 So I'm Jake Barton from Local Projects. In the 1970s, the South Bronx in New York City was literally on fire. It was the hardest time for New York. The city had declared bankruptcy. Firefighters would later refer to this period as the war years. They'd go from alarm to alarm from fire to fire, answering as many as 40 calls a day. Imagine that. Now, the city did something that, of course, any city would do, is they tried to think about how to solve these problems, and they called the smartest people that they knew, people at the Rand Corporation. That was the think tank associated with the American Department of Defense. They came up famously with the Internet, and the Cold War strategy of mutually assured destruction. So these are very, very smart people, the best and the brightest. And they came up with a computer model that looked at where all of the different firehouses were. But a lot of the presumptions inside of the model undid all of the work and eventually made the situation considerably worse. They presumed that because of all the different firehouses, all the firefighters were going back to their individual firehouses and recommended that they close literally half of the stations. And by the end of the 1970s, the South Bronx looked like this. But what's interesting is that the thing that actually brought the South Bronx back, more than anything, was the people who stayed and fought. The people who lived in the South Bronx, with help from the government, with help for not-for-profits and churches, and a lot of different organizations essentially fought for the South Bronx and brought it back to where it is today. And it leads me to this question, which I think is a good question to answer or to think about at any of these types of conferences. And when you think about this, you think about the city of the future, and of course that's a lot of what we're talking today, but actually the other quote I wanted to bring up with is, you know, the future is already here, it just isn't well distributed. Because this is actually the city of the future. This is Rio de Janeiro. IBM has built through its Smart Cities program a command and control center, a mission control for the entire city. And it helps them to deal with on-the-go crises, with fires, with crime events. They're hosting the Summer Olympics in four years and they have an incredibly high rate of kidnappings and poverty. And so this is a very big play for them in terms of security. We used to build mission controls to put people on the moon, and now we put them in cities with our best and brightest to coordinate vast bureaucracies. And New York is still in on this game, so Mayor Bloomberg just last week announced a partnership with Microsoft, and New York's play is straight up about security. They're interested in surveillance, they're watching, and they can trace a digital or a car for over a month throughout all the city spaces with all the different cameras they have. This is put forward by a number of large corporations doing Smart City initiatives. So this is the IBMs of the world, this is Cisco, this is Siemens. And the interesting thing is when you actually get into the Smart Cities endeavor, what they're really looking at doing is taking some of the algorithms and processes that they've used to optimize factories, to optimize energy grids, and apply them to city systems. So this is for public safety, this is for energy use, this is for transportation. They're looking to get people to work six minutes faster, seven minutes faster. And I actually don't have a problem at all with Smart Cities, there's a lot of critiques. I've seen big fights between people from IBM and public policy people, but in reality, they're really optimizing some of the systems within cities. But in my estimation, those aren't really the big problems in cities, right? These are the problems that we're really facing and these are actually not really problems that computers are particularly good at solving. Transportation, health, opportunity, livability. And the reason is because these are problems that have this at the root of N, engagement, ownership, and complexity. And when I look at really the big problems of today, the climate crisis, education, the economic crisis, these are problems that are at the root of it problems of complexity. They are far too big to have any single owner, whether it's an individual or even a nation. So a lot of our work deals with how to get people at the core of these decision-making engines. So I'm going to show two projects. The first is for the BMW Guggenheim Lab. This is a global initiative that started in New York City. It's in Berlin, it's going to go to China, it's going to go to Brazil, it's going to go to Africa. For six years, it's going to tour the world. And we built a game called Urbanology and it helps people collectively imagine the city of the future. So the way that it works is there's a series of different scenarios, very simple questions that you're asked. And as people are being brought into proximity to each other, they have to argue for their point of view with other people. And the essential presumption is that's essentially how cities work. As Maria was saying, people are bumping into each other. It's the way that we build our identity, it's also the way that we build our collective will. I actually had the pleasure of hosting it on the opening day and essentially what you're really trying to do is to get people from New York to argue with each other. And not surprisingly, that's actually quite easy to do. Lots of people were able to try and convince each other about what to do next. Questions like for this, there's a question about passing a law 10% for any housing development would be designated for affordable housing. And once people are voting on that, we actually put that into an algorithm that's able to bring up a tally of all the different votes historically. And once you answer a series of these different questions, and again, they're really values questions. How do you want your city to act? It actually puts it through a much larger algorithm which actually compares that city of the future that hypothetically this group of people have created with other cities all around the world. And the presumption there is that essentially all of these different cities exist. It's just a matter of where you want to build your city of the future together. I have to mention this, which is not an initiative that we're partnered with, but which I think is really, really important within democracy today, which is something called participatory budgeting. And when you think about, again, the ideas of engagement, of ownership, which certainly in America we have massive crises with, famously, it's one of the world's leading democracies, if not the sort of bastion of democratic principle and only 50% of Americans vote. So that's a clear crisis right there. This idea that you can actually take a chunk of taxpayer funds and distribute it based on direct votes from people within communities I think is transformational. In a very global setting, this came actually out of Brazil, and it was actually originally developed as a way to get the most underprivileged members of a society of voice within democracy. And so people basically pitch each other with different community projects. They workshop them together. This is now being implemented in New York City, as well as in Chicago. There's 1400 different participatory budgeting groups all around the world, and they vote sometimes by hand, they vote sometimes by little stickers. But this I think is really interesting that how to actually get people involved is to give them direct control, which of course is something that our generation, I think that technology is really putting us in touch with. And interestingly enough, the biggest problem with this, at least in New York City, is that it doesn't reach the underprivileged. The lack of engagement that New York is really struggling with, and it actually keeps technology out of this system altogether. They're trying to keep it just face-to-face to try and level the playing field even more. Now, during the time that we were investigating participatory budgeting, we were asked by an urban think tank called CEOs for Cities to look at the question of urban collaboration. And we started investigating just how it is that cities talk to each other. So we did some research into what's called the community board meeting. This is essentially the technology, if you will, on how cities typically communicate. And what happens is that the powers that be tend to do a speech. We just put community board meeting at the flicker and got these photos, and then someone comes up and has a pointed question, and then typically an official will look sort of hot under the collar as someone from the back is yelling out a different point, and then someone else yells, oftentimes leading to certain types of headaches, say something, and then these people end up sort of going back and forth and back and forth, right? And then like this lady shows up. This is very, very typical of how these meetings always work. And so we were really interested in a way to actually build a community forum that would be constructive, that would be collaborative, that would be really about making a productive change in the way that we deal with each other. And so we started with a project called Change By Us, and essentially it's a way for people to tag ideas all around a city. It's a way for a city to push the responsibility for coming up with new ideas not to the government, but onto the people themselves. It's essentially a platform for people to express a collective aspiration, whether it's education, or transportation, or climate change. Again, not from the government, but into lots of little community groups, individuals, and neighborhoods. Mayor Bloomberg announced it on Earth Day as part of a much larger initiative, right? And so this is a different model for how a government should work. They have planned NYC 2030, these very, very big lofty goals, right? So this involves cleaning up brownfields. This involves building large pieces of infrastructure. These are things that governments do, and that governments do well. But when you look at the actual goals themselves, this goal, which is essentially composting 75% of New York City's waste, that is not something that the government can do. That's not something that the government can even try to do. That's something that the people would actually need to embrace. This is a very, again, different model for government. It's essentially looking at government as a platform. The city works in some ways, like the iPhone platform, where people will build things on top of it. They will have the city's permission. They might even have the city's oversight. But change by us is a way that the city can say, how can we make New York a greener, greater place to live and push that off onto the people and to see what individual neighborhoods, individual community groups will do with that challenge? So the way that it works is people put in different ideas, then you put in your location, and you post it and an algorithm will connect you with an existing project. So it's a very simple way for projects to essentially solicit ownership and interest. With the first round of mini-grants, $15,000 is a very small amount of money. They got an incredible amount of activities and even more, a much larger amount of users and amplified media impressions. So all the different press coverage, all the people who were paying attention to these projects. And when you look at what change actually looks like, this is what you see, right? These are the actual composting beds that were created. These are the community gardens that were built. This is how people found out about the initiatives through individual community groups talking to each other about what was important of that day. And this is something, again, that the government can't do. They can get people to talk to each other and then get people to actually convince each other about what's important. And when you look today at the South Bronx, this is actually the home to my favorite project, On Change By Us. It's called Brook Park Chickens. So they had this idea that they were really interested in food justice, in teaching children in the South Bronx where their food came from or where food comes from in general. They got a very, very small grant, $700, to build these individual coops and to get what they called chicken deputies, which is very exciting. They essentially had school kids from all around taking care of these different chickens. So you look at these pictures, it looks so idyllic. It's like Martha Stewart's living in the South Bronx with her chickens. And here's the individual students themselves. And this is the way that the city, in its largest, largest aspirations, was able to actually achieve some of its goals. The city does not want to be in the chicken business. That's not what the government is there to do. On the other hand, the ability to make a platform and to inspire people to actually build towards this larger collective goal in a way that they do differently in the South Bronx than they do in Brooklyn, than they do in Staten Island, than they do in Manhattan. But the larger platform encourages all these individual groups to collectively make a change within the city. And so that larger effort on the city's behalf gets amplified through all these different groups, but the real effect, of course, is down to the individual itself. Because you think about how these projects are able to touch each individual life, and that, I think, is what change by us is possible for. Thank you very much.