Transcript

Connected Cities: How Boston is Linking Citizens to Government

April 28, 2011

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ANNOUNCER: You’re listening to an archived version of the PDF Network call featuring special guest, Nigel Jacob of the Boston Mayor’s Office on the subject: Connected Cities: How Boston is Linking Citizens to Government. The call was recorded on April 28, 2011 and is presented here in its entirety.

For more information on the PD Network and upcoming calls, please visit PersonalDemocracy.com.

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MICHA SIFRY: Hi everybody, this is Micah Sifry from Personal Democracy Forum. Welcome to another in our ongoing series of PDF Network calls that we do every two weeks with movers, shakers, thinkers, innovators in the field of using technology to change politics and government and civic life.

As always we’re thankful to our sponsor AT&T for making these calls possible. This week I want to offer special thanks to our partners at GovLoop, which is a social network for people who work in and around government, which you should go check out.

This week we’re really excited to be joined by Nigel Jacob who is one of the two people who run the Boston Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics. And recently we profiled this office and Nigel and his partner, Chris Osgood, which has been doing some really interesting things using new tools, new technologies ranging from mobile tools to social networking to even virtual spaces to re-think how you can -- without spending a lot of money -- transform how cities work to make the lives of communities and neighborhood and individual citizens better, and also enable cities to do a better job delivering the services that they have to do.

So, I’m really looking forward to getting into this conversation with Nigel and as always we will take the first half of the call just for dialogue between him and me and then second half of the call we’ll open things up to take the questions of people who are listening. So you’re phones are muted now but about half way through I’ll ask people to start signaling if they want to ask a question.

So, Nigel, thank you for joining us. What would be great is if you would start by give us an overview of both what is the Office of New Urban Mechanics about and how do you personally come to be working in this space? Your background isn’t really as a long-time city bureaucrat. As far as I know it’s more in being a computer programmer. So, tell us how you got here.

NIGEL JACOB: Absolutely, sure. So, the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics is a civic innovation incubator that operates out of City Hall at the Mayor’s office. And our charge from the mayor is basically to develop innovative city service for the residents of Boston.

So, within that context -- and that covers a lot of ground -- so we have a lot of latitude in terms of the kinds of projects that we pursue, the partnerships that we develop in order to let people to execute those projects and so on.

We essentially develop projects in three core areas; economic development and planning, what we call Infrastructure 2.0 and then 21st Century Skills, Development or Education. So, the specific projects in those three areas, they could be technology projects but not necessarily; they could be sort of more initial policy stuff; design oriented projects and so on.

So, when we look at the kind of projects that we do they’re all targeted at providing the value to the citizens and residents and visitors to Boston. That’s our unique spin in terms of what we look for it, model (inaudible) innovation. Two years ago when a few of us here at City Hall started looking at, ‘how do we introduce a (inaudible) innovation to Boston City Hall?’ We essentially looked at the previous systems that worked. And a big one was the way our mayor, Thomas Menino, has always worked, which is to be entirely focused on value to his constituents, to the residents of Boston.

In fact, that’s where the name comes from; the name comes from a 1994 Boston Magazine article in which Mayor Menino was called the ‘Urban Mechanic,’ and the tone of it was whether or not the mayor’s nuts and bolts approach to focusing on quality of life issues would or could turn the city around. At that point, things were looking fairly grim in Boston. You were seeing people leaving the city, you were seeing a lot of problems on the education front and so on.

So, we would say our mayor is now in his (sounds like: fifth) term and we would say that he’s actually been very successful in this particular model. So, when we look at developing an approach that would work for us, if you were to start there, if you were to start with this total focus on bringing value to the residents of Boston and then jump start that with some 21st century approaches that could be flavored with technology, could be flavored with best business practices or sort of tech sourcing, human setup design, so that’s how we’ve developed this office.

So, as we were thinking through, ‘how do we develop a model that works for City Hall?’ It was pretty clear to us that innovation needs a home, it needs a place where you can point that. Which is to say that of course that we’re the only people that are doing interesting things at City Hall? Absolutely not. But in terms of organizational change and changing management methodology, it’s been very successful to have a place where the mayor, Chief of Staff, CIO, whoever can point to and say to people both inside City Hall and outside City Hall, ‘if you have an idea that you’d like to explore with the City, start here, start with these guys and see if you can jump start the project and explore whatever the element of civic innovation is that you have in mind.’

MICHA SIFRY: That’s a great overview, Nigel. And how did you come to be tasked with this work? Give us a sense of your background.

NIGEL JACOB: Absolutely. So, a few years ago I came to the city out of grad school to do a fellowship. My background is as a technologist. I have a Master’s Degree in Computer Science and I’ve been involved with the local area startup community for a number of years, working on lots of different projects with my friends.

And I after doing some scheduled stuff, I went back to grad school and once I was finishing that off I was looking for a way -- something I could (inaudible) myself into that would have a strong civic focus or sort of a public good focus. And for technology at the time, there weren’t a lot of obvious things, but one of the things I was looking for (inaudible), I found this fellowship that the City of Boston was offering. So, this is back in four years.

And so applied and was accepted and I started out as sort of a special assistant working on emerging technology issues. And I think I took a very different approach relative to what I assumed I would be working on. Given my background, I assumed I would be doing (inaudible) engineering work in terms of (inaudible) code monkey somewhere in the bowels of City Hall.

But when I looked at the opportunities that were available, Boston being the place that it is and it was all the amazing research institutions that are (inaudible), it was pretty clear to me that one of the biggest value add would be to pursue (inaudible) with a brand of non-traditional partners, at least at the time, non-traditional partners for City Hall. So, that would be MIT, Northeastern, a range of a non-profits and so on.

And so we did some really interesting work early on and then we did that for a couple of years, they turned my fellowship into a regular job, and I became the mayor’s advisor for emerging technologies.

Then last year when the mayor was lucky to (inaudible) new term, his (inaudible) term, and he brought in a new Chief of Staff, Mitch Weiss, Mitch and the CIO, Bill Oats, and Chris and myself were talking about what kind of institutional changes could we imagine rolling out to enable innovation in a deeper sense.

And so we kicked around for a bit, but Chris and I had already been talking about this. So, this idea of trading this (inaudible) for innovation, this place where a lot of this stuff can get nucleated, came out pretty fast. And the name, as I said, was Mitch’s take on our -- on the old term, you know, The Urban Mechanic.

So, Chris has a different background. Chris is a Harvard Business School MBA guy who had prior going to grad school, had been involved in urban policy with the City of New York and he and I came to City Hall right around the same time, about four years ago, (inaudible) different fellowships, and over time our work just kept intersecting and I think our desire from both of us to be transgressive in terms of thinking about this thing that City Hall should be doing eventually kind of culminated in this (inaudible).

MICHA SIFRY: Great. Sounds like a really cool job that you have there. Let’s talk about one of your showcase projects first so people can get a sense of what new urban mechanics is really trying to model, the Citizen’s Connect mobile app. What is it? What does it do? How many people are using it? How is it changing how the city works?

NIGEL JACOB: Sure. So, Business Connect is our mobile phone application. We hold it as the original version in 2009, and it is essentially a platform that enables the citizens of Boston to partner with citizens (inaudible) in Boston to partner with the city in addressing disorder at the community level in terms of if you see potholes, if you see whatever it is.

And when we were developing the project, that project came out of an earlier piece of work that people had been doing, looking at the data system behind the mayor’s 24-hour call center, which has been in operation for about 30 years now, up til the point that they went to this project. That was -- all the incoming complaints, service requests by the public were being written on paper. So, there were a bunch of people like Chris who eventually embarked on an effort to rationalize that process and put a system in place.

Once that work had been done, we looked at -- it was very clear that the data that was being generated provided a window into understanding what people are seeing at their community level and we should be doing more of that. We should be very clearly creating a channel by which people can not only report things, but be assured that they will be closed. So, there would be this feedback in terms of how the city gets back to them.

So, that’s what we did. It was also clear when we were looking at that project that if we tried to go about it in the conventional way, which would be to issue and RFP and to work with IBM or somebody or Microsoft, I apologize if either of those companies are on the call, that the project just wouldn’t happen. This is one of the challenges of doing an innovation project in the city. The scale of project that are attempted are often just out of whack with what can actually be delivered in a timely and effective way.

So, instead of going down that route we decided to do a (inaudible) approach that would be more focused on the user experience as opposed to sort of (inaudible) double-edged surfaces in a more general sense. So, we (inaudible) our network of contacts and we found a group, a local mobile software development company called (inaudible) to help us through (inaudible) and the user experience and so on.

And (inaudible) came up with this product that is -- it takes the top three or four service requests that come into the City through a variety of different channels and focuses on connecting the service request that they entered in those types, potholes (inaudible) and funnels those requests directly into the work queues of the teams that are going to be fixing those things. So, the vision was --

MICHA SIFRY: (Overlap) I was just going to say it sounds a lot like See.Click.Fix?

NIGEL JACOB: Yeah. When we were developing the project, See.Click.Fix had only just come out and it was from our perspective, in order to be able to deliver on our intention of getting feedback directly to the public, it was pretty clear that we would need to provide some sort of notification of closure and ticket numbers directly out of our system. At the time See.Click.Fix didn’t have that capacity.

So, developed that system so it connects directly to our (inaudible) management system, which was developed by (sounds like: ILogIN) enterprise company, and when you enter your service request, it goes into the work queues and you’re issued a tracking number that you see as a notification that pops up, and when it’s closed, you get another notification with the ticket number, the reason for closure and so on.

And that was the original version. And there was a 2.0 release about a year later, 2010, that makes it more of a community-centric app so you can see other service requests that other people have entered and you can (inaudible) and follow them, you can Tweet out on your service request via either your own channel or your own feed or through the (inaudible) feed.

MICHA SIFRY: Is that all visible only on the mobile app? Or is it also visible on the -- just like a website that people can go to, to sort of see the overall impact?

NIGEL JACOB: Both.

MICHA SIFRY: And so has it -- I mean, I’m noodling around on the site as we talk and I can see about 5,600 reports going back about a year. How has this changed things for people living in Boston? How’s it changed things for city workers?

NIGEL JACOB: So, when we were developing the app it wasn’t clear from the outset exactly what the specific benefits would be. So the general benefits that we were looking to develop is to re-build a sense that government services can be engaging and to get that trust issue between the public and the (inaudible) that is so often described as having (inaudible).

So, we wanted to create something that we would want people to actually use. So, when we -- some people thought that ‘oh, this will result in a decrease in the number of calls to the 24-hour hotline,’ we’ve got pushed back because it was officially rolled out just on iPhone, we got negative feedback on that, too. People were saying are we going to (inaudible) in other modes of checking with the city and it’s always -- we needed to explore all those things.

So, when you look at the number of service requests that have come into the city, it’s actually increased, the number of calls that have come into the hotline. Our (inaudible) from the feedback that we’re getting from people that people who are coming in through the mobile app are essentially a new group of constituents that prior to this never called into the 24-hour hotline or otherwise interacted with City Hall in this context before.

It has certainly generated a lot of broad interest in addressing (inaudible) and disorder level issues that people in the neighborhood (inaudible) which is the increase in phone calls into the mayor’s regular hotline that come from -- when we look at -- so we’re just getting into now understanding, really doing some deep analysis of (inaudible), looking at what about the deeper impacts? Does this app actually result in a broader sense of civic engagement beyond just the app itself?

Honestly, when we were developing the mobile phone app our hope was that it would become like a gateway drive in terms of civic engagement where people would be -- it would be an easy point of entry that people would engage, it’s easy to download the app and install it and bring stuff in and it would be fun to see how the service (inaudible) time and what other people are seeing and so on.

So, we’re getting to that level of it now, but --

MICHA SIFRY: Certainly, and a lot of these projects are in the exact same stage of two or three-years-old and just starting to get traction. Is it a one-way channel? Do you give people -- I mean, do you send information back to users and even more do you connect -- you know, for example do people have the option if they’ve registered a report to find out about other users of the app who maybe live in the same neighborhood as them or maybe even reported the same problem?

NIGEL JACOB: So, when you enter a service request, you see a map -- when you open the app, you see a map that shows all the different (inaudible) of service requests that people have entered and you can open up any of those. And so if you were to see an issue directly in front of you, you open up the app, you enter a new service request and you might see that somebody else has already entered this. So, you can either edit the comments or favorite that comment or service request so that when it gets closed out, you’ll be able to get notification as well.

By having things go out on Twitter, it’s actually been really interesting because now we see these service requests being grabbed across platforms, across sites. So, a story that we’ve been telling people a lot about lately was about a month ago, we had a lady who entered a service request about a possum in her backyard in a garbage can, and she said, ‘I’m not sure if this possum’s dead or alive, what do I do about it?’ Somebody helped.

And then because the service requests are viewable across everybody, one of her neighbors three blocks down, walked over, tipped over the garbage can, freed the possum who was alive and this is exactly what our animal control folks would have done anyway, and then entered a note saying, ‘freed the possum, problem solved.’

So, you know, eventually the intention here is really to enable city help to get out of the way of people doing that level of direct community level help to one another. There’s no doubt that we’re corporate, we want to be as helpful as we possibly can, but there’s tons of opportunities for people to directly help each other. So, we want to create a way of doing that.

And that’s definitely in concept with the broader intention of New Urban Mechanics, which is about exploring the boundaries of that kind of engagement that crosses a range of different projects.

MICHA SIFRY: I want to get another project out on the table, too, just to load the decks up with lots of good information for people. Another one that Boston has gotten some notice for recently is this Street (sounds like: bomb) app, which is, if I understand correctly, you had some kind of an open call for developers to come up with a mobile app that would help the city -- collect information automatically on potholes as cars drive over them. And then this happens (inaudible) I guess you worked with a particular developer to get it made. Is that correct?

NIGEL JACOB: Sort of. So, the origin of the project; a lot of what we do here in Mechanics is to be a place where people with an idea that’s publicly focused and come pitch the idea to us, and we’ll explore it together to figure out if there’s a way that we can resource it and fill it out.

So, a number of years ago we had been -- I’m not sure if we reached out first if they reached out to us, but Fabio Carrera who is a researcher at Worcester Polytech had an idea around doing different ways of gathering information about the city. He calls this (inaudible) city public knowledge, but essentially use the metaphor of agriculture as opposed to (inaudible) in terms of how you gather information about (inaudible) the city.

And over time we developed this idea of creating a mobile app that would automatically grab information about the city. You know, we believe (inaudible) a couple years ago, it was pretty clear that phones would eventually become mobile phones, smart phones, and eventually become mobile sensing platforms.

So, the idea was -- we went through three different iterations, but the phone idea was to use the (inaudible) in Android-based phones to enable the phone to gather road condition information and then associate that with location. So, essentially you start the app, you’d be driving around, it would be in your pocket or in your coffee cup holder or wherever, and as the car moves and as the phone moves, it would be gathering that data and then sending that to a server for analysis so that you would automatically be able to gather general information about work conditions, but more specifically, it would be able to find the potholes and other things that actually need to get fixed, and automatically enter those things into the (inaudible) that (inaudible) uses. That was the vision.

Now so the app itself was released as alpha and we did a lot of data catcher with it, so Chris and I had spent a bunch of time driving around the city, aiming directly for potholes, so it’s been fun (laughter).

So, we’ve been gathering all this data and what we’re going to do is there’s no doubt that -- we’ve done some cursory analysis of the data and it is clear -- first of all, to me, it wasn’t clear that this would work at all, but we did enough tests to ascertain that in principle, it can detect a pothole, that it’s sensitive enough to do that.

The real challenge is whether or not you can -- out of that city of data extract all the false positives and all the other phenomena that are in there and really pull out the things that the city needs (inaudible). So, that level of challenge is really what we’re -- Phase II of our project, which is to crowd source the analysis.

So, we’re working with (inaudible) incentives, which is a competitive challenge company that works with their parties to do these challenges so they can marshal the talents of their 250,000 worldwide solvers to tack a whole range of different technical challenges. And there’s a bounty that’s awarded to the winner. So, that’s what we’re doing.

We’re going to release the data, work with Liberty Mutual to put up a $25,000 that the winner or winners of the challenge will be awarded once we’ve gotten all the submissions back in. Once the (inaudible) app is out, we can release all the (inaudible) code, (inaudible) OpenSource. You know, we obviously want a whole range of different people looking at this stuff and developing the code and just creating a context to enable this kind of civic initiative (inaudible). We’ve gotten all kind of interested queries from around the world. Obviously potholes are a worldwide issue and we’re launching challenge hopefully over the next several days. So, we’re very excited to get it all developed.

MICHA SIFRY: We’re nearing the half-way point, so I want to remind people that we’re on the PDF Network call with Nigel Jacob from Boston. By the way, if you want to use Twitter to send questions in or comments, just use the hash tag PDFNetwork and I’m keeping an eye there.

But if you do want to get yourself into the queue for asking questions, hit *6 on your phone and sit tight, we’ll get to you soon.

Nigel, I want to ask you one or two follow ups. I mean, Boston’s not the only city in the United States that’s sort of working in the States now. From Washington DC to Seattle to San Francisco, Toronto, places north of us are opening up their data, are inviting developers to work with that data and inviting the public in as well.

And there are two things I’m just curious that I’ve seen other cities do that so far as I can tell, Boston has chosen not to do and I’m just wondering if there’s a reason you’re avoiding these approaches or choosing other approaches.

One is the proverbial ‘apps contest,’ you know, the first one being the Apps for Democracy contest that (inaudible) did in DC with the help of Peter Corbett a couple years ago, which set off a wave of very interesting innovation hubs, if you will. You know, New York City has the Big Apps competition, and I think if you ask Peter he could rattle off dozens of examples of these kinds of -- you know, put up a bounty, put up data and see what developers do.

Is there a reason why Boston has avoided that approach or it doesn’t fit with the way the office thinks about how to do this? Are you thinking about it in a different way?

NIGEL JACOB: I would say (inaudible) with that, we think it’s a great idea and the (inaudible) are terrific apps competitions. When we look at -- so we’re a little bit different in (inaudible) relevant to the way innovation is pursued in a lot of other cities. Because our entire focus on being about the quality of life issues the cities face, it does tend to drive us in a certain direction in terms of the kinds of projects that we take on.

The apps competitions have the affinity to cast a wide net in terms of getting people to contribute work on or apps on or analysis to -- you know, our version of that -- I mean one answer would be to say that our (inaudible) our street front challenge is our version of an apps contest, right? But again, our focus is really on particular issues because our intention, our desire is to get some greater depth on some of these things.

So, we are trying to guide the -- if you look at the range of different kinds of assets submitted, our interest would be in particular trying to focus in on a few of the really big issues that the city faces whether that be education and specifically college graduation rates or something, or jobs or the (inaudible) environment in terms of the upkeep of the city’s infrastructure.

So, our focus is a little bit different. So, a lot of the stuff that we’ve done over the last year has been to pursue a (inaudible) explore a range of those different things. So, beyond just a purely technical -- one interesting project that’s also launching this week and next is a design project with the firm (sounds like IDEO), the Cambridge office of (IDEO), in which we’re going to be taking a bottom-up, human-centered design approach to trash, to garbage where we look at the big issues that cities face.

And certainly our city, garbage is often ranged right up there, garbage that’s in the street creates a context for rats and all kinds of things. It’s one of the things that people talk about most often.

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So, our sense was why don’t we, in the spirit of being citizen-focused and grassroots and bottom up, let’s take a non-traditional approach in thinking about the trash problem. The first one, government approach would be to levy fines or to be (inaudible) in one way or the other. But instead, what we’re going to do is we’re going to work with IDEO and community to go through an (inaudible) and ethnographic study of trash in the city so that the designers are going to be doing -- right along with trash companies, they’re going to be visiting with folks in their homes, they’re going to be going to community meetings, doing design charettes and from that they’re going to develop a series of -- a small number of specific solutions that will address a number of different dimensions in terms of how do you deal with residential trash issue at the city level?

So, again I think apps contests are great, we take it a little bit differently, though, the challenge that we see this on.

MICHA SIFRY: Let me ask you the follow up which sort of is another way of asking a similar question, but this is really helpful because as we get deeper into this movement, I think we’re seeing the rise of a certain sense of best practices and if you ask Peter Corbett today, ‘what are the value of these app contest,’ he would say, ‘it’s okay to be skeptical of some of them in part because often it’s a way for a city to sort of get a quick PR win, but not necessarily develop stuff that is meaningfully going to change and improve how the city works or how people’s lives are affected.’

There’s a little more sizzle than there is steak. On the other hand you could, for argument say that app contests are a great way to attract the developer community that is outside of city hall into a more productive conversation and that in some ways that community is this under-utilized resource in lots of places.

But speaking of under-utilized resources, cities have for a long time, governments, I’d say, treated constituents -- there’s this whole government should be run like a business and you know, just provide good services to consumers. But in this century we’re seeing more cities experiment with asking the public for help in identifying what the problems are and what new solutions might be.

Maynard, Texas is the sort of classic example. We did a piece, Nick (inaudible) did a piece on Tech President a couple months back about cities like Maynard using ideation platforms like IdeaScale or Spigot to invite -- and not just invite the public in, but also kind of leave a trail for anybody else who maybe didn’t join on the first day but wants to see what other people are talking about.

So, I’m wondering again if it’s a philosophical or methodological choice that you guys are making. I see on the site for NewUrbanMechanics.org has its own site, and it’s got a page describing ‘Projects’ and it says, ‘if you would like to work with us on an idea you have to make Boston even better, we’d love to hear from you.’ Click there and it basically gives us your contact information.

So, are you guys -- would you prefer that you kind of channel things that way? Is there a reason that we should be skeptical of using ideation platforms?

I mean obviously you’re using an incentive, which is sort of a solution platform, but is there a reason why the city isn’t sort of creating a platform for the public to suggest whether it’s concerns or solutions, or is this being done somewhere else and I’m just missing it?

I’m just wondering whether if there’s a choice being made here that we should know about.

NIGEL JACOB: Sure. So, when we look at the different ways that people are able to communicate with us one way or the other, we are (inaudible) already inundated with a whole range of different thoughts and opinions that people have as to the challenges that they face in their communities, and solutions over what people feel the solution to those challenges should be.

So, our mayor, all of us in the mayor’s office spend a lot of our time at community meetings, listening to the public, we get a barrage of email that comes into a bunch of different channels. When you look at all of those different things, our sense of -- in terms of where we see the real issue, the issue does not seem to be one of people communicating what they think the problem is or making themselves heard. That is often -- arguably, we’re already getting a lot of that stuff.

What we want to -- to go back to the (inaudible) and absolutely that is one of the things we want to be able to do, however, when we look at the root, the missing piece in the puzzle of this civic (inaudible), it really lies around the problem of execution. How do you actually do these things? How do you figure out a way to solve -- to take on these problems and actually try and solve it.

So, when we put that (inaudible) there and ask people to come and if you’ve got an idea and work with us, we’re very serious about that. So, at least 70 percent of the projects that we engage in have come to us from other people, right? Okay, so they come to us from community people, people in higher ed, for profit, non profits, the range of different groups.

The point in fact is we actually don’t do a lot of -- we don’t do an awful lot of ideation at all internally. Most of this stuff is coming from other people. And what we try to do is we’re approached by people that have a particular way of solving a particular problem. And our value add is we’re able to work with them and figure out -- the typical user people that for one reason or the other, need some buy in from City Hall to be able to execute on their problem.

So, it could be as simple as (inaudible) as to an event or it could be some data that’s needed or some access to a public facility, whatever it is. So, a lot of what we do is connecting the dots on those civic innovation projects and further help to incubate them and get them out.

So, we’ve done projects that have come to us from start-ups that are aimed to encourage -- one in particular (inaudible) has developed a project platform to enable people to buy local, to keep those dollars circulating at the local level. We’re working with a brand new technology for (inaudible) supposed to be developing dirt cheap search technology for (inaudible) on the autism spectrum. So often these things come to us from other sources.

Some number of them come to us from internal to City Hall. We address the projects in much the same way because there are two of us who do this full time. A lot of what we do is as marriage brokers. So, that somebody comes to us with a need, or with a project idea that they are looking to drive and that we are able to help connect them to sometimes dollars, sometimes grad student work, sometimes researchers, whoever it is. But a lot of what we do is helping people connect the dots and help them evolve the idea, if it’s something we’re able to help them with.

MICHA SIFRY: I’m just going to remind people listening in that if you want to ask a question, what you need to do is hit *6 on your phone so that I can get you into the queue. And while people are thinking about doing that, the lines are open as they say.

Nigel, is there -- I’m going to ask you a sensitive question -- are there places where you found you just have to be careful? Boston is a very traditional city and politicians can be very turf conscious. I mean is there a piece here of also we just have to recognize that some of this is potentially -- can shake things up more than some incumbents would like to have happen?

I’ll give you an example of what I mean: a couple years ago, folks in Chicago were working for the mayor’s office on a site called Chicago Works for You, and they had done task breaking work, I would say in gathering a lot of the city’s service request data. And at the behest of the mayor were putting it on these very dynamic, searchable maps so that you could zero in on things like how many pothole requests were made in a particular alderman’s district. And then you can even see the rates of -- response rates over time and things.

And the site was all set to go and one of the last steps -- and this is a story that was told to me by Daniel O’Neil who was one of the developers at the time, still very active in Chicago data work, he works for (sounds like: Everyblock) -- and they had to take it to the alderman and they started showing the sites to the alderman and the alderman said, ‘wow, this is great, this is amazing information, you’ve done fantastic job.’ And then Dan said, ‘terrific, well you know this is going to be going live in a couple weeks.’ And they all said, ‘no, no, no, you can’t put that out to the public; we don’t want the public to know this level of detail. My God, my opponents will use it against me in the next election that 10 percent of the potholes didn’t get filled,’ even if 90 percent did in 30 days.

So, I’m just wondering if there’s also -- and by the way, Chicago is on the verge of a big new wave of innovation with the new mayor coming in, they’ve got people like John Tolva joining his administration from IBM, Smart of City’s project. I think cities have come a long way from the attitude a few years ago that these folks in Chicago were expressing of we don’t want the public to know what our problems are.

So, give us a sense of how you navigate that terrain for Boston? Where is it most sensitive? Where is it most promising?

NIGEL JACOB: So, there are sort of two answers; the first answer is to say so nobody pushes harder on addressing 10 percent of unsolved things that (inaudible) our mayor. So, the advantage of operating out of the mayor’s office is that we have a lot of -- we don’t have any limits in terms of the kinds of projects that we’re able to go after. So, in that sense really nothing is politically sensitive in terms of there are certain things that are ‘hands off.’

The other side of that however, is that there’s no doubt that city hall, city governments in any city size is a radically de-centralized organization. So, although we have a very strong manner, as in Chicago, we -- even calls coming out of the mayor’s office can often be met with skepticism, depending on the person who’s on the end of the line, on the call. So, we have to do yeoman’s work in making sure that if an issue comes to us or if a project comes to us that we can find a partner on the other end that will be responsive and that frankly, can work at the same speed that we want these projects to go at because these things have to go out fast otherwise they -- you lose momentum and people -- you only have so much time and passion to pursue these things.

So, like I know Dan really well and when Dan was first rolling out (inaudible) block, he made a bunch of trips to Boston, we went through together a bunch of digging for different data sets. And it was a challenge. At the time I was working in the CIO’s office but it remained a challenge, there was not double about that.

Arguably, I would say that Boston City Hall is no different than any big institution of size. So, that could be a university, it could be a big corporation. I think any institution or organization of this scale has problems in terms of connecting the dots (inaudible) or doing certain things in a timely way. I mean, there are huge challenges of sort of change management and so on.

But again, the value of our mayor has been that he is all about execution, getting things done. So, and everyone has that sense. He is constantly pointing to his senior staff and saying, ‘what have you guys done lately?’ ‘Where are the new ideas?’ ‘Give me something new and fresh and innovative.’ And the challenge has been for those folks is they have core business services to offer or whatever their operations is.

And often they don’t have the capacity to think in certain novel directions and that’s a lot of what we do. A lot of what we do in (inaudible) is to be a place where those folks, public works is a great partner of our, our department of human development, there’s a whole range, police department, they’re -- you know, a whole range of different partners that we can work with to do these things.

MICHA SIFRY: And what could help change that environment? Do you think that some of the job here is for other institutions in the city to sort of get with it? Maybe the media needs to be a more active proponent of these kinds of approaches or do you view the media as a friend?

0:46:00

NIGEL JACOB: The issue often is one of risk. These city institutions are often very risk-averse for good reason. I mean, they’re dealing in public money, taxpayer dollars. So, there’s a tendency obviously to be very conservative with how you go about thinking about those projects.

But that of course is the (inaudible) for innovation. I mean there has to be some dimension of risk. So our approach has been to say what we need to do is open, change the culture of risk taking to generate a culture of innovation. And when we reach out to other city departments, we found -- we’ve never -- I can’t think of any department that we’ve ever interacted with where there aren’t creative people that have great ideas and very novel approaches to thinking about problems. The challenge has been traditionally that maybe they’re not the person at the top of the org chart, you know? Maybe there’s someone in the middle, at the bottom.

So, a lot of what we’ve been trying to do to be in partner with those folks, who traditionally would have had to run an idea up the flag pole which would have been stymied at any number of different levels, now comes directly to us in a lateral way in terms of organization and work with us. And in those cases, our model is to aggregate risk.

So, instead of the Department of Public Works taking on additional risk with some crazy design project in the trash, they can work with us and these projects essentially -- it depends on how they want to run it. What we say to them is we happen to run these projects as urban (inaudible) projects so that if somehow things go sour or in some way that there’s some perceived set of failure with the project, it is a project -- it is a new urban (inaudible) project. And that’s what we’re here to do, we’re here to be experimental and (inaudible).

The other side of that is a lot of this risk aversion does come from the media. So, a lot of what we’ve been trying to do is to partner with folks in the media in a general sense to give -- to set the context to which these kinds of innovation-focused projects are talk-able. So, that rather than saying there’s this group at City Hall that’s wasting taxpayer dollars, the conversation is much more about there’s a group at City Hall that if you have a good idea, you can come and work with them and (inaudible) and they will run small, tight projects that will be testing a certain criteria and in this way we’re able to experiment in disciplined manner.

MICHA SIFRY: Great, got it, great explanation. We have a question on the line here. I just unmated their phone, if you would just introduce yourself and ask your question.

PARTICIPANT 1: Hi, this is Mike Sarah from Idealist.org in New York. Thank both of you for your time today. I wanted to ask on your crowd-sourced apps, the citizens can act in the Street Bump, what sort of rates of participation you’re getting and what the city is doing to address the disparities in access in different demographics?

MICHA SIFRY: Great question.

NIGEL JACOB: Yes, great question. So, we have seen about 10,000 unique users that have been using the app (inaudible), which is a result in little more than that in terms of the number of service requests that have been entered. And we think those numbers are actually good because we’ve done no marketing because we don’t have that capacity, really. So, all of the -- the app is spread entirely by word of mouth.

Now, in terms of the issue of making sure that this app is equally accessible across the board, one of the biggest challenges in doing these kinds of projects is the incredibly low expectation that the public has for government services, which means that we’re never able to build momentum on when we do something well because people constantly have this, ‘oh yeah this will suck, too.’

So, instead our approach was to build momentum at the community level so that people have the sense that we were doing good things, and that would give us a window of opportunity to do -- to broaden the reach of these platforms.

So, we release this (inaudible) iPhone app and as I said before, we definitely got a lot of -- oh, we did get some negative feedback from people saying that this is a (inaudible) platform, but the intention was also to get people to see our services as high quality and that would buy us leeway in order to -- plus we’ve gotten those people engaged -- we could work from that group and build outwards in terms of supporting more platforms.

So, we’re rolling out on phones, we’re rolling out on (sounds like: S&S) gateway, there’s Twitter, (inaudible) with the site, with our apps, there’s increasingly a whole bunch of different ways to interact with us. So, that’s how we think about the issue of access that the challenge is not -- if you start by trying to be all things to all people, you’ll basically be, in our estimation, at the local level anyway, kind of nothing to anybody, right, because you’re not serving anybody considerably well.

But instead our purpose has been to say, let’s get people using it, start getting real feedback from people and we’ll build an appetite for this approach, and then we’ll use that essential mandate to do interesting things, to broaden the approach and to bring as many people as possible. That was always the intention.

So, in order to enable that approach, our (inaudible) is open now so we have an open-through on one standard and we actually support a super-set of the open (sounds like: two-and-one) standard, so that See.Click.Fix, anybody else that wants to be able to submit service requests into our local management system will be able to do that.

So, I mean we responded very well to that dimension of (inaudible) platform, but we want to be a way that multiple points of interaction are possible.

MICHA SIFRY: Did that answer your question?

PARTICIPANT 1: Yes, thank you very much.

MICHA SIFRY: Great, thanks. We have a couple minutes left, Nigel, and I’m just going to wait and see if anybody else wants to chime in a with a question. Just remember the way to do that is to unmute your phone by hitting *6 and while I’m waiting, we’ll see if a question chimes in.

One thing that occurred to me, Click for America, you mentioned Tim O’Reilly, is Click for America active and working in Boston I understand? Are they partnering with your office or -- wait, got a question coming from someone else. Hold that one, and go ahead, you’re on the line.

PARTICIPANT 2: Hi, this is Steve Buckley, can you hear me?

MICHA SIFRY: Yes, we can hear you.

PARTICIPANT 2: Okay. The idea of culture change, I think, I was wondering is there a way or have you found any way, and I’ve been interested in this and using technology to make it safe for people to go against the status quo, perhaps some time of anonymous innovation platform or something so people can (sounds like: cloak)?

MICHA SIFRY: Anonymity in innovation! Nigel, what do you think?

NIGEL JACOB: So, our vision of innovation again, this is very particular to us, is about execution. So, if somebody has an idea for something, that’s (inaudible) not nearly enough, we want to see -- we want for someone to approach us with a plan, or at least a semblance of a plan, that we can work with them to get to the next point.

I think the challenge of just private sourcing ideation is that unless the people who are on the receiving end of those ideas actually execute on something, that those platforms risk losing people’s good faith even further because they’ll say, ‘you know, I spent time, I set a bunch of ideas up there, and you guys didn’t do anything.’

There is no doubt that it is important -- however you said that -- there is no doubt that it is important to treat a culture in which people feel comfortable stepping forward in talking about things. But I think when you look organizationally, the piece that has been missing -- there’s really no shortage of good ideas that come to us from any number of sources. The challenge for us is really that execution.

So, we want people that have good ideas to come forward and work with us and to actually develop a project in and of itself. And then in that case can be very difficult. I mean, you know, we are putting resources on the table for people that want to do these things, so that could be people’s time, it could be projects (inaudible), whatever it is, but we do want to get to the issue of execution.

MICHA SIFRY: Great point. I was actually going to say since we’re almost out of time, if you would just jump on that question about Click for America very quickly.

NIGEL JACOB: Yeah, so we are a partner of Click for America. The Click for America votes are helping us develop some apps targeted at education, specifically at the middle and high schoolers in terms of enabling those kids and (audio falls out) and the broader community people interested in helping kids to enable them to connect to all the various opportunities that the city offers.

So, when you look at the city as a place of learning opportunities, there’s a huge number of those, of things that people can be engaging in, and the challenge is often -- and we found this so I’m just talking to kids and families, that they don’t know what’s available, they don’t know what they’re eligible for, they don’t know what fits and what would work.

So, we’re trying to create a whole series of apps and sort of light weight tools that would enable that stuff and then underneath that there would be an API (inaudible) so that it becomes a model for sustainability for these technologies moving forward.

MICHA SIFRY: Great, so I think what that’s suggesting is we need to keep an eye on those projects as we will certainly be doing on Tech President. People should follow (inaudible) reporting in particular as this is his primary beat to see how folks are re-inventing government from the ground up using connection technologies and ways of thinking and doing.

Thank you Nigel, this has been really a fascinating call. I feel like we all got a real sense of what is uniquely developing there in Boston and why we should continue to pay close attention to the office of New Urban Mechanics.

So, thank you so much for the time. Thanks everybody for listening. Again, thanks to AT&T, our on-going sponsor for these PDF Network calls, thanks to Doug Luke for partnering on this call.

Two weeks from now we will be joined by Katie Harbath, formerly from the National Republican Senatorial Committee where she was Chief Digital Strategist. She’s going to be talking about mobile campaigning in 2012, moving beyond texting alone.

So, we’ll see you on May 12th at this same time, from 1:00 - 2:00 PM and in the meantime we will also see you online at (inaudible) PDFNetwork. And until then, be well.

Thank you Nigel.

NIGEL JACOB: Thank you. (Inaudible) if you’ve got an idea or project that you want to come try out in Boston, find us and let’s talk about it.

MICHA SIFRY: Absolutely. Go to the NewUrbanMechanic.org or go to the City of Boston online and track them down. They’re interested in your ideas. Thanks again.

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