 Okay, I'm Rachel Stone, I am a sophomore at BYU, I study political science and I'm just barely picking up a minor in computer science so I can be sort of like you guys, or so it seems. So I study the crossroads between technology and government and I think it's a lot of fun. I've been kind of alone in that endeavor or so I thought for the past like year and then in the past three months or so everything started to pick up and it's been a whirlwind and I've been having so much fun. So we're going to start off with a necessary dose of pessimism about government. I don't know where the, okay, yeah, so I don't know how visible that is but I will read it. It says, we are 21st century citizens doing our best to interact in 19th century designed institutions that are based on the information technology of the 15th century. Okay, this is Pia Mancini, sorry Mancini. She is a great democracy activist in Argentina. She started this thing called Democracy OS and it's basically a crowdsourcing platform and we'll talk about it later but she's identifying the fact that in today's government the few make the decisions of the many which sounds familiar and also that there's a steep cost of participation. If you want to be deeply involved in politics and the governmental process, it costs a lot. So here's a little bit more optimism from Beth Novik and I have in every formal discussion of technological government have started with a Beth Novik quote because I love her. She used to be the deputy chief technology officer at the White House and she says in the Cambrian era of big data, of social networks, we have this opportunity to redesign these institutions. We invest plenty in innovation in broadband and science education and research grants but we invest far too little in reinventing and redesigning the institutions that we have and so what she's suggesting is a top down reevaluation of the way that we govern ourselves today in the 21st century and a top down redesign of those processes. So we see a couple themes in this discussion of 21st century government. We see e-governance and crowdsourcing and e-participation and lots of transparency and direct democracy and big data which is great because every other place has been talking about it for five years. So who's been on this website? Okay we have a couple hands. So this is the hallmark healthcare.gov and this is probably like the worst introduction to an American's technological idea of government that there was. It crashed multiple times. Here's a little news thing about it. Says after two years and $2.1 billion healthcare.gov is unfinished and people are still pretty unsatisfied with that system but it's part of this transformation which we're watching where governments are starting to put a lot more of their information online, make their services available so let's learn a little bit more about that. The United Nations has been tracking e-government for about seven years now. The most recent survey that came out was in 2014 and it put the United States of America at number seven in the world. Congrats to us. Republic of Korea is the first. That's a little awesome and scary. Asia's cool. We are the first in the Americas however to top that so we have a little bit of a leg over somebody. I like to show this particular website. This is the Republic of Estonia and I am a big fan of Estonia because in 2005 they were the first to try to implement e-voting and about 2% of their population joined in and voted on their laptops rather than getting in a line and a building like we do here in America and it's been growing steadily more successful ever since and so I love Estonia and they do a lot of great e-government and they're a really small country so it makes a great lab rat. Okay so now we get to the title of my talk. A government crafted series so I want you to step into my imagination with me real quick and pretend that we're five, ten years in the future and the government has created your very own personal automated assistant named Siri for the sake of familiarity. Okay so this is a streamlined mechanism for engaging one-on-one with government like the way that you have a streamlined mechanism for engaging with your phone, your smart phone. It's created equally for public servant and average citizen meaning that your government researcher can use it, your policy professor can use it, you can use it as the average citizen. It has access to all publicly available online government data. It draws from all levels of federalism from state to local to federal and it's seated in the environment of five to ten years in the future so let's think about with this series what kind of questions or commands we would ask. I don't know why there's music notes but they're cool. Alright question one. What are the new Salt Lake City regulations on self-driving cars? Send the clip of my congressional hearing on net neutrality to my email. What percentage of the state budget is transportation oriented or energy oriented? What is my projected tax return for this fiscal year? Renew my vehicle registration one week before its expiration. Wow. What is the average donation to the Liberty Super PAC? That's for your researcher to know. And here's a good favorite. What is the president doing today or right now at this very second? So I want to for the rest of the talk go a little bit more in depth to a couple questions that I have identified as key indicators of what the future would look like if we had this series. Okay and so we'll just dive into it. The first question goes. Siri, based on my personal data, what proportion of the city's annual budget applies to my particular circumstances? That's interesting. How much of the city's budget actually applies to me? Okay. So the point of this question is to bring to attention this idea of personalization and transparency in government that we're seeing in this evolution. This is a screenshot of Cedar Hills City budget on their website. Cedar Hills is right that way. It's south right by Alpine. And they have put their budget on a dashboard that anybody can access from their website. So this is a lot of transparency that we're seeing from them. And then you can look and see, okay, well, the golf fund relates to me. So that's good. And I like that. And the water and sewer fund relates to me and I support that, but not maybe the capital project fund. Not so sure about that. And so you have a deeper stake in what's going on. What else do we have? Here's a new app that came out recently. It's a mobile app from California that helps you find jobs in the city. And it's geolocated. So lots of little ways that governments are personalizing themselves towards you. Okay. Next question. Siri, notify local road management that there's a fallen tree on 124th and center. Kind of cool. Really simple. You can do this already by calling your city's 311 number. This is the screenshot for Provo where I live. Where I am loving living. But nobody ever dials 311. And I've tried it multiple times and it's okay, but it could be better. And so we have these other apps that have taken place. Text is in is pretty popular. Text is in serves a lot of purposes. But primarily it's been used by the city of Boston and the city of Philadelphia. And the idea is that if you see a fallen tree or any problem of any kind in your neighborhood, you text a number and it filters through the government system, goes to the right person of contact, and then there's a feedback loop. So you had to do almost nothing. You texted like you normally do your friends, your family on your phone. There's a similar app called Citizens Connect that does about the same thing. They're coming out in a lot of different cities and there's one that we're working on here at BYU. So you talk and have it too. I think smartphones are one of the greatest things that have ever happened to government and we're just barely starting to realize that and capitalize on it. And this is one of those ways. Here's something in Uganda that has been pretty successful. It's called the UReport. And essentially the Ugandan government will send out little polls to people's phones via text. And so like they'll ask a question, respond number four if you think this, number one if you think this, et cetera. And they get these real live data like streaming in through their phones all the time. So it's constant crowdsourcing. And we see that applied constantly and visualized. This is the crime rate of Chicago, which has been pretty great. Okay. Siri, send a message to my senator's office that I just posed an amendment to the drone regulation bill. Okay. You pose an amendment to the bill. That's not our job. That's never been our job. But it is now because there's been this huge focus on direct digital democracy. Here's a couple of websites that have come out with ways to do this. This is an article from Motherboard from about a year ago when this startup in California decided to run two candidates for office, for Congress. And they ran these candidates that were software. So the idea was that this, the software would take the place of the candidate and be elected into office. And then you would be able to tell the software, yeah, okay, this is my input. And it would crowdsource from everybody in the district. And then the people would really be in control. Now, I think this is smart, but this is actually not so great because who roams the hallways of Congress then. Does anybody do that? Does anybody network? So it's not quite there, but I like where it's going. And they called that place a vote. Exciting stuff. This is another website called PopVox. They just hosted a hackathon in San Francisco that I was pretty sad to miss. But essentially what they do is they streamline all the different bills that are coming through and then you can rate them. And then you can favorite them with the heart or the cancel button. No problem. And there's a lot of these coming out. There's the one that Pia Mancini worked on, Democracy OS, and this one here. The ultimate goal is that everybody has an input and that your voice really counts. All right, here's where we get really radical. Theory, cast my vote for the incumbent me of love in the House race. All right, so the disclaimer is that I would never actually ask you to tell Siri to cast your vote. And the reason is because it's not private. If you were actually going to say out loud, this is who I'm voting for. Anybody can manipulate that. You can have a 3D printed gun to your head saying okay, you're going to vote for the other person or else. Your boss could definitely get in there. And what you see is that Estonius tried it. They've tried to vote online. The way that they've been doing it is they have these little cards with chips in them. And you insert it into a portal that you've been mailed or something and you put it into your computer and you're able to securely, supposedly securely, place your vote. And you can do that within a 24 hour window as many times as you want to. You only get one vote, but you don't get as many as you want. It's been really interesting to watch. They haven't been incredibly successful, but they have, they've been raising it over the numbers. It's only a country of 1.3 million people. So it's a lab rat nation for us. But the idea is that we're on the verge of voting in a whole new way where you don't have to stand in line at your local school anymore. And this is what I wanted to say. I wanted to say that I'm very proud of her voting record in favor of altering the national clean air standards. This is revolutionary in a way. Nobody votes like this, but I think we ought to. I think we ought to vote with rationale because what does your vote actually say when you say yes or no? It's a majority rule, but you've said yes or no, but why? And so how are we supposed to direct policy without actually saying yes? Why isn't there a way for you to express a little bit more than for or against? Okay. So this is what I would like to see in tomorrow's government. We'll see how it works out. And then the final thing that I wanted to get to was the perhaps even more radical idea of introducing artificial intelligence into the way that we govern ourselves. I have here Siri rank all poverty reducing U.S. policy mechanisms from the last decade by percent reduction after one decade or from the last century. The idea is that our policymaking processes are antiquated and slow. And they're run by lobbyists. I'm from Washington, D.C., so I have a little bit of a hint on how this goes. And it takes a lot of time. And we're constantly depending on outside resources, private resources to furnish us with information. You who have heard of I.B.M. Watson know that he has all this information in his great repository and can access it. And so we can access that for for publicly serviceable reasons. And so finally, Siri weigh the arguments for and against reproductive genetic engineering and support of the Supreme Court case, assuming this probably will happen. So I'm going to talk about human cognitive limitations. Human cognitive limitations help us figure this out. There's this idea introduced by Herbert Simon of bounded rationality. And that idea is that human cognitive limitations, that humans are limited in the way that they can process information within a certain given amount of time. And we know that in Congress we are always on a time where we can work together, our collective technologies together to create a better way to govern ourselves in the future. I would be amiss without referencing this app called Justify, which is one of my team, my collaborators. Great life works. It's an online tool that you can use to make rational decisions from which sock to choose to wear in the morning to whether you should take the test. And that's us at the hackathon a couple months ago. So that's all I have for you. Thank you very much for listening.