 Who knows, maybe. We're back, we're live. We're here with Bert Lum, one of the directors of Think Tech, Hawaii, and also the director of open data, Hawaii Open Data, and we are so happy to have him because he is Mr. Tech on Byte Markets Cafe every Wednesday, 6.30 on HPR. What channel is it? HPR One. HPR One. We do from HPR Two to HPR One. Okay, the talk show now. It's 88.1. 88.1, yeah. So Ryan Ozawa and I, we still carrying the banner supporting tech. Bunch of geeks. Yeah, we have a good time. Yeah. Well, part of that is transforming Hawaii government, calling this show tech transformation, tech transforming Hawaii government, and in a way of some preliminary thoughts about that. We have talent here. We've been developing that talent for a long time, since Ariyoshi time. In fact, since John Byrne's time, and now we can finally come of age, hopefully knock wood, that we'll actually be able to use this talent in the community, make money, make business, make entrepreneur stuff, you know, make hits, but also in the government because the government needs us. The government needs tech, you know, what's his name, Abercrombie? What's his name? I remember him, I saw him last week. You know, he talked about transforming Hawaii government with tech, and that's the idea we need to transform Hawaii government. We have the talent, and the government needs us, and the talent is, you know, it all works so swell to give them opportunities and have entrepreneurs come together and develop software that can be used in the government, a fabulous thing. And you've been shepherding that, haven't you? Well, there's a number of initiatives that are going on that are exciting, and we've been trying to tell that story. I mean, part of it is the accelerator activity, you know, the emphasis on startups and entrepreneurs. You have blue startups. You have Accelerate UH. You have Energy Accelerator. And they're all pumping out some pretty good startup companies. So that's a great program. And then, you know, in terms of the initiative that I'd like to talk about is something called the Hawaii Annual Code Challenge. Now, Governor Ige was involved with a couple of hackathons. And as a result of those hackathons, he saw how the community got together and got really excited and started to contribute in a form that he hadn't seen before in terms of innovation and just being creative and just coming up with ideas that weren't limiting by any sort of box that they might be put into. Yeah, we were there. We took some footage down there and we put it on OC16. But, you know, one thing that struck me, you've done a lot of programs for it. You do all these programs all the time. This one had real grit. What I mean is these guys were coming down. They were engaged. They spent a month. It's not a lot of time. That's not a weekend. It's a month developing these programs. The governor came down himself. He spoke of it. He was very encouraging. Did he wear short pants that day? I don't remember. No, I think Todd was going to wear short pants. Todd Nakapoy, the CIO. But they advised the governor to make sure that he at least wears long pants and a long shirt. And he spoke about how he was basically a techie himself. And this really was dear to his heart. And a lot of people came down. They actually engaged and volunteered their time. And government agencies came down and pitched them RFP-type projects so they could answer a need. I was very impressed with that. And then at the end of the day, after a month, you guys rounded everybody up again and see what we got here. And there was some real programs there that could actually help the government. Well, you brought up a good point. Now, hackathons tend to be only weekend events. I mean, they might be 24 hours. They might be 48 hours. But they're basically a weekend event. And oftentimes what happens at a hackathon doesn't really get further developed. Now, when I was brought into the planning committee for the annual code challenge, one of the things I suggested was that instead of doing a weekend event, they'd consider this 30-day event and allow people to kind of get their meat, get their teeth into the meat of the challenge. And the other side of it, which I think was testament to the folks over in the state, the ETS, the Enterprise Technology Solutions Group, what they did was they went out and actually solicited the different departments and asked them, do you have a problem or a challenge that you could pitch to this community of technologists, programmers, developers? And the answer was often yes, because actually tech can help everybody. Everybody has a problem that can be automated and the solution can be automated. And that's especially so in government. So there were probably something on the order of seven or eight departments that actually came in and did pitches. Public safety came in and did a pitch for OCCC. We had the Department of Health come in and do a pitch. We had the Department of A come in and do a pitch. We even had the folks from the city do a pitch on the age-friendly initiative. So we had a bunch of different things. And I think the audience really got into the different opportunities to maybe suggest something that could perhaps get implemented. When you say pitch, you know, usually pitch is the other way. You know, I'm the entrepreneur, I'm pitching, you know, my ideas so you can invest in my company. This is a reverse pitch. This is a pitch where I need something and see if your guys can help me out. And it was really interesting to watch that happen because a lot of those pitches, yes, somebody could help them out, somebody local, somebody here, somebody, you know, part of the organization. It was really interesting to watch. And the one I remember that you mentioned is the Department of Public Safety. I found that would be very interesting and I think the solution was very successful so far. Just to go into the detail of it, it seems that people have trouble organizing visits to the prisoners in the prison, you know, OCCC. And it's very hard to keep records about who's coming when and whether they're going to be there, not be there. Whether they're properly dressed. They're properly dressed. All the rules being followed and all that, you know, and it's been catch-us-catch-can for a lot of families that come and sometimes they can't see their loved ones. And so they needed a system. It was a really simple kind of solution. I mean, well, for a computer guy. A very simple solution for a big problem. And I knew when they spoke, they were very articulate to people in public safety, I knew when they spoke that somebody was going to belly up to that and give them a great solution. It was a database issue and a communication issue and it happened, didn't it? Yes. And so what we did was we had actually a couple teams propose something. So it was basically considered like a visitation app. And it was something that would be available online. And so they actually got recognized. They got some prize money. And what the state did to help further foster that was the code that we encourage all the teams to do is all open source. So what it is, is it's available for people to either further develop or take and run if it's ready to run. So what the folks over at ETS did was they took the code. They actually modified the code. They actually made it more functional. And they stood it up on some internal servers. So they have it running on Microsoft Dynamics. Actually running. Actually running. Within that month it was ready to go. No, no, no, no. No. The pitch was done, which you described. The teams had 30 days. They did a demo after 30 days. At the demo is when they were recognized for what I call a proof of concept. Right. So that was a proof of concept early stage. And then after the event is when the state decides if they have the resources they can further move the application into an implementation. Effectively hire the team. Well, that's what I want to talk about about this bill that we have introduced to this legislative session. The 30 days and the original proof of concept, that was volunteer. That was volunteer. That was out of love. That's right. And really wonderful that you were able to get all the people to come down and do that. And great that you could have the engagement because you can't write code without talking to your client. Right. You don't have to find an interested party out there who will give you the detail of it. Okay. So the 30 days go by and then you want to get, you know, you want to go further with it. Right. And you need a special program to do that. Right. So once the demo day is done, what I call proof of concept, the proof of concept could take a number of different paths. Right. It could take a path where the state says, oh, I like this. We'll adopt it and we'll implement it. That's one possible. Another possibility would be, let's say the team really likes to continue to work on it. They want to work on it with, you know, no compensation. They are free to do that. They can continue to do that. A third option might be the department might say, wow, I really like to see something continue in terms of this development. So as one of the examples, the folks over at the Institute for Human Services, there was a pitch on homelessness. I remember that one too. There's some open source code that was developed. The teams got recognized. And the folks over at the Institute for Human Services are continuing to have conversations with that team to see if they can help further the development of that code. Now, in terms of compensation, that depends on what monies might be available to help pay for, I guess, or at least engage in a... Ideally, you know, the agency involved is the client, and the coders, the programmers who responded to the pitch are hired. I mean, up till now, I guess, they've been working volunteer in anticipation of the possibility that they could actually have an agreement about this and do it for money. I want to be careful about the idea of this sort of agreement with the government, because the government still has procurement of rules and regulations. How does that play in this case? Okay, so how this plays in this is that these open source proof of concepts, they're just prototypes, and they're prototypes to help further the potential for an application to actually get implemented. Now, in order to go down this timeline of development, you have to take this proof of concept, and then you have to further develop it into an alpha or a beta, and you could start to look at perhaps raising some money to actually get it to a prototype. Now, the government, because of procurement, they're not going to... This is not a process to circumvent the procurement process, but with a prototype and the potential to do a pilot, the government can then look at whether, through the pilot, whether it meets security requirements, it meets scalability requirements, it meets usability requirements. They can set the specifications for a potential bid. And set the specifications on the basis of the model that had been developed, the proof of concept that had been developed. And then they could go out to bid on whatever... So then they do go out, and they comply with the procurement code. Now, anybody could respond to that RFP. It doesn't have to be a team. It could be any commercial developing or commercial software company that might want to compete for that particular bid. So it still goes out to the community. But the guys who developed the concept in the first place would be a good and valuable bidder because they have developed the concept. Well, the thing that... And again, we'll talk about this in terms of the bill, but a lot of the teams that come into the code challenge are teams. It could be like you and me, Jay, we go in, we form a team. We already know each other. We may not be a business. We may not have the structure for how we want to go in and actually deal with government procurement. We don't have the... Let's say the backup resources within our organization to provide maintenance, training, support. So there is... That can be very onerous, actually. That is. And so we don't expect the teams to be ready to actually provide a solution to the government that requires all of those things. There are others that are out there that can do that. But what we want to do is we want to help nurture some of these teams so that they can get to the start-up mode and start thinking about how this process that they're going through could potentially result in them becoming a full-on business. Now, it doesn't guarantee them anything in terms of business with the state or the government, but it does give them a pathway to get further development beyond just... Because they've been successful in developing this proof of concept. They've been successful in responding to a pitch by the government. So now they've worked together. They've achieved something. And now what we need is a step here that will bring them together as maybe a potential business organization and develop it further. So as far as the program goes, we're familiar with accelerators and accelerators will... You have to go in and apply to an accelerator. You could be the early stage of a company and then you are in a situation where you have your chief technology officer, you have your chief executive officer and with that you start to form this business. And then with the accelerator, the accelerator will help mentor you to not only set up your business structure but to get your pitch down, to meet with investors, to meet with financial people, to just meet with the right people to give you a head start on how to take your business to the next level. That's the accelerators. Now in this scenario where teams are coming out of a code challenge that are interested in moving down this timeline, they may not be ready for acceleration. This may be even a pre-accelerator kind of program. And so the idea is we would look at HTDC, the High Tech Development Corporation to help set up a program that not only helps fund them to further develop their proof of concept but to look at what kind of mentoring or do some workshops around business 101. It's the perfect agency. You couldn't find another agency in the state of Hawaii as good and they have a long history with mentoring, a long history with entrepreneurship and acting as an accelerator, incubator organization. So you have a bill. Getting down to the bill. Well, it's HB 1329. So 1329, what it does is it looks at helping to set up a program just like we just described that is going to be resident in the High Tech Development Corporation. Okay. There it is. In HTDC. And we are going right after this break we're going to examine how it works, who does what and what's going to do for the developers, the community, and the state in general. That's Bert Lomb. He's a star at Stage, Screen, and HPR, Byte Marks Cafe. We'll be right back. Hey, has your signal just been taken over or am I supposed to be here? This is Andrew, the security guy, your co-host on Hibachi Talk. Please join us every Friday on Think Tech Hawaii. Ah, I'm standing in your man and I want you to be here every Friday. Noon! ThinkTechHawaii.com. That's the show. Be there. I pity the fool who ain't! Hi, I'm Tim Appichella. I'm the host for Moving Hawaii Forward. And the show is dedicated to transportation and traffic issues in Oahu. We are all frustrated by sitting in our cars in bumper-to-bumper traffic. And this show is dedicated to talking with folks that not only we can define the problem, but we hopefully can come to the table with some solutions. So I invite you to join me every Tuesday this afternoon and let's move Hawaii forward. And I can never count. Okay, we're back. We're live with Pertlum, who is the, I guess, the star of Stage Screen at HPR, Byte Mox Cafe, every Wednesday at 6.30 p.m. Are we right about that? 6.30 p.m. HPR 1, 88.1. 88.1, yeah. It's the talk channel now in HPR 1 and HPR 2, yeah. Anyway, so you really are such a community guy developing. It's so important we do this. Let's talk about the developers themselves, the ones that emerged, because you had no way of controlling, just emerged in a sort of organic process in the Code Challenge, the one month long volunteer code challenge. And we talk about two teams, one with public safety and the other with homelessness. Who are these people? Well, they could run the gamut of students all the way to professionals. And in the case of the public safety app, they were students over at Honolulu Community College. And they were all part of a group that does a lot of the computer and networking, training types of classes. And they saw an opportunity to participate in this Code Challenge. Now, they must have had, like, 15 people on that team. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, and they all wore their same black shirt for him. Perfect, yeah, right. But then, you know, after the Code Challenge, a lot of their priorities weren't necessarily let's form a company. You know, a lot of them as individuals wanted to find jobs. Other types of participants were graduates out of Dev League. So Dev League is a boot camp. Talk about Dev League, what it is, what it is. Yeah, so Dev League is a 12, I think it's a 12 week boot camp for coders. So you can come in as a sort of a beginning coder and go through this boot camp. You get an expert coder, and then you get jobs. You come out motivated with that. And so the Dev League folks have been very supportive of these types of events because it, again, gives their graduates an opportunity to feel the real world challenge of putting something together that then gets judged by, you know, real judges, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's the Dev League folks. And then we actually had teams that were consistent of professionals that are in the community that wanted to just... They're already doing this kind of stuff. But they weren't necessarily looking to form a business. Right. But they were... Right, right, right. And so it sort of ran the gamut. Now, we want to see if, you know, how do we come up with a program that allows any of these teams to potentially get further along the timeline of implementation. Now, this is not going to be suitable for everybody, right? Like we just talked about the team from Honolulu Community College. They may not have been interested in doing a start-up. Right, they're students. And maybe they're going to leave, go away. You can't assume they're going to stay together. But there may be that special case where the team comes together. They work well together. They want to consider the idea of forming a company. Even if it's just a small business, now there's, you know, the structure of small business. And we can help them. We can encourage them. We can make them more likely that they will do that. By the way, I want to add one other point about coding. I'm sure you code. Long ago. Coding is one of the most creative things that you create in another universe. Like building another alternative universe. And you're dealing with the symbols of the code. And you're inventing things. It's such a creative, innovative experience. You're inventing things all by yourself. Sitting there. I mean, the client says to you, I want this and that. But then you have to get there. You have to find ways to get there. And sometimes it isn't easy. You learn a lot in the process. And the big problem is you're living in your alternative universe. Do you want to learn more about this? Are they going to use this? Is this really comport with the need that was described to me? Or is this just going to get on the shelf and gather dust? And that's the big issue. And the problem to me I see is that without this kind of encouragement and incubation, a lot of these great ideas will go nowhere. And so this really helps. Not only those people, kids, whatever students or professionals who are doing it, but also the ideas and helps roll them out, preserve them for use in the community by the government. That's really important. Well, you bring up a good point, this idea of incentive. How do you incentivize people to be involved with this kind of a process? And you'd be surprised. Students would be incentivized just to participate in a program like this. There could be incentives just as a result of being recognized by the judges, like the governor. Incentives by seeing the application actually get implemented. There could be incentives. Great gratification in that. There's incentives in having a vehicle by which perhaps you could start a business. And this could help kickstart that effort. So there's a lot of different incentives along the way. And we don't have the exact formula for what would be the perfect thing to incentivize people. But what we're trying to do is create an environment where there's options that could satisfy some and satisfy others with other types of incentives. And the end game is can we help some of these teams and some of these proof of concepts actually get further down the implementation timeline. So the bill tries to look at establishing this program, put it in HTDC, have HTDC look at how they want to mentor these teams to move down the startup pathway to further developing the application. And then the hope is that ETS would look at the consideration of how would they build a specification around this prototype, whether it's a pilot or whatever, and then ultimately go out a bit. And the program might help them build that specification. Might help them shape what they really want. They're going to have both sides of the transaction, so to speak. And that you want to try to nurture as many flowers as possible to see which ones will continue to grow and bloom. And with ETS you can't expect them to do all the implementation. You can't expect all of these applications to be successful. But if you can get some of them that have the right elements to succeed then you have just a nice example of how this process that leadership continues to other people will do it too if they see a success. And the success is measured not necessarily in money, although money's nice. But in the success of the product, the success of the project. Another thing that I think is also beneficial is the departments that get involved they see how this innovation and the creativity that comes in as a result of the community it's part of the changing the culture of and helping them to see that there are other things out there that could potentially influence. This sounds a lot like your open data project. Yeah, so a lot of interesting things going on and I'm hopeful, I mean the bill has got its hearing on the house side with Mark Nakashima's Economic Development Committee It also went to thank you Mark, thank you for the support on this. And and Sylvia Luke's committee on finance it passed that just a couple days ago so now it does a crossover and now it will go to the senate side. So we're definitely tracking that and keeping people informed as to its progress. It's iconic in a way because it's the kind of thing we should do the kind of thing we've been waiting to do it's the perfect place for it to happen on HDDC and it's on hack annual code challenge. And the governor has already put a blessing on that. It's the information technology office is into it, ETS you call it. And it's ready we're at the crossroads where this bill is perfect. We must have this bill, I'm telling you. Well, and there's a couple other bills that are being marshaled through the legislative session. There's, you know, we talk about transforming the government and we are encouraging another one is SB 312 which tries to get agendas from board meetings and minutes to be done electronically as opposed to hard copy. And if it's in electronic then it gets out faster to the people that need to know about it. You mean we're not redoing that, Bert? There's a lot of work that needs to get done. That's the same thing making government work better. And you would think it's fairly simple to do but it takes an act of the legislature to make it happen. Why can't this get done without an act of the legislature? I think people tend to have a comfort level in the status quo. So if you're in a frame of I've done this way for the last X number of years, decades what do I need to really change? And there's a comfort level with that sort of status quo. And I think technology has the opportunity to speed things up make things more efficient but it does disrupt sort of that status quo and that's why I think there's some challenge I guess in terms of moving as quickly as we would like to. So we looked at the legislature for leadership as we have over the past as long as I've been following it. If the legislature blesses it it'll happen. If the legislature doesn't do anything it's much more difficult. So you're in the right place. So we had a special time, we have one minute left Bert. Well there's another interesting bill that's still moving forward, it's HB 1481 and it's all about blockchain. And blockchain got its popularity through bitcoin but it's an interesting technology that does the transactions and it sort of is a very secure way of monitoring a transaction that takes place. So there's actually a and it's moving forward to set up a small committee to actually study the opportunity that blockchain would offer the state and the bill identifies this committee and then it sets up a reporting back to the ledge next session on the opportunity for blockchain. So it's good that they're looking at some new technologies and how that might impact government and economic development in Hawaii. Bringing technology to government technology transforming Hawaii government and the guy at the center of that is Bert Lump.