oakland

And coming from behind: Alameda County to adopt OpenData!

Posted on by spjika

Some days you get pleasant surprises. Some days bureaucrats really do get stuff done. Some days government staff really do agree and align their efforts with those of the elected leaders who typically just butt heads with those they lead. Yesterday was one of those days.

Alameda County is going to be adopting an opendata platform this year, with either a live portal or an alpha version for internal review by the board of supervisors retreat in September. Just like that. Well, not quite that easy. Late last year we were part of a new committee setup by Supervisor Nate Miley to examine ways to integrate data between agencies and after some initial discussions we pushed the group to consider the value of making much of these data available to the public. We delivered a few demos on our web mapping and data tools and developed some materials showing the benefits, principles and reasons for opendata in governement. As with the City of Oakland I drafted a policy piece, some guidelines on how to select data within each department and a guide to implementing opendata across the county. Couple meetings happen, then nothing, silencio.

But during the silence the county was actually doing something constructive. Albeit choosing a vendor (some things don’t change), one with a heavy monopoly, but still making a good decision for the county. Alameda County will be rolling out a Socrata portal.  Now I do like their tools, they make an excellent product, I’m just saddened to see a steady monopoly in a space that is all about openness, opensource and innovation. Personal grievance aside, this is GREAT!

There is now some real momentum to this working committee to make something happen. Socrata got the nod because it’s just so damn easy, turnkey and all that. I can’t disagree, it really lowers the barrier to entry for agencies without the opensource chops to stand up a CKAN instance, sadly, and that will likely be the same scenario in most US cities I’m guessing, although it will be interesting to see just what Junar can come up with.

There’s a lot of work to do, many agencies have reservations, many have piss-poor data ecosystems and this seems threatening, but there is some exciting progress, including the sheriff agreeing to publish their data in a usable format for the first time publicly. Did you know that Alameda’s sheriff published block level (hmm) crime data to Crimereports.com for the past year? I didn’t, not that it matters much when you only publish government data into one closed, average system.

Our next step is to work through some issues that we’ve discovered within the county systems in the course of our work- serious data deficiencies that only a small does of modernizing would yield some serious gains. We’re also hoping to get a couple of new data sets released in time for the next #CodeforOakland hackathon on July 21st. I’ll also be curious to see if a larger urban county can help to pull up some of the smaller cities in it’s coverage to use their same data platform.

What is surprising is that despite their being serious approval of this effort at an elected leader level there isn’t a desire to formalize this effort in legislation, policy or directive. I suggested that this rare circumstance of staff and leaders wanting the same thing is the perfect opportunity to get supporting legislation or directives in place- partly to sustain it beyond the current champions and also to really leverage these good efforts. It’s really wonderful to see county staff and leaders working in the same direction- it’s not as common as you may think. Once again technology and data are really capable of bringing about cultural and functional changes beyond their seemingly innocuous scope of impact. Geeks unite, open government is creeping forward.

How to (not) support new business in Oakland

Posted on by spjika

There’s a lot of excitement in Oaktown lately, lots of amazing national press coverage about how amazing our town is, how great and diverse the food and culture is, the art and music scene and the bustling new venues to enjoy. People in city hall and various chambers are talking about new business opportunities here and are optimistic about the chances for a real retail and commerce boost to this wonderful but struggling city. I’ve been chatting with people about the ways to enable and encourage new business start-ups, in both the tech and regular retail/commerce world, lots of folks are positive about spaces being leased and used from Jack London to Uptown. Then I ran across a hackathon (that is sadly fully booked, say what?) with a focus on building opportunities for commonly disenfranchised and discouraged communities to help establish new businesses in their communities, very cool TED. And I started thinking about how a new entrepreneur goes about finding the space for their new business in San Francisco, and conversely how they would do the same in Oakland. Profound differences.

In SF you quickly stumble upon the official SF Prospector, an online tool that is old and clunky from a UI point of view but never the less allowed me to pick some square footage requirements, select an area of interest, a leasing rate and some other sensible variables and then to automate the process of finding possibly suitable sites. For my theoretical new photography studio I found a good location, that happened (by pure luck I’m sure) to be on a block with several other photographic studios close by, so fortunate locality with related traffic in the area, awesome.

But if I wanted my new site to be in sunny Oakland, to establish my new business in this side of the bay? Good luck. Leg work, connections, various real estate and small business sites with no real info and no leads. Nada from the city or the county. So we have a new dream team of the city administrator Deanna Santana, well reputed deputies in Scott Johnson and Fred Blackwell and zero ability for new business owners or expanding ones to find possible new locations quickly and online and at no cost. I was really stunned, nothing official, nothing to make the path smooth to help business locate in our town. WTF.

We recently soft launched www.infoalamedacounty.org as a web mapping and data viz tool to allow people to combine public data from multiple city and county agencies, all in one place, to promote data driven decision making and real, informed planning decisions. We aimed at our main partners in the CBO community, organizers and policy makers needing better access to data. But it may be that we need to load in all our countywide property data, connect up the foreclosure filings (which are privately held and sold by the way, or scraped…) and wait till the city releases all the current business permit data and vacancy info so we can just build this ourselves. The technology is no longer a real barrier, building interactive, responsive, usable tools to support our community should be a no-brainer for our governments, but it seems very slow in coming in the east bay. Technology is an enabler, but only if you choose to use it that way.

PS If you do know of a web based tool that does help businesses plan and launch in Oakland PLEASE let me know, I’d be happy to eat my words and let people know that it is actually possible!

Calling on the Mayor – Show coders some love!

Posted on by spjika

Once again, in another California city not too far, far away, a city is showing leadership and is capturing the talents, passions and excitement of an incredibly valuable, natural resource- the tech community. Sounds like San Diego had a cracking hackathon last month and some interesting new tools were built, but most importantly this event was endorsed, supported and the key apps from the competition will be sustained with help from the Mayor of San Diego, Jerry Sanders.

In Oaktown we have seen some interest in this world expressed by a few city councilors so far, although barely two city staff attended the main Code for Oakland event last year and none attended the OpenData Hackathon later in 2011. It seems our new deputy city administrator Scott Johnson is interested in the developer world and how it can benefit our city but once again, to really move stuff we need the support of our Mayor. Please understand the huge potential for the city and it’s residents. This is not a bunch of OWS hackers looking to jack with the system, we’re (others at least are…) a community of immensely talented, broadly experienced, civicly interested software developers, coders, builders, engineers, scientists who would love to get some love from our city leaders.

http://www.govtech.com/wireless/San-Diego-Results-Hackathon.html

Just had to vent a little. I hate wasted opportunities 😉

OpenData v Absentee Councilors

Posted on by spjika

After all the excitement (mostly on my part) of finally seeing an opendata resolution making its way through city hall, just like that, pow, it’s off again. At a Finance Committee Meeting, two city councilors (Brooks, and the committee Chair, De La Fuente) didn’t show, rendering the meeting null, no quorum, hence no vote to support an opendata resolution for Oakland, hence no change happening yet, no better engagement with the tech community, no new start-up possibilities encouraged just yet…

We are on the agenda now for the next month… sure this can wait, but every extra month it takes is an extra month where our city isn’t improving, isn’t getting better PR, isn’t enabling innovative new solutions that government data can help unlock. And that’s a shame.

OpenData hits Oakland City Council

Posted on by spjika

Today is a very exciting day in the city of Oakland, especially so if you’re in any way interested in public data, civic engagement, open government and technology incubation and innovation in your community. At noon today the city council’s Finance and Management Committee (sounds fun doesn’t it!) will hear a resolution and likely pass said resolution requiring the city to move towards a true OpenData platform. After 18 months of civic hackers, developers, journos and tech heads talking, encouraging, blogging and educating our elected officials, we finally are at a place where our cities enormous data holdings can be utilized for more than mere compliance reporting and perhaps occasional management tasks.

This represents some very real, very powerful change for our town. It means that our rich developer community will have a huge trove of data to work with for app development, research, analysis, data visualization, accountability work and for planning of new businesses in the tech and non-tech sectors. It’s a chance for us to not be a lagging city, to really tap the potential we have both internally in city hall and in our residents.

Imagine- being able to quickly and easily find all the current business permits by address, to compare that with the vacant and blighted property datasets, city zoning standards for every parcel,  to then add in the best crime data, population demographics and public works calls for service- all the key pieces of information a potential new business owner would want to consider placing a new location in Oakland. Key things that allow commerce to grow and prosper, all available to everyone, at no cost. The potential for our town is huge, city data warehouses, bureaucratic spiderwebs of red tape and uncertainty over what data exists and can be released are a real and present barrier to growth and development in our city, especially in micro-enterprise and new, innovative start-ups. But this can change.

The resolution hitting the committee today, introduced by Council member Libby Schaaf is a result of slow, honest education of our elected officials and leaders of the value of data to both our community and to city staff, and open data policy, process and web portal will mean incredibly smooth access to data for city staff and officials that do not have access even now, which is a travesty.  It’s also a result of some fantastic field building efforts courtesy of CivicCommons, Code for America and the Sunlight Foundation.

Now that several other US cities have established OpenData policies and work-flows, I don’t see the need to go through all the pain and red tape of new policies drafted by committees in every single city in the US, (ala my piece on Barriers v Processes). I’ll write up the whole process from day one of trying to get a city to consider and implement an OpenData policy once it’s all done, but for now I want to show how the pieces can be massaged to work together.

The resolution and the report for the committee includes concepts, large chunks of text and principles from the following sources:

So we’re not there yet, but it’s finally happening, and I want to make sure the above sources get due credit for making the path straighter for us here in Oakland. If we can build and reuse technology in government we sure as hell should be reusing policies, reusing approaches to get new policies in place or at least considered, and reusing approaches to highlight the value of opendata for our local governments.

Lastly, regarding the build-out of an opendata portal for Oakland, as we had been planning (via Urban Strategies Council and the Code for America Brigade), we are going to wait for this resolution to pass, hoping that the city administrator or mayor’s staff will be willing to really engage us and the tech community to plan and help build out a system for both the community and the city to use and manage. I’d always prefer a partnership approach than a solo gunman approach. Hopefully this will be the first big opportunity for the city to open up and work with its very skilled, motivated tech community!

Code for America in Oaktown?

Posted on by spjika

Today the City of Oakland met with Code for America to learn more about the fellowship and how it could benefit our town. We had representatives from the Mayor’s office, the new deputy Administrator, city council and ourselves. There was real excitement from the city folks about this partnership, and a very sure commitment from leadership that the city was serious about this possibility and clearly understood the benefits we stand to reap from being part of Code for America in 2013. This was for the first time a group of senior leaders who were willing to stick out their necks and allow for innovation in city hall. There was a clear understanding of many impediments our city faces to improving service delivery, being a more open and engaged city, removing barriers and blockages to effective service delivery and to allowing new technology to be a spur for process changes.

I’m personally very excited about this effort. Our city has faced numerous real challenges in the past year and there seemed to be no coordinated leadership to effectively use technology to improve our city and no chance city hall would get it together to present a cohesive, thought out application for CfA. But they’re on it. Giddy would be appropriate. I went in hoping it wouldn’t be CfA needing to sell itself to the city and was very happy to see the city staff and leaders being gung-ho to start this relationship and to become part of this dynamic, powerful network that CfA represents.

The idea pitched by the city resonates with my experience working in and with the city.  But I’m not going to steal anyone’s thunder by publishing what it was- that honor needs to remain with the people who actually formed the idea (and dealt with my constant stream of encouragement and nagging to become a CfA city). Combined with a very serious plan to move an OpenData policy through city council, this represents some really positive changes for our town. I’ve been open about poor decisions and bad tech in the past but I’m going to be even more vocal about good decisions and people trying to innovate and take risks rather than do the same ol thing the same ol way that never worked in the first place.

Let’s go Oakland! (Yes I just watched Moneyball and nearly shed a tear hearing that chant as Beane walked back into the stadium on the 20th game of the streak.)

Coding Across America (and Oakland!)

Posted on by spjika

Code Across America: A Week of Civic Innovation

From February 24 through March 4, passionate citizens around the country will come together to “Code Across America” – to make their cities even better. In over a dozen cities, there will be hackathons to build civic apps, “brigades” to deploy existing ones, unconferences to plan for the year ahead, and meetups to strengthen the community. Check out details of what’s going on and where it’s happening below.

Details

When: Simultaneous event, February 25; Ongoing, February 24 – March 4
What: Activities ranging from hackathons and app deployments to unconference sessions
Who: Urbanists, Civic Hackers, City Reps, Developers, Designers, etc — anyone with the passion to make their city better
How: Bring together the city government with a supporting community group, organization, or business, and reach out to a broad range of participants with diverse backgrounds and skills

OAKLAND EVENTS (Hosted in SF)

OPEN DATA FOR OAKLAND/ALAMEDA PLANNING TEAM

If you’re an Oakland based coder, developer, designer, journo, researcher and you want to help build the first Oakland OpenData portal then please join us next weekend (Feb 25th @10am).  We are partnering with the alpha event of the Code for America Brigade for the first Code Across America day and will spend the day laying out the plans for this new resource for Oaktown.

We want your ideas, feedback, critique, concepts and creative spirit to help us make this work for everyone in Oakland. In mid/late March we will host a hack day in Oakland to do the dev work and get the site up and running, but the planning phase is just as important. We want to brainstorm with you on how we deal with the City/County split, which system we adopt- either the OpenDataPhily or the CKAN system, how it’s hosted and who will contribute to maintaining it, branding and promotion and more. We don’t want to do this in isolation so here’s your chance to help make this happen and to make sure your voice is heard.

More on the OpenData planning effort here.

PUBLIC ART MAPPER FOR OAKLAND

We’re going to start lifting up what Oakland is really about- great art and culture! Too much bad press gets a brother down, so let’s put our heads together and build something dope for our town that will elevate our profile beyond crime and out-of control protests. Art. Art and tech. We are the creative town, so let’s make it known.

The previous year’s fellows at Code for America built a great little app called the Public Art Mapper– it lets you snap pics and upload locations of any public art in your town, then visitors, friends, tourists can find the great art in our town via a smartphone app, on twitter and even check in to the locations and discuss each spot using Foursquare. The app has already been rolled out in SF, Portland and Philadelphia.

More details on this effort here.

FAQ

What’s a “Brigade” event? This year, Code for America is launching the CfA Brigade to bring together groups of civic hackers in cities across the country, focused on customizing and deploying civic apps locally. These Brigade events will be the kick off: each city will identify an app to focus on, customizing it for their needs, standing it up, and getting it in the hands of users by the end of the day.

How do I participate? Find your city on the map above or the list to the right and join the event there. If you don’t see your city, then host your own event using our guide, and if you can’t make it happen on February 25, don’t worry, Code Across America events are happening all week long, February 24 – March 4. Contact us if you need some help or want more information.

An Open Letter to Oakland: Innovate or stagnate.

Posted on by spjika

Today in SF one of my favorite organizations had a big launch event with Mayor Ed Lee. I’m incredibly proud to have been a program mentor for Code for America in it’s inaugural year and have gained so much from my involvement with and support of CfA this past year. I swear that at every single tech, geospatial, gov and urbanist event I’ve attended in 2011 I’ve run into CfA fellows and have had great conversations and felt a huge kinship with the amazing people who have volunteered their year in service of our country.

Today the CfA CEO Jen Pahlka and the Mayor of SF announced the new accelerator startup that that will partner with cities to help streamline city processes and apply the innovation and energy of the startup tech world to the challenges of city government in SF and other cities. Also announced was the move of Jay Nath from the SF Tech Dept to the Mayor’s new Chief Innovation Officer position, congrats Jay and very impressive decision by a proactive Mayor Lee!

What does this usual tech innovation and government transformation mean to us in the East Bay? Firstly we need our city leaders and officials to recognize and support the great wealth of talent we have in the technology sector in Oakland. San Francisco is seen as the hub of tech innovation, but the reality is that Oakland has this facet also- Pandora is my personal fav of the Oakland tech startups to make it, and is a great employer in our city. Given the turnout at the first Code for Oakland event we helped run last year and the recent OpenData Day Hackathon we ran, it’s very clear to me how many interested, talented, creative technology developers we have in our town, and the reality that too many of our leaders do not appreciate is that these professionals want to support, improve, grow and celebrate our city.

Secondly we need to encourage a culture of innovation and creativity in city government, especially in the realm of technology and community engagement. I’ve had a chance to work with many city staff across different departments and can draw out a long list of problems, failures and flaws that other cities in the CfA program have also identified as weak points and have now developed open source solutions to fix these weaknesses. Currently the city is leaderless in this space and our county is not far ahead of the city. There is no support of the local tech community from city hall, no spirit of entrepreneurship emanating from the city hall, no  effort to be a platform for civic innovation and very little real engagement with this hugely talented pool of local software engineers who have a habit of finding incredible solutions to city tech issues.

This frustrates the crap outta me. As a city we have all the ducks lined up, all we need is a city structure that supports and leverages the opportunities and tools already built. Our government can and should be a platform for civic innovation and new tech startups. But what needs to happen first is that the city shows some intentional leadership on this. Like San Francisco we should create a role for an Innovation Director for the city, either in the Tech Dept or in the Mayor’s office. We should also consider the need to have the ITD director as a cabinet level position- technology is not just a bunch of back room nerds doing desktop support and the person responsible for all the city tech infrastructure should not be merely a director level with no strategic input at the Mayor’s table. This person would be empowered to motivate and mobilize our great tech community to help build new solutions for our city and to help adapt many of the tools built through CfA and in the Civic Commons to collaboratively improve our city technology solutions. Many of our tech problems have been solved in other cities and all we need to to is pick from existing open sourced applications and implement them in our town.

From my work here are a few quick areas that I’ve seen solutions for either out of CfA or in the Civic Commons:

  • Contracting processes: currently a small business contract with the city for perhaps a few thousand dollars requires the business to complete approximately 12 different documents, from word docs to locked PDFs, so they must print them all and fill them out by hand, and then submit copies. I can only imagine the city process for recording and managing these various forms when they are received. Take a look at the SmartPDF work in SF for a powerful solution, or just make the effort to combine all these forms into a single, fill-able PDF at the very least, and one day perhaps implement web based forms?
  • Adopt an Open311 system for calls for service. This platform, developed in SF and DC is an open source 311 system that has open connectors and a new public dashboard feature developed by CFA. Very powerful and no proprietary software required.
  • Work with the county to build a unified property addressing system.
  • Implement Classtalk.org across the OUSD and help our teachers keep in touch with their students via SMS – perfect for a community with low internet access at home!
  • Implement ChangeByUs, a great new tool for community engagement and collaboration.
  • Implement an OpenData policy and work with our tech community to build an OpenData portal for our city. Free up valuable city data to encourage innovation, engagement and new startups! We’re doing this anyway, but it should be supported by our city!

One glimmer of hope is the recent decision of the city Public Works agency to adopt a tool called SeeClickFix. This is the first tech move that indicates a move to more open, innovative software selection for Oakland and I’m excited about this move. We’ve already had access to this app to a degree but this new step means the city will be integrating this web based citizen reporting tool with it’s newish CityWorks platform. Finally a set of tools that have open interfaces and allow the city to connect to other systems as they are implemented. This is great, a good, forward thinking decision and we need much more of it! So congratulations for this. Seriously.

I think our city has enormous potential to become a leader in this field, to be seen as a true innovator and a city of real collaborative efforts to solve our common problems. But our leaders need to step up and be real leaders in order to see this occur. Otherwise it will happen slowly and stubbornly on it’s own, and the city will not be recognized through this but will instead grow it’s reputation as an immovable, clunky, closed bureaucracy that did nothing to leverage the immense talent and interest of it’s residents.

I love my town and I’m excited to work for an organization who supports civic technology innovation. If our city steps up we’ll support their efforts aggressively. Our town needs some positive PR, and this one is all ready to go!
peace
Spike
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the Accelerator event

To hear about the accelerator as it ramps up