Lower barriers to entry by creating special zones where organizations, companies, and individuals can showcase new technologies, ideas and concepts through a single pilot permit. The permit would address liability, risk, safety and establish other terms such as length of pilot. The goal is to create a platform where innovation is encouraged in our physical spaces. An easy place to start is facilities and spaces managed by SF government.

Create a marketplace between needs expressed by City agencies, neighborhood organizations, etc to providers of potential solutions such as cleantech companies, urban designers, architects, and citizens. This is kind of like smartphone app stores, with the goal of improving discoverability and reducing friction.

Reduce friction by creating specialized permits. SF has done quite a bit in this area: parklet permit, pop-up restaurant permit, food truck permit, and urban farm permit. To create new permit classes we should consider letting our community innovate and see where we need to make structural changes (perhaps through pilot permits). Creating a centralized entry point for these types of permits to improve access and spread awareness would also be helpful. UPDATE 5/16/2012: SF Planning launched a one-stop for public space improvements.

Invest in R&D by allocating a very small percentage (1% or less) of capital projects to exploring and implementing new technologies. For example, a new playground could experiment with intelligent lighting that operates based on time and motion.

Hack SF by doing what Rebar did to parking spaces leading to Park(ing) day and parklets. One hack that should be explored is taking advantage of the street festival permit. The City for under $1K will close down streets, reroute traffic and change public transit routes. If the Folsom Street Fair is any indication we have quite a bit of freedom to experiment and innovate.

As we explore the possibilities of our public spaces we hope to invite our community to think about these ideas and others in the near future.

 The goal of procurement is noble: ensuring that we are wisely spending tax payer dollars; yet our approach often has the opposite effect by introducing significant administrative overhead and time without actually being smarter about purchasing. This investment in time and process would be worthwhile if we were optimally purchasing goods and services; however, the lack of access to tacit knowledge by many of the actors in the procurement process diminishes the ability to correctly make decisions.

The current approach to procurement is layers upon layers of review and approval. A typical procurement process might look something like this: your manager reviews your purchase, then your division manager,  finance manager, CFO, department director; then it leaves your agency to head to your central purchasing agency which goes through several rounds and of course your union wants to make sure that existing staff aren’t adversely affected. During all these reviews who actually understands the nuances of your purchase? Perhaps your manager and one other person does. What we need is the collective intelligence of the organization to determine if this purchase is appropriate; not just administrative staff who often know little about the specific purchase. In academia, the concept of peer review is a common practice to ensure that an academic paper’s suitability for publication. We simply need to shift the subject area from scientific papers to purchasing to see that this approach can be used to determine the suitability of a purchase.

Technology plays an important role to ensure that peer review is open and utilizes the collective intelligence of our communities. Technology helps achieve the scale required to introduce a distributed and open approach to peer review of the actual purchase that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Imagine a system where experts or non-experts could subscribe to specific topic areas like public safety and get notified of new purchases so they can provide comments, vote, and other signals to provide additional information to the traditional actors in the procurement process. This approach keeps the current process intact but provides invaluable tacit knowledge to each of the actors so they can make better decisions. Surfacing the collective tacit knowledge of an organization is critical to helping government recognize if and how we should purchase goods and services. As we face ever growing fiscal challenges, the need to actively experiment with government procurement through open peer review, cooperative purchasing, and other approaches has never been greater.

Outlook 2011 Mac Keyboard Shortcuts - The Definitive List

My list comes from the following two resources which did all the hard work:

http://www.groovypost.com/howto/microsoft/mac-outlook-2011-keyboard-shortcuts-cheat-sheet/
http://www.macworld.com/article/155037/2010/11/outlookkeyboard.html

It opens the door for experimentation on the edges: voice recognition, vehicles sensing potholes, and disaster response.

Voice Recognition

Mark Headd from Tropo is imagining a voice recognition service to begin exploring this area. As this technology improves and becomes embedded in iOS, Android and many other platforms I think this technology may become more common.

Intelligent Vehicles

Why report potholes if your car took care of this for you? With Open311, auto makers could put sensors on shock absorbers to automatically send this data to local governments. Of course more cities need to adopt Open311 but the possibility exists.

Disaster Response

When emergencies happen you want to make sure people are already using your service for non-emergencies. Otherwise getting people to adopt a new tool or behavior is really challenging. This is why we need to integrate Open311 into Ushahidi as David Eaves and Philip Ashlock are pushing for.

SF has been a supporter of Open311 and helped launch it with OpenPlans and DC. We continue to believe in the possibilities and hope other cities jump onboard like Toronto recently did.

So I decided to make SubsonicTV which lets you stream your personal music & video library to the Roku. This little black box allows you to access all kinds of media on your TV: Netflix, Amazon Video On Demand, Hulu Plus, Pandora and hundreds more. Since they have an SDK that allows anyone to create apps I partnered with Musiclouds to develop SubsonicTV.

The challenge with Roku is that it doesn’t make it easy for users to access local media content. To get around this we used an open source media player called Subsonic which has an open API. Subsonic can be installed on PC/Mac/Linux and can stream your library to your iPhone, Android, your computer – basically any internet connected device. Subsonic is fast, lightweight and super flexible; a great alternative to iTunes.

If you own a Roku, check out our free version and if you like it upgrade to our premium version.

Our goal should be to make the walls of government more permeable and bring our systems and people into the public square. We should take a page from the open source community and see if we can create an open source government – one that is fully transparent and closer to a peer-to-peer model.

Today, our only contact with public servants is taking the bus or at the DMV. Why can’t we meet with people who are managing the stolen bicycle process; or the team that designs our website? We have communities with so much creativity and passion, and yet we rarely invite them into our systems to see how they could be improved.

Strategies for Opening Government  Systems

• Hackathons – we’ve had tremendous success in bringing city staff to meet urbanists, developers, artists and others to solve problems. Check out the dozens of projects that were spun up as part of Summer of Smart
• Microvolunteering - launch an online/offline volunteerism portal/platform that also helps city staff post/manage opportunities.
• Challenges - great approach for areas that have multiple solution sets. We’re looking at this approach for helping design better services.
• Open Office Hours – I try to make myself available to anyone in our community who wants to help or has an idea. I even make my calendar available for people to schedule meetings

With government services and operations diminishing, the need for increased transparency couldn’t be greater. There is huge opportunity to reshape government to what we want it to be through co-creation.

Transforming Civic Volunteerism through an API

There are two challenges to scaling the matchmaking between civic opportunities and volunteers. The first is technical: how do we standardize sharing civic volunteer opportunities. This is critical to solve, otherwise these opportunities get buried in stand-alone closed networks like VolunteerMatch, or worse, agency websites. Thankfully, All for Good has solved this problem by creating an open platform for creating and discovering volunteer opportunities. Not only do they have an API for discovering volunteer opportunities, but they also allow providers like the City of SF to create civic volunteer opportunities through spreadsheets or in more automated approaches. Imagine if all cities used this platform to share volunteer opportunities; we could transform civic volunteerism with an API.

Creating a Culture of Transparency

The second challenge is to get local government staff to share their problems. This requires awareness and education. We need to let our staff know that a platform for sharing volunteer opportunities exists and how to use that platform. We also need to encourage them to use this platform instead of trying to solve the challenge on their own or hire a contractor (or worse just ignoring it). This won’t happen overnight as many don’t believe that volunteers can solve our problems; only city staff or paid contractors can. The realization that amateurs are often better than professionals because their motives are intrinsic vs external needs to be common knowledge. As Clay Shirky states in his book Cognitive Surplus “Doing something because it interests you makes it a different kind of activity than doing it because you are reaping external reward.”

A new culture of sharing and civic participation is a huge opportunity for local government to tap into. Platforms like All for Good provide the necessary tools to make this happen. My intent is to call upon my peers in other cities to join this effort and unlock our collective challenges. Transparency needs to go beyond data and information and should encompass our inner workings.

I’ve been a big fan of Vivek Wadhwa and Eric Ries for a couple of years now. When they spoke to nearly a hundred City of SF staff through our Innovation @Work series, both of them made a huge impression on me. It was during our subsequent conversations that I was surprised by the similarities between lean startup and what we had been practicing in our Office of Innovation.

What is Lean Government?

Lean government is traditionally defined as the application of lean production principles and methods to government services. The focus is on efficiency through frameworks based on lean manufacturing. In contrast, lean startup takes agile methodologies to rapidly test assumptions and go to market faster.  Both approaches have tremendous value and potential. The remainder of this post explores the application of lean startup principles to government.

Citizen Centric

While this seems self-evident, unfortunately there is not enough citizen focused design occurring in government. The examples are all around us: when we visit government websites or pay for parking tickets or try to search for answers. While services like 311 have done a great job to change this notion, we can do more. Open311 API represents the beginning of a shift in design where government becomes a facilitator and the public creates the citizen experience. But the change can be much simpler: design solutions with citizens in mind first and then work through the policy and operational challenges.

Open Source

Why open source in government? Several reasons:

• Shorter time to market as you can avoid a lengthy procurement process
• Ability to make changes real-time vs asking a vendor to put on a  product road map
• Near zero capital costs allows for experimentation leading to innovation
• Much closer to end-product than coding from scratch
• Ability to collaborate and share with other organizations

Lower capital costs and agility are the main benefits of open source software in government. That being said, we do extensive market research to find the best technology solution – open source or not. But using open source allows us to experiment since the typical constraints of procurement and cost are removed creating abundance. This abundance allows us to quickly test out hypothesis and discard them with little cost, increasing the potential for innovation. Our last option is to develop software from scratch but even then we leverage open source libraries and frameworks. A good example is our SmartPDF project which allows constituents to electronically submit information through PDFs. We developed our solution as a WordPress plugin and used libraries like Flexigrid to make interactive data grids.

Agile Design and Development

The idea of moving away from traditional waterfall approaches for government service development to more agile approaches is not new; however, it is fairly uncommon. The reasons for this are mainly institutional and cultural. Government places a high degree of effort in controlling risk; resulting in  more time creating documents and policies than producing actual work. This coupled with policies that require project proposals, business requirement documents, statement of work, memorandum of understanding, etc often lead to project cycles that span months to years. If we actually spent more time with our customers and developed iteratively, we have the potential to get to market more quickly. With rapid application development tools we can actually build faster than we can create documents. But this also requires the ability to focus on what is the most basic design that can help us validate our assumptions which Eric Ries refers to as Minimum Viable Product. Otherwise, our customers would continually ask for changes without every releasing a product. So how do we make that shift to agility? Ask for permission/beg for forgiveness to conduct a pilot project using agile methodologies. Make your customers advocates by demonstrating the value of seeing real output. Last sell your success and highlight agile development as a key component of that success.

Community Participation

The private sector has in the past several years recognized the value of customer driven product design.  Google, Facebook, Wikipedia all harness the power of consumer participation in shaping their services. There is tremendous potential in government tapping  into this powerful force. A great example is DARPA issuing a public challenge to develop the next generation combat vehicle. In four months a working vehicle was built. This approach is part of the larger Challenge.gov approach to harness innovation by experts and non-experts alike.  But community participation can happen in smaller ways as well. We often invite community members to help us think through design and technical questions. I recently asked my Twitter followers if we should open up DataSF to non-government data such as NGOs and academia. We’re now meeting with members of both of these communities to engage in more dialogue. There is a strong desire in our communities to be part of the solution and not mere consumers. We see this in hack events like Summer of Smart where my office is partnering with GAFFTA. The idea that we should collaborate with our community to co-produce solutions is moving from the abstract to the real with events like this and CityCampSF.

Lean Government as a Platform for Innovation

Scarcity has hampered our ability to innovate in government. It is the scarcity of ideas, solutions and creativity that stifles government. With our growing fiscal challenges and ageing workforce, the constraints on public sector are only increasing. With lean government we have the opportunity to create abundance. It is the abundance of ideas and solutions that will lead to innovation in government.

MS Outlook

A better way is what the San Jose Mayor and Council are doing which is to use the out of the box feature of Microsoft Exchange to automatically create a public calendar. All you need to do is:

1. Install WebDAV on MS IIS web server in DMZ

2. Publish your calendar to the web server

Google Calendar Sync

Another option that doesn’t require IT is to install Google Calendar Sync. Only caveat is that it doesn’t work on 64-bit machines like mine.

Google Calendar Sync allows you to sync events between Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook Calendar. You’ll be able to determine the direction of information flow, as well as the sync frequency.

Tungle

I found Tungle to be the best option for sharing my calendar.  Tungle has some killer features (no wonder RIM purchased them):

• super light-weight and doesn’t slow your computer like Xobni
• sync just works and it’s crazy fast
• control how little or much you want to share
• super easy workflow to suggest and accept times – great when coordinating with people outside of your email system
• works with Lotus Notes! (yes people still use Notes – esp govt)

If you have any other options for public officials to use, send me a comment.