I encounter this 2 years ago when I co-founded the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, in San Francisco. It’s become a real nexus for digital types, creative storytellers and artists. San Francisco had just opened up hundreds of municipal data sets. We collaborated with Stayman Design to create a show around this. We mad an exhibit of crime data in San Francisco and unfortunately the greatest concentration of crime was right in our location. I thought the community would throw a fit!
Who were we to come in and put up this big display and show where crime is going on? I got completely defensive and really open did not seem like a very goo idea at the time; boy was I wrong. The police came to the exhibit and love it, they we’re saying things like, “Look. I made that arrest.” People started paying attention. Single parents in the community, which the our part of town, the Tenderloin, has the greatest concentration of, were saying “finally someone is paying attention to our problems.” This was electric, suddenly designers, geeks, and urbanists were coming together as much to build urban prototypes, solve problems and get messy with the city as they were creating art. I was completely astounded by the whole thing. The Tenderloin has many problems; one is that it’s really noisy. How would you get people to pay attention to that? Well on another prototyping weekend the folks from Stayman and Orup design firms got together with some artists and deployed sensors in the neighborhood, measured the noise, and shared the visualization with the city; asking no one for permission.
I was at City Hall one day talking to a city supervisor about applications and open data, and how it would change everything. The supervisor looked at me and said, “What are you talking about? Will all of that data get me reelected? Will my constituents like it? Will you help?” I suddenly felt like the IT guy talking to business user who had no idea what I was talking about. I was a victim of Enthusiastic Data Syndrome. I realized from my days in enterprise marketing that it was out job to get the city engaged with us and solve things together, or it wouldn’t work. We had an election coming up and I started wondering what if we actually got the candidates to be coconspirators, to be creators to actually be clients for projects? Could bottom-up innovation be sustainable in the city? We came up with this idea called “The Summer of Smart”, where we would take 16 candidates, run hackathons all summer and see; could we produce sustainable change?
 “Facebook and Twitter, they've got an ecosystem; we're trying to build that same platform for government. Hopefully, we're developing an urban operating system.” |  “When you’re looking at civic application think: What is the one thing you want people to do? And design your application around that.” - Margarita Quihuis |
We ran a summer-long set of activities and at the very end the best applications were presented to the candidates and they all sat around debating the best way to implement this stuff. We pitched it as basically the Silicon Valley Innovation Playbook; fast-fail ideation, but applied to the city. If you’re a liberal you loved it because finally it was progressive ideas moving quickly. And if you were conservative you loved it because it was less government and more self-determination. Candidates loved it because it was ideas worth stealing, literally. One of the candidates was complaining to me one day that another candidate had stolen all her good ideas and put them on his website and I thought if we could just come up with enough good ideas and they steal them all, we’re influencing the city.
We had 500 people show up throughout the city; 10,000 hours. It showed there was an enormous amount of cognitive surplus that wanted to work on this, and we see this over and over again. You also see that it's this kind of diverse talent matching a city bureaucrat, up with a non-profit, up with a coder that unleashes this kind of innovation. Here's an example, our head of public works showed up and said, "Where we see public art, we don't see graffiti. Where we see graffiti and blight, it's not very interesting, there's no public art. Could that lead to a solution?" If you were a geek, it was very clear this was a dating app between buildings and artists. They actually went ahead and built that app, and the idea was looking for a business model that actually got picked up by Zero One, an arts organization in San Jose, that launched it as Art Here. They basically said, "Let's take a whole bunch of space in San Jose and use it as a prototype digital campfire, or digital canvas." They have NEA funding and the artists, kind of like the WPA, but in the current world. They actually see this as a platform, or as they would say, an open source project for crowd source urban revitalization, and it’s moving back to San Francisco and onto Palo Alto.
There are instances where you get a candidate that shows up with an app that makes you cry. Dennis Herrera, the City Attorney of San Francisco, was running for mayor and he showed up with the Fire Department App. The basic idea being lets say someone is having a heart attack and by the time 911 arrives it may be too late; but their maybe someone nearby who has CPR training. He learned about this app form Sam Ramon, and they the only city I know of to make a commercial for an application. Remember if you’re a city, don’t make a video about something that’s a bad idea.
(Concluded in Rebooting Tomorrow Pt. 3)
(Concluded in Rebooting Tomorrow Pt. 3)
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