 So, next, we're going to begin the conversations, and I'm going to turn it over to John to introduce Jennifer and Paul. Jennifer and Paul, come on down. Please, Jennifer and Paul, come up to the stage. So, Jennifer Palka is the founder and executive director of Code for America, and has wherever you like, madam, and been involved and active with the news challenge for several years. Paul Steiger was among the things that were created in 2007 was ProPublica, one of the most important new initiatives in journalism over the last 10 years. Paul is the founder and also happens to be one of my bosses at Knight Foundation as a trustee. So, we're really excited to have the two of you. I guess I'm going to awkwardly shift and come over here. Did you want to be in the middle and I took your chair? Yeah, that's okay. I'm just going to come off to the side so you guys can talk, because this is really about... No, no. You're making us feel uncomfortable. Come back. All right. So, where should we start? So, Paul, what were you thinking in 2007 when you started this crazy idea of a nonprofit national journalism project, and how do you think it's grown in the last 10 years, and how does it fit in with where we are today? Well, thinking is too soft of a word. I was praying it would work, and those of you who know what ProPublica is, it's a nonprofit investigative reporting team, and we came into existence because of what the other Jennifer alluded to a few minutes ago, but the downside of the Internet, which is that it completely destroyed the business model of journalism, particularly newspapers, and created a need for all kinds of remedial efforts to restore some of the balance, one of which was to mobilize technology, which has been, I think, a revolution in journalism that's happened over the last 10 years, and that's been possible because of all these developments, some of them funded by night in the tech world. And the particular focus we had was investigative reporting, because it was the one that was most hammered by the destruction of the old business model. The other, which somebody else will have to come along to do, is international reporting, which was also hammered. But it's been an extremely exciting 10 years for us, and I'm thrilled at what's happened so far, and my successors have taken over running things, doing it much better than I could have done, and I'm eagerly anticipating what they're going to do next. So, Jen, I mean, sort of Code for America arose at this time as journalism, especially local journalism, was shrinking. How much has that driven the work you all have done, especially around open data and pushing out information in a way that's kind of untraditional for a way we would think about it from a journalism background? Yeah, we were just comparing notes about 2007, by the way. You forgot to mention the time that you took off to watch your football games. Well, that's true, January 1st and 2nd, but then January 3rd, we started. I was trying to figure out what the roots of open data were in 2007. I was really thinking about, I guess it was, when did Barack Obama announce his candidacy? Because in 2007, I was all wrapped up in the world of Web 2.0. That's what I was doing, was running this event that was all about, it was very optimistic times, all about the web coming back as this sort of participatory medium, and all about what government data was going to do for us. And it was that moment when we had the Sunlight Foundation people come to Web 2.0, and we had this room set aside for Web 2.0 developers to work on state data, I think it was that year. I think that was 2007. I'm trying to get my years right, but yeah, I remember it as the year of the iPhone, and for me, the dawning of the realization that government was going to be a player in this, and that world of tech, media, journalism, and that government was now a player in it because they were bringing all the state data together. I think one of the first times, I think people in the Valley started paying attention to government and that sort of triad and saying, hey, there's really something interesting here. And I think it changed the kind of the relationship. And one of the things we were talking about before was when government comes to the table with data, it's not that actor in the room that we're trying to hold accountable as much. It's actually at the table with something good, and we think about it differently than when we are investigating malfeasance of some sort. It's actually playing with us in that way. And I think that was what started to happen in 2007, 2008. We decided to do Gov2.0, I think, in 2008, which was the first time we said, how do you apply the principles and values of the participatory web to not just the business of getting a new guy elected, but actually a job of governing. And I think that actually launched in 2009. So it was sort of this gradual, for me, awareness of a world that I didn't know coming more from the tech space. And it's a little daunting to look back at how positive we were then, how much we thought open data would change the world, and how much we thought this was a way that government would always be coming to the table in a more constructive way. I think that you have a marvelous list of some of the great things that governments brought to the table. I've heard you talk about geopositioning satellites, which think of everything that's hooked to that. That's how I'm in New Yorker, but I wanted to check which subway route was better, and the geopositioning satellites helped me to do that. The weather reports, all are based on government data. But there also are fundamental problems with the way that government tries to use that data, and the challenge of getting bureaucracy to deliver it in its best form. One could argue, one of the reasons that the Affordable Care Act got such a bad reputation was that they didn't wheel out, it might have been an impossible task, but they did not wheel out the program that would allow you to sign up in a way that people could deal with it. The website didn't work when it launched. It did later work. It's a good reminder that it did end up working really well, and we signed up more people than we originally thought we could before it even failed. But it was yet another punch in the gut of, yeah, if government can't do digital, then it really can't implement its policies. And I do think of that as particularly a watershed moment, in a very practical sense. It was a watershed moment for a whole later step in this story, which is the creation of the United States Digital Service and the Technology Transformation Service, which are going to be part of this story as we look at the next 10 years. Those things really wouldn't have happened. I was trying to make them happen, and I absolutely would have failed. I was in the process of failing at doing them until HealthCare.gov had such a rocky start, because then it was like, oh, right, you can't spend all of this time, all of your political well getting this thing passed, and then have it fail because you can't use the internet, right? You can't make a website that works. Truth is, you can. And you said it was an impossible task. No, not an impossible task. Absolutely not an impossible task, but hard in a government context. In the time frame. I want to drill down on some of your lessons from that, especially in terms of the local work. But first, I want to remind you all and folks, or tell you all and the folks watching, any questions you have for this dynamic duo, if you use the hashtag NewsChallenge, I will peel some out and ask that. And then, so before I ask you guys about local and the lessons from HealthCare.gov and local, I'm just going to connect in terms of night foundation history. One, I would say in 2007 that first set of grants we announced, one of them was to EveryBlock, which you remember very well, which I think really got the ball going for a lot of these sort of civic data government conversations. And Paul Smith, who was on the technical team at EveryBlock, of course, was on the rescue team that came in and worked with HealthCare.gov. So just linking this night foundation historical footnote. But can you guys talk me? And Paul Smith now works with Dan O'Neill, who is at EveryBlock at ad hoc, one of the new vendors. And Dan O'Neill is the one who taught, well, Dan O'Neill and Max Ogden are the ones that taught us how to get data out of governments. It's a combination of being nice and being mean. Sorry, I just had to throw in more history there. Combination of being nice and being, so how does the combination of nice and mean work differently at the local level? I mean, ProPublica's rolled out in Illinois, its first sort of local initiative. I know that the brigades and everything you guys have learned, that you learned when you were in Washington is now being rolled out locally. I mean, the example of nice and mean, this is way before Illinois project. This was our nursing homes project. And it's a perfect example of what's good and bad with government data. Government collects everything you can imagine about practically every nursing home in America. How many beds do they have? How many stories? What zip codes are around it? And they also include things like how many patients escaped, how many patients escaped and died, how many failed tests there were. But if you try to go in and pull that stuff out, you can't do it, because the interface sucks so bad that... Max and Dan O'Neill didn't fix that yet. What's wrong with you guys? But it provided a great opportunity for ProPublica, because what we did was we said, we, I mean, my colleagues who can do this stuff, said, look, we can write code that will allow you to easily extract which nursing homes are the best and which are the worst and where they're located. And an ordinary human being can do this. And then we said, OK, this is fine. We put up the big database, and we updated every quarter, which is when the government updates it. But we said this would be great for local TV stations, because when there's new info that comes down, we can give that to them. And it's something other than shootings and fires that they can put up on the evening news that has real relevance to their community, which nursing homes are doing great and we can interview them, or which nursing homes should be in jail and we can do interviews with them and say, oh yes, you might want to go to this website and you can look for yourself. So that's the combination. They have great data. They collect everything. But they're a little nervous about making it easy to offend people. Yeah, because they've been burned so often. Right. Yeah, I was just on the phone with John Wonderlick at Sunlight talking about, I asked him first, or what's his story he wants to talk about at our summit, our Cook for America summit in May. And he said New Orleans. And it was just funny, because I think we did a project on blight in New Orleans back in 2012. And it's the same example. I mean, it's easier, I think, to get data at the local level if you are persistent, because it's very, though you're right, they do collect a lot of data. So I think when I got in this field, I kind of had my vision of is you'd get a data set and you'd do something with the data set. And it's not that. It's like a dozen data sets or like three dozen data sets in different formats where the fields don't match up. I mean, it turned out to be a lot more complicated. But when people care, right? I mean, people care. If you have elderly people in your family, you may really care about the nursing home care. In New Orleans, people really cared about the blight set so it was worth it to sort of persevere through the complexities, both technical and, of course, really human, to make that data available to the people in New Orleans. So this was a project we did called Blight Status. We're previously really the only way you could understand the status of a blighted property in New Orleans was once a month when each individual data owner was sitting at a very long table. It's the only human data integration when they're all at the same table. And it's just something to think that that project is still having a deeper and deeper impact in government operations in 2017 where it's not just about getting that data out to the public, but it's also about improving government because they have access to that data. And I mean, one of the things that has impressed me about what you've done in some of your various incarnations is sort of breaking down the walls between the bureaucrats and the public. Using only things like possums and fire hydrants and that kind of thing to get people to see that if they step up, you have a wonderful phrase that I've forgotten, but it's, you know, don't complain, lend a hand. It's more felicitous than that. Okay, let's set a lot of different ways. Some people say, raise your hand before you point your finger. Yeah. Great, but that makes people feel like they can make a difference using these things. You know, in a place like Boston that occasionally has 12-foot snowfalls, you have people adopt a fire hydrant, and if it's covered, they get notified by an app and they go out and fix it. Or if somebody thinks that there's an animal in the nearby garbage can, they mention it on the website and they go in and let the possum out. Those are actual examples, right? Yeah, those are examples from Boston in 2011, yeah. And that kind of thing makes people more comfortable with each other, but going from there to the big stuff, whereas you say there are multiple databases and you've got to get lots of people cooperating and interacting, that becomes more of a challenge. I think I would have thought 10 years ago that we would have gotten a little bit farther with this, but it is still pretty amazing how much it's grown. I mean, if our civic notion as a country is that it's by the people, that we do this by the people, we're not doing as good a job as we should in 2017 of letting people raise their hand and say, I want to work on this, and then giving them a good way to do that, whether that's getting data from their local government or federal government and making something of it or figuring out how to help their neighbor, but I think I'm also kind of amazed. So we had this Congress of our brigades, our local communities, we have 76 of them around the country. Miami was there in full, really showing off their great stuff around working with Texas after the hurricanes had sort of swept through the country and they had- Johnson, shout out, Ernie, shout out. Yeah, totally amazing. Julie Kramer, amazing. Sketch City in Houston. So Sketch City in Houston is a Coach America brigade responded to Hurricane Harvey, built a bunch of tools, a bunch of stuff, and then just called up Miami. It was like, here you go. We have, I think, seven brigades in Florida. So they took them, and now that's sort of turning into stuff. So you actually had really on show amongst these 76 communities, really concrete, visible, beautiful examples of people saying, yeah, I'm gonna raise my hand. The other thing we say, where our favorite laptop sticker these days is, no one is coming, it is up to us. Which I think is, which actually came from Matt Weaver who was on the healthcare.gov rescue. But it is up to us and we gotta do a much better job in the next 10 years of making that us really aware of what we can all do together. And I think that bridges that. It's always been, I think, the same community, but even tighter ties between the journalism community and that government community. In journalism, we talked about the downside of the web and how it destroyed the business model. But the upside is that there has been a revolution in journalism over the last, maybe a little more than 10 years, but certainly the last 10 years have been the most dynamic. Where technology has transformed journalism in a way that's just as profound as the invention of the telegraph, the photograph, the lithograph, radio, television, you name it. I mean, my last year at the Wall Street Journal, we won the Public Service Pulitzer Prize for a story that involved a significant amount of tech and it also pissed off the tech industry. This was about backdating of options and I won't, trust me, it was a fraudulent way that companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere used while competing to hire folks and they didn't really have to do it, but it was easy and they did it and it went right up to Steve Jobs, who was the one who called me up in London and chewed me out for 40 minutes, but we were right. But to do that story, okay, one of the things we had to show that was that to do with these companies said they had done with their options would have required more good luck than a $1 bet winning the megabucks and I had a young reporter, math major, who could write the equations, but I had to go in and beg the business side to use their servers to crunch the numbers for hours overnight while they weren't using them. In those days, it would take me days or weeks, if I could do it at all, to do something that now a couple of people in the office will not wait for a scribbler to ask them to do it. They will think of the story and in half a day, they'll have it done because there are now people that have both the genes and the training to write code and the genes and the training to think about news and that combination has meant that you can get databases crunched, you can get ideas for stories, all kinds of things that simply could not happen. Now happen because a 25 year old coder is standing near the elevator with two Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and the journalists say, we just can't scrape this data, it doesn't work. The young man says, there's no data that I can't scrape and they go down, they get some sandwiches, they come back upstairs and the data scraper discovers, well, this is part of the night thought, but I can do it and they work together for a few weeks and all of a sudden, they have an app that we call dollars for docs, that still delivers anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 page views a day. This is a revolution in impact for society. That so reminds me of Max Ogden in Boston City Hall, except for the part where he says, it's harder than I thought, everything always seemed easier than I thought. Manush on Twitter just said, wow, this is more positive than I thought it was gonna be. And so I'm gonna pull in a couple questions that maybe will take us in a less positive way. You guys are just the first of many. But I wanna ask you both about sort of the state of the industries from which you come over the last 10 years and where things are. I mean, Paul, one question to you was, what do you think of the last 10 years of the Wall Street Journal? I would broaden that and say, ask for your sense of where traditional journalism newspapers have gone. And then, Jen, for you, I mean, partly thinking about the great work that Code 2040 is doing that we just mentioned, you've been in the tech industry for a decade plus. How do you think we, they, are doing? Are you, you know, are we on the issues of equity and inclusion? Are we where you thought we would be today 10 years ago? You want me to speak for the tech industry? Can I decline? Yes. I'll let Paul go first. That's why I think I anticipated that. It was why I coupled them together to give you a minute. The Wall Street Journal is still one of the, you know, three or four or five best newspapers in the country. It's, everybody has changed. Though the Wall Street Journal was, well, I was still there. We had a visionary CEO who said, content has value and we charge for our content from the first day. It took other people. Remember, information wants to be free. Sorry, if you can't get people to pay for advertising, the only way you're gonna be able to pay your reporters is if you can get them to pay for the content. So there has been at the national level, I think, the combination of what the internet and faster and faster computers and phones and all of the other changes in technology that has counterbalanced the hammering of the financial model. At state and local, it's the negatives are way outweighing the positives, but I'm hopeful that and optimistic that over time, we'll find a way to support this kind of journalism at the state and local level. This is why my colleagues at ProPublica have come up with the Illinois Project, which is a pilot to see if our model can work doing that kind of journalism. All right, now, thank you, Paul. Now you can bring us in on the state of the... Follow us. You can speak to the tech industry. Yeah. As much as you'd like. I mean, I feel a little bit like it's unfair because certainly the civic tech community is not perfect and not perfectly diverse in the way that it should be, but it is a little different from the tech industry at large. Certainly, the numbers show that it's different. It's a more diverse community that's driven by, I would say, a set of values that are connected to the tech industry. There's sort of borrowing of the ambition and optimism of the tech industry, but are really much more grounded in a sense of, well, we're talking about the name ProPublica and our tagline, we reference for the people by the people a lot in our work. That really, a different sense of the commons as being for everyone, not just sort of the commons that we've created in Facebook, et cetera. There's just a little bit of a different set of values, so it's very hard to, I don't really know that I work in the tech industry. I feel like I work in a slightly different, I'll say, corner of it that I really like and is not perfect either, but one thing I would just say is that, when we talk about all of this stuff and Paul was talking about the chance encounter with a set of journalists and someone who knows data really well, I mean, all of this is happening because of human capital and connections and redefining roles, it's these hybrids, these people who didn't exist, they weren't, most of what gets done today in my world and I think in your world now is like, certainly the job titles and job roles that we had before and the new job titles and new roles that didn't exist before and they happen because we're bringing different communities together. So for me, it's all about the intersections of things. It's all about not one thing and a different thing but something new, like data journalism, like design in government, whatever it is and so we kind of feel like you have to build the human capital community for government that works in a digital age in a way that matches the country we're trying to govern. And so, we've made a big effort towards diversity, I think in the tech industry, it's still pretty bad, I guess. We're still fighting a lot of fights that we should have thought a really long time ago. But one gets in for a really optimistic closing and then you gave us a dose of realism, a dose of realism. I have a piece of optimism here. I mean, here we have someone of the female persuasion who knows from tech like crazy. We both went to Yale. I knew you were gonna get that in there. But she got into, Jen got into the Bronx High School of Science, which is no way could I have gotten into Bronx Science. And I have, I hope you're a new friend, but I have another friend, Jessica Lesson. I love Jessica. Who was a star reporter right off the Harvard Crimson for the journal, but then she left and started her own expensive $400 a year website called The Information. And one of the things that she did recently was to break the story. It's not as colorful as Harvey Weinstein's depredations, but about a couple of these funders in Silicon Valley who would invite, there are now women with startups looking for funding. They invite the women to meet them at a hotel and they arrive and the desk clerk says, oh, you've got to call up to his room. And he says, I've got a suite. Why don't you meet me at the suite? And some women say, you're not in your life, dude. And but others go up there and he chases them around the desk. And if they don't do what he wants, they don't get any money. And he denied it, he threatened to sue, all kinds of things like that. Did the story anyway, and... And this was before they came out in the Times. Jessica really, I think, broke that. Yes. She just did a great job. Yes. Now, you know, the Times stuff was spectacular. I mean, you know, getting, breaking through the walls that Harvey had set up, that was a tremendous bit of reporting. But so was what Jessica did. It was spectacular, and that set off a cascade of women coming forward in Silicon Valley. So, you know, on the one hand, it exposes a seamy underside of human nature, but the other thing is, it shows that women are in two positions of power. They're doing startups, and they're in a position to expose the bad stuff that's going on. That was a good way to tie it back y'all in. Things are changing. Thank you guys so much. We're gonna step aside now. Jennifer is gonna lead us in the second conversation. So, thank you guys both so much. Thank you.