 at Davis Media Access and today my guest is Bob Fung who is the developer of a local election website and blog called Civ Energy. Welcome Bob. Thank you. You're here because you and I have something in common and that's that we both care a great deal about local elections. Right. And so I carry out that work through Davis Media Access and you carried out through Civ Energy which is a relatively recent addition to our election resources. So how'd you get started with this and why? Well I have done some reading after I retired and I tried to analyze sort of what was happening in the world and technology is really moving quickly in the private sector and but it's not that that well applied to sort of public areas sort of say public decision making. So I thought that I'd apply what I know to helping people make better voting decisions. Right. So now you and I first started talking about this some years ago and and when the project started actually had a different name. Right. It was voter prep. Voter prep. Right. And then it seemed like it kind of got backburnered for a little bit and now you're back and in a much more substantive way. Right. And the idea I am focused on local coverage as you are and I thought that if the website was just oriented at elections that people wouldn't have any they'd have to like find it when the elections came around. Right. Only once a year. Once every two years. Yeah. So I thought I'd add some stuff to voter prep that would try to hold people's interest through time. So what's your particular niche then? We have in Davis for a small relatively small city. We have a local newspaper. We have the community media center. We have a campus radio station, political blogs. Where do you fit in? Well we provide on the web and on your phone and tablet a non-partisan views of the candidates. So you know there's the voter pamphlet guide which is on paper and which is fine but the candidates can express their views their viewpoints on issues in video or in text or both or in Spanish or whatever they like. So and then we hope to reach voters through you know through these the modern channels of you know having them look at the phone. Let's take a look at the website and we'll kind of so here we are civenergy.org. Right. And tell us what we're looking at here. I see this is the Davis City Council candidate page. There are nine candidates so you see nine pictures of the candidates and then on the right column you see events that are relevant to the election and if you scroll down you'll see news items that are related to the event and then in the middle the main part are we pose and citizens pose questions to the candidates that they can answer that they can respond to. So if say we click on the first on the first issue which is just a basic introduction to the candidate then you could see that three out of the nine candidates so far have written something about who they are and on this page you see a summary of what they wrote but then if you click on go to full viewpoint on one of those you see more text. So it really is kind of rounding out the other suite of options I mentioned here in town and let's talk about the city council race for a minute. We have two seats open. Rob Davis and Rachelle Swanson seats and nine candidates. Last week it was 10 and we're down to nine now and of course the final filing date isn't for a few weeks yet and that's true of all races in the county. You said that you're going to focus some energy is mostly going to focus on the Davis races and the parcel tax issues and what Davis Media Access does is anything kind of within Yellow County so from city up through congressional and I think you and I have already talked about we'll make the meet the candidates videos we do available to you. You can share them we'll share your contact and in fact we're partnering on a forum so let's take a minute and talk about that. Yeah the forum will be on March 18th Sunday from 3 to about 530 and Ann Evans will be the moderator. She's a former mayor of Davis and co-founder of two Davis institutions the Davis co-op and the Davis Farmers Market and so in sort of Ann would like to have some refreshments after the formal period so to you know because she's also the author of the Davis Farmers Market. That's right that's right so and we might we're trying to you know figure out if we can use some of her recipes and so on so we wanted to make it to make it a welcoming environment for the candidates and for the people and so after after the formal question and answer period the candidates will have tables and have their election materials available and then they can people can go up to them and talk to them and and have a refreshment so try to make it very low-key and social. Right of course candidates end up doing a lot of forums right and I I saw recently that the the League of Women Voters is trying to make a comeback here in Davis. Right that's right it used to be very active it used to be the League was a strong partner of ours and they were known for the kind of forums where they would ask completely non-partisan you know non-specific issues that's right some of these the candidates sometimes end up doing 13 14 15 forums that's right in a season right so we're getting out there early relatively early yeah so I attended that the last two meetings for this of the League of Women Voters right so the the person who's moderating the meetings says that it will take a year to form a new chapter that you need 18 people and so yeah we we would she's been publishing the the invitations to the meetings on Facebook so if you're interested you people should come out right yeah it's it was very strange and kind of sad when the League closed up shop here in Davis and I understood why a lot of its members had aged out and weren't really embracing social media right it's kind of kind of time for a new breath of fresh air then well in in terms of sieve energy what kind of response are you getting from the candidates and from community members well this year I have I'm working with Leslie Hunter who is well known in the political community in Davis and so she's been able to use her her the people that she knows to sort of get the word out right and in the in the conversation that we had with yesterday at the League of Women Voters Jesse Salinas was there okay and in local politics you know like a website is it's it's good but a lot of a lot of local things happen by word of mouth yeah and through relationships yes and so that's one sort of change in my approach for sieve energy that I've taken to try to get more involved in the community and get things sort of do partnerships like with you guys and so on in in order to get everything going you're absolutely right I had a volunteer comment to me last week that wow you're always in and out of the office and I said you know if I'm in the office all the time I'm not doing my job right because you're absolutely right you have to go out there and connect with people and tell them hey I do this work and I'm really passionate about it and here's where you can get more info are you interested yeah right that kind of thing yeah so so the enterprise has published some some notices about the about the forum and will be tabling at farmers market and you know we're trying to to get to people as many different ways as we can through facebook and so on right so what led you to do this you mentioned you retired and I have to admit I don't know from what okay retired yeah I I developed algorithms decision-making algorithms okay so I studied decision-making how to help people make better decisions in my graduate work right and that translated into developing algorithms that were done by by computers and so I developed algorithms that were mainly used by financial institutions to make decisions about their customers so developing is it's your background it's kind of in your blood yes but that's that's right but I develop algorithms are are one thing and websites are another so I'm a complete novice at website development and I have a team that I use I don't I I do a little bit of programming but I haven't done it for a while so so I depend on a on a team to do that right but I understand the the the development process is the same I mean the same yeah that's the same kinds of pitfalls and but you've been in you've been in the Davis area for a long time right that's right you raised your family here and yeah right yeah so I've lived here 30 years right so and in that time you see a lot of local elections come and go that's right and kind of follow the trends and yeah and and I was involved in a another project last year with the finance finance and budget commission to look at the city's finances so it's I find the sort of collective decision making the decision making that the city council does this the decision making that citizens do when they vote I think it's fascinating to me yeah something that I hadn't looked at in my professional career but I think it's really important to to try to get it to try to put some light on it and to help people do better yeah again kind of drawing back to where we started at the top of the interview it's really about voter education I think both what you're doing with Civ Energy and and Davis Media Access election work is really about providing as much information as you possibly can I like to say there's no excuse to be an uninformed voter when you've got all these resources around you right so how do you in in between election cycles what kinds of content can we look forward to you well we we thought that we would provide discussions of of civic topics which we're not coming up we're not coming up for election like Nishi had and the idea of for example innovation centers has been on the on the city's agenda for a number of years right although the current bill or the current piece of measure does not include for the right she doesn't include an innovation center but things like that where where if there's something sort of that the city government wants to do or you know or maybe some private citizens want to do then we could highlight that for the citizens and have it discussed even though it's not an election so I mean you know that that there's now a task force for looking at the downtown for the core area yes yeah we had them in here a couple weeks ago yeah so that would be one that's not going to come up for election right but that's an important topic for for Davis maybe the condition of the roads you know how the parks are doing stuff like that yeah remember your partnerships cool Davis is looking at you know the the during the Davis futures forum we've been recording those and they're looking at a lot of those those kind of citywide issues right yeah so the yeah so there's other the the Davis futures forum I think they do a great job of highlighting various issues in town so we we uh you know have we we talk with them regularly right well thanks for coming in we're almost at the end of our time I told you would go quickly yeah I just want to remind viewers that we I'm sitting here with Bob Fung the developer and originator of CivEnergy.org and together with CivEnergy Davis Media Access we'll be sponsoring a an election forum for city council candidates March 18th beginning at 3 p.m at Davis Community Church and former Davis mayor and Evans will moderate so it's been fun to talk to about this this thing we do this civic engagement around local issues very important thanks autumn all right thanks for coming in and thanks for tuning in