2014年3月30日日曜日

Jay Nath at VIP Hackathon

Jay Nath, Chief Innovation Officer at City and County of San Francisco came to VIP hackathon to give a talk.

This is the website of SF Mayor's Office of Civic Innovation.

http://innovatesf.com/


This is their team, they have 7 staffs including Jay:

http://innovatesf.com/about/

He introduced a whole bunch of projects that they are running:

An online platform that makes it easy to start a business and to grow their businesses.


ImproveSF, a website to invite citizens to submit ideas to improve San Francisco, and spur projects for the government and citizens to work together in solving those problems.


Some examples from ImproveSF:

Central Market/Tenderloin Food Access Challenge


Living Innovation Zones is a project to improve public spaces in San Francisco. One of the outcomes is this outdoor art space which was created on Market Street at Yerba Buena Lane by Exploratorium.


Entrepreneurship In Residence is a program that selects talented entrepreneurial teams and help them develop technology-enabled products and services that can capitalize on the $140+ billion public sector market by providing them with direct and ongoing access to government needs and opportunities, staff, their expertise and their pain points.

6 startups and 6 SF government departments will work for 16 weeks on this program.


Open Data

SF is working hard on open data, and wants to be the leader in the open data movement.


This open data movement started when President Obama released the Open Gov Directive.


The federal government launched Data.Gov- Vivek Kundra launched the data portal in DC, and joined the federal government as Chief Information Officer and launched data.gov for the federal government.


3 months later, San Francisco launched DataSF which was extremely fast.


Why were they able to launch so quickly? "We bypassed the procurement process by using open source softwares" says Jay. "We talked with the necessary people, which was mayor and lots of lawyers. We hosted press conference. We said, if you want to stop us, talk to the mayor."

This is how the SF data portal looks now.



They also launched the apps showcase.


Several examples from the showcase:

HowSFVotes is a very cool visualization of how citizens votes in SF.


311 Visualization, "actually there was a proposal from Microsoft for doing this with half a million dollars to make this, but it was done free by an individual" says Jay. Impressive!


Routesy is a cool government-citizen collaboration project creating mobile app that gives users fast access to up-to-date information about the Bay Area's most popular transit agencies: San Francisco Muni, BART, Caltrain, and AC Transit.


SFpark is a project to show real-time parking availability.


And I am happy to hear that not only did they build and launch this app, but now they are entering evaluation phase of this project. This was a 20 million dollar experiment, so they want to verify whether it is it working or not, looking at the data feeds and apps, and evaluating the next steps by Spring/Summer of 2014.

Urban Forest Map is a project that integrates data created by the government and the community, to create a map.


Open311 API

There were lots of read-only APIs, but for Open311, Jay wanted to create a read/write API that enables community input, but the objections he had was "why are you trying to make hackers into our system?" He said one of his staffs was suspended for 5 days for this...

How did he get around this time? He worked with the White house!


This time he would say "If you want to stop us, talk with the mayor or the White House." San Francisco is really lucky to have this guy!!

And today, there are lots of data, lots of apps and the ecosystem is continuing to grow.

 

New project that are taking place now:

Restaurant inspection score was extremely hard to get although it was public. So SF city worked with Yelp and Code for America to integrate that data into Yelp. Jay recalls "More than the technical difficulties, it was political difficulties that got in the way. Restaurant community hated this. But this information is needed for citizens, so we pushed it forward. Suppose you are taking your kids to restaurant- you want to know the inspection result of that restaurant don't you?"


Housing data was hard in that it was something that required access to multiple departments- so they partnered with Trulia and Code for America to enable citizens to acquire data about the housing.


Open law project is an initiative to make the laws of San Francisco more accessible to the citizens.

http://open.innovatesf.com/openlaw/

The law of San Francisco on Github:
https://github.com/SFMOCI/openlaw

 

And they partnered with Open Gov Foundation to launch San Francisco Decoded site:


Opem Data Legislation is something they are working on with SPUR, Sunlight Foundation etc.

- Establish Chief Data Officer
- Open data coordinators in each agency
- Develop an inventory of data assets
- Provide citizens with secure access to their own private data
- Structural changes so that our City is open by default
 (1) Data belongs to the City not the vendor
 (2) Software that we purchase must have a public API


Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer. -Fumi Yamazaki

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