Question that we are on opposite sides is a little bit wrong. The government and techies believe that encryption is one of these 21st century marbles. Its one of these things that gives a defender and asymmetric ability to be better than an attacker. Thats great. Its something that even the folks who have spoken out about , the important foundational Building Blocks for what we do every day online. The Law Enforcement community has had many challenges with encryption, and as a government, our stance is that we dont take legislation is appropriate, but the issue of what are we doing to go after the bad guys, to make sure that we can still protect the country, thats something where there is no disagreement. Thats something we all think is a good idea. I think thats how i would, the problem, as opposed to megan one of the things that is is going onork that with integrating the community. The Defense Department had put in Silicon Valley has a lot of National Security and military leadership team, talents together with venture capital. There is so many topics in the security area. We need to keep advancing the skills and the quality and implementation skills across the acrossederal government, Law Enforcement, across our private sector. Having meeting points like that, very important. He will probably talk more about that. The other area, i know you have some young women part of the let girls learn, the first ladies let girls build initiative, and they have been working on hackathon. Nine out of 10 parents want coding taught at school. The more our kids are in active inrning coding experiences k12 and a college as we adapt our College Curriculums to have much more balanced Computer Science departments. And this is between for century literacy. We want to make sure that all americans are doing that. It will deeply affect this is 21st century literacy. We want to make sure all americans are doing that. It will deeply affect all. You think that collaboration between technology and government is the way to go, and true to that collaboration we will find a solution to Law Enforcement and encryption . This idea of a tour of duty, generally, is really important. For example, if we were at a legal conference and we were talking to colleagues, and everyone was working in the industry of law, a very large number of this community would have been pro bono and the nonprofit sector. One of the things that is interesting to us like i said, we are in the early days of digital government, but to see how far behind we were and where we are coming from in terms of recent tech in the nonprofit sector, and state and local, as well as federal. And how did we get our community to have a tour of duty . We have law, science fellows who rotate in government. Lets have the tech folks rotate. Not to take everyone in and build inside, but more like the surgeon general. The Surgeon Generals not doing surgery when they are doing policy. We get the best people to rotate that. Thats what we want to do. The bestit will have effect on modern Service Delivery that we are starting to see with the quality of products coming from that approach, policy choices, having tech folks, economists, almost like a university deciding policy together, not leaving tech for implementation later, but as part of the architecture. This third area is capacity for the american people. Also, solving hard problems together, having our community a part of the conversation as part of our career tracks. This is something the president has been great at, bringing strong tech people into government. I work with one of the experts on Cyber Security and encryption in general. It is the right way to think about these problems, with a real grounding in the technical realities. Mentioned how important diversity is to this, bringing Diverse People into government, bringing diverse students into tech said that they are ready for that path when the time comes. You are the first emailed cto. What can you tell our audience female cto. What can you tell about improving diversity and companies . Is one of the great moon shots of the 21st century. How are we going to get all of our teams playing, all of our talent . The greatest asset of our company of our country is the people. Also, a lot of times when people look at diversity and illusion, they are thinking almost a charity agenda. Its actually a deep prosperity not only is it right, but its prosperity. Companies like intel and slack and others really step up and put it in the short list of their priority is to talk about it at every executive meeting, and really get out there. It comes from leadership deciding this is on the short list. Course everyone is on the everyone in the industry is pushing on Diversity Inclusion as something to do, but if you notice in your company that all of the leadership has outsourced into the diversity team, you are not going to get anywhere. Those people are incredible, but they are your coach, and it is your job. One of the things we also know is that much of our challenge is unconscious and institutional bias. What are we going to do to change our system and also train on ourselves and build technology to help negate help mitigate . Today if you watch childrens fantasyon or fa television, 6 1 boys to girls on screen. How do we give our hollywood teammates the tools to see the biases may have . I was lucky to work with the team that built the macintosh with steve jobs. At those, if you look photos, seven men and for women. The women in the photo all the men have speaking roles. The only recent one was Joanna Hoffman who won the golden globe in the jobs movie. She is from eastern europe. Supertough. She is the only one that would really challenge steve and move things forward. Son that said, mom, did you really iron steve jobs shirt . She said, jeremy, i have never ironed a shirt, except one for you when we were late for something. This unconscious biases all around us. Is all around us. We need to fix the Public Record of the truth. Womend to know that black charge related the trajectories for john glenn in the apollo mission. We need help from hollywood, for media, for wikipedia records that are not correct. Most people have not heard of hopper, but they have heard of edison or the White Brothers wright brothers. Kate yeah, i think thats great. Amac, you came to the government from twitter, where you championed free speech as a core value of the platform. Now we have Hillary Clinton talking about twitter being a birthplace for the allright right movement. How do you balance free speech with encouraging diversity, with supporting minority candidates who might experience harassment as they enter the industry . Thats a great question for the five minutes we have left. I can completely tackle its. I think it is one of the hardest asngs we have to deal with an internet community. Voiceshed many different online. We want to hear from lots of diversity points. There is this worry that the internet has become weaponize. It is definitely not something that, as a government, there is a lot for us to do, but it is a fascinating problem, one that we in the industry have to tackle and one that i have a ready dissolution on. There are lots of people doing good work in this space, but it is a really important thing for us to focus on. Hasn the Vice President done an extraordinary amount of and culture on us change. He was on the oscar stage talking about how we need to change our culture. It is interesting to juxtapose that with the meeting today in the white house. Included everything from active learning to emotional intelligence. Work people are doing in this country to help our young people get the kind of tools they need to live 100 years. What are the tools they need to be adaptive learners, creative, for the possibilities of the future that include getting along . These are the things we are very mindful of, and we are driving hard. A lot of times, the message we use is not unlike venture scalp and scale. You are trying to look for people with solutions to problems. Injustice and technology, we found that there are several jurisdictions who are already doing very interesting work with data. An example would be miamidade. Went from 7000 people in prison to 4900. They closed the prison and changed how they were doing with Substance Abuse challenges, and opened a 12 bed unit in the hospital. Our Incredible Police officers, they have a choice when they have someone in that state to take them to jail or take them to the emergency room. Now they have an option. That 911 and the police are trained on, only 109 arrests. It requires all of these tech skills and policy skills. We now have different ways to do it, and we have a datadriven justice initiative. Over 25 of the jurisdictions in the countries are now are dissipating a biweekly. Aarning Conference Call biweekly learning Conference Call. It iser it is, whether Diversity Inclusion, justice, learning, we can use these new Internet Network messages to try to bring the different people to the table to solve things is great for the skills, of the folks in this room, who can be working on these social problems. We need more technologists to come in on the area they are passionate about. Not everybody is passionate about criminal justice, but figuring out what your passion is and making a difference. im glad you brought up open data. We are running short on time, but one of the data sets i think americans have really craved over the last two years has been data on Police Killings and uses of force. You mentioned the data justice initiative. I think when we are looking for this data right now, we are outletso look to news like the guardian, who are trying to count these incidences. Can you explain some of the challenges you have had in releasing the data at the that are a level . Federal level . Leadership, the leadership in dallas, in los angeles, already releasing use of force data, officerinvolved shooting, sets of data. We have over 60 jurisdictions in the police data initiative. This is in the open Data Transparency Initiative that goes with datadriven justice. It more of an enterprise internal data clustering. Now the jurisdictions are committing to opening the data and engaging in the community, which will include tech people, as well as those in the Community Practice nationally. Fellows noticing the work going on in the country, and having Police Leadership meet each other, and realize they could do it as well. They can build a movement around transparency, and the kind of data sense that helps us see where the real challenges are. We hope to do that across every topic. Of course, we have amazing weather and mapping data on our phones. We want to think about every agency as we release the opportunity project. Census. Gov, and Great Companies like redfin and zillow are stepping up. They have opportunity scores. It lets you know if you should live in a face. Place. What are the jobs there . If a tech company could have solved it on our own, it would have. We need the policy in other places. Boston just had an opioid hack a this weekend with medical tech, so we can dive in with our new message. Kate i would love to stay here and chat with you all day. But i wanted to ask you one more question. You have spoken about government as a second act, for all these amazing technologists who have entered the white house. What is the third act . What happens in january . We have no idea. We are heads down, completing this last focus on the fourth quarter. Abouthard to think anything else. I will take a breath, see my kids more. There was a recent piece written about triathletes, and flowinga of techies into the commercial private sector, and then flow into the government, state, local, federal, the u. N. Sector. The nonprofit how do we get people flowing areas . Ose i have always loved working on technology that can improve peoples lives, and technology that can reduce our impact on the planet. Very in line with the president and climate work. I think anything we can do around accelerating all the factors, as well as making sure that all people back to the missing history, when the film hidden figures, comes out, henson is playing the main character. She grew up in a poor community. She said, had she known this woman existed, she might have been a scientist. Lets make sure we are tapping cans,ne in, like the everything we can do to reach out to everyone to make them creators. That is the president great hope the president s great hope. It changes the future for our country and the world. Kate thank you so much for being here. I think it is almost an entire an impossible task, but you make me feel hopeful about government. Thank you very much. [applause] i hope that was as exciting for you guys as it was for me. Crush on megan smith forever, but please dont tell her. We will keep it moving along. Please welcome to the stage Megan Rose Dickey and morgan blavity. Thank you for joining us today. Thanks to having me. Megan the stats are pretty harrowing. Between 2014 and 2015, the amount of funding that went to black women was less than 1 . Im excited to come talk to you today. I think you are a true unicorn, of black female startup founders and ceos. Tell me about the last time you try to come . Great question. Is about ago, blavity two years ago. When we first started blavity, i applied to get a scholarship to come to techcrunch disrupt. I was declined. Im excited to be here for the first time. Megan give her a round of applause for sure. Lets talk about visibility. How important is it that you are up here as a black female startup founder . I think being visible is part of any startup life. You want to get press, you want people to know what youre working on. You want to be a leader and you want to be seen. I think for blavity specifically, part of what we do is inform as a media company. It is important that people know who i am and what we are working on. Thinking of diversity in general and startup diversity, a lot of my messages from people, they are inspired by seeing an meblack startup team, and as a black female ceo. I think it means a lot. Definitely. Im going to keep talking about how you are black for a little longer, but we will move on. You are on the verge of closing a pretty significant ground. What was that experience like for you . Morgan it has been a journey. Media is hot, and also not hot at the same time. The fee, it raised was tough. I started, and i realized i was not emotionally ready to go through that mental process. 20 meetings a week. We stopped. We really made sure the metrics were aggressively overachieving for the stage we were in. We had almost one million monthly unique visitors with no funding. Ice we got to that stage, spent a lot of time trying to find partners and investors that aligned with our mission. We spoke with really great people on board, like media ventures, macro ventures. Now, as we go into our speed round, they are looking for a more strategic partners. Run. S been an interesting i just finished 500 startups the last batch. Megan what do you look for in investors, especially in terms of remaining authentic to the black community . Morgan i look for people who get it. Right . You can tell the first five minutes of the conversation with an investor, if they understand and agree with the premise that blavity is on, which is that black people influence culture, that they are underrepresented in tech and consumer tech, and therefore we have a blue ocean opportunity to build Something Interesting for the audience that is incredibly influential. Megan you mentioned black people are underrepresented in the tech industry, across startups, and they tech companies, big tech companies, and even more so in venture capital. Do you have any black investors . Morgan absolutely. Charles king, a black investor. It is part of how we involved designed the team, and nature it is reflective of what we care about. Megan you previously mentioned that you do receive some criticism, even from the black community. What is that about . Morgan i think because we are so visible. Blavity is a media company. It is our job to be creating content, and pushing things out there. We also have user generated content, so a lot of the content is submitted from the user base. Not everything that goes up is going to be completely aligned with me personally, or with other people in the communities. This conflict. There was an article that happened this summer, and we started trending on twitter, because people were upset megan which article . Morgan it was about a netflix documentary. The guy behind it, a lot of people dont agree with his personal statements. It was a tough day. Megan how do you handle that . Morgan i listened to what people were saying. We spoke to the writer and ultimately decided to take the article down. I explained what the process was, and a little bit more about blavity as a whole. We are a media company, and we have this content. It wont always be the same. Megan was that the first time Something Like that happen, where you took down an article based on feedback from the community . Morgan it was. It was a tough editorial decision. Megan do you envision you might have to do things like that in the future . Whats your process . Morgan im sure we will. We make so much content every day. As we grow, we will continue to put out a kind of content every day. I think it is about having a strong Editorial Team, and having Community Guidelines about what is ok and not ok. If something is flagged, it is not a surprise. Megan blavity is about creating relevant content for black millennials. How do you determine what is relevant to them, or to us . To me . [laughter] morgan thats a great question. I think it is really about listening to what people are saying, a