Transcripts For SFGTV2 20121228

Well launch in about a month or two. Thank you very much. Were really happy to be here. applause cool, were going to do a short panel talking about the state of open data and sort of what specifically some of these companies are doing which youve gotten a brief peek on. Again, youre probably familiar with, already know who a lot of these people are. Really quick go down and have everyone introduce them self. Hello,ishv. My name is ian kalen, hottved by the department of energy and i support thuous us chief Technology Officer todd park who is not the cto, but assistant to the president. And im peter hirschberg, run publicly a dozen hackathon, [speaker not understood], build apps and explore whats possible. Im chris, the cofounder and ceo of 100plus and we use data from many different sources to try to help people be more healthy in their daily life. Hi. [speaker not understood]. Were a mapping and locationbased analytics platform. And we are working with open data and trying to see how we can turn data into information, data into knowledge, and the kind of decision products. Hi, im john, ceo of motion loft. Were trying to understand how people move around cities and provide that data to the public to build new tools for public safety. Hi, im [speaker not understood] with code for america. Were a peace core for geeks. Were trying to bring talent from the private second for and government to innovate. We work with dozens of citieses across the country and next year we should be working with San Francisco which is up, great. Im filling in for a second. [speaker not understood]. Hi, im yo yashida for appaliscious. Well try to get a conversation going to talk about typically what youre doing. Id be interested in hearing each one of you talk a little more about what you think it certainly is a term were hearing a lot today and in the past. Wed love to hear what you think open data is now, sort of how far along are we in terms of actually getting governments to release that data and actually getting companies to do interesting things with it. This is kind of awkward sitting on his shoulder. You know, weve been doing this in america for awhile. I would say this is a nice turning point. Before there were people on the outside banging on the door, open data, give me your data. Now youre seeing governments take the turn themselves and set up a culture and the institutions like chief data officers where theyre actually proactively doing it themselves. This will actually be the third chief data officer in the country. Chicago has one, philadelphia has one. So, [speaker not understood]. I have mixed feelings about it. No. I just think that its great to see governments themselves start to do this and that means there is going to be a vibrant ecosystem. Just to add to that, [speaker not understood]. In fact, we actually learned a lot of lessons from what finphily and chicago have done. Were looking at what departments are working with. Theyre improving their data. Open data legislation has been out there. Weve bon working with them because we realize they need to have clean data sets to have good information for the public. So, its been kind of a synergy between the private sector and the Public Sector where the departments themselves have been motivated in assigning tasks to their department to make sure that those data sets are clean which then benefits both public and the private sector. So, im pretty excited about living in a city that is kind of the forefront of public data. I cant really think of another city that has spurred so much innovation as well as San Francisco. [speaker not understood]. Were also really excited about this. Everybody is going to say that, but as a private company who builds tools and allow you to do things with data, this is one of the most important things thats happening for our customers, this movement of open data. I get asked every day by our customers, id like to do this, but where is the data, how do i get the data . They have the idea, but they dont have the resources to necessarily make that idea bring that idea to fruition. And, so, this is going to mean huge things for innovation as the mayor said, and huge things for our customers. We work with a lot of civic startups who are trying to do Better Things for their community and by combining private data that you see in here with companies, with the public data through the portal, we can actually start to make businesses around the data. I think were at the very, very beginning of this. One of the best parts of the job is i get to hang out with other people who are really trying to do very innovative things and be very creative. I talk about some of the data sets we use. Most people still dont know they exist despite great efforts from the city and others. And, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs that were looking for is the way to get leverage, a way to build an experience or build a product before we have 100,000 users using it. Open data is the key way to do that. You can start out with this experience, very lively and robust with very few users. And then when the first users come in, there is actually something for them to do and see. And i think that youll start to see as the data sets get more robust and a little bit better and hopefully as we get to improve them ourselves and put them back into the public domain, the innovation that comes off with them is just going to grow exponentially. This seems like a really important moment. The world of civic innovation until now has really been focused on sort of open public data and the private data world has been separate. The fact that the city realizes that it is private data that adds to that and provides so much more richness because it is information as motion loft tells us where people are dwelling in the city or in the park applications how people are using it. When you add all that together, that leads to new forms of innovation. This summer there was a project in singapore, urban prototyping singapore where we worked with local interests to open up over 30 private data sets and we had to engineer, what kind of contract would you have . How would you handle privacy . How would you let people use it for only that purpose . That form of innovation as it spreads here and elsewhere i think leads to a whole lot of new possibilities and applications. And this great cross trading between the private second for and Public Sector is just now taking off. In many ways San Francisco has a special responsibility here. Lots of cities are investing in opening data. Thats a lot of supply. You need the demand side to prove to the city its worthwhile and to prove to the public you can build an ecosystem there. We can do things with that whether bottom up activities, gray area or private companies. So, its a moment of real burst of innovation and the landscape changes as the public and private sides come together. I very much agree with everything that was said. Ill add that in addition to the Public Sector, at the city level for open data disclosures and the private sector i can also speak to how important this is at the federal government level as well as we continue to work with cities across america to get more open data sets released, to the question about the history and we really look to recent examples to see the dura power of open data sets. My favorite examples are weather when weather data was released, weather channel. Com and many others, and gps Global Positioning system. We know the history there was the military infrastructure that liberated public consumption and use, but the things we expected such as navigation, but also things that people didnt necessarily anticipate in the beginning such as precision crop farming which lowers the cost of food in the supermarket ultimately. So, the question is now what is the next gps, what else can be done . How can the federal government work with cities, with platforms like cities. Data,. Gov and other systems like that. How can we liberate some of this data while also protecting privacy and confidentiality which is hugely important and something that were seeking to celebrate and support in a way our customers which im sitting alongside here, for the entrepreneurs and the organizations that are using consuming this data to turn them into real value. That is something that is very significant priority for the administration and thats why the president launched an open Data Initiative to support. Let me dig a little more on the federal side. Can you talk a little more about the work that you specifically are doing and sort of, you know, how the department of energy when it became interested in open data, what is available right now . There is so much available for startups right now. Its hard to choose a few favorites. Wow, i can tell you what some of the best ones that people have told me are the most popular so that will be like many other things in the startup world, its not the government that is going to come up with the answer. Its partners working together to find the solution. So, one data set that comes to mind, i want to do a show of hands. I get this question a lot in terms of how much of the work is getting out there. How many of you have ever heard of the green button, a green button . Most of the panelists and audience members. Its a good thing were here. It is a initiative launched by the white house but industry led. You should be able to get your own energy data in a machine readable format you can then give to companies, organizations like the ones being celebrated here today to provide real value to you such as saving money, improving energy efficiency, and protecting the environment. So, the green button here we are in San Francisco, i can say with some public comfort that pg e is a signatory to the green button, download my data. And basically you go to the utility website. You can download your own green button data which by itself is, well, im an energy guy, an energy geek. I consider with confidence. It is not interesting, necessarily, but when you take your green button data and you give it to some companies, they have Amazing Things they can do with that green button to, again, save you money. Something as simple as if you look at your green button which is kilowatt hours for those that are engineering minded, a line grab if you think about t some companies today can look at your green button and figure out if your refrigerator is broken function need a new air conditioner. Thats real money if you think about it at a commercial or industrial scale. That is one data set. To your other question about what is the federal government doing, were seeking not just an energy, but across the government to engage entrepreneurs and innovators across all the different sectors. For those of you familiar with the history of the health Data Initiative launched by then the hhs health and Human Services chief Technology Officer todd park, we sought to have a Health Data Palooza proceeded by health data jambs or modeling sessions, jams sounded more fun, we can invite entrepreneurs in and see what can be done and created Real Products within a few months. That is being rolled out at education, energy, treasury, u. S. Aid, other agencies as well. These programs are celebrating the use of open data and hopefully will provide some additional support. I think there are even folks here who have been part of these events. Were excited for that continued support and hope you can all join this initiative in the neutral. Future. So, earlier you were talking a little about kind of how San Francisco came in in terms of actually ading the officer. More broadly how do you think San Francisco compares and what are some of the other cities that are doing really well in terms of open data . I should be clear. When San Francisco is third, we have a pact. Ill add to that actually. Whats great in San Francisco is there is not just going to be a chief data officer. There is also the office of civic innovation. Jays team, shannons team. By having both of those units in place i think there is going to be a really powerful team. Because you cant just open up the data. You have to do things like this, where you get the Community Together or you have people actually talking about it because the demand side, as we were talking about it, will be there because there is going to be someone there. There have to be people working with it who are getting out there. I think this is what this city is going to be really powerful. In terms of other cities doing as well, chicago is doing some really interesting stuff. Scary cool stuff. Theyre taking 3 in 1 data, pothole request and crime report and matching it up with social media. Theyre getting this really deep and rich picture of what is going on in the city. And you can do that with data when you think about it creatively. Philadelphia as i mentioned, they are really active in open data. And new york, again with 3 in 1 is doing smart analytics. I think thats what youll see happening as well, government starts to become smarter, make better decisions, better policies. This term algorithmic regulation, which means you can have laws and policies in the cities determined by data and not just what we think is best, but whats actually best. So, as cities keep catching on and more and more with the data, youre going to see some really interesting things coming out. Cool. While were talking about data, another part of the announcement today was also motion loft making private Data Available within sort of that initiative and that website wrierid like to hear a little more, john, about kind of deciding to share that data with the city and also a lot of times especially with other companies you see them being very protective of their data. There is a lot of value there. How do you sort of balance, protecting the value of your data and commercial viability versus making it available to the public . So, we have a unique problem, i think, to a lot of startups in the fact that we have a product that we sell and a lot of different vertical. We also have data we want to provide to the society at large. And how do we not step on our own toes and give away our own data and make the company worthless. So, its tough. Its a definite fine line between the two. Today we announced that were going to give crowding data to the city so youll know where crowds are in the city and when they occur and where they occur. And that really isnt commercially viable for us. So, something we can provide to the city without any repercussions financially, which is great. We want to do more of those things. I made the decision to release this data about three minutes before a speech that i gave at spur a couple weeks ago. And literally, yeah, i was committed obviously, jay took me up the second i said t we have to go talk now. Okay. So, jay walked it down. I think jay is great for partnering with startups as much as he does. Great. Who can be the other startups, people using the data to make products. You already talked about what you actually made. Id love to hear more about the experience of working with the citys data like, you know, other things, Like Services or data points you would actually like would make it better and you can sort of take that. Whoever has an answer ready can go first. And i have a microphone. I wanted to say this earlier and it kind of slipped my mind. We have the most amazing experience working with the city over the past just really the few weeks in building this application about urban growth. One at the data portals, it has a rich repository of information. But working with we had lots of questions, right. Something maybe there were attributes or information that wasnt necessarily documented to the extent we wanted. And we asked the question, we would get these immediate responses with really insightful conversations that would come out of it. I think that type of collaboration is only going to make the portal better. The more people use it the better its going to get. We also experienced some challenges, you know. We did a lot of work with the data. We did a lot of data, put things together. We did things like added value, added certain locations. And i would love to be able to pull that back up to a shared community portal. From what i can tell it wasnt necessarily promoted at this time, but i think there is a lot of value in that. And shannon, interrupt me if im speaking if thats if im stating anything thats incorrect. You know, i know that they went through a special process. Maybe we make it a little easier, a little more seamless so that anybody is pulling down data and doing things, they cant push it back up. That was one of the things we would love to see. Probably shouldnt have been in public, but we were very naive about the whole process and we were actually trying to feed content locations around the city. And started to do this and started to think there must be a list out there. There must be a list of every park in San Francisco. I would find it in wikipedia. We stumbled into the sf data website and started looking. It was unbelievable, actually. So, some of the data sets we really needed were already there in very, very good format. And random things that i would never think of like movie set locations in the city of San Francisco or every piece of civic art that was there, just really interesting things all with, you know, latitudelongitude, tags and information about them. It was really interesting. And then in my first meeting, in our first meeting with the innovation group, the city i heard of 10 other things that i clearly should have been using and didnt even know existed, literally within the first 15 minutes of the meeting. Ss things like street safety, sidewalk safety scores and quality scores so we could wrap people around places. Route people around places. Really unbelievable. We availed ourselves of resources going forward. We had the same like any data set, you find great things about it. Then theres missing values or is thisxtion that got auto populated. We fixed a lot of things. We fixed a lot of gps coordinates. We would love the ability to post that back up. Even if youre not crowd sourcing new things, you can definitely crowd source quality of a data set that way. Yeah, its been a really great experience working with 100 plus and motion loft. Just to respond, i think that this is a whole new opportunity actually what youre talking about. In addition to reaching out to the private sector to generate more data sets as you just mentioned, theres also the opportunity to have better data sets from the work that youve done, scrubbing them and harmonizing them. I think there is also this really great opportunity to generate whole new types of data sets like motion loft is doing. And i think that this is going to present something kind of back to the city, showing where some of our gaps are and hopefully filling in some of those gaps with those data sets. So, i think that there is something about having more city data sets, existing data sets as well as creating new types of data. This is really exciting for us. Were going to tell a quick story on how private data can stimulate civic innovation. This summer in singapore, we had about 30 data sets opened p. Up. One data set was about a million or so records of taxis all over town. Typically taxi data stuff, its hard to get, private companies, they dont want to open it up competitively. One taxi company at the last minute opened up, motion loft made it efficient to see what would happen. Because they contributed to the stuff, we had five separate teams working on could we do collaborative consumption of sharing taxis, build a dash panel for companies to know where to go. Had i hatch i had been working on a model to see how much overlap there was. They sent us to tokyo to work on that. So, this one set, a million records of where the taxis were not only led to a lot of innovation, but people realized 15 of all taxi routes kind of where people went, about 15 of that was all overlapped. So, a city that never really thought about collaborative consumption or sharing suddenly is looking at that. Parking data was opened up similarly about a million records of where people werent parking and within a couple of days predictive analytic app was written. Go to a parking reservation thing. The carrier local phone Company Released pairs of where people were all over town. A lot of privacy issues. We wrote a contract around that. All of that led to a huge amount of innovation and new forms of thinking. And even as i look at what goes on with teams working in San Francisco stuff, the minute for example i saw the esri data that has tons of economics and social behavior behind t i realized sometimes you come together and work on something, and lacking that stuff you make assumptions, you make things up. You dont have a rich set of data. The fact there is a place to turn either because its free or you can go pay for it, but its kind of normalized and available i think just speeds things up, reduces redundancy and thats going to be the thing that leads it a real burst of innovation and value both financial value for developers, but also civic value for where we live and clearly were at the very beginning of that. And i think San Francisco has been pushing ahead and thats why its exciting. Im going to give you a chance to talk about his experience in a second. First ill open it up for questions from the audience in just a second. Think of anything you want to ask our many panelists up here. All san franciscans. Ill give the panel to ask each other questions if they want. Talk about your experiences working with San Francisco. Sawyer, i could barely here you. Sure, could you talk a little what your experience is like working with San Francisco and, you know, other things that youd like to see that have become available in startups that arent already. Sorry so, we started navigating the city of San Francisco or working with the city of San Francisco close to 21 2 years ago after our initial concept. We realized about two years ago we discovered the Innovation Office. We discovered sf data sets, and we were absolutely delighted to have the Resources Available to us through these offices. And they really were the driving factor behind our development moving forward. Obviously they werent exactly where we needed them to be at that time, and we had worked with multiple departments now on cleaning up the data sets obviously. And then putting that back out there. One of our biggest pin points or struggles has been with the legislation and the old models of the [inaudible] the regulations and laws which are being slowly worked on through the legal departments and the San Franciscos legal department. But essentially we found the experience through Innovation Office has been driving the initiatives through and helping us develop and the data sets have bon become cleaner. They have become easier for us to use and the process has become a lot more efficient. School. Cool. I was told if you have a question you should line up at that microphone right there. If youre coming up no, he did youant [speaker not understood]. I dont have a question. I wanted to comment on this. I think Something Else is really unique and maybe one of the Untold Stories or not told so much stories about the impact of open data is really the companies that are being formed. And as you mentioned earlier, theyre a Sustainable Company and this is being powered by open data and motion loft is figuring out how they can share the asset that sort of your Business Model is built on. So, i think that this is presenting a whole new type of question for sort of apps built with Government Data or public data. I guess ill jump in once here, too, while people are stepping up. Weve been doing this for awhile now. One thing weve learned in this innovation space, people matter. Like you can build technology you want, platform you want, thats great. Its the people who are doing it that matter and theyre going to get stuff done. This has some of the best people, shannon and jay are doing t. Theyve been doing it awhile so they know what theyre doing. Its great. Last year i was building this adopted tree app and i found it on the data portal. It had like some weird geo data like it was in some form i couldnt use. I just dropped jay a note and like within 24 hours i got the data fixed and it was perfect. So, its those kind of relationships that matter and having the right people in place. So, i think the chief data officer, these guys will end up joining a rock star team. Not a question, but just a comment to say thanks to the citys Innovation Office. Were a Small Company from ireland called building i. We take permit data from cities and show it to anyone who wants to see it. We started off in ireland, discovered the San Francisco data and came over here and now weve got an office up and running here with San Francisco data. So, its great to be able to do that. Just one note of caution of how do you prevent kind of thirdparty data integrators from owning that data. I think jay was talking about it earlier on. Its just a note of caution for you guys. How do we prevent vendors from holding the data . Yes. Were still working on this piece with our legal department. Were looking to do and this is very exploratory right now, really looking at the contracting process itself and how we can use that as a mechanism. Basically we want to do business with you if youre willing to share your data. As jay mentioned we dont want to be held hostage. We dont want our data to be held hostage to the companies. As we figure this out, well continue going about it and providing updates. Yeah, i think that theres actually a lot of companies out there that are being powered right now with our open data program. So, if theres any that arent represented here today, please let us know. We would love to feature you. Because this is the other story that i was talking about. Open data is demonstrating Economic Growth and job creation. So, yes, its about transparency, yes, its about openness, but its also about creating jobs and this is a really exciting piece of the story. We have another question. Thanks, everybody, great panel, great things going on. I have a question around strategies that you guys are facing to monetize somehow this data. Of course, having companies that create applications and then they sell these somehow is fantastic. But is government thinking about ways in which they can directly monetize these data sets . Can i say one quick thing first . I remember we were at the white house Innovation Panel and there was this exact conversation came up because we are looking to monetize everything we do. And the city is also looking to monetize this and make revenue. One of the biggest conversation pieces that came out of the talk and some of the questions from the crowd was opening up apis for transactions, permitting, reservations and those type of things, which would be an incredible influx of private industry working with governments and also providing incredible efficiency for the public to be able to make these transactions. Ill probably say that ian might want to talk more on this, but that would be something that would be highly