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

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.

Here's the FAQ on SB 1002 (pdf)

And here's the draft bill text for SB 1002 (pdf)

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.