stacks up so you know there's there's really a broad spectrum of civic innovation happening at the government level um and just a little plug very quickly for the fellowship program who has absolutely no idea what i'm talking about when i say presidential innovation fellow okay there are a few in the in the room so um i was given some talking points but i do want to just i want to talk about it because it's important and we are right to to cut you off and we're going to be uh the next round of fellows the applications are going to be open over the probably in the next few weeks but the the presidential innovation fellowship the PIF program was created by the white house office of science and technology policy um in 2012 and um Todd Park was really one of the guys that you know is is the champion and he's kind of the godfather of this program Todd Park and making Phillips and a bunch of people helped get it off the ground in 2012 and the idea is that you know they wanted to take uh innovators entrepreneurs people who have started companies people who are doing really creative and and awesome work in the private sector and bring them into government and pair them with these people that i've kind of been alluding to that are trying to get things done that really want to be innovative that that have a really cool idea so to bring people you know from the private sector into make them federal employees for six to twelve months and say okay let's work on this very you know specific problem to see what we can get done and that's that's the fellowship in a nutshell there were um five projects the very first year my USA was one of them we carried over that that project was also a project this round there are i think 10 projects this year and there are about 40 of us this year and we work you know across the government we've got their people in department of education treasury i work at the gsa and so we're really just kind of incubating ideas all over the place and that's that's kind of the the purpose of the fellowship but if you go to whitehouse.gov slash innovation fellows you can read more about the projects and also just sign up to get notified when the the next application round begins it's going to be exciting so this will be my last question to the group and then we'll open it up for q&a with the audience and twitter so what's needed to continue to spur civic innovation and and i'll just i'll start with you ryan and go down to to rachel if you can kind of just talk about what you think is still needed in this space well i think about two things one from lessons i learned working in the us and one internationally i know when i worked with municipal data and mostly planning departments trying to get their data to do new and interesting community projects the worst part is that those are the programs planning departments that are cut often and so as we're increasingly asking for more data and different ways to access that data to do all these innovative projects that we think are sort of transforming potentially our democracy the departments that are actually maintaining the data are losing personnel so i think that's one thing we have to think about and then the second thing you know i spent a lot of time thinking about countries where people are defining governance and the absence of a government and the energy that they have around developing alternative forms of governance of rebuilding democracy i think a lot of that hope and aspiration would need to be transferred here and we need to find some way to transfer that energy here because it is a very stark difference and i think we've become stagnant in a lot of ways i feel like one of the important ways to keep civic innovation going locally is to kind of nurture first of all nurture the relationships that the local volunteer community has with local government and also have local government feel comfortable you know in in that nurturing of relationships happen and feel comfortable working with outside volunteers working with technologists you know i guess a common concept a lot of people have is let's get all the data open you know and sometimes there's a lot of hesitancy by governments to open data i think that part of that comes from just a need for relationship building because i think at the end of the day you're always going to have a group of interested citizens that want to contribute their time towards their their local community and improving their local community and there's really no ulterior motive usually you know i mean at the end of the day if you're coming to a hackathon you're coming on a thursday night to go code on something you're not looking to you know make your city look bad you want to look good so i think to some extent it's communicating that value and communicating that interest and that altruism with your local government to see how you can partner and sometimes this baby steps is patience you know i mean i think it's going to take a lot of patience and just being willing to wait it out or just wait the time whatever it takes and just kind of move like a dance you know one step at a time and you know i think it's going to happen honestly i feel like there's enough i think that the technology platform and through through these wonderful efforts to like hillary's efforts you know and policy nonprofit policymakers you know you're going to see that this is going to continue along anyway there's a momentum already here but nurturing those relationships is definitely going to be a very important part going forward i think if i were to sum up in one word it's probably sustainability and there's so many things that that play a part in making the things that we're all doing on the policy level on the technology level sustainable and so i think that it's it's twofold it's one making sure that the the technologies can can progress can find homes can keep doing the good work that they're doing but it's also on a people level again it's coming back to those stakeholders and empowering the people that are trying to get the good work done you know giving them giving them the power to actually do that and continue the job and continue the work and and take the message from SAVE NYC to SAVE USA and and you know figuring out the model that really works for sustainability of anything from you know a Code for America project that started in Louisville and you know wants to go you know nationwide to you know something like you know i always talk about utah.gov they've been surprisingly you know you don't think of you know kind of like maybe technology or or you know progressive things in in utah but um utah.gov the team there is kind of a perfect storm they've they've just been ahead of the curve for the last you know several years maybe a decade now and the the perfect storm there really kind of revolves around people again the technology is the easy part but they have the talent to to pull it off once they have a good idea they've got you know management of that team that says we do want to push the envelope we want to we want to we want to be better than Colorado or whatever it is but they also the CTO and the CIO the people you know even all the way up to the governor they empower those people to say that is a great idea let's make it happen and so you know i think it just kind of comes back to to people. I mean we focus a lot on the power of networks and really just questioning just going to Los Angeles just last week and having them complain about all the fragmentation around their data work and like it doesn't have to be this way it's other look at other places and there's no one answer but i think networks across the country and national organizations have a place in this can show other models and i think networks that cross fertilize between technology and policy folks i'm thinking about you know the transparency camp or other places where we can meet each other and learn new ideas and new language and skills are really important but you know i'd also like to end on the the when you were talking about the citizen relationship that there there is a there could be a negative side to this if on the focus of technology could just reinforce current power structures that are there so if the people that have the smartphone can report the problem in their neighborhood and that they have higher expectations and then more resources resources go to wealthy neighborhoods once again so it takes a really deliberate focus to make sure that the benefits are are going to be experienced equally that the voice is equal and i just read oh in the school boundaries in dc they said that three quarters of the people that attended the focus groups had a graduate degree so i mean that's that's not all of dc so it's not representative so i mean i think that that just it just needs to be really aware as we think about what what does it mean to have high-speed access what does it mean to have a camera on your phone and i think some of that digital divide is the technology part might be getting better about that piece but i think the trust in government and the willingness to think that it's worthwhile to engage is is still a really big divide so it's a trust issue i think i think we're talking about relationships once again so thank you i mean similar to your first point about networks i mean having a strong community of practice and that allows that allows cities who are looking to address specific times types of needs to connect with cities who already have you know i think new york is a unique in this sense it was very entrepreneurial you know and it was also financed by bloomberg money and that also cities have bloomberg money so as a product of their experience they they found that they were attracting other cities who wanted to start replicating different aspects of that and wanted to figure out how and wanted to figure out how to do it in a much more financially sustainable way so i think as an outgrowth of that experience new york and san francisco have teamed up have teamed up to form cities for financial empowerment and which is now has 12 members um that allows uh mayor's offices who are committed to meeting uh the financial needs of their most vulnerable citizens um to sort of tap into this network of cities who have already played out different ways uh to to embed some of these needs so i think that's uh that's one example that's allowed um you know sort of a democratization of benefits from sort of this isolated this isolated experience thank you thank you guys all for joining i'm going to open it up to questions we have about 15 minutes left um and we have andrew with the microphone so if you raise your hand he'll come up to you up here with the scarf yep that's thank you um hi son yeah okay um so in my career as a civic innovator i've been routinely disappointed or dismayed really by the lack of commitment or even thought about the community engagement and organization needed to make projects work um you a lot of even alluded in several comments to the importance of community organization um and community organizing in the civic and innovation process that i just was wondering i feel like for me it's a really important aspect of it and projects i'm successful without it but i but i'm sort of interested in in what you guys have to say about that to some degree that question um does also lead back to this question about uh equity in the kind of work that we're talking about um and i think you know one thing that's interesting is um the work that kathy does and work that i um have done in the past is that it came out of community organizing around social justice and that the data piece that like innovative piece that we often talk about um was a means to an end and you know the the caution around a lot of this open government open data work is that because it's not coming from a social justice equity framework um we are going to have those inequities and unless you have the social organizing framework um you're not going to be able to counterbalance that at all so i think that is a really good question for everybody yes i think that um you know our most of our our organizations are outside of government and i think there's a reason for that and they can be a little more vocal about those things that maybe the city government is not always um uh free to do or have the um so it takes you know um i think there are different pressure points um to to do that but i think um i jump in i mean i think the i think our partners have um who might have been reluctant about the hackathons to begin with um have now decided that it's easier to join the places and our data our detroit partner is now partnering with a tech company about gathering um uh gathering data about vacancy and having they have 120 residents um mapping out the city now so i think i think opting out is not the right answer i think jumping in learning a language figuring out the different perspectives both from the government from the technology folks um uh is the answer and it's um it's not a short process i think i went to my first tech like 2010 i went to my first tech meeting and thought i don't blog here and we're different we're different people and um uh but you know i think that the two worlds are coming together we're actually learning to do things better i mean i i think of course we have a whole panel full of optimists here um as you can tell from where we are but um yeah i think that i think we can we can shape how things are um progressing coming out in our communities and it sounds like you you're you are doing that too so any other questions yeah here in the front oh i'm bob hersey i'm a consultant uh how have you been able to bring in the communities by getting their inputs over the internet well um i'll know very basic sort of technology level if you will uh we've had several projects that i worked on have seen great success from using things like idea scale user voice um the some technologies that just kind of do that for you uh but then there comes the hard work of community organizing because you have to get people to those tools so tools are only part of the answer um but you know i i think that if i were to add something to the last comment that plays into this it's there there i think that there is a job description there basically for you know organizations like code for america and for companies like nc like they really do they need a community organizer you know or something like them you know a catalyst you know i don't give it a cool name but but i think there is a job description there to kind of ensure that we are getting people to the tools that then keep people to the output and just to add to that hillary i think getting them to the tools at the right time in the process i think is also really important because oftentimes i've seen in the work that i do in municipal governments in california that the tools are used after the fact and so we really want to get people seeding the ideas and it based on need and so if we can insert that process earlier on with tools whether it be internet tools or face to face um i think that's important questions yep in the back so i wanted to go back to the community organizing question and um and one of the things that kind of bothers me i go to a lot of data things is we always talk about people showing up but we never talk about going to where people are so for example um i did a brief thing with open 311 where i went to community centers and can you hold the mic to your yeah closer to your to your mouth thank you it's actually for me that i'm sorry anyways i did this project where i went to community centers and to neighborhood centers in dc with open 311 where people had never heard of it had never done it and then we did a mapping of their neighborhood and they thought it was great they thought there was problems with it but they thought it was great but and i'm involved with code for dc but no we always have things at 1776 or at sunlight foundation we don't really go out into communities and to me that's reinforcing power dynamics and reinforcing lack of social connections between communities and so i would like to hear besides having people show up at our spaces how we can start going out to people's spaces i have an example of um at code for oakland which is a hackathon that's held in oakland i think they're in their third year now um the first year they did some listening sessions and they started doing them and asking people to come to city hall that didn't work out and it was listening sessions with the community because they had realized early on that there was a disconnect between the community need and the technologists that wanted to build really cool stuff and so the second year what we did and it was just it was an attempt and i think it can continue to be improved upon but what we did was create listening sessions and go to public libraries throughout oakland and so we held them in different neighborhoods still a government building in a library but it was meeting people in at least different neighborhoods throughout the city to have those conversations i've heard of stories and i i don't know the actual organization that was doing it but i've heard of examples of doing outreach while people are waiting in line and so asking people questions and getting input kind of getting input into the process while people are waiting on in line for something that they normally would do but i don't know if there's other examples of kind of meeting the community where they're at it was a great um piece of uh the what was code for america hana lulu was that last year 2012 2012 i think i was a mentor to the code for america hana lulu team um and one of the things that kind of came out of that was uh this i can't remember what they called it had a great name but it was basically like a ride the bus campaign and the mayor of hana lulu rode the bus all around and and kind of texted and tweeted throughout the day and got feedback and and just kind of talked to people all over the city um and i think things like that can go kind of a long way towards towards what you're talking about but i also think kind of in the work that i do to step back and maybe not speak specifically about civic innovation but but there is a lot of um i always kind of think of user testing and trying to get out to people kind of where they are and in the communities that they are and you know focus groups are user testing or you know standing on the corner and having them look at a at a wireframe for a prototype something like that i mean even little examples like that are a good way to just kind of get get it in front of people that you wouldn't normally get it in front of people we've talked about recently in the office a lot is that we actually don't necessarily want to be training people to build communications infrastructure that we actually want to um we actually want individuals in the community sort of civic technologists to act more like labor organizers in the us act and that they go to a community and ask what the community needs and it might be a tech thing and it might not be a tech thing um and address those needs as you would if you were an organizer but you know so often because of how we're funded or what our specialty is even if you are going to the neighborhood you're still going with your solution so for us it really means creating community organizers in places and letting them figure out what the needs are in their own in their own places yeah i think i mean um and i've i've actually heard very unhappy stories on all sides about developers even going into the neighborhood and saying how can three one one solve your problems you know when a kid was shot last night or something and they're terrible school the violent crime and three one one is not solving their problem so i mean i think it's the listening so you have i think you're right you have to go to them both physically and um and actually in practice yeah to actually listen and be open to what's um to what's needed and there's i think there's a lot of examples and um we have a story on our website about Pittsburgh and it was a promise neighborhood focus that was focused around kids and that was the funding was around kids but the parents were worried about vacant housing because it it was the kids had to walk past the vacant housing and the squatters and the drug drug use and unsafe buildings to get to school so you had to rearrange things and be like oh okay it's not a kids program it's about housing which is about kids and so i think yeah it's um both uh yeah mentally and physically going to where people are is where we're going to get the most traction and hopefully community change i feel like it's also very important for like brigade groups um such as uh co for northern virginia to again like i guess a nurtured relationships with nonprofits that have uh have outreach already in the community and already understand these needs because a lot of times you know um we may be you know developing an application that just serves a particular you know demographic and and but yet that's never the intent okay you know so it's like to the extent that we nurture relationships with other nonprofits and that we understand we get a better sense a better broader high level picture of what's going on amongst um needy communities um that that's a better way i think that we can really make sure to be more inclusive i would say though honestly like i guess probably our perspective is anybody is always welcome to come to our meeting you know like we try to be welcoming and friendly but i can see how it would be both an effort and also um scary for some people to just walk into a room encoders and be like hey i want you guys to do this you know so i think um you know it's just a matter of kind of trying to build those relationships with with other nonprofits and it'll happen i i'm optimistic that it'll happen and events like these bring bring the techies and the policy people with the real boots on the ground knowledge together so any other questions combining a couple of of things you've both said people have said well in tunisia you were talking mostly well some of the pictures you were raising were kids and you were and and michelle you were just saying how you know it's scary to walk into a room full of coders uh but you know 12 year olds are too small to fail you know what's being done to reach out to you know to to find ways to engage kids here i mean you know meeting on a thursday night at nsf especially if you know there's no no food no you know i think um you know pretty much um again it'll it'll be just kind of like it's an evolution you know our our hacker groups our civic hacker groups have just started you know a couple years ago and we're still still trying to learn our way and um we are very altruistic geeks you know we we want to help kids we want to help everybody um as much as possible and i think you know by interacting with other nonprofits and by interacting with activated citizens um eventually i hope that we will get to to help everyone and or at least learn more about those opportunities see what's out there and you know you're gonna have uh community college professors and professors and high school teachers that will find these opportunities and and try to get their students involved and try to there there'll be an evolution in what we're doing it may not happen overnight but i think it is in the back of everybody's mind that we want that to happen and i would argue that it is happening i don't know if it's specific to the 12 year old said or not but definitely you know under college and high school and uh they they are you know starting to get engaged and starting to show up at events and starting to go to hackathons and there are even fellowships targeted toward toward kids um and i think that the all of the models that have been explored here today whether it's a code for america brigade or a hackathon or a fellowship you know i think there is an understanding that there is the next generation that just totally gets it and wants you know to be boots on the ground as you said from the get go and the image that i used for the invite um was the girls make the city out of the city of boston so it was a really great program where the city of boston went around to different schools and engaged kids and making things for their city so it was a maker project um and it was a really successful project so i'm going to wrap up the event now it's six o'clock and we're actually ending on time so thank you all for joining us this evening um you have our twitter handles and i hope that we can stay in touch thank you thank you