 I'm John Walton, the CIO for the city of San Francisco. It's great to be here. I can tell already this is going to be a really frustrating thing for me to do because I've written out this whole page of things I wanted to talk about. Now I have an opinion about everything that's been said before me, and so here's what I'm not going to talk about because I don't have time. First I want to say, though, it's ironic that I'm talking about two of the things I love the most, books and technologies here in a church. Because when I was a kid, the way my parents got me to behave in church was I let me bring my Edgar Rice Burroughs novels to church so I could sit there and read and not make a nuisance of myself in the church setting. So that's kind of my background books in church. First of all, I will say you have a great amount of data. It's just fantastic. When I look at internet archives and Project Gutenberg and the National Archives, I don't think you lack information. If you look at the wealth of information out there, it's just staggering to someone like me. I think what I'm not going to talk about is what's already been mentioned. You need good tools to access that information that's an inhibitor to why people probably aren't using it more. You need good applications, user-friendly applications. I could tell you a long story about how I was looking for one piece of, I guess, somewhat obscure text. And it took me, like, as a CIO, two and a half hour from Project Gutenberg to finally get it loaded on my Kindle, which practically drove me insane. So I'm not going to talk about that. I think e-readers are just prevalent in our society now and need to be leveraged more. I think you all as librarians and as technologists understand that already. I was telling Luis the other day when we were brainstorming. I love having coffee with Luis, because I always go to Luis all fired up about this great idea I have. And he always patiently listens to me and says, yeah, we already thought of that. He lets me vent, though, which is nice. And then I ask, well, how can I help? So I would like, as a parent and as an individual, if you want to know what my vision for libraries and bookstores are, I still fight with my wife over bookshelf space, right? I think there's a tactile piece as human beings or social or tactile. I'm always going to have a bookshelf. I'm always going to want some things in a hard copy because they're comforting to me, and I like those. I consider them artwork. I don't want to get rid of them. At the same time, I would like to see libraries and bookstores be more supportive of the e-reading devices. I don't see them in competition with each other. I see them as complementary. And I'd love it if I was an entrepreneur, if I was a millionaire and could give Luis a million dollars, I'd like to see him buy an e-reader for every kid in San Francisco because then they would have access to all these things. So what I am going to talk about for a few minutes, really, is what I think is one of the challenges in this conversation, which is connectivity to the information. And this is something I probably understand a little bit, so I won't get too far out of my depth here. We do a lot with connectivity in government, especially here in San Francisco. We partner with internet archives, for example, I'm doing fiber backhaul for them. We partner with Luis and the Housing Authority on putting fiber to public housing and free Wi-Fi for people. And Luis and I and our Parks Director are working on how a strategy around how to continue to expand free public Wi-Fi. We all remember five, 10 years ago when there was this dream that we're just gonna blanket large cities and the nation eventually with free public Wi-Fi and the economics of that didn't work out. Earthlink tried it, Google tried it, a couple other people tried it. There's some small pockets of success, but it becomes, in my mind, an inhibitor. I grew up in the country, in Virginia and Arkansas, and to go to a bookstore, to go to a library was a trip. Some of my parents would have to take me into town to visit one of those places. And so I had books at my disposal, we didn't have a TV when I grew up, so books were my friend, but I only had the books that were in the house for what I could borrow from my friends. I think as anchor institutions, when you're talking about getting that wealth of information you have out there, you have to be thinking about how people are gonna connect to your information. So even if you assume they have the e-reader problem solved, you have the search engine problem solved and the app problem solved, you have that wealth of data, they're gonna need to connect to it. In a big city, I won't say it's easy, but I can pull fiber to a public housing authority. I can put up a free Wi-Fi hotspite in a public space. I can work with Louise, I'm putting Wi-Fi in all the libraries and our parks and things like that. But I think, and I'm going to go out on a limb here, I was talking to some of my other CIO friends before I came to this, sort of pitching this idea to them and I will say they're pretty much split 50-50 on whether this is a crazy idea or a good idea, which means I'm probably right in the sweet spot of, I should put it out there right now. I was in a meeting with Cisco the other day, we were talking about the future cities and things like that, to be honest, I was on the board trying to think of something to keep me awake in the meeting. And I had this thought, I was thinking of all the other projects I was doing and I mentioned to them, yeah, that's all fine, but I'm about to spend roughly somewhere here in the city, somewhere between $200 and $300 million on the new public safety radio system. We have a lot of old radio technology here in the system. It's the old 800 megahertz, 700 megahertz radio systems we use for public safety. And we have to move everybody what we call P25. I know this is, sorry, way out there on the technical limb here, but we're moving everyone to a new digital public safety radio systems and so we're gonna have all these new radio systems put in place. And so halfway through this conversation and Cisco's extolling the new future digital city was fascinating. I said, hey, what if I called you in motor role and some of the other vendors into this? And I said, look, here in San Francisco, we're all about reuse, recycle, repurpose things. What if I challenged you as vendors? One of the challenges I have is getting people connected, getting people connected to information like digital public libraries. I have all this equipment. I have all the antennas. I have all the backhaul equipment, all this stuff. What if we repurposed that equipment? The thing I love still about my first Kindle. I have a, you know, and trust me, I got about 20 devices. When I travel, I still take my first generation Kindle because it's got whisper sync on it. It's free. I go anywhere. It's got a long battery life. And so what if we did a government version of whisper sync to support what you folks are doing? It wouldn't support, unfortunately, the high speed video. The old radio technology is very slow. But what it's good for is if you live in a county or something like that, it's everywhere. It's prevalent. It would be low speed. You couldn't do probably audio. You couldn't do video. But what you could do, what you could deliver is if you design the apps, right? If you were in a hotspot area or if you were on fiber, you would get the full content. You'd get 100% of the content. But if you were in one of these rural areas, if you were in someplace in San Francisco, up at Twin Peaks or out in, you know, Park Presidio where you didn't have good Wi-Fi coverage and you couldn't afford, like so many of our people here can't afford an expensive data plan or something, you would at least have some way to get to these public connections and download the text, download a book for your kid, download a reference, download learning material. And we could provide that, I think, pretty cost-effectively. Yes, there would have to be changes to the antennas and the e-books. And yes, I'd have to negotiate with the FCC because they're pretty draconian about the use of their frequencies. But I think it's an opportunity. And so I will put that out there. I think, again, you know, I work with a group of CIOs around the nation, New York, Chicago, Seattle, LA. And I think we'd all really be interested at some point, if you're interested in working with us, I would put that out as an offer to this group and I'd be happy to champion that with the FCC and with the manufacturers to see if there is some way we can help you create that connection to the people out there that want your data. So that's all I have today. Thank you all very much.