 This is now starting. All attendees are in listen-only mode. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us today for the BC Ideas Exchange Economic Development Webinar Series. My name is Jessica Ricci and I'm part of the Regional Programs and Engagement Branch which is part of the recently renamed Ministry of Jobs, Economic Development and Competitiveness. I'll be providing technical support for today's webinar as well as moderating the question and answer session at the end of our webinar where you'll have an opportunity to ask all the questions that you have for our presenter. I'm located in Victoria, British Columbia on the unceded Coast Salish territory of the Lekwungen people known today as the Esquimalt and Songhees First Nation. First thing I'm going to do is go over a couple of housekeeping things just in case that this is your first time on a go-to webinar session and then I'm going to hand it over to today's speaker Todd Pugh from Civic InfoBC who's going to share the exciting opportunities that are coming through with Civic Labs in terms of community apps that you may be able to tailor and leverage for your community. So just to give you guys an idea you should have a control panel that popped up when go-to webinar launched for you. You'll see a number of things and ways that you are able to interact. The biggest thing that you should know if you have questions any time during the session just pop those into the question pane. We'll be monitoring the questions wrote, we'll jump in with questions for Todd if they're timely or we'll be asking them at the end of the session that way. If you want to raise your hand if you're having any technical difficulties myself I can reach out to you that way or you can just pop in a question into the question pane if you're having technical difficulties. If you are calling in and having any challenges with audio it may be a network issue so sometimes it is a little bit easier to connect with your phone so you can just do that by clicking on the phone call option. A pin will pop up and you'll be able to connect to the network that way. And then last but not least if you'd like a copy of today's presentation and slides you should also see that in your control panel you'll be able to download that today or you could download it from our website when we post the recording later next week. So that is a reminder that you will be able to find today's recording on gov.bc.ca backslash economic development it's under the BC ideas exchange section and you'll see the slides that have been prepared by Todd as well as the recording of today's session and you can reach out if you have any questions or suggestions for future webinars from that website as well. So without further ado I'm going to turn over the present presentation to Todd who's going to share with you the exciting work that's being done by Civic Labs to create some applications for communities across BC to be able to leverage. Great thank you. I think I will start my screen share now in one second. I think we should be in good shape. So thanks everybody for being here today and the webinar is kind of an interesting format I'm used to doing a fair bit of public speaking in front of crowds that say UBCM events or local government management association events and I can usually get away with a cheap throwaway line about what a good looking crowd this is but I can't do that on a webinar so that's too bad but thanks for joining us here anyway. Glad to be here and thanks to the ministry for for making this webinar happen and for inviting me to be part of it today. So I'm here today to talk about our Civic Labs project which is a mobile app pool for local governments and First Nations. In terms of just some ground rules for the presentation I would like to invite you to interrupt me at any time if there are any questions that you have. We can pause the formal presentation and go off on different tangents if you'd like. This this can be relatively informal we've got a good size group here but it's not so large that we can't we can't do that. As mentioned we'll also have a lot of time at the end for questions and answers and hopefully this is something interesting to you and we'll get started. So who am I? My name is Todd Peele and I'm the executive director of Civic InfoBC. We're a not-for-profit municipal information data service. Civic Labs is a project of ours that we've been working on for a couple of years now. My email address appears on that slide it's also at the end. I'm pretty easy to find if you google me or just look up Civic InfoBC contact informational pop-up all over your screen. We are also based in Victoria. We're just up the road from our colleagues down at the ministry and yeah rainy day here but that's okay normal for this time of year in Victoria. So what we're going to be doing in terms of today's agenda I'm going to talk a little bit about the problems we're going to define what it is that is the problem and what brought us to do this. I'm going to explain a little bit about the Civic Labs project itself exactly what it is and how it works the rationale behind it's a lot speed the logic all that good stuff. I'm going to give you a little bit of a tour of the first four apps that we've developed or I should say three are developed one is still in process one is still embedding but they're coming along nicely. I'm going to show you a little bit of the back end on how people who are part of the Civic Labs project can manage their apps. This is not a sales pitch but I am going to give you information about how it's priced and how people can be part of it how they can order and as mentioned there's going to be time for questions and answers too. So the problem how did we get here why do we need a Civic Labs app pool project anyway and you know it's kind of interesting this is a quote from Stuart McLean some of you are probably familiar with him and this I thought really defines what we are as a country what we are even in British Columbia and it's just a quote from his book from 1984 travels in small town Canada across thousands of miles the Canadian population clusters loosely like loosely strung beads on the thread of the 49th parallel this is truly Canada a vast stretch of land and a bounty of small towns it's small towns the Canadian experience is small towns in British Columbia this is very true we have 180 municipalities and regional districts in this province that includes the island's trust we're about to lose jumbo it's about to go down to 179 we also have about 209 First Nation communities inside BC provincial boundaries now to make my point about small communities of all of those so we're talking about nearly 400 communities only about 20 have populations of over 50,000 people 95% of local governments of First Nations are smaller it's this is a province of small and rural communities I think many of you are probably from small and rural communities so this is this is something we know well myself I grew up in a town of less than a thousand people or outside of a center that had about 40,000 people but that was the big city if any of you have ever seen the letter Kenny that's where I'm from so yeah this is a province of small town 20 with populations of over 50,000 and that's the 20 local governments that really have the resources to do things on their own means the reality of 2020 is this citizens and businesses have a reasonable and equal expectation to have access to local government services regardless of community size and location and we all know mobile devices have transformed the way we've we access the internet the way we access services the way we access information we almost all have one of those little monsters in our pocket we are glued to them the citizens are glued to them businesses use them they're part of how we just live our lives now so you know there's the two those are the twin factors going on we're glued to our smartphones and expectations for citizens of the businesses are just at a level they've never been before but because there are only those a couple of dozen municipalities of that significant size most small communities neither have the resources nor the capacity to offer a range of digital services that you might find in a larger urban community so and that's a real problem that's the digital divide that we hear so much about there's it's very real we hear about it all the time when we're talking to our member municipalities you know whether it's in the north whether it's in the Kootenays northern Vancouver Island wherever it's something that comes up all the time and I'm sure you guys hear it too and part of that divide is it's resource basis apps anything software related but you know apps being what we're looking at today they're expensive and each time you build one what people don't realize is you're actually building at least two you know thank goodness windows phone has gone away because you were building three for a while or blackberry it's kind of gone but each time you build an app that's purpose built for a smartphone you're building one for android and you're building one for iOS for Apple devices and they're very different and you can develop them in tandem of course but you know the code is different the apps themselves are a little different it's not just you know build it once in a way you go so that's certainly a barrier so that's what we were dealing with that's the problem that's out there and you know we heard from small communities that they would like to have access to some of these online tools in a smartphone environment so we hatched the the civic labs app pool concept and how it works it's well this is this is this is what it is it's a program run by us civic info bc the ministry formerly known as jobs trading technology thank you for the new ministry name I was I was stumbling on it I will update the slides accordingly but you know how it works why are we doing this we're what the ministry of municipal affairs and housing called a system organization and system organizations perform functions collectively on behalf of local governments that municipalities and regional districts couldn't do or could do as effectively on their own so you know our core mandate given that it's data information services for local governments we consider apps it's a data service it's an information service to be an extension of our mandate so the model we hatched is something that we hope will save thousands of tax dollars across the province as local governments adopt this and first nations adopt this and what it is it's a simple and shared out-of-the-box mobile app solution available at an extremely low cost so this is what's always been the case till now you get three different local governments in this case a hypothetical large village a medium-sized town in a small city each of them wants an app they spend fifteen thousand dollars each independently of one another to purchase an app that does more or less the same thing whether whether they buy that from a vendor or whether they develop that themselves independently of one another doesn't matter in this hypothetical example you've got three minutes valid is each seven fifteen thousand which equals forty five thousand dollars in tax dollars spent for essentially one app so that's the problem when you're purchasing in silos you can do better there's a good tradition there's a lot of history in in places like metro vancouver greater victoria vancouver island the north where shared purchasing is a reality where you might get that same large village medium town a small city working together and they share costs and they spend fifteen thousand dollars for that single muni app that municipal app and they share it between themselves so that's great you know when you do that kind of thing you've saved collectively thirty thousand dollars and that's and you still get the same benefits to your citizens and businesses so that's a better model it's a common one we like it we see that with all kinds of you know goods and services that's that's everywhere but we thought for something like the apps for mobile apps there's an even better model and that's pooled development and this is what civic lab this it's meant to be dozens and dozens of communities together in one single pool and as a member of that pool you pay a fixed monthly subscription average about a hundred bucks a month a small community can be a little less a larger community can be a little more but it's it's really meant to be about the price of a single cell phone bill of a larger variety and that's your subscription fee for your local government to belong to the civic app pool for that single monthly price you get access to every app that's in the civic labs library so at the moment four apps more coming down the pipe so instead of spending say you know 15,000 each on an app or spending you know $15,000 among a few of you to do an app you know you would spend perhaps $1,200 a year for a fixed cost subscription and you get now four apps soon more we think it's a pretty good deal when you start doing the math when you start crunching the numbers it's something that you know it just drives the cost down to the basement and we think that's pretty exciting in terms of bridging that digital divide and the model is pretty simple it's it's very circular so starting it out at the bottom left bottom left members pay monthly subscription fee when they pay that subscription fee and become a member of the pool they get access to all the apps and they can brand them and deploy them from our civic labs app library members can also suggest new apps and vote for the next one in the development cycle and our members get new apps as we develop them too new apps are developed with accumulated revenue from the subscription and then they just add it to the civic civic labs app library so over time the library grows pretty neat models so lodging is very simple a local government or First Nation only has to subscribe do some very basic configuration and I'll show you how that works later and I say very I mean very basic you don't have to have you don't have to have any computer skills really at all if you can if you can find your way around in a web browser you can configure your app and then you just deploy that's probably the trickiest part is deploying the app in your community because not because it's difficult to watch the app itself but it's a marketing exercise you have to make your citizens and your businesses aware that it's there and available for their use and you have to commit to keeping it populated with your own information with your own data but really a simple concept so I'll get into this our four initial apps the two that are fully ready now we have one called tell the town which is an issue reporter we have another one called town crier which is a public notice push notification we have one that's 90 ish percent done now should be ready soon called tour the town which is essentially a build your own purpose driven map system just very simple maps for community festival things like that I'll get into detail and the fourth one and this will be our most complicated one it is under development now working title is my pet pal we're not sure we're going to keep that name but it's essentially an app for for registering for animal licenses dog licenses cat licenses along with lots about and I'll get I'll get into details on all of these but I'll start with tell the town the issue reporting and tracking app so there's just a just a screenshot just disclosure Campbell river is not a member yet I hope they will be at some point but that's just a screen mocked up for demonstration purposes tell the town report any issue to your local government authority and you receive updates as they work to resolve the issue so in that mock-up on the screen there that's what a citizen would see if they were say using this app in whatever city in this particular case the citizen has reported two issues they reported the stray dog and they reported Powell you can see the data it was reported and there's a little status little status update at the bottom there just that's submitted as the issue works its way through the local government that status changes the local government will acknowledge it as received as in progress as resolved anything so there's a little bit of communication back to the citizen as this goes along so you know what do you use it for you know of course potholes you use it for stray animals so maybe you want to report missed curbside garbage pickup traffic lights not working street lights not work a thing there are a lot of different issue reporters that are out there already again quite expensive quite expensive and this is available for that for that cheap monthly subscription or as part of that cheap monthly subscription another thing I should mention about this the the app itself it's database driven and I'll get into that a little more as we go on but some issue reporters not I'm not knocking them but they're simply email systems where it's a an email form where a citizen types in something is wrong and hits the submit button then it's simply an email form that goes off to you know either either a senior staff person or a staff person in charge of a service or even an elected official you know that's that's great that's a good step but you know it doesn't have the ability to attract the progress of the issue doesn't store anything it's really no different than picking up your phone in a lot of ways so this is the next level from that one other thing that we think separates this out from some of the others I mentioned we're one of these system organizations in the province civic info bc has a close relationship with another system organization called the municipal insurance association of bc they are an insurance pool they they they offer that kind of coverage to local governments around the province the pooled model is not new in local government mi abc graciously created a list of recommended practices for local governments first nations that choose to use this app because there is there is a liability when you take something on like this you have to be sure that if you are providing people with a mechanism to report these issues that you also have the resources and people in place to deal with them to actually solve the problems so it's a it's a list of recommended practices from the mi abc just to limit one's liability when you roll it out and that's just something it's not something we charge for we're not actually hitting us to make money at all we're in this to serve so no additional charge for something like that app number two a town crier so this is a very very simple one and it's just an alternate system for pushing public notices into people's hands it's a it's a push notification alert system for local governments and citizens to communicate directly with citizens social media is cluttered social media is poison it has a it has a place but we all know what the clutter is like this is just a very simple app that people can install on their phone and when a local government has a specific notice that that may be of interest to you and you can choose through the app what you like you might just want the regular public notices you might want the local government news you might want when you got their council schedule public safety notices public work notices special events something crazy you know that's that's development that that's just a development screenshot there is something crazy but you can actually add categories you can do whatever you want whatever category you want in there is fine so you install the app on your phone you select what categories you wish to receive a notice for and when there is a notice published your phone just your phone buzzes and you get the app just delivered to your phone it's very simple and that's kind of the common theme through all of our apps that they're meant to be simple they're meant to be small they're meant to be agile so very simple so you know what else can you use it for inform people about open meetings you know we talk about this a lot in local government the the legislated minimum that exists for local governments for publication of public notices typically you have to put a public notice in a local newspaper you know for for x number of times so many days before a certain deadline and that's a minimum and increasingly we find that the citizens are complaining that they don't see these notices that they were unaware that certain things were happening in their neighborhood so there's a real push with local governments to exceed the legislative minimums for notices so this app is a way to to assist with that it's not on the slide but another another really interesting application for this some some of you on the line maybe from communities where the weekly paper has gone under in the last little while that's a fairly common occurrence as well so what do you do if you're a local government authority and you're in a small community where your community paper has gone belly up a tool like this doesn't replace your statutory requirement to advertise in another newspaper but it does provide you with a practical channel for informing citizens in the of whatever in the absence of your community newspaper so it can be something of a substitute when your community newspaper is gone so again you can also notify people about special events or deadlines you know your your property tax deadline for example or a special event maybe it's maybe it's something like a community festival or maybe it's a parade or whatever it doesn't have to be you know serious business all the time distribution of non-emergency news and information about things like routine road work water main flushing things like that it is not meant to be a replacement for a purpose built emergency notification system i do have to say that there are some very robust systems in place out there for emergency notification you'll see in the event of a tsunami or a wildfire no doubt some of your communities have them in use they are very robust very well constructed and they are purpose built for this reason i'm subscribed to one in my home community i live in the district of north sandwich and i know for a fact it works i get text notifications and my phone actually rings if there is a emergency pending or or if there's a test so you know stellar to have a system like that in place i have to stress that our app it's not meant for that non-emergency only but it does have a purpose third app tour the town which is a customizable local map for tourism and other purposes this one this one was one of the ideas that came out of a focus group that we did with ministry of job training technology staff early this year and we sat around for a morning and just brainstormed ideas you know great ideas came out of ministry staff you know what what would be a simple app that maybe we could roll out so that would just that would support businesses that would support you know downtown that would support economic development quite frankly and this was one of the this was one of the easier ones that came out in the suggestion list so it's just make your own math so you know this is this is a mock-up of what that might look like this is one that's almost finished it's in the development cycle now but essentially you know take a map drop pinpoints on it you'll label your map accordingly you can do things like map out community festivals you know the location of stages booths where vendors are that's just one use you could create say another custom map for that that charts out where your business improvement association members are you know you want to you want to map for people who are visiting the town you know please come in and you know shop at these merchants or visit these businesses these are the members of our local BIA you know here's the location here's business profile you know describe it a little more right you know to play it out it's a little bit of an advertising vehicle that way you know a local government could use something like this to if they're so inclined to pinpoint where development applications and permit locations are in the municipality so you could use it for serious business like that again more on the business development economic development side you could use it for like a special event like dine around town restaurants that's a popular program in some municipalities art and sculpture walks that's a that's a good thing places like castle guards have a great one didn't he have a great one historical tours garden tours agritourism you know whatever you can imagine that's maybe a that's a purpose built map something just kind of small something something that you think your visitors might be interested in or your residents or business members so that's what it's there for a quick question Todd um someone had just asked if you'd be able to draw a parade route on it you bet yep that would be that that that's certainly part of the functionality that's under development good question thank you for that uh moving on the fourth and final one that i'm in a position to talk about today is again the working title is my pet pal uh animal license renewals and lost pet notification system so this is this is just a cheap slide purely pandering because it's an interesting photo but you can renew renewing your dog license is is obviously a core function that you want in an app like this uh dog licenses you know people sometimes think that they're a cash grab on the part of the municipality uh not the case usually uh it's it's you know there's a variety of purposes behind them they're they're not exactly money uh money uh money generators they're they're not that great in that respect more often than not it's just to keep tabs on how many dogs are in your municipality if there's a lost dog you you return the dog uh based on the license information things like that so what can we use this for renew the pet license from a mobile phone report a missing pet we think that we think that's huge you'd be able to tap into uh to the other app users and report a pet that's uh your if your pet's gone missing you're going to be able to report or look up a found pet so again connect with other pet owners in your municipalities and uh i don't know if any of you are from the uh from the central okanagan but uh the central okanagan regional district did a pet app of its own a few years ago a couple of years ago and this was a really popular feature it remains a popular feature what i understand uh news and special promotions that are of interest to local pet owners so i know that occasionally they might publish say like a uh a special promotion from a pet food store you know 20 off kibble this week or or whatever it is there's a little bit of a sponsorship opportunity there quite frankly uh that's an optional feature so really it's renew licenses it's report a missing pet it's uh report a found pet or look up a found pet and uh and news and special promotions uh we think this one's going to be quite popular actually but this is also the most complex of the four another question so yeah someone asked will you be able to turn off something like renew an annual pet license or how will that functionality yeah yeah yeah all of that is in the hands of the user so uh yeah you don't have to renew through the app obviously a local government will have a great deal of uh freedom on what they would like to do with something like this so you know if a local government actually didn't want to use this for renewal of pet licenses uh you know let's just say they still prefer the counter method for pet license purchases and renewals they can leave that feature out uh and it could be solely a missing pet found pet kind of a app if they want so yeah there's some flexibility built in for sure does that answer the question or hearing uh hearing no follow-up i'll move on so managing the apps for this kind of a thing to work these are all standalone apps but they're all related and they're all connected and the key to the system is a back end database the civic labs web platform and database which provides a common framework for all the apps to rest on to be built on it is canadian hosted we're hosted off of the amazon web services farm out of much real so it meets our bc data residency requirements our clients the local governments or the first nations can select their apps and adjust settings through the civic lab dot ca site and citizens themselves need to be directed to the apple app store or the google play store when a local government has decided to deploy the app in their community so this is that um this is that work i was mentioning earlier where it's up to the local government really to market the app you know say hey look we now have the uh you'll tell the talent issue reporter deployed uh downloaded on google play or the app store and uh you will find us there uh log in as town of whatever and and you're set uh so citizens have to download those apps in the uh in the appropriate store but local governments of first nations manage the apps through the civic labs dot ca website back end so there's a screenshot of what the app library looks like uh so there's the four apps right there so if you are a member of the pool you've logged in using your unique username and password and there it is that's the one you need to do is select the app that you wish to use you click on them and that's it you that they're enabled for your community if you've got that login access where you're authorized to be in there and you just turn it on you with one click you're there it's it's enabled and it's ready for you to use the apps that are in there they're available to the subscribers as is so this is one of the ways that this model works is uh it's not something that we customize for every municipality uh it needs to be as is uh that said if there is a strong desire to take one of those apps like again let's just uh say it's the issue reporter tell the town if there's a desire to take that and build it out beyond what we have in that as is form uh we can and will make the source code available under a license to our subscribers they can take that source code away build on it however they wish that would be up to the individual member those costs incurred would be up to the individual member but there's an opportunity there perhaps for local software developers if that is if that is something that anybody wants to do so you can take the basic one that we've built and you can you can enhance it if you want but that's at your cost when you're in the admin console you can customize your apps again very basic but it should be enough it is enough for a lot of small communities for most small communities we think uh essentially what you do is you change your you change your color scheme to match whatever the color scheme is for your uh for your local government uh you know everybody's got one for their website for their for their logo local governments have uh have color schemes so you select yours and you upload your local government logo and you remember you may recall earlier that demonstration screen that had Campbell river on it you saw that there was a logo uploaded you saw that there were colors there this is where you select those you manage your individual apps through this console so this is a this is a screenshot of just a test record through the tell the town app this is this is a noise complaint one of my one of my staff he's a he's a new dad that's his that's his little guy and he decided he was going to file a noise complaint so this is what you would get on the back end if you are the local government staff person who's receiving in this case the the tell the town submission so you can see you know the person's uploaded a photo there's a description of the issue you can see if you squint that on the administration side of things there's a space where you report where the issue to whom the issue has been assigned a cat you categorize the issue your public works you know administration parks and recreation whatever the location information is there notice that it's got a street address that may have been inputted directly in this case but you see it's also cut latitude and longitude I didn't mention this earlier but one of the features of that particular app is when you're reporting an issue you just tap on a you tap on the screen to tap on a map and drop a pin and that actually gives the local government or First Nation a an exact pinpoint within a few feet of where this issue is information about the submitter and the way you go so you know this is a simple management console behind the scenes that a local government or First Nation could use and all of the app have this is just the one for the for the tell the town app the town criers got one my pet pals got one tour the town the the little mapping app has them they're all there so it's a complete system for you and earlier members have a say in what we do so when they're logged into the behind the scenes civic labs platform there's a place where you can make suggestions for new apps or suggestions on how we can improve existing ones and there's actually a little bit of a crowdsourcing voting mechanism built into this where members of the pool vote for the next app to be developed so in order for this to be a self sustaining self funding program the development cycle it's not fixed you know it's not like every three months we're going to develop an app or every six months we're going to develop an app it is it is tied to what we're bringing in in terms of subscription fees so the voting period can be adjusted like they're shortened accordingly but when subscription fees have accumulated to an efficient to a sufficient level that we can cover the cost of developing a new app both ios and android that's when we would close off voting for the next app so you know it's rather democratic in that way that's the neat part of the system I think when you are voting the top three projects appear at the top and others below and like I said the voting period is variable depending on available funds so I'm rounding the bend here on near the end pricing and how to order we think this is ridiculously affordable for small local governments we hope that it's something that they have the value in so our pricing we haven't set at $75 per month for communities with fewer than 2,500 residents again we want this to be about the price of a of a corporate cell phone bill we have it up to $100 a month for communities of 2,501 to 10,000 people 125 for communities of 10,000 to 25,000 we in the larger communities over 50,000 we can still we still want them 150 a month for 25,000 to 75,000 when you get into that handful of communities that are over 75,000 you know we know that that's custom quote kind of country and that's probably custom need kind of country it might be that in those circumstances if there are communities that wish to use these apps or be members of the pool where it might make sense to just make the existing apps available under license and let those communities build and know how they fit but again affordability is the key it's you know the development cost perhaps is usually crippling this shouldn't cripple anybody this should be any budget the budget should be just fine this should be affordable for just about any community out there and the prices aren't meant to change so this is our basic basic business model how it works over time so we have bottom arrow the light green arrow support and maintenance you know we think that the amount of money that we're going to be we know the amount of money that we're going to be spending on support maintenance for these apps over time it's going to go up that's fine the black arrow development the number of apps that we are developing over time it's going to go down there is a finite cap to the number of apps that are absolutely useful there are there there comes a point where we would we don't want to be developing apps for the sake of apps we have a list of apps that we think are likely to be developed in the coming years but if we had to guess it probably caps out around a couple of dozen who knows we could be surprised because there's that democratic mechanism and people can suggest things you know maybe new ideas will keep coming along for a while yet but we do think the development cycle is going to be a little more hectic in these first few years and it will gradually subside and and over time number of subscribers we're experiencing what we think with this the curve that you see there is what we will experience over time you know that initial kind of a take-up and it'll flat line over time we hope it goes up over time but it will certainly level up that's just a normal business curve but that is how we think we can keep the pricing relatively stable over the years it amounts to more money being allocated for support and maintenance and updates less money over time being allocated for development but it's the fluid environment and it just changes over time that is it i'm about five minutes ahead of where i thought i might be i was probably talking a little fast my apologies if i was but i did want to leave about 15 minutes at the end for open dialogue for questions and answers and just to discuss anything that you might want to so you know thanks very much for for listening to these past 40 minutes and i'd love to open the floor up to questions great thank you so much todd we have had a number of questions come in in the last section that you've been speaking about so i'll just try and run through those if there's any that we aren't able to win this 15 minutes i'll be sure to connect you with the people that have asked those questions so that you can follow up with them directly after the session the first question sounds great have you successfully integrated these apps with common municipal software systems that are doing similar tracking they're meant to be independent of common municipal software systems for us to do that extremely time consuming extremely expensive and different vendors would be more open to that than others so it's not impossible again that might be one of those situations where it makes sense to take the app as is under license and if you want to integrate it with the software system that you have in place that's fine it's worth it's worth noting too that you can deploy any or all some of the apps you know some of them some of them just frankly aren't going to be meant to integrate with the software system or couldn't so yeah it's going to be probably under license to you if you want to pay for that development cost but no we're not taking that on ourselves okay great um and then another question came in um when these are going to be published for people to download in app stores are they being published all as one or specifically by municipality from municipality to municipality really good question really good question we wrestled with that uh exact question for a while um it is all as one um there are reasons for that um specifically uh some of the uh some of the policies in the app store um the apple environment in particular they don't like app cloning so they don't like you rebranding the same app again and again and again and again uh in fact it's not allowed so what we have done instead it's that one app in the app store and when a citizen initially logs in they select their municipality or first nation and the app remembers that so once you've downloaded it and selected your municipality on that first login uh you're you're there you're set up but no I wish we could brand the app you know town of whatever but we are facing restrictions in the app stores that don't permit us to do that great thanks for that um someone was interested if you have a demo subscriber login account for people to log into to have a better look or another look at the the applications that have been absolutely my contact information is on the screen still if anybody would like to arrange the demonstration we are happy to do that we do have that so just contact me send me an email call me uh we'll arrange for that kind of a demonstration with that demo login and go from there um and then can data be exported for the integration with other tools like power bi oh good question there we have not built that functionality into the back end there is no reason that we couldn't uh a data exports very simple so um that's you know that's that's one for the suggestion column quite frankly uh strikes me as an easy one uh I think we could do it I know we could do it uh it's not there now but yeah if that's something you'd like to do let's talk great and um for the for the tell the town app specifically do is there a way for municipalities to deal with duplicate issue requests if they get overlaid and how do they manage if there's multiple people reporting the same issues it's going to happen multiple people will report the same issue regardless whether whether you've got that tell the town app or not you're going to get multiple phone calls you're going to get multiple emails so no there isn't a way that we can prevent people from reporting duplicate issues what it does give you is a way to perhaps deal with them quickly if you've got a bunch coming in by the app you can set the set the response as soon as it's there the the user gets that submitted message if you've got somebody on the back end that just you know is clicking you know the status to in progress or we're working on it something like that at least you're getting back to those people really quickly rapid fire you could use that perhaps in conjunction with the with the town crier app and presumably some of the same people who are interested in municipal business to the point that they downloaded one would have the other and you could you could push out a notice you know we are dealing with the fallen tree at third street in main or we're aware of the giant car eating pothole on on second street you know so there are different ways that you would communicate it but no we can't we can't block duplicates great and a couple people are asking how many municipalities are currently subscribed or currently interested or are you working with in terms of the getting into civic labs using the apps it's early days we are in discussions with probably about a half a dozen right now and it's early we've only had two available for the last little while with two more coming down the pipe so the timing of this webinar is actually really great because we would love to work with more we want to get this we want to get this moving and we need we need municipal partners to work with us so municipal budget cycles that some of you are from local government some of you are from First Nations some of you are from economic development offices you guys know the budget cycles it takes a year for things to wind through even if it's a small item like a you know hundred dollar a month subscription so we're just kind of at that point now where when we were pushing this you know midpoint last year yes okay we got a week till the 2020 budget is in effect and we can go from there so that's where we're at now okay just in terms of you use does each member municipality get multiple users to be able to log in or is there one shared login per subscription how does that work you can have multiple users okay so a municipality could have multiple login information yeah based on this different staff that are using it right and what a couple of questions that are specific about the different apps what's the base mapping that's used for tour the town at the moment we're using open street maps but we'll see that one's still in the shop and I'm expecting an update on Friday to be frank and what is the plan for payment details related to dog licensing that is going to be an interesting question we will have the ability in this app to collect payment on behalf of a small local government if that's something they want us to do we may be able to pipe that right through to the local government payment system depending on what it is yeah this one's meant for small communities that might not have sophisticated payment systems in place at least in an online environment so we will be offering a basic one that a small local government could use that that's under our under our umbrella but yeah in terms of integrating it with your systems every local government's going to be a little different and we're going to have to you know just see what we can pipe into we can do a lot with APIs we do have the ability to connect to some different systems that way so yeah that one again it's the most complex of them it's the least it's still very much under development and it's the least developed of all of them at the moment and I wish I could give you a better answer and a more straightforward answer than that I'll be able to give you a better straight forward answer maybe about three weeks times I don't have it now though a question and I don't know if you guys are at this stage yet but of the member municipalities um have any of the apps been implemented and if so how many residents are using those apps like what percentage of residents yeah we're not at that stage yet and uh even you know flash forward like a year from now I don't think it would be possible to really tell for sure what percentage would be using the app it would be your measures would be more in terms of just how citizens are engaging you know the level to which they engage with you through the app year to year whether that increases decreases or whatever we could see the total number of downloads obviously we could see how many have logged in but the percentage whether they're actually using it you know that that's that's more science fiction than it is science I'm afraid so in terms of metrics that'll indicate uptake and usage by residents it's going to be mainly downloads and what was the other thing that you had said for metrics I would suggest it's interaction through the app itself again on the tell the town app how many submissions did you get in a year through the app that's a very simple measure what was the percent change year over year another very simple measure those are those are the kind of metrics you'd want to track internally again we're trying to price this so low that you know even if uptake is low to begin with you haven't lost anything that's the idea um in terms of the municipalities or first nations organizations that come on board would you how do you have market would civic labs have marketing materials to help support the implementation of the app in the community to get the word out and get subscribers we have some very basic messaging again it'll be up to the local government because every local government's different and we don't have the resources to support you know dozens and dozens of local governments nor do we have the budget to do that so we do rely on local governments themselves to say put notices in their community newsletters that exist now you know do an insert in your utility notice um you know rely on on local media uh you know that there are still local papers out there that'll report this kind of thing we can help we can provide advice we have some key messages we do have material like that but we don't say have you know 10 thousand glossy brochures that we can ship to you and have those sent to every residence we don't have those kind of pockets unfortunately great and then just one more question that had come in just in terms of the different systems and how they're going to work together would it be easy to tie an app into or into existing an existing gis system so that you could leverage the maps we already have to be to in the tour the town app that would be up to the local government so again we would make that particular app available to the local government under license and that would be up to the local government to work with the developer if it's choice to do that another question that's come in around the tell the town app uh is there an option for um app users to be able to see all of the um outstanding issues not just the ones that they have created them and put in themselves at the present time no um possible we could do it um we have the privacy considerations there that we have to make sure um people's personal privacy uh is protected to an adequate degree that they are not that someone would not be able to view any kind of an issue that's been logged that might personally identify somebody who has chosen to report the issue so that would be that would be an enhancement for the future whether it's possible or not we would really have to think through the privacy implications of that before we do anything absolutely that makes sense um so i think we've gotten through all of the questions that have come in um during the session i'll just give a couple more minutes in case people um are thinking of anything last minute um and then obviously on on your screen you can see um Todd's contact information and i'm very generous to let everyone know that they can reach out if they have any other questions or want to know more about uh the project after today's session okay so i'm just going to take control of that so i just want to remind everyone that uh logged in today that this session was recorded so if you do have um uh you want to see this information again or want to share uh the information that Todd provided with someone else in your organization that might be interested in you know implementing these apps it will be posted in about a week on our website gov dot bc dot ca back slash economic development under the bc id is exchange webinar section so um we'll try to get that up there within a week and then we'll also have those handout slides if you were able to download them during the session today and i just want to let everyone know if you uh if you're new to the webinar and you just popped in because of this one you can uh sign up for our distribution list so you'll be notified of all of our upcoming webinars um we don't have anything uh scheduled but we're working on a number of topics that are going to be uh coming to you in april and may we're going to be chatting with the small business venture capital tax credit program they're going to be just going through um how you can get involved in that program um how the the eligibility eligibility requirements and they'll be there to answer any questions that you might have if you're trying to um support people getting into that program we're going to also be following up on a cannabis webinar that we had last year um it was very popular and had a lot of uh people wanting to know more about people that are being successful in the cannabis industry um so we'll be sharing some success stories for um with that and have an opportunity again for people to ask questions for those people that have entered the industry successfully on um ways that they may be able to do that themselves and then in may we are going to be um uh having a session on the great bc business sale um so people will be able to um learn about how their community can get ready for the bc great business bc business sale um and uh what what what that might entail and what businesses and organizations need to know and well that i just like to thank everyone for joining us today if you have any questions or suggestions for a future webinar topic um please do send us an email at economicdevelopment at gov dot bc dot ca and i'd really like to thank Todd and um for lending his time both to share what's going on with the the apps and answer all those questions that everyone was able to submit thank you so much well thank you very much for the invitation to be here and the opportunity to share this that was great absolutely um and with that i'll i'll end the webinar and if people have any further questions for myself or for Todd you should have our contact information now in the webinar i'll be posted later next week thank you so much everyone thank you