Transcript

How Chicago is Using Data to Make Life Better

January 05, 2012

0:00:0

MICAH SIFRY: Hi everybody, this is Micah Sifry from Personal Democracy Media, Happy New Year and welcome to the first in our 2012 series of Personal Democracy Plus conference calls with movers, shakers, thinkers, doers in the political, technology space.

This call is coming to you thanks to our sponsors at Microsoft. We appreciate their support.

I’m very excited to welcome to the call John Tolva, the Chief Technology Officer of the great city of Chicago and a good friend of Personal Democracy, spoken at several of our conferences back when he was in the private sector working for IBM on their Smarter Cities Program and now he’s actually in the midst of really taking Chicago further into the 21st century than any other city in the United States.

That’s what we’re going to get into on this call today. So, welcome John!

JOHN TOLVA: Thanks!

MICAH SIFRY: Thanks for making the time to talk with us and John, I should say your Twitter handle is Immerito, I-M-M-E-R-I-T-O before we (inaudible) I have to ask you to explain what is Immerito and why is that your handle?

JOHN TOLVA: Well that’s my personal account, the other one is ChicagoCTO, but so in a former life I was actually an English PhD student and that is the name of a narrator in the epic poem, The Fairy Queen by Edmund Spencer. It was – English Renaissance was my focus.

MICAH SIFRY: I see, I see (overlapping remarks). That’s a whole ‘nother call on that topic.

So, why don’t you take the first couple minutes to describe – you know, you’ve been there now a little bit over a half a year. What’s your mandate? What does the Chief Technology Officer of Chicago actually do? And then let’s get into your vision and how you’re starting to implement (overlapping remarks). It would be great to really lay it out and then we’ll get to things like Chicago snow and what to do about that.

JOHN TOLVA: Well it’s a role that didn’t exist previously, so that’s good and bad. There is a CIO in the city that is more operational, running systems and things like that.

But my role – and then another one called Chief Data Officer – were brand new. I think in part it was the mayor’s experience in federal government as Chief of Staff for the President in creating the first federal CTO that he said, you know, we need some sort of policy level or cabinet level technologist or technology perspective.

And the mandate, as you asked Micah, was pretty broad, you know set high standards from the mayor’s office out for open and participatory government. And we interpreted that in a couple of different ways.

You know, a lot of that has to do with open data and I think that early on the mayor’s grasp of that was around transparency and accountability, you know the sort of bed rock of open data. But I think where we’ve been able to push it now in just a little over seven months is more towards analysis and actually even economic development coming from open data, which as music to anybody’s ears in a recession.

So, we’ve pretty much operationalized and pushed down the departments kind of standard operating procedure of publishing data. So – and that’s a good thing. We really didn’t want the mayor’s office to be hounding commissioners for the next four years.

So, that’s enabled us to do things like really focus on tools, really focus on mapping and exposing the data in interesting ways so people could build things from them. That paired with a really proactive to get out of the community, community groups, neighborhood groups, anybody who this data should be actionable for to kind of listen to their concerns or get tutorials. 2012 I think you can characterize as the year that we pour most of our effort into making this data actionable.

So, you know, there’s plenty of other things going on. We’re implementing something called Open 311, which is a way of kind of platform-izing service requests and I think that’s going to be a pretty radical change for the city in the way that transit specifications have changed the way people use public transit. I think once you start exposing at every step along the process of the service request and fulfillment with the city, it opens up some pretty interesting things.

And then I’ll just also note that this open data initiative is really the driver behind like a new eco system startup that we’re very interested in promoting which is – you might call it a civic start up, right? So, a company that is not working directly inside a government, but working with the data that it gives off to provide sort of value either back to the government, or to resident.

And you really are seeing things like (sounds like C Click 6) and others but the interesting example locally is a bunch of guys got together locally when we released our lobbyist data, so it’s basically ethics data and you know, it’s comprehensive but let’s face it, it’s a database. And they built a really usable site on top of it called Chicago Lobbyists (.org) which is really useful.

Well subsequently, unrelated to that, the city released and RFP to build a new internal ethics database and these guys, all of whom have day jobs, decided to propose, to submit for it, right? Merely based on the subject matter expertise that they gained in creating Chicago Lobbyist (.org).

So, in some ways you could add a fifth thing on to wide open data which is to actually change the skills mix of the vendors that we interact with over time.

MICAH SIFRY: Right. Well, I wonder if we should get into the weeds but why not? The folks who submitted that proposal – I mean, is it pending or has it already been decided?

JOHN TOLVA: No, it hasn’t been decided. I’m actually not part of the review team but –

MICAH SIFRY: Well obviously or else you wouldn’t be talking about it.

JOHN TOLVA: No. But – no, it has not been decided.

MICAH SIFRY: It has not been decided, that’s very interesting. So, that’s something to watch. You know, just putting on my (inaudible) foundation and advisor hat for a second, sunlight, the labs team, looked at trying to bid on government contracts, you know as a lot of the open data initiatives of the administration began a few years ago.

And one of the first things that they discovered was there were just a ridiculous level number of hoops to jump through to even qualify to be a government contractor and they said, the heck with this. I mean, you know there’s a steel wall fortress around the federal government in terms of small, nimble groups. Maybe Chicago can show a different way of doing that. It’s definitely worth watching.

JOHN TOLVA: Well I think – you know, we’re not the only city that’s trying to move from this sort of vending machine model of you know, put the coins in, get service out.

I think you’re always going to need internal technology. There are just enterprise needs for running an organization this big. But I love now that it’s being paired with a more platform based model where you know – (inaudible) is a great example of – especially mid-sized cities where the publication of you know, service request data allows a business to thrive on the periphery of government rather than being run right in the middle of it. But it’s a good corrective actually for you know, for the big enterprise IT.

MICAH SIFRY: For sure, for sure. And the fact is some of these bigger enterprises are in the process of being desegregated because there are a lot cheaper ways of doing this.

I want to talk about the history of open data in Chicago for a second just because you know, you are standing on the shoulders of earlier efforts of folks both within government and around it to start to expose this information, civic data that the city collects and make it available.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the history of Chicago Works for You (.com) that people like Daniel O’Neil worked on that was an earlier effort supported by the mayor’s office than to, for example make it easy for the public to see how many pot hole requests for service were coming in and at what rate were they being fixed.

And you know, Daniel once told me how this project got pretty far along until it got shown to the Alderman who are the equivalent to the City Council representatives in Chicago. And they needed to approve it and they said, no, there’s no way this is going to be made public because the last thing they wanted was for their political opponents, potential political opponents to be able to say to voters, look, you know look how long it takes for pot holes to be fixed. Or this guy’s got a 10 percent rate of pot holes not being fixed in 30 days, you know? Throw him out.

0:10:15

MICAH SIFRY: What’s changed in the blood stream of Chicago politics that now you cannot just put this data up but make it really easy for people to do comparisons and my goodness, even show people on a nightly basis new reports on things like crime.

I mean, is it just the times? Have the Aldermen all rolled over? Is this a sign of Rob Emmanuel’s incredible persuasive abilities? What do you think is going on?

JOHN TOLVA: Well there was a significant turnover in City Council but I think it has to do with the mayor. I mean the very first thing out of his mouth at the very first Cabinet meeting was, we’re publishing performance data weekly, publicly.

So, that wasn’t necessarily a statement to the Aldermen, but it was to the Commissioners. But it certainly filters down. I mean you had a number of Aldermen actually who ran on transparency who built some apps actually as candidates, those sorts of things.

So, in part I think it’s in the water but this couldn’t have been done without really strong executive support of it. I mean –

MICAH SIFRY: Have you run into resistance? I mean, I don’t know if you can talk candidly about it but are you (overlapping remarks).

JOHN TOLVA: Yeah, in specific – the Aldermen’s’ a really interesting case. So, before 3-1-1, you actually called your ward office when you wanted something done (inaudible) that sort of thing and even though they were then – the ward office was then interacting with a centralized city service, say CDOT or (inaudible) sanitations, it was kind of a personalized local interface, if you want to call it that.

So, 3-1-1 came around and you know basically took that away except that the proprietary service we’re using is totally opaque. And it’s not just opaque to residents, it’s opaque to the Aldermen. So, now even though you call 3-1-1 or get it online to get your pot hole fixed, if it doesn’t get fixed, you know, say 8 times out of ten, you call your Alderman. And they’re in a bind as well.

One of the reasons for implementing Open 3-1-1 or possibly – easily as important as empowering residents is giving the Aldermen the ability to create sort of customized dashboards, ward specific, so that they can – you know, it’s almost like a re-decentralization of service request fulfillment. Obviously it’s all going through centralized systems, but now the ability to see where the request is at any point really gives the Aldermen back some of the control that they had previously.

You know, Chicago Works for You didn’t have that kind of visibility in the system but I think there is a sense here that – and I’ve heard this actually in City Council – that anything that we can do to make request fulfillment easier is good for them both politically and for their residents.

MICAH SIFRY: So, there’s been a larger shift in the culture that’s permeated at least – well, that’s – I’m very excited to hear that. You know, we’re certainly – right now I think a lot of folks who pay attention to the We Government space or open data are looking at Chicago as probably you know, the best case scenario in terms of just aligning leadership and people like you with the smarts and private sector experience as well as the developer community in the city to begin to show what can be done.

Why don’t you talk to us a bit about this Snow Shovels site. Seems like a bit of a fairly mundane topic to sort of stake such a big push around, but the New York Times gave you a very nice story earlier this week. How did that come together and what are you trying to achieve with – it’s Snow Shovels (.org) or Chicago Shovels –

JOHN TOLVA: Chicago Shovels (.org). Well it was actually a number of things; one was we had been looking at optimize – well one of the things that we’re doing internally is optimizing all of our fleet movement and this again is a ward issue. It’s the delicate balance between a ward-based system let’s say a refuse or recycling pickup versus grid.

0:15:02

And you know you can apply analytics to this. Certainly the private sector and delivery companies have done this forever, you know eliminating left-hand turns and those sorts of things.

And while we were doing that for the – in preparation for the snow season we thought, you know there’s no reason not to expose this. We have traffic tracker – train tracker, bus tracker, it just makes sense. You know – can you get useful information out of it? Yeah. You can see when a plow is going to turn into your neighborhood streets. Can you do an – can someone sufficiently motivate it, actually look at the pattern? Yes, and I hope they do.

But really, it’s to show how hard working these guys are. I mean – and that they’re out there right as things are happening. So, in part this is just a kind of an accountability thing. We’ve been tracking those trucks and we sweep their routes for years with GPS. So, you know, it actually wasn’t that difficult.

But the other piece of this of this was about the areas of the city that the city doesn’t shovel, so that’s primarily sidewalks. It’s also the alleys we have here and it’s actually city ordinance, you’re required to shovel your sidewalk.

So, one way of doing that, you’re familiar Micah, with (sounds like: Code) for America, since Chicago is a recipient on that next year, they’re doing the Open 3-1-1 implementation. But last year during the blizzard in Boston, the Code for America team there – they’re kind of a 20 percent plan like Google, they can work on their own things – they built something called Adopt a Hydrant where you can claim a hydrant and shovel it out during the season.

But we can do that a little more expansively for – and we built Adopt a Sidewalk on top of this open source code from Boston. So, basically this Adopt a Hydrant functionality of Chicago Shovels allows you to – you know there’s a little bit of game mechanics in there. You claim it, you clear it, there’s a little bit – you know, if it scales up, you know the ability to roughly you know project how much snow was cleared, we know how much fell, we know how wide a sidewalk is.

But it’s also an actual tool for our volunteer corps. I mean, there are people who legitimately need to be shoveled out and they can’t, you know? The people with disabilities and the affirm and elderly. So, we use that map now to deploy this volunteer corps to where it’s needed.

There are a bunch of other apps there, too and I guess you know, of interest to this call two of the most useful apps there were not built by the city at all. They were built by third party interested residents; one’s called Was My Car Towed (.com), which you know shows you relocations and things like that. You know, it does one thing only. You put your license plate in, they show you where your car is.

And the other is called Two Inches. So, we have the ability to put a parking ban in place if the snow gets over two inches. It’s not used all that often but when it is, you know, it can catch you unawares so this allows you to put an email address in and it will send you a note if that goes into effect.

You know, so those are the main applications. It’s kind of a neat story of sharing all the way around, right? We got the code from somewhere else, at least the Adopt a Hydrant from Boston, modified it, the code itself is about sharing.

I didn’t mention that one of the functionalities of Adopt a Hydrant is you can see where people are willing to loan shovels and salt and things like that. Local company here called (sounds like: Oh So We) that does that.

And then obviously we put that code back in the set of comments repository or will after we put it through its paces during the first snow event.

MICAH SIFRY: Right. So, I want to just take one more – drill one iota further into this because whenever I talk to the idea of engaging the public not just engaging developer community, which is a very powerful group of people if you can get them helping to paint your fence you know, that’s a wonderful thing.

But when I talk to people about say involve the public in you know, identifying where pot holes are or in these cases, involve the public in helping to shovel each other out.

One of the first things I often hear – and this really isn’t a tech question so much as it is a social question – is, oh, great, what happens when the first person sues the city because the city facilitated a connection to somebody who then robs them? Or they’re out reporting a pot hole and they tripped and broke their leg?

How do you get around – do you need a community manager role here, too? I mean, if you’re going to tap the ability to crowd source here and do community organizing, is there a community organizer as part of your team? What happens if you have a big snow storm and you know, 20,000 people volunteer through the site and then you know – who’s going to stay connected with them? Where’s your thinking on that?

0:20:23

JOHN TOLVA: We do have a social media director who kind of herds all that, but we also have a Chief Volunteer officer who is in charge of the volunteers specifically.

You know, it’s a really good question. So, just yesterday we were going over a design point about the hydrant where multiple people can claim the same parcel and that’s fine, it’s probably going to make it be clean more often. And the question was do we allow those peoples’ names or pseudonyms or however you authenticate it to be linked to their say, Facebook account.

And for the time being we’re saying, no, actually. The social network is going to be the sidewalk itself. If you all claim this parcel and you mean it, chances are you’ll bump into each other out there. And that’s the level of social – I mean, quite frankly, that’s the best kind of social networking there is.

Maybe we’ll change that, you know, if you use Facebook to log in then a link to your profile goes live. You know, just like anything else we ran this by corporate counsel and they didn’t see any problems with it. Other questions arise about does this – does this in any way invalidate a resident’s responsibility to shovel their walk if someone else claims that they’ve done it, you know? And the answer is no. You, the owner, are still required no matter who signed up to do it.

And you know, we really do – I mean the mayor’s office and each of the departments has had a number of months now to build up a pretty significant social communities around them, so it’s really – there’s basically two people who are full time on that and each department has basically the equivalent of a community manager, if you want to call it that.

MICAH SIFRY: But so far you’ve avoided taking the approach of we’re going to build a social network platform for city residents to connect to each other around civic issues through us. In other words, you’re going to use their email address, people sign up and then maybe let them affiliate through private services like Facebook.

But it’s not like the city has a social network itself. Is that a deliberate decision to the path of least resistance? I mean, I don’t want to add more work to your plate, but is the reason for the city not to put itself in this role?

JOHN TOLVA: I think it’s two things; one, we didn’t look at it as why should we not do this. More as you know, what are the pros for using four square – and the major platforms are Four Square, Twitter and Facebook – and then integrating those deeply into things like ChicagoBudget (.org) so, which was a very vibrant conversation about the 2012 budget with Facebook functionality kind of interwoven.

But the other pieces – and I’m very serious about this – is that the (inaudible) environment is – what technologies can we be using to make the built environment – the actual physical city – be that social platform.

I mean, one of the things I think about a lot, especially as we’re moving into snow season is I think you remember the blizzard last year, basically shut down Lakeshore Drive and there were people stranded on busses for hours. Some of those folks – I mean, I have a friend actually who keeps in touch with three of the people that she met on that bus who you know, 20 minutes before the storm hit were perfect strangers.

But I think about that from time to time – what – how can activate that sort of latent networking or just conviviality when it’s not the middle of a crisis? You see a little – like the mayor did a Facebook live – it’s like a video Town Hall early on and that was fine, there were a lot of people watching it. But was more interesting was the conversation that was happening powered by Facebook down the gutter where you had the people from really diverse parts of the city, people who would not normally interest on a transit route or in any other way, having an almost completely level-headed conversation.

I thought, gosh, I’m trying to think where in the city I could go to hear that in person. I couldn’t think of too many places. So, one of the things we’re trying to think about is how to activate that with technology out in the real world.

0:25:01

MICAH SIFRY: Well how about letting people affiliate to their subway stop or to their bus stop?

JOHN TOLVA: Yeah, although – and that’s fine. I love transit as a proxy network. One of the issues with that is you can – what is it – those can be networks of affinity especially if you are certain stops, are only serving one kind of neighborhood, right?

You really want something that cuts across many – I mean that’s why certain lines are more diverse than others.

MICAH SIFRY: Not sure it’s an either / or choice, I just –

JOHN TOLVA: No, right, right.

0:235:48

MICAH SIFRY: Where are the cow paths that you know can be turned into real paths because they’re already are social with each other to a little bit of a degree and maybe a nudge or government stepping in and saying we see an (inaudible) here. We can – folks who use the same subway stop every day maybe have a greater interest in helping clean it up on the weekend than just your random transit user.

You’re right, that may not serve the whole city in the way you want, and those are obviously questions that come up as well.

So, Chicago (inaudible) is still kind of data form, right? We haven’t had a real test of the platform yet. I mean I just went to go and sign up and I can see some pieces are still being worked on.

JOHN TOLVA: Yeah, so load testing obviously, but that’s not the real deal. Like I said, it was like 45 degrees out when I came to work so it will probably be a week or more before it gets truly hit.

MICAH SIFRY: And has there been money issues about doing all of this that you’ve encountered? I mean again, obviously having the mayor support and you have a fairly strong mayor system there. But have you found yourself needing – running out of staff or running out of budget?

How do you get things like the busses and the subways, you know the internet of things (inaudible) start to get all that stuff wired up.

JOHN TOLVA: Okay, so you’re talking more broadly than the snow portal?

MICAH SIFRY: Right.

JOHN TOLVA: It’s – partially it’s culture change, you know? Getting people to think about data as a driver in policy making. It’s partially about skills mix change which we’re trying to do, so that’s not necessarily we need more people, we need different skills. Not a lot of open source technology skills here, that’s changing.

Dan O’Neil you may know is heading something called the Smart Chicago Collaborative which is a non-profit that we work with frequently. It’s a kind of get us in front of these civic developers, civic nerds we call them. So, much of the snow portal actually was built by volunteers in addition to us re-purposing what was open source code to begin with from Code for America, just flat out volunteers.

I mean we did have one internal resource who worked on it, but you know it’s – the internet of things which you mentioned is a vastly different thing because that is actually hard wiring city infrastructure. None of that is actually – well, very little of that has been deployed.

You know, some of the internet of things will be paid for by also using city infrastructure for marketing, you know or for advertising. For instance our physical bus shelters here are paid for and maintained by J. C. DeCoe who does the advertising in them.

There may be some sort of similar model there with the internet of things, but I mean just to answer your question more succinctly, it hasn’t been too much of a problem largely because of the community here that we can turn to if we’re really in a bind. That window may close, but it’s wide open right now.

MICAH SIFRY: Well as you said, 2012 is your moon shot year. We’re right at our half way point. I’m going to just pause to say if folks listening, if anybody would like to ask a question, now’s your opportunity. The way to do it is to hit *6 on your phone and then I will see your number come up on my screen here and I’ll pull you into the call. So, we’ll give a pause just to give people to collect their thoughts.

But let me ask you John, what – in terms of what’s most surprised you in your 6 months, 7 months –

0:30:00

-- on the job, has there been anything that really just blew your mind and made you go, oh, you know, I thought government worked this way and I’ve like completely had my head turned.

JOHN TOLVA: Oh, boy. You know, a lot of people – early on, a lot of journalists were like, tell us how bad it is. Is the bureaucracy like sucking your soul out? (Laughter) I was like, (inaudible) 30,000 employees for the city of Chicago. I just came from a company that had 450,000 employees. You know, that’s a bureaucracy of a totally different scale.

So, that actually – that wasn’t shocking at all. You know, I guess it’s – there really are a lot of very smart, very hard working passionate people in the city. And you know, I guess it’s just the sort of public imagination that’s not what you think of when you think of – at least, city workers, which is a real shame because there are just some talented people here who are – you know, let’s face it, the salary data is all public, they’re making less than they can make in the private sector. And that – and to stay here and to do the good work they do means they’re doing it for something else. And that comes through.

So, I haven’t regretted it one bit. I mean really, I haven’t. I mean I will admit to you, you know, there was some soul searching in leaving a company that I very much admired, been there for 13 years. But there’s just no looking back. I mean there is rarely an opportunity to try to implement what you’ve been consulting others to do forever.

MICAH SIFRY: No, it’s a great – I mean, like I said, we’re very – we both admire you for taking the leap and we’ll be watching closely and hopefully seeing the results as they start to play out.

We do have – hang on one second, I’m going to unmute the phone here. Caller, just please introduce yourself and then ask your question. Or phrase your statement as a question.

PARTICIPANT 1: My name is Steven (sounds like: Alexer), I live in suburban DeKalb and I have a blog called Digital Governing which deals with why aspects of this whole process – but one of the things that I’ve been kind of speculating about is the altering of the relationship between citizens and government that comes with more and more egov.

In other words, I love to comment on your blog about this, that citizens may have excessive expectations of the efficiency of government response. You know, when you get something like (sounds like: C Click Fix), well maybe things aren’t going to be fixed that fast especially in a time of declining budgets. That’s one thing that’s kind of interesting to think about.

The other thing is this whole process of citizen co-generation where you know, we’re talking about the Chicago budget and so on and I remember that Governor Quinn opened up a site where citizens could propose changes to the Illinois State budget and that may have been ignored. A lot of people didn’t post ideas.

But once citizens get engaged in the tasks of government, you can’t really expect to evict them. In other words, they’re going to want more input into government decision making.

So, what I’m saying is I think some (inaudible) needs to be given to this whole process of altering that relationship and what that might lead to in the future.

MICAH SIFRY: Great question. Stay on and John, what do you say to this?

JOHN TOLVA: You know, there are those that you know, will claim – and I think Micah may be in that group that – you know, one logical end of a truly networked citizenry you know is a dismantling of much of the machinery of – or reconstruction of much of the machinery of government or even democracy.

I think you know, that is one plausible end to this because you’re right, you cannot evict people once they get in it. And I’ll give you an example of that; people love the open data forum that we have, but we receive some criticism for the process of publication itself not being open. Like, how are you deciding what the next set is?

And my response to that – at least in the first couple months was, we ‘re just getting it out as fast as we can. There really wasn’t much thought to it. But it was kind of eye opening for me, right? You know, here I thought I was being all transparent, but the actual decision for what to do next wasn’t. And you’ll hear – I mean one of the comments that I’ve heard is call is Democracy by Spreadsheet, which I took that to heart too. I mean, there’s really no narrative around some of these sets, no context.

So, those are just examples of you know, once people are engaged, they’re not going to leave and they’re going to keep drilling down.

I mean, I’d be interested in your thoughts about what that changing – what that changed relationship would look like assuming the current sort of democratic structure stays in place.

MICAH SIFRY: (Overlapping remarks) jump in here just because I remember Jen (sounds like: Palta) of Code for America and founder of Code for America (sounds like: riffing) on this subject a couple months ago.

And she made a really interesting point which I think goes to what Steven is suggesting, which is part of this process of making government more transparent and open and collaborative is not just a change in the culture of government, but it also requires a change in the citizenry in that we may have this expectation of instant gratification, right?

0:36:18

I paid my taxes, how come my pot hole isn’t being filled? And that when the information about where all the problems are is made more transparent that the citizens maybe also need to learn that government is about prioritizing and self-government doesn’t mean that your pot hole gets filled faster than anybody else because may be the one on the corner of a major intersection where it’s causing lost of traffic is a much higher priority.

And it’s not at all clear how we get the public, “we” the people, you know, start to learn except through this process that we have to go through, too, of beginning to see that not everybody’s problem is the highest priority, how do we decide together how to prioritize?

So, you know, John, I think you’re – not to let you sort of kick the ball back to Steven right away, but you know, aren’t you kind of creating by setting loose all this information, you are now creating expectations for a level of engagement that one or two community managers may not nearly be enough. You know, maybe the Alderman, every community office that the city runs has to you know, be involved in engaging the public about all this new information and all this new interactivity and you know, where to set their expectations appropriately.

JOHN TOLVA: Yeah, I mean it’s very possible. I think we should be careful to say that this is a subset of the citizenry, right? There’s a huge portion of the city that is not expecting data that don’t know that you know, Open 3-1-1 is coming or give a damn really.

And so we think about them as well but I think you’re right. In some ways the ward offices are those community managers. And you know, it’s – the reason I’m in where I’m sitting and not in the department of IT is because at the end of the day this is culture change and Jen’s right, you know? We should turn our you know – turn our culture, change lens in some way to the people we’re serving as well as the commissioners and the folks in the mayor’s office.

MICAH SIFRY: Steve, do you want to comment or –

PARTICIPANT 1: Well, you know I’ve studied the whole development of the digital world for years now and observed it very, very closely. And as a historian, you know I have to tell you I think we’re in the process – we’re in what I would call a revolutionary process. And that revolutionary process, the outcome is really almost impossible to predict because we’ve seen the so-called (sounds like: Arab) spring and how that’s ruled out. The outcome is almost impossible to predict.

But I think when you say well, it’s still a relatively small number of citizens who are queued into this, I think you can expect and exponential growth in the number and diversity of those who have become engaged.

The tools of the digital world really are – they’re democratizing. And this is a very critically important thing. We’ve seen all of the barriers to creation, you know? Things like music publishers and book publishers. All those sorts of gate keepers fall by the way side and I think government really is almost – has in the legislative process and other areas – the government’s (inaudible) gatekeeper and it’s going to be under siege by new technology.

0:40:21

I think we’re in a kind of very dynamic situation – it’s very hard sort of to predict where we’re going with this.

JOHN TOLVA: Well I completely agree. This is a transitional moment and I mean – for instance, smart phone usage on the south and west side of Chicago, places where you’d think that they’re – it would be less than the north side is actually off the charts. The problem – so that – the broadband digital device does not exist.

The problem is, as far as this is interaction with city government or city services, it’s kind of a second internet, right? It’s not broadband, it’s sort of throttled by a couple of carriers, that’s a totally different thing. And as we – I mean I completely agree with you that they will be interacting with government online and that expectations will rise.

I’m concerned though that it all happens on a level playing field when it does happen. I mean, it’s inevitable. It’s coming.

MICAH SIFRY: Thank you Steven for that question. Let’s pause and see if someone else wants to throw their hat into the queue, just hit *6 and we’ll bring you into the conversation.

John, I guess I want to ask a question about the mayor’s role. Well, you know what? We have a question in here so I’ll hold on that.

Go ahead, caller. Just tell us who you are and ask your question. We have a call from New York? (Silence) Okay, hello? You have to hit *6, make sure you’ve un-muted your phone.

PARTICIPANT 2: All right, this is Scott Cukor with the New York City Department of Education on our school performance and accountability team.

I have a question regarding – earlier you mentioned the need for narrative around data and I think certain types of data place different demands for that narrative more than others. For example, data on infrastructure, time to (inaudible) for example, it’s relatively straight forward in terms of interpretation. Whereas other sources of date, for example, educational data have multiple measurements and multiple interpretations. Even something ostensibly straight forward as test data in determining how well a school is performing, if the principal’s doing well and so forth is hard to make comparisons without taking into account the needs of the student population, how those measurements differ from the measurements the state or the federal government is giving and so forth.

So, you know, how do you grapple with those issues?

JOHN TOLVA: Yeah, so we actually just released report card data basically on schools and there is a bit – I mean, the short answer is not as well as we would like.

And I would even challenge the comparison to pot holes that a pot hole is filled is a pretty simple data point. Why it was, when it was, where it was is something where context would be very helpful.

Obviously, you know, school report cards is a much more meaningful thing, but part of this is about sort of data literacy, you know? You want to contextualize it simply on the one hand because there are some well known simple errors that someone can make in reading a graph or a chart or something like that. You know, units not being normalized and stuff like that.

But the other is just to give a little bit of story behind this and how it impacts other data sets. So, we’ve built actually a blogging platform that wraps around the data portal that we have now, the portal is run by something called (sounds like: Sucrata), but wrapping that in Wordpress, which is something that we learned from the county quite frankly – they did this before we did – is one attempt at that.

So, every set that goes up actually lives within a larger narrative. So, that’s the technical solution to it. You know, allowing the owner of that set and others – and actually this is something that I worked on at IBM – others that kind of comment and over time add different perspectives to that single set of data. I think that’s one way to get at it.

0:45:14

PARTICIPANT 2: That makes a lot of sense.

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, just to follow up. Scott, thanks for that question. Stay on if you want to chime in again, but you know, John what do you do about the bad data problem?

You know, not to pick on schools, but we know there have been scandals where you know, teachers or principals are erasing or fixing test answers; we know that the cops say here in my fine city of New York will you know do their best to make the numbers look good in part by not recording when a crime is reported. Sometimes they’ll downgrade it so that it doesn’t look like crime is going up in their precinct.

What are you doing to handle these problems? I mean, you don’t want to just build a great infrastructure that messages bad information.

JOHN TOLVA: So, two things; one is we actually are running fraud detection analytics. It’s mostly right now we’re doing that on financial data. I mean, there’s a pretty well known algorithms that identify outliers in what should be a – let’s say a random set of data. And that helps.

But you know, the short answer is exposing the stuff, putting it online pretty quickly shows you where – let’s call it errors because there’s at least just as much flat out error than deliberate malfeasance in this data. And people find it and find it pretty quickly. And then when you …

MICAH SIFRY: People meaning who?

JOHN TOLVA: The users of the data.

MICAH SIFRY: The users of the data who come back and –

JOHN TOLVA: And we’ll respond that way. That doesn’t mean these things are clean, but you know, the answer is we – I don’t know any other way than to expose it to many more sets of eyes. And you know, that’s what we’re finding.

It was pretty interesting, after we really – 10 years of crime data rolling forward, which is more than any other city, got a lot of calls from reporters saying, you know, thank you very much, we’ve been asking for this for years, you know? The (inaudible) process has been horrible. And their very next question was, okay, now point us to the good stuff. You know, where’s the good stuff in four million rows of data?

Assume that I even got through all that, but what I wanted to say was it – a) if I even knew where the good stuff was, you know, I would be committing the same spin that you – that just releasing a little bit of data here and there, you know you were talking about for years and years. In my opinion, the ability to parse data, whether it is defined malfeasance or whatnot is journalism right now.

So, putting it out there is sort of crowd source error checking.

MICAH SIFRY: Scott, you want to have a follow up or we’ll move on to another call if someone else wants to chime in?

PARTICIPANT 2: I’m good, thank you.

MICAH SIFRY: Okay, thank you. All right, we’ve got about 10 minutes left in anybody listening wants to ask a question, now is your last and best opportunity.

I do have one that I wanted to follow up with, which I’ll start to ask in case somebody doesn’t chime in in the next 10 seconds.

So, John talk to me more about how this is being perceived? How you think you’re doing with the public in terms of how people understand or do you think that you know, the media gets it or doesn’t get it? And to what degree are you trying to be your own media?

I know Cory Booker in Newark has this amazing usage of his own Twitter channel. I don’t see Mayor Rhom – the real Mayor Rhom doing quite the same thing. So, what are you seeing in terms of how the message is getting out and whether the public – whether the media number one, and number two, the public – they understand that something’s going on here.

JOHN TOLVA: I do believe the media and the public understand that something is going on. I will say that I don’t think we have made the impact with the public yet that we want to. It’s just not all that actionable outside the social media channels, which people do like and use.

I mean I think they understand that. We’ve not done as good a job as we can –

0:50:00

-- making data actionable, you know? Making the – let’s call them end points with government, the ways of interfacing as actionable as they could. So, there’s some work to be done there.

MICAH SIFRY: Give me an example of what you mean by that? That’s interesting but it seems a bit abstract.

JOHN TOLVA: Okay, so there’s a community development organization here called (sounds like: Lisk), actually, it’s in New York, too – Local Investment Support something. And they are chomping at the bit to use the crime data, to make decisions about how they deploy their funds and resources with this crime data and they just don’t know how to. They don’t know how to integrate neighborhood, block level data about the indicators that give rise to something they would want to correct, joblessness or foreclosure.

And that’s failure in my eyes, on my end, right? The data is there, but you know we need a set of tools, a suite of tools – whether we build it or the community builds it, you know, the city plays a role in activating that.

So, does that make sense?

MICAH SIFRY: Yes, it makes total sense. Look we may come back to that if we have time but I do see we have a person waiting to ask a question. Go ahead and introduce yourself.

PARTICIPANT 3: Hi, this Jeff (inaudible) from Regional Plant Search. Hey so we all know that data doesn’t stop at (inaudible) boundaries and you’ve got some pretty strong community right next to you. What’s the integration with them like are you helping persuade to help them open up a little bit?

JOHN TOLVA: It’s almost like you work for a regional planning association. Yes, absolutely.

MICAH SIFRY: (Overlapping remarks and feedback) we’ve got some echo, okay?

PARTICIPANT 3: Is that me?

MICAH SIFRY: No, I think it was Jeff echoing. Okay, it’s gone away.

JOHN TOLVA: Yeah, a lot of the sets that we’re publishing actually are cross-bounded. I mean I think in some ways more than New York, actually especially on the west side of the city here, there are routes and services that actually go across suburbs to get back into the city, so we’ve actually done quite well.

They asked for Metro Chicago (inaudible), the first that I know of that actually was three different governments but focusing on the Chicago (inaudible) area so it was the county, the city and the state with Chicago-centric data. And there’s something like 200 municipalities in Cook County, Chicago being the largest.

So, I’m not seeing a kind of data (inaudible) park (dot org) or anything like that but we get calls all the time from folks. You know what’s really got people hopping is the plow tracker, right? The communities around here want that. So, you know, we’re kind of at their you know, beck and call and the calls are starting to ramp up.

MICAH SIFRY: (Overlapping remarks) Let me squeeze in one more question here. I’ve got somebody calling from Princeton.

PARTICIPANT 4: Yeah, hi, my name’s Michael Hertz. My question is sort of a big picture one about the difference between citizens and customers. You know, a lot of what you’ve been talking about today is about customers and indeed the huge majority of egovernment stuff is about government and its customers and much less about government and its citizens.

And I was just noticing that your title at IBM was Director of Citizenship and Technology, so when you’re in the private sector of citizenship and now you’re in the public sector and its customers so is that backwards? Is that sensible? Is there a citizenship agenda you have separate from your customer service agenda? Which do you think your role in technology role should be focused on?

JOHN TOLVA: Great question, and actually it’s a funny story about the title at IBM that was actually short for corporate citizenship, which was the (inaudible) d’jour of corporate social responsibility. I like the ambiguity of it, though with citizenship at large.

It’s a great question. I’ll tell you, I don’t think I’ve used the word customer once. I think –

PARTICPANT 4: I don’t think you have either.

JOHN TOLVA: -- horrible way of thinking of people and I’ll (overlapping remarks) earliest sort of ways that I agreed with Micah is in this move from egovernment to we-government. I absolutely want to get away from the vending machine model, right, where you put money in and you get a service out, or you don’t get a service out and you kick the machine.

I’m much more interested in the – we actually don’t use the term citizen here – they’re Chicagoans whether they’re citizens or not. But I take your point, you know, how do you activate them and I think part of it has to do with you know, providing the raw materials in one case, data, for them to do things with, to write applications, to build businesses. You know, why should the city have the only service for reporting a pot hole or you know, tracking the bus? Why shouldn’t there be the ability to – for anybody to create that?

I think that moves a little bit away from the customer / client model.

MICAH SIFRY: It’s an unfolding process which we are going to obviously keep a close eye on. I think it’s really thrilling, John to really given a relationship you’re having spoken to Personal Democracy Forum a couple times in the past, maybe we’ll get you back this June to talk you know with a bit more of the perspective of it, insider who’s trying to get the walls to come down and take advantage of this moment that’s starting to unfold.

I don’t think we’re going to get to the bottom of these questions for a while, but you know, folks should know we are going to be watching and listening and reporting on it.

But for now we’ve run out of time and I’ve got to thank you John Tolva, CTO of the City of Chicago, for spending this hour with us here.

JOHN TOLVA: Sure thing, thanks for having me.

MICAH SIFRY: It’s been a pleasure. Thanks again to Microsoft for sponsoring this call.