CityCampSF Hackathon Judges
Shannon Spanhake recently joined the City and County of San Francisco to focus on building an OpenGov program within the Dept. of Technology. She aims to strengthen and enable partnerships between public, private, and people sectors to identify and solve civic challenges. Previously, she held a dual appointment as a Sr. Researcher at the Center for Development Finance and also a Post-doc at the California Institute for Telecom and IT. She has a patent-pending for a citizen-powered wireless sensor networking technology and she has co-founded cultural spaces in Mexico and India that explore the community and urban dynamics.
@shannonspanhake | Shannoninsf.blogspot.com
Jake Levitas is a designer, consultant, and community activist based in San Francisco. He currently serves as Research Director at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, a leading Bay Area nonprofit dedicated to fostering creative applications of technology, data visualization, and digital art. He has led and worked on a number of creative technology projects, and managed GAFFTA's four-month Summer of Smart initiative that brought together government and the creative class to build solutions to city issues using open data. His multidisciplinary background includes several years of experience in urban planning, mapping, information design, and sustainability consulting, as well as work in graphic design, audio production, and architecture. @civicinnovation
Sherry Willhoite joined Granicus in November of 2010 and is VP of Product Management
. She brings with her over 12 years of experience in industry leading consumer Internet companies including Yahoo!, Friendster and Spark Networks. Sherry has a track record for building highly trafficked online communities, monetizing businesses through advertising and direct subscription memberships and optimizing user experience for key business metrics. She brings a unique combination of in-the-trenches product management, high-level product strategy and analytical business optimization.
Loren L. Hart has more than 35 years of experience as a computer scientist and systems architect. He received his education in computer science at U.C. Berkeley and has since worked for Schlumberger, Sun Microsystems’ JavaSoft, Nanobiz, Data Ace, and Verisign before joining Theranos in 2006. He has garnered extensive experience in Unix systems and kernels, having worked on them since 1980, and has also contributed code to Linux. His work on Java-based commerce and security has earned a patent one-time password tokens, and he has designed and implemented mush of the server-side security systems used in Theranos products.
Javier Muniz draws on his broad knowledge of networking and application development to provide direction on product strategy and design for Granicus’ product development team as Chief Technology Officer. Javier, Granicus' co-founder, enjoys leveraging new technologies to solve pervasive business issues for Granicus and its customers. In his role, he’s able to act as a visionary and technical expert to ensure products meet the desired goal for the company and our valued customers. Javier began his career at Sun Microsystems designing and managing remote access components of the Sun global network infrastructure. Later, he went on to WebTV Networks where he designed and developed applications used by the Network Operations Center to manage over 600 nodes that supported over 1 million active WebTV subscribers. @javicmuniz
Briefing Doc
This is the briefing document I've provided for prospective lead legislative sponsors (see questions and comments below):
Along with a number of other open government advocates, I've launched a campaign to put a definition of "open data online" into California and San Francisco law. The issue is that often when documents and data are published online, they cannot be accessed or used in a meaningful fashion because they cannot be searched, indexed by Google, or combined in a meaningful way with other documents for analysis. I want to tackle this not by mandating that certain documents and data be published online, but simply by creating a reference standard so that when new mandates pass, or new documents are published online as a matter of course under existing law or regular business, they are in accessible formats.
This has the benefits of making things easier for people who use screen readers, for developer who want to use public data to build applications, for transparency advocates, and is simply good policy. Publishing data in formats that can't be searched, compared to other documents or reused in a meaningful way is as useless as keeping it tucked away in an obscured file cabinets. Publishing in accessible formats online is as simply as education employees in how to properly save and store documents for online publication using the same software they already have on their computers. In an ironic demonstration of the current problem, San Francisco's current open data law was published by the Board of Supervisors as an unsearchable PDF.
- Javier Muniz, CTO and co-founder, Granicus (based in SoMa and one of the greatest open gov tech company success stories in the U.S.)
- Steve Ressler, founder, GovLoop
- Rep. Jason Murphey, Chairman of the House Goverment Modernization Committee, Oklahoma
- Scott Primeau, OpenColorado
- Luke Frewell, founder and publisher, GovFresh
- and many more who can be viewed online - http://www.wiredtoshare.com/structured_open_data_campaign
Structured Open Data Campaign - Sign On!
Here's the FAQ on SB 1002 (pdf)
And here's the draft bill text for SB 1002 (pdf)
Comments meant for official consideration should be directed to Alicia Lewis, alicia.lewis [at] sen.ca.gov
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Open data in San Francisco, the state of California, and throughout much of the U.S. and the world remains hobbled by a lack of legal definition. San Francisco's own open data law, for example, is posted online by the Board of Supervisors as a non-searchable PDF. On December 10-11, at the winter CityCampSF Hackathon, Gov 2.0 advocates will publicly launch an advocacy campaign to institute an open data standard in San Francisco municipal and California state law. The primary goal of this advocacy will be to achieve a clear and reasonable definition of open data for all materials required by law to be published online.
Please join us in endorsing this advocacy campaign, and encourage your friends and legislators to sign on as well.
Use our recruiting tools to rally your friends to this important cause.
For more backgound on open data laws, check out Civic Commons - Data Policy Policy; and Open Standards Policy.
For another definition of open data online that we will consider, see the CityCamp model Open Government directive, which describes open data as being published online in an "open format that can be retrieved, downloaded, indexed, sorted, searched, and reused by commonly used Web search applications and commonly used software."
This legislation should also encompass the goals of increased transparency in responses to SF Sunshine Ordinance requests and California Public Records Act requests - documents released in an electronic format after implementation of this ordinance would have to follow its standards of accessibility.
Machine-readability: Data should be published in structured formats easily processed by machines/software.
Government Social Media: If You Don't Want to Engage, Don't Bother
And much of the hand-wringing over official social media use is about the public - what if they say something we don't like! Many of the agencies using shiny tools like Facebook and or Twitter don't even allow comments on their Web sites, even sites they call "blogs."
Fear and failure to engage are simple reinforcing citizen concerns that government doesn't listen and doesn't care.
According to an April Pew study on trust in government, "By almost every conceivable measure Americans are less positive and more critical of government these days."
I, and, I hope, thousands of other Government 2.0 advocates, have not spent the last two years building a movement to have it end up as "The System 2.0."
Some may argue that government needs to be on social media channels because of the large audiences. However, I cannot state more emphatically - if you're considering a social media channel, but don't want to provide citizen (customer) service and two-way engagement on that platform, you shouldn't bother.
Using new media channels for one-way broadcasts and propaganda will only further alienate the people we serve. There are plenty of agencies using social media to engage and build trust. Join them, or don't bother.
Resources:
Pew: Distrust, Discontent, Anger and Partisan Rancor - The People and Their Government
GovFresh: The politics of open government free speech
EPA social media response matrix chart
Radical Open Source Law Project Swings Through San Francisco
Malamud is not a lawyer, but he's met plenty - allies and adversaries - in his time as the nation's "rogue archivist." If you want open government, Malamud's your go-to guy. Intense and lightly sweating, at 9 a.m. he was decorating tables with postcards highlighting one of Law.gov's foundational elements, a state-by-state national inventory of legal materials; after the event, he broke down the space himself. Soon he'll be in Chicago and DC before returning home to the Bay Area and wrapping up a project report. He exudes a revolutionary zeal and the steady confidence of a veteran of many open government and privacy skirmishes.
Wednesday's series of panelists balanced open data dreams with hard truths about privacy in the globalized infoweb. Bob Berring, a UC Berkeley law professor, summed up the core issue: Carl is working on a 10 year old's question: Government has laws. We have to obey those laws. Where are they?
Twitter in-house counsel Alexander Macgillivray talked about the difficulty for legal staff's at small companies to afford basic research because of high Westlaw and Lexis fees - fees that units of government pay as well for access to legal documents.
Malamud believes that the law is one area that the disintermediating promise of the Internet has barely touched, and he brought in friend O'Reilly for a lunchtime discussion with California Secretary of State Debra Bowen. "What are we missing as a society because we are denied access to what is essentially the open source of our democracy?" O'Reilly asked.
A recurring theme was the problem of authentication of legal materials online, and the implied authority of the two major vendors. Erika Wayne, a Stanford law librarian, asked if anyone had seen an "informational only" disclaimer - common on web legal materials - on a physical book.
Chris Hoofnagle, a privacy researcher and UC Berkeley law professor also had a stark warning about the need to protect individual privacy as advocates seek to put more government information online. He argued that believers in "Big Brother" powers for the government - "I'm serious" - will use the language of the transparency movement to accomplish their goal of a surveillance society.
Despite the serious mission and very real challenges, the promising theme of open data, Law 2.0 mashups and lowered barriers to legal knowledge was not lost. Said Macgillivray, imagine a statue with its own Twitter account, tweeting its revisions.







