City of Seattle Citizens Telecommunications and Technology Advisory Board (CTTAB) 2/10/2014 Minutes
Topics covered included: Hack the Commute event, Cable code revisions, City Privacy Initiative and draft principles, report by Chief Technology Officer Michael Mattmiller, Digital Equity Initiative, Technology Matching Fund, Seattle Channel outreach campaign, and position statement on low income Internet accessibility and committee reports and goals.
This meeting was held:
February 10. 2015; 6 -8:15 pm, Seattle Municipal Tower, 700 Fifth Avenue, Suite 2750. An audio recording of this meeting is available at: http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/CTTAB/podcast/cttab.xml
Attending: 22 total
Board Members: Ben Krokower, Dana Lewis, Beryl Fernandes, Sarah Trowbridge, Jose Vasquez, Joneil Custodio
Public: Chris Lona, Nancy Sherman, Doreen Cornwell (STAR Center), Christopher Sheets, John-Gabriel D’Angelo, Dan Stiefel, Dashiell Milliman-Jarvis, Lloyd Douglas, Ann Summy, Yonus Berhe
Staff: Michael Mattmiller, John Giamberso, Tony Perez, David Keyes, Derrick Hall, Cass Magnuski
Meeting was called to order by Nourisha Wells.
Introductions.
Minutes for January was approved.
Agenda was approved with two changes: Michael Mattmiller moved to after break; Candace Faber to report via Skype.
Broadband and Cable Committee Report
Sarah Trowbridge: On our radar for the Broadband and Cable Committee are the upcoming cable and franchise agreements with Comcast, negotiations with Comcast and Century Link and one of our work items is collaboration with the Council for one or more public input sessions on the franchise renewal. I reached out to Bruce Harrell’s legislative assistant, but I haven’t heard back yet. There is an opportunity for the ad hoc public engagement committee to help with these public input sessions. I am a member of the public engagement committee.
Cable Code Revisions: Last week, a reporter from the Seattle Times, Daniel Beekman requested to interview someone from CTTAB regarding input CTTAB gave with regard to Cable Code revisions and specifically, the elimination of the cable franchise districts. I had a brief conversation with him to let him know that we’ve been briefed on the Cable Code revisions but as an advisory board we haven’t given an official position on those revisions. I would like to follow up with Michael Mattmiller and Tony Perez to find out when those revisions will be moving to City Council.
Tony Perez: It’s really up to them. We typically have some technical modifications that they need to make. We’re hopeful that they will introduce it to the Council next Tuesday and that it will be discussed by the Public Safety Technology Committee on Wednesday, February 18. If it’s not the 18th, it will be two weeks after that, but we’re hopeful that it will be the 18th.
Beryl Fernandes: Tony, have you briefed Councilmember Harrell?
Tony Perez: Michael Mattmiller and I briefed the Council Committee last week, and it led to a couple of newspaper articles. We could discuss it at another point with the committee, but I think, speaking for myself, they probably missed the big picture on the existing franchise districts, because keeping them in place the way they are will not bring competition to Seattle. If you want them to serve and build out a whole current franchise district, you’re basically saying you need to spend about $200 million. Even if a company wanted to do that, it probably would not get the financing. So, we felt that what we needed was to try to create a more flexible way that people could come into our market, get established in some area and perhaps be able to grow a business over time. We also don’t think it necessary for it to be one competitor. It could be more. Finally, I think you have to make a decision as to whether some competition is better than none at all. We believe that some competition is better than none at all if you negotiate to ensure there is not redlining. One of the other things that I think was not discussed sufficiently in the article was that, in the new Cable Code, the actual franchise area will be determined in the franchise agreements. This is an opportunity to be more flexible, and say, where do you want to go? Let’s work something out. Let’s take low income areas into account, too. We don’t want to be rooted too much in the old style cable regulation. We expect that the FCC will soon make available programming to open the top providers, like Sling TV. Apple is working on a similar package of channels.
So, after the FCC rules on net neutrality and Title II regulation and also what is called NPPD that would give these over-the-top providers the opportunity to compete with cable companies over the cable system. So at some point, you’re going to have the choice to purchase your channels from, let’s say, Apple, over the Comcast system, or purchase a video from a Comcast. So it’s not just facilities-based competition. Now there’s going to be a form of open access over those networks. So when you take all those things into account, it’s not as black and white.
Low income Internet position
Sarah: I’m going to jump forward to the low income Internet position statement. This document was originally drafted as a tool to providers. This is the third iteration of the document. I want to open the floor to any feedback you have about the document.
Beryl: Nancy Sherman sent an email this afternoon after her review. She had two comments.
Sarah: We should review this during the break and then come back to it with any changes. [See email with suggestions later in this document]
Digital Inclusion Committee/Tech Matching Fund
Ben Krokower: We had the first meeting and decided we will have our meetings on the third Tuesday of every month. For now, all meetings will be in the conference room 2474. I’ll be sending out instructions. In addition, I’ll tell you now. That conference room is behind a card key, so in order to get in, there’s a sign that says to get in, call this number, and there’s an extension that goes right to the conference room.
David Keyes: We can also arrange it so you can text or call us.
Ben: I’ll be sending out details to make sure everyone can get in. We had our first meeting, and right now our primary task is working on Technology Matching Fund. There are a couple of TMF workshops. There was one this morning at 10:00 a.m. that Jose and I attended. We were there as representatives of the TMF committee. We answered any questions they had and gave some input on how we do the review. We are attending another one on Thursday with Solid Ground on 45th. So after the workshops, the applications should be coming in at the beginning of March. I know Delia has some time to be organizing the grants, and then it will start in earnest. That will be a lot of work over the next few months.
In addition to that, we’ve got Get Online. Vicky will be spearheading that. We’ve got a few specific asks from her to review some content and find any additional materials. Coming up in July, they will release the Digital Equity Initiative results. Between now and July, we’re starting the work on this Digital Initiative. Once that happens, there will be a lot of specific asks of the committee.
David Keyes: We just got a new flyer on the Digital Inequity Initiative, completed and approved by the Mayor’s office. Basically, on the timeline we’ve got about three different phases: an inter-departmental team, a series of stakeholder interviews, an external strategy/action group, and then some community roundtables. We’ll run those opportunities for input around the committee.
Nourisha: Is this going to be like the Tech Indicators?
David: Yes. Like the indicators process with some engagement, but then also involving tech companies, schools, and so on, to get input on vision and goals. The Indicators are a key part of the data that we have about gaps and barriers. PRR, the firm we’re working with on organizing the initiative, took information we had about other cities and did additional research to put together a matrix of what other cities and digital inclusion frameworks include. City of Austin also came out with a new digital inclusion plan recently. I’ll send that around to you guys.
Beryl: What happened to the digital inclusion plan that you and Brian had done?
David: We are pulling some pieces from that. It wasn’t completed, though.
Beryl: What is the company that is going to do this?
David: PRR is one that we’re working with.
Beryl: I see what this says about digital equity, but what is the purpose of this project. What are we hoping to get?
David: Set some vision and goals. We are at 85 percent of Internet at home right now, so maybe a goal is getting that up to 95 percent in three years. Maybe there are some goals around “X” percent of Seattle having some baseline digital competency in their skills. We hope to come up with some real goals and also to set the stage to build some partnerships.
Beryl: When you go out to the public, are you asking them what the goals should be?
David: Yes, for three things. The vision, goals, and what they need and what are some opportunities for partnership.
Nourisha: Let’s open the floor to public comment.
Christopher: Most of my comments and questions have to do with the CTO, who isn’t here yet.
Ann: February 21st is Open Data Day, and Code for Seattle is hosting an unconference that day at the UW computer science department in the atrium of the Allen Center that will begin at 9:00 a.m. and go to 5:00 p.m. Sign up here: http://www.meetup.com/Code-for-Seattle/events/220166485/ We will have an open discussion about how we can make new civic technology to make Seattle better. It’s intentionally vague, so there will be open discussion.
Doreen: I noticed in my Tweet stream that some of the police privacy issues being discussed, and I wanted to say I think that’s really important. I think that some of the issues around cameras depends on the kind of situations people are in, such as domestic violence, and I want to thank you.
Christopher: One question I have doesn’t necessarily involve the CTTAB. The federal Department of Transportation has been progressing its intelligence transportation system research program. I was wondering whether CTTAB has influence on how that’s affecting Seattle.
Nourisha: I don’t think at this time we have had a conversation about it. I think we should ask Michael Mattmiller when he arrives, if that is something you think should be on Seattle radar.
Ben: Do you have any particular concerns?
Christopher: I’m particularly concerned about privacy, but I want to know how Seattle is preparing for it in regard to traffic. They’re actively progressing whatever they’re doing, and in the various stages it’s a complete revamp of their systems.
Ben: Does a committee want to take that? Is it under the purview of the privacy commitee, or E-Gov?
Nourisha: It kind of falls in the middle. Maybe E-Gov could take the overall picture, and then Privacy might advise on the issue.
Beryl: There’s going to be a lot of other new technology coming down the pike. I’d like to see a comprehensive way in which we’re going to approach it. Because we could take this one and focus on it but what else are we leaving out? I would like to see us devise a strategy for dealing with new technology that’s coming online that impacts us in Seattle. I do think the CTO should be involved in this discussion because I would imagine that he has already thought about these things.
Christopher: Is there anyone in the Washington State Department of Transportation system that could come to these meetings?
Beryl: That would be really good, and then we could pose the specific question and have them come and let us know what they think.
David: Bill Covington and the folks at the UW law school clinics are doing research on the legal policy impacts of driverless cars. So they may have a paper out on that. I don’t know whether it’s out yet or not.
Nourisha: Would that be at all connected to any other public discourse at the Hack the Commute themed event that’s happening, or even a conversation in that space?
David: Candace, from Hack the Commute, is probably a good person to ask that question.
Beryl: I don’t know if this falls under public comment or not, but Nancy is here and she had comments on the low income statement.
Nourisha: We are going to come back to that after we’ve reviewed it during the break.
Hack the Commute Event
Candace Faber: [via Skype] First of all, thanks for inviting me to talk about the event. I am the project manager for Hack the Commute. I’ve been hired by the City of Seattle Department of Information Technology and the Department of Transportation to organize a civic Hack-a-thon addressing transportation issues in the region. I assume, since this is CTTAB, that you all know what a civic Hack-a-thon is, and you’ll understand who we’re targeting.
We’ve been working for the past month to pull together data sets from SDOT, King County, Sound Transit, WADOT, and a number of private companies as well, to gain a more complete picture of transportation issues in the region and to create a list of resources that hackers can build on.
The Hack-a-thon will take place March 20-22 at MOZ downtown (1110 Second Avenue, Suite 500). All of this is on the web site. It’s http://hackthecommute.seattle.gov . And then we’ll have a championship round on April 29. We’re going to take the top three teams, like application, data visualization, whatever comes out of that hack-a-thon. They will advance to a championship round where they’ll get a chance to present to a much wider audience at City Hall on April 29.
What we’ve just done over here in South Lake Union is put together a launch event. We wanted to bring together everyone who has wanted to work with us, just to build community and get people who work on open data and all of the different agencies communicating face to face, and some of the companies that we’re hoping will sponsor the event in a variety of different ways, including with their data. So we have folks from CarToGo, Bikeshare, and basically people that we need to agree to share their data with us so we can put on a great event five weeks from today.
Since I’m talking to you from a distance, I feel I should stop there and find out what your questions are and what you’re interested in learning more about. And then I’m happy to share how you could help.
Beryl: How forthcoming are these potential competitors in sharing the data?
Candace: What I’m trying to create — and I think we did successfully tonight — is that we’re putting out such a comprehensive list of data sets that if you are a company unwilling to share yours, it makes you look like you’re not part of the transportation system. We had sort of a middling response before tonight. Everyone who was in the room tonight was very enthusiastic about offering up data. And we’re giving them a couple of ways to do that. We have a portal on https://communities.socrata.com/catalogs/hack-the-commute/ where we will be uploading all of these data sets and providing access. It’s kind of a curated thing. It looks like everyone we’ve asked so far will be able to offer at least one of those things.
David: There was a question earlier in our meeting whether in the Hack-a-thon, you will deal with or address privacy issues?
Candace: We’re asking for anonymized and/or aggregated data from companies in accordance with their own privacy statements. I’m not the person to ask, but I can tell you that we’re working with Sound Transit, King County Metro, and ORCA data, and that has to be aggregated because we don’t want there to be any potential that someone could look at that data site and find out who traveled at what time. We’re sensitive to that.
Christopher: Before you came on, I was asking how the federal department of transportation is going through their various phases right now for their intelligent systems connected vehicles program development. And I imagine part is guidelines for how states and cities have to work together with connecting vehicles. I was wondering what aspect of the federal agency’s work you’re bringing into the program.
Candace: I have to say we have not attempted to address that with this particular event. I think that might be a better question for Michael. I’m working on this project with Bruce Blood, who is the open data manager for the City of Seattle.
David: Is there any opportunity in the Hack-a-thon for non-coders to participate?
Candace: There are a few. We know that there are commuters that have ideas for things, like ‘I would love an app for ‘x.’ Or I would like when taking a trip to know about ‘y.’ We have created a forum to start accepting ideas. It went live tonight, so there’s nothing up there yet. But if you’re familiar with the platform, Reddit, we’ve created a sub-Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/2wch6s/hack_the_commute/). That will be a way to take ideas from the community. If you haven’t used Reddit before, there’s a way to up-vote or down-vote and/or start threads around certain topics. So we’re hoping that that will be a great way for people who can’t contribute to coding to participate. I will say I want the technology that we build in this event to be relevant to and accessible by the broader community. One of the challenges that we have in organizing Hack-a-thons is that the participants tend to reflect demographically, and particularly socio-economically the makeup of the tech industry here, which is largely, to be completely frank, white and male and very privileged. What that means is that if we’re not conscious about integrating perspective from outside of that, it’s very easy to end up with apps that only serve that population. My goal and the City’s goal is to actually see applications and data visualizations come out of this event that serve the entire community. I’m very hopeful that we’ll be able to use Reddit to bring in some of those problem sets from outside the group of people who will be there, but I’m also open to other ideas for how we can make sure that we do a good job. Of course, people who show up are volunteers, and we can’t command them to work on a project that is oriented towards something else. But in my experience, when we provide problem solvers with an intriguing problem, they are eager to solve it.
Beryl: That is the million dollar challenge. Trying to address the needs of the 99 percent. Having an online forum, again, it self-selects. I’d like to get the majority of bus riders, at least from some of the geographic areas in Seattle to be getting online to participate in this. There’s no easy answer. There’s no formula, but it’s something that needs a little working on.
Candace: It’s been part of our conversation since day one, at least on the City side, and it’s something that’s really important to me. I’m struggling like everyone else. We’re doing as much outreach as possible. It’s a question of what is diversity. We’re trying to bring in people from obviously under-represented communities who are in the tech industry, who can’t participate. Data is helpful because it is neutral to who is using it, so that’s another way. But I know this is a problem that none of us has solved.
I want to reiterate that if you have ideas for ways that we can efficiently engage a broader side of the community in surfacing those challenges, I am all ears. You can reach me at Hack-the-Commute . And I would strongly encourage any of you who have suggestions to offer to send them to me. And if we can work something out, I would be very glad to do that.
Doreen: Have you done any outreach to the people who participated in the Hack-a-thons in the CD, or maybe do some outreach to the people who have research design experience. Another point would be that I would probably be willing to give some time to helping involve people who don’t use computers. Sometimes there is a value in having a conversation with those people.
Candace: Again, we have about five weeks between now and the Hack-a-thon itself. If you have ideas, please send them to me. To the extent that we can, we will be glad to work with you.
BREAK
David: Last year, we gathered the group and took photos to put on the CTTAB web site. Would you like to do that again?
Nourisha: Yes, let’s do it first and then break.
Photo was taken.
E-Gov Committee Report
Joneil Sampana: We had a meeting two weeks ago on Friday at 6:00, not an ideal time to meet. So it was a pretty small turnout. But we did discuss some of the items that we’ll be visiting this year. Primarily, what we heard on Hack-the-Commute is pretty similar to the spirit of what we’re trying to do. So, there are a lot of Hack-a-thons going on around town. What we want to do is create a conduit to the City of Seattle in a more formalized way where every month we’ll get a recap of the more obscure Hack-a-thons going on around town, so to connect citizens as well as sponsors and partners to all these activities as well as their asks and their accomplishments. We want to be more connected with the grassroots. So that’s our challenge this year, getting people on board and hitting the streets and being present at a lot of these events. And then coming back in a systematic way to convey this information to the board.
Beryl: In your outreach, are you also looking at people who are not necessarily coders? Are you making specific efforts to reach out to get them in?
Joneil: Absolutely. If you join the committee as a volunteer, then we would hope that you would have your committee reach out to you or your neighborhood. Reach out to those community leaders and come back with their needs. We will pull it all together — a listing — verbally as well as a document. In essence, we’re trying to create a pipeline of great ideas from the citizens, whether it is an application or a platform or incubator that you have in other cities.
We’re still looking for volunteers to join our committee. We just decided that on the fourth Tuesday of every month, we’ll be meeting. Right now we have a meeting place down at 320 Westlake. It’s a Microsoft conference room, but we’re definitely open to a more convenient place.
Privacy Committee Report
Beryl Fernandes: There are two committees. One is Ben Krokower’s.
Nourisha: That’s the City’s Privacy Initiative Advisory Board, and separate.
Beryl: Well, that’s why we should hear from both. I think it’s really important that we know that they are different, working in parallel. Ours is the CTTAB Privacy Committee (CPC). We took this on last year, and we went full-bore. At that time, there was very little interest in the issue of privacy. When you look at it now, it’s all over the place, which is great. Our focus, because there was little interest and it seemed like little information out there in the general public and also inside City government about privacy, we thought that one way to raise awareness and disseminate information was to have a symposium. So we focused on that. Washington State Supreme Court Justice Mary Yu agreed to be the keynote speaker. We had scheduled it for August of last year, and then DoIT asked us to postpone it to September, which we did. And then they asked for another postponement and that was to March 26. Just this week, I heard from the Justice’s office and she said she wanted to reschedule it. I’m working with her office on a new date. So we don’t have that yet, but we do know that it will be sometime in the future.
To clarify the approach that we are taking, we are trying to make sure that when we look at anything in the technology world, that we are being as inclusive as possible and actively soliciting the views and perspective of people who don’t normally get online–people whose voices are not normally at our table: the under-served communities, low-income. To do that, as you heard from Candace, it is a challenge. We have made huge efforts to do that and that effort is ongoing. I will be making a massive effort over the next several weeks to do that, and anyone else who wants to do that is welcome. It’s not easy, but just contact me if you’re interested in finding a group that is under-represented that you can go and meet with in person. We’ll also have some online places where people can go and participate. That I see as being less of a challenge than the other. But that will be our major contribution to this whole effort. So since Justice Yu is coming back to this community, people in the community are very excited and thrilled. We’ve got everyone from elementary school kid age, up to law school, and people from the legal profession, the technology field and everybody else who is interested in attending.
The focus, we think, is not going to be the legal theory behind privacy, rather, we’ll start out with allowing perhaps two or three kids to ask the questions of her, like ‘how did you get from where you were to where you are today,’ –just personal questions, two minutes each, but then we’ll bring in the voices of the people we’ve been talking to during this period. We’re hoping to collect a handful of stories that are compelling, that tell us about the breadth and depth of the issues of privacy, bring that to the forefront and then we’ll take it from there.
Nourisha: Do you want to speak a little bit about the partnership idea for getting sponsorship from the university or other organizations? Have you talked about that?
Beryl: Councilmember Bruce Harrell is sponsoring the event. Is that what you meant?
Nourisha: Well, that, and have you heard from Seattle University about whether they are interested in partnering?
Beryl: I haven’t really asked for that right now. That would have been if we weren’t able to get sponsorship within the City. Then we would have gone outside. But at this point, that’s not necessary. They will be participating. They’ll be invited. It’s going to be 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. It will be a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. We won’t have food. When Marina did her open data Hack-a-thon, she had food, and it was a whole weekend. Where did that budget come from?
David: They had some sponsors. It was partially a state sponsored event. It was a mix.
Beryl: That takes a lot of coordination to pull that off. For a weekend, I can see where you would need to have it, but for two hours, not necessarily. I was at one that Peter Steinbrueck did last week. It was only 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. and they didn’t have food. People seemed to survive just fine. It was an excellent turnout.
Ben: I am on the Privacy Advisory Committee. The committee was convened. Michael Mattmiller and the Mayor asked a group of community stakeholders to comment on a group draft of privacy principles that they’ve been drafting over the last few months with the inter-departmental privacy team. A bunch of department heads and people around the City have drafted these principles and they’ve asked the input of the Privacy Advisory Committee and then from there, once those principles are in place, they are going to go ahead and draft an actual privacy toolkit.
David: Just a quick note. The Privacy Initiative is on the DoIT technology web site, under Initiatives. There’s a link to the privacy initiatives, which has a list of members. And Ben just mentioned the draft principles. Those were out in a press release from the Mayor’s office, on the News Releases part of his web site. (Download pdf of the adopted Principles)
Ben: I believe these principles have been transmitted to the City Council for a possible vote. So this is fairly pioneering work at the municipal level. I don’t know that any city has gotten this far with these principles and recognizing that this is an important thing. It’s a really interesting group of people. The videos of the proceedings are up online. A lot of the people on the committee are very interesting and it is fascinating to hear them talk about the issue. They have devoted their lives to this, so I would encourage you to look at the proceedings and learn more about the issue.
Beryl: These principles are what you want our Privacy Committee to comment on?
Ben: Once we can get a meeting scheduled, we can meet and discuss these principles.
Beryl: I wasn’t thinking of meeting. I was thinking of sending these out and allowing people to simply comment on them. I think that’s the most efficient way to do it. It looks like it’s fairly brief.
Christopher: Are they amendable?
Ben: This is a draft in the sense that this has not been adopted by the Council. Obviously they can accept any public comment, but the ball is in their hands.
Chief Technology Officer Michael Mattmiller: When we think about the Privacy Initiative, what we set out to do was three things.
The first is to create that ethical framework for how the City thinks about individual privacy and for what we want the City to be thinking about every time we make a decision relating to personal information. These are the privacy principles.
The second step is to then make that more official around our practices and what we call Privacy Statement, where if we retain data for over a period of time we will implement notice in these ways.
And the third piece is create a privacy toolkit. So what is that educational effort that will drive privacy awareness across the City and create a privacy program that will live on.
These are the decisions that we want everyone to think through every time they have to think about personal information.
I think we have six principles. It’s at the framework stage. So this isn’t ‘we will not use this piece of technology,’ or ‘we’ll only retain data for 30 days.’ It is ‘if I’m going to collect information from you, number one, I need to remember that we as a City will value your privacy. Number two, we are going to minimize how much data we collect, so it’s only what we need. That’s where we are right now.
Are these amendable? The answer is that the Council hasn’t voted yet, so sure, we can go to Council and request some changes. The legislation is now in their hands. But if we’re thinking about specific kinds of practices, like before we collect your data, we will give you a notice. That notice will include that you can contact the City and request that your information be changed. Those are the types of practices we get to next, once we lock down our framework.
Beryl: So it has gone through your Privacy Advisory Committee, and gotten its blessing. And now, it has gone to the Council. So the appropriate place for any of our citizens to comment is to go before the Council?
Michael: You’re certainly welcome to send them to me or any members of the committee. We also have an email address: privacy@seattle.gov .
Beryl: But it sounds like it has gone beyond your committee already, so I’m not sure that is going to help. What would you do with a comment that came in at this point? Would you revise it and then send it back to the Council again?
Michael: Well I think, one, we want to understand the comment and the principles is the right place to reflect that comment. This is still very much an opportunity for engagement.
Beryl: And the statement is not ready yet?
Michael: No, if we think about the sequence, we can’t draft the statement until we agree on what our principles are. We’re trying to pull together some content but the statement will probably be a few months out.
Beryl: I don’t know what to say. I think that our committee would have had a lot to say looking at it. But at this point, it seems that is has gone beyond that point of comment, and maybe we ought to wait. I don’t want to waste people’s time and give them false hope. It makes more sense to wait until the statement is out and at that point comment on it before it’s finalized. When it goes to Council, it’s pretty much a final document.
Michael: To be clear, it’s not too late. So if anyone has comments, I would personally value them. You can send them directly to me or to privacy@seattle.gov. In terms of the process by which we got here, I talked to CTTAB back in the October meeting about the approach we would be taking and the opportunities for engagement. Once we made that announcement, I think it was early November we had the press release on behalf of the Mayor and Council that talked about the types of engagement opportunities there would be and our timeline to get this submitted by January. We missed the mark by a week. I apologize. So whatever we can do to make sure the principles are understood, please send me any comments directly.
Nourisha: Are there any more questions?
Christopher: I was, of course, happy to see the Mayor stand behind privacy. And you as well. Fundamentally, I think there are some lackings in the understanding of what privacy entails in terms of the principles. Mostly, privacy is my ability to maintain my own information, and the principles were more like ‘we recognize that there’s a bunch of data information out there; you’re going to have to trust us with that. Because of the Seattle Privacy Coalition, I am particularly interested in abuses and what the Seattle Police Department is able to do. There’s just nothing there making clear that you value privacy over security, for example. There was nothing in there that for SDOT they are going to think about issues like stingrays and mesh networks and license plate readers. I see that you care about privacy, but you just didn’t seem like you understood the fundamentals of privacy and its comparison with security.
Michael: It’s an interesting point. The representative of the Seattle Privacy Coalition, Tracy, reviewed the document and we had some lively conversations in the room this past time about specific technologies. As we think about moving forward with the privacy statement, how would these principles apply to, say, a stingray. It kind of falls two ways. Once we say that we value privacy over security then where do we say that we value privacy over the other 53 lines of business we have. Similarly, for technology. If we put language in here that we will never ever have a stingray, what happens next month when they come up with the Stingray II and then call it Salmon. What we’re trying to do is keep it at that higher level.
Here’s what I envision to get to what you’re saying. Let me know what you think. We get to the privacy statement point, we’re going to create one privacy statement for the City, which means to get 28 departments to agree to one set of documents by July. It’s still not going to be sufficient for every situation, especially in higher risk areas like police, where the public really wants to understand in more detail the practices. so they would have to provide a supplemental privacy statement that explains how they thought about the principles. At the same time, you actually made a great recommendation sometime back in October/November. It was a privacy impact assessment where if you’re going to, hypothetically, think about a stingray. Well, here’s the impact assessment you have to complete. And by the way, after you answer the 20 or so questions that are in the federal privacy and tech assessment template, it should be clear to you that there is very little business value in having a stingray. And a heck of a lot of risk. And at that point, you would have to take your impact assessment to the right department, whether it’s law, or DoIT or someone for review, and discover that we can’t really take that risk. We haven’t yet figured out with this theoretical model what level of reporting as to the public. Do we report when we decide not to do something? We obviously want to report out when we do do something, how we’re thinking about protecting your privacy.
We’re thinking about that process, but we just didn’t want to get into specifics in the principles. Does that help?
Christopher: Sort of, but again, you said you are wanting to protect citizens’ privacy and that’s fundamentally flawed because what you’re really saying is you want to protect people’s information security. Privacy is you, as the government, saying we’re not going to collect this information because we want you to have privacy. Citizens don’t become public citizens just because they walk in public. They’re still private citizens. And I just don’t see any of that paradigm philosophy in this.
Michael: I’d love to think about how to affect that language change. My preference would be to not get into specifics of police or fire or ‘x’ department at this level.
Beryl: Can you send us — all of CTTAB but especially the Privacy Committee — a copy of these principles?
Nourisha: It’s online. We can copy it and send it our through our listserv.
David: I’ll send it out to the CTTAB members.
Beryl: I think we also should be made aware that it is past comments stage for the advisory committee.
Michael: Understood, Beryl, but CTTAB and the Seattle Privacy Coalition are all on the advisory committee.
Beryl: That’s true.
Michael Mattmiller Update (continued: including Cable Code, Hack the Commute, IT Subcabinet, Organizational Redesign)
Michael: I do apologize for being late. I saw Tony was here. Did he talk cable code?
David: Yes, he talked cable code, and Sarah mentioned that they have reached out to Councilmember Harrell’s office about participation when that comes forward. Tony just briefly shared expectations about when that’s going to come to Council so CTTAB can comment. We did have Candace Faber join us to talk about Hack-the-Commute via Skype.
Michael: I’ll share a couple of quick things then. First off, hats off to Candace. The kick-off event was really tremendous. We had well over 50 people. KOMO and KING 5 were there and other stakeholders. So, if you are at all passionate about, say, transportation, or data, or civic hacking or being civically engaged, we would really love to have you at the hack-a-thon. The dates are March 20 through 22, and it will be held at Moz which is over on 2nd Avenue (Moz, 1110 Second Avenue, Suite 500). They’ve got a great space. If you don’t know how to code, we need more than people who can code. We need subject matter experts who know something about transportation or transit. People who have ideas about how to engage with the community, especially around equity. When we think about hack-a-thons, people think about developing an app for a device. That doesn’t work for all populations, so I’m very sensitive that we’re producing things that can be consumed by all of Seattle. We also need project managers. If you’ve ever put a bunch of devs in a room, they say, ‘we just want to write code.’ It doesn’t necessarily go somewhere. So we need someone to say, ‘hey, we’re at hour 30, what are we actually producing?’
Doreen: They need a boss who is able to give directions. I can attest that I have gone to hack-a-thons, and I don’t code, but I have had great conversations.
Michael: So this is a great selling point. Think about joining us. We’ll have another meeting before the hack-a-thon. The most exciting part of the hack-a-thon after that 36 hour sprint in March, we’ll have a championship round on April 29. We’ll invite the teams that had the most promising apps and visualization tools, other cool tech products. They will come to the Bertha Landes Room in City Hall and go before a core group of judges that will include the Deputy Mayor and other exciting people to pick a winner of the hack-a-thon.
Just a general update on IT in the City: I was honored last week to meet with the Mayor’s IT sub-cabinet. That’s an executive level steering group for IT in the City, chaired by the Deputy Mayor. We finished a strategic vision in process that we started last fall. What we left the meeting with were a purpose for IT in the City, a set of principles much like these that will govern how we make IT related decisions, and some priorities for IT for 2015. My team is in the process of documenting this so we can present them to the Mayor for his formal acceptance. My favorite part, which is the purpose for IT within the City. That purpose is ‘powerful technology solutions for the City of Seattle and the public we serve. What I love about it is this notion that whenever we think about a new technology project for the City — we want to build a system, buy a piece of hardware or put a governance process in place — number one, we want it to be powerful. By that I don’t mean power consumption. By that I mean, if we’re going to do something, we just don’t want to put something in place as a bandaid. We want to think about how it would be effective, cost effective and outcomes effective. We want a really powerful solution that has an impact. But it has to not only be about the City of Seattle capital C corporate entity, but it has to be about the public. We should not be buying that piece of hardware unless it’s going to have a public benefit, it’s going to enable some type of delivery, it’s going to let a system run better, and thus provide better service. So we don’t want to get a system that’s just going to do something nice internally that’s fun or interesting but ultimately doesn’t benefit the public, somewhere downstream in a meaningful way. I think that’s a real perception change, it’s a shift to have one mantra for all of IT. It’s a shift in connecting those dots when we think about how we employ technology.
I think I might have mentioned at our last meeting we had just landed our DoIT organizational assessments and how we can improve to be better professionals delivering enterprise grade scalable, sustainable solutions. The next step is we’re going to be thinking about IT writ large in the City and how we are delivering services internally and to the public. Thinking about ways we can leverage our resources to create more capacity. We hope to have some good information for you by next month.
Michael: The motto is: Powerful technology solutions for the City of Seattle and the public we serve.
Christopher: A couple months ago in a news article, Police Chief O’Toole mentioned that the mesh network might be handed over to you? Has there been any developments with that?
Michael: We haven’t made the handoff yet that has been guided by privacy principles. We are developing a plan of what that might look like. In talking with the team at a high level, what needs to happen is, number one, a lot of the nodes are nonfunctional, so we need to have the vendor come in and bring them back up to speed, and two, we need to make sure we have the right governance principles in place to make sure that we can allow fire and police to roam on that network. We need to do a privacy impact assessment to help discover what the impact would be. To be clear, what would be transferred to the Department of IT is just the mesh network. It would not be the surveillance cameras on the waterfront. We’re still trying to talk with SPD about their mission. Do they stay with SPD? Is there another group in the City that takes them over? In terms of privacy impact, based on what we’ve been able to gather, the network is not capable of capturing MAC addresses in passing. So, if you are walking down the streets of Seattle and you don’t have the device that has the certificate to interact with the network, the network doesn’t see you. The only way you would communicate with the network and exchange data with if would be if you have one of our certs that lives on the device so that you can have the handshake and then exchange information. But again, we need to do a privacy impact assessment.
Christopher: And one other thing, you can use your cellphones in the transit tunnels. Was there a privacy impact assessment on that?
Michael: The transit tunnel is the domain of King County. I am not aware specifically. My sense is that since they are still at the contract stage, that they would not be in that position yet. I think the contract starts in 2015. But it’s a good question and we can reach out to them and ask them.
Christopher: The City has the power to say we cannot do certain things, because it’s in the City.
Michael: No we would not be in a position where we could lead another government entity’s project.
Christopher: I’m worried because the company that the contract was awarded to is not only paying for everything but they’re paying King County a monthly fee just to put it in there. And I’m concerned about where they’re getting their money. They’re not AT&T and T-Mobile. They’re installing devices that can communicate with these networks, so where are they getting their money from?
Michael: Since we don’t administer the contract, I can’t speak to the specifics. It would be King County Metro that administers that. But we would not have jurisdiction to have authority over that contract.
Dashiell: I was just wondering, I heard that Washington State courts in general are updating their web sites to make it easier for access to case information. Do you have any information on whether Seattle courts are doing that or if there’s any plan to update local court networks as far as case information goes?
Michael: Statewide, there is the effort afoot to create a more consistent system for our courts. I think that’s the Odyssey Project. It’s a technology from Tyler Technologies that is being implemented. I think Snohomish and Thurston are pilot counties and there are a couple of others that are starting to implement. But it’s a multi-year initiative. Seattle Municipal Courts is not part of that system, so they will not be adopting that. What we have here is a system called MSYS, which has been home grown over a number of years. They’re thinking about modernizing that system, the internals of the City and the system they would be touching. I was talking to Yolanda Williams, the court administrator, about those upgrades, as well as their IT crew. To my knowledge, there isn’t a specific thing yet that I’ve seen about enhancing their web site. But that is info that I can take back to them.
Beryl: There was a question Christopher had about the US Department of Transportation.
Christopher: The US Department of Transportation is starting their four-year phase project on driverless cars, and I was wondering whether CTTAB or the City Council or anybody in the City of Seattle is aware of what’s going on and how that’s going to impact Seattle, not necessarily their testing but also when it’s determined what they’re going to do in terms of policy.
Michael: I haven’t heard. I know that the Director of Transportation is very intrigued by driverless cars. But I can certainly ask him the next time I see him, what specifics would affect Seattle.
Christopher: Do you think it’s possible that your department could have someone here come and speak?
Michael: I’m sure they’d be happy to. If we are not participating or envisioning driverless cars in the near future, would you still want them on another topic? Or are you looking specifically for that topic?
Christopher: Well, my concern is specifically on connective vehicles, not necessarily driverless vehicles, but cars that talk to each other and other devices, and how that impacts Seattle. CTTAB needs to be aware of those issues so that we can educate the Council.
Michael: Okay, I’ll see if they have someone to address that.
Beryl: I’d like to know going forward what’s the best way in which we can have this happen so that we can review things in time and give you, as a body, comments?
Michael: A couple of thoughts: Going back to September/October when we were talking about how CTTAB can be part of the privacy initiative, there were a couple of asks that we had. We were asking for some insight as to what other major cities were doing around privacy, so we could think about how that could frame our efforts. So, certainly, there are things the Privacy Committee can do to help inform that perspective. That would be great.
Beryl: Let’s start with that one, because that’s a research project and I don’t know that anybody’s taking it up or has the bandwidth to take it up. I’m thinking now that you had asked for comments on the principles and the statements. In order to do that, we have to see the principles first. So you can have two sets of comments coming forth. One is Ben is a member of your committee, so you’re getting feedback from him continuously. And then another one is from the other committee, the CTTAB Privacy Committee, if you want that. You may not want it, you may already have what you need from Ben. And that’s fine. But if you also want it from us, we just need a little bit of warning that something’s coming down the pike.
Nourisha: Ben is on that committee, not representing CTTAB.
Ben: If I was not a CTTAB member, I would not be on that committee. We haven’t met as a committee. We could do so.
Nourisha: The Privacy Committee has been meeting.
Beryl: We don’t need a meeting of the committee in order to comment. There’s no time to do that. You can give it to us. We can comment by email. The thing is to just get clear on whether Ben is there as a citizen — that’s been established. so is that sufficient that you can handle the comments and don’t need more from us.
Ben: I think my intention was to update the CTTAB Privacy Committee on the work of the Privacy Advisory Committee and receive feedback, get a vote of some kind and then bring it to the whole CTTAB committee.
Beryl: But you can send that to us. We haven’t seen any correspondence from you.
Nourisha: I’m on the committee too. It’s not just us in the room but there are other people who have signed up.
Michael: I think we definitely want feedback and engagement. Within the Privacy Advisory Committee, we have CTTAB and the Seattle Privacy Coalition represented. When I think about opportunities for engagement, keeping Ben informed that he can be that voice at the table, that would be great. And again, if there are questions or thoughts, please feel free to send them to David (david.keyes@seattle.gov) or myself (michael.mattmiller@seattle.gov). In terms of how best we can affect those, it would be best if we are on the same timeline. We definitely hear that privacy is important and so we are moving full speed ahead on this initiative so we can by August get something in front of the public and to the Council to help build that trust.
Going back to that October ask, we asked the committee to help us understand what other cities are doing, what proper privacy practices are, and what the committee would like to see affected. And so, yes, we have now moved past the principles phase, or I should say we’re at the point where we can still accept feedback. We don’t have anything out there yet except the privacy statement. The privacy toolkit, or what you would envision for a privacy program. So those will be the opportunities to inform us sooner rather than later.
Beryl: So Ben, are you going to undertake that research project? Can you do that?
Ben: No. I can’t, but what I can do and I think that I offered to do, is be the liaison between the Privacy Advisory Committee and the CTTAB Privacy Committee. As we meet, I can keep you abreast of what’s happening.
Beryl: Well, the best way to keep us apprised is to send us an email and give us copies of documents. That would be by far the most efficient way. Our committee is focused on the symposium, and we’re doing things. So that anyone who has aligned themselves with us has specific tasks that they’ve signed up to do. We’re not meeting on a regular basis. That’s not what we’re about.
Nourisha: I think we probably need to add space on the agenda for you to give an update on what’s happening in addition to Privacy Committee updates.
Beryl: At CTTAB meetings, you mean?
Nourisha: Yes, exactly.
Doreen: I did have a question, Michael. I’m not remembering who is on the Privacy Advisory Board. Is there somebody from Human Services or Public Health? That’s a fast way to get information that’s different from police and fire.
Michael: Absolutely. On the inter-departmental team within the City, we have HSD represented. Ginger Armbruster is our privacy program manager who is leading that effort. If you email privacy@seattle.gov, she can check on that. Externally, the members are listed, but not the internal team.
Posting Work Plans
David: One of the goals that we’ve done in the past was to have each committee post work plans on the web site on the blog. When you post that, we can have that show up under your committee blog up top. If you would also tag it with ‘work plan,’ then we’ve got it separate for people to be able to find. I think that’s a nice way of making your work plans and what’s going on with each community transparent. This is also good for recruiting volunteers, and people can find out what your doing.
Beryl: The Privacy Committee is not a monthly meeting.
David: Correct. So what I’m starting to do is update, so where we have the standard format, we can update any changes. We could either put your contact information or our contact in there. If somebody wants to come and find out more, who do they go to for that? In the cases where you’ve got active email lists, and we’ve been putting the sign up for community email lists right there, then if you schedule a meeting and it’s going to be here, people then have that opportunity to find out. And you have an easy way to distribute where you’re going to be meeting and what your agenda would be for a community meeting, or any materials. Just send it out over the listserv. So, this is just a note to post your work plans. I know some of you are keeping them in Google Docs or other places to enable folks to work on it. But to pull even a draft as of ‘x’ date, it’s still helpful to put it into a cohesive place. I don’t know whether you all have agreed on standardized format, so there are a couple different formats that are being used.
Councilmember Harrell and the Mayor could not make it tonight. They hope to come in March. I will try and get confirmation of their schedule between now and the meeting. We sent them a quick synopsis that Nourisha and I did of the items that are in your work plans. But again, if they’re up on the blog here, then we can also put that reference so that if the Mayor and Councilmember Harrell have time or want to refer back to what your work plan is, they can go and see what you’re working on, too.
Beryl: Can we have the Mayor and Councilmember Harrell come in different months? It seems like when they come, we want to spend time with them. It seems like they want to spend time with us. And it’s hard to get the time.
David: Typically, we’ve tried to schedule half an hour for each. Availability is based on their schedule. So that’s what they’ve been able to allot. In some cases, they’ve spent more time or less time with us. So that would be an hour of our two-hour meeting. The initial hope was to get them here for this meeting, so they could provide feedback on the work plans. We’ll be a little further out on that now.
Beryl: I don’t see them giving us a lot of feedback on the work plan, itself, because that’s so specific. I haven’t heard them give comment on that. It’s really been a question and answer thing. It shouldn’t hold up our work plans at all because they assume it’s in good hands.
Nourisha: Does everyone have their login for the blog?
David: If you don’t have your initial login, let us know. If you’ve just forgotten your password, go to the login space, use your login and request a password change.
Seattle Channel Outreach Campaign
John Giamberso: I wanted to alert CTTAB about that the outreach campaign at the Seattle Channel, the City’s government channel, is going to start and we are looking for feedback input on this campaign. Basically, what we are trying to do is increase the awareness of the Seattle Channel. Some of your have watched our programs and we thank you for your nice comments. Beryl, you have been very generous in your comments about the channel. But, we need to make more people aware of it, and this campaign is an attempt to do that. It’s a targeted, coordinated campaign, and we’re trying to get people curious enough to tune in. We have also redesigned our web site, http://seattlechannel.org . I encourage you to go see it. It is beautiful.
This is a multi-year campaign. These are modular elements that I am going to show you and talk to your about, and we’re going to be customizing them as we go forward with it. We’re gong to have a high level marketing strategy document. We’re going to have a campaign tagline with print and online ads. Let me show you some of them. This is the general ad that’s going to go in magazines. We’re working off the tagline of ‘people are not aware of the channel.’ So it’s more than you think. It’s not what you think. And we work with these different words: untapped, unpredictable, unstoppable. Each of these different formats go in buses, on walls. We’re hoping to have a big impact with this.
[Plays video]
So, it’s designed to get your attention. It’s modular. We can shape those images, put different images in, and target the arts community, civics, culture, in different ways according to the audience.
The last thing I want to talk about is how we are going to track this, some of the metrics we’re going to use. Comcast, as part of the franchise agreement, has given us $100,000 worth of cable channel ads. So we’re going to be comparing before and after, the effect and response to the ads, compare web site visits before, during and after; measure social media page growth and engagement; measure us against some of our competitors so we’ll have a benchmark. So we’re looking at different kinds of metrics to see how effective the campaign is and then we can change the elements of the campaign. Please feel free to email me john.giamberso@seattle.gov if you have some different ideas or especially if you have some ideas on ways to reach out to different audiences. We’ll be looking for feedback on those issues.
Jose Vasquez: I have a recommendation. I appreciate that you focus on those under-served communities. One of the best ways to do that is work with community organizations that do work with those communities. Because it’s one thing to do broad marketing on TV and buses, but it’s another to actually get feedback from and work with community organizations that know those communities really well.
Nourisha: I would say, too that, you participate and have a booth at Seattle street fairs. Also, you could use movie theater commercials. I am one of those weird people who are at the movie theater early, and so I watch those.
Beryl: What’s the difference between uncensored and edited? Because you have the uncensored, and I’m think back to a public meeting of the Seattle Police Department and a group was quite loud and Seattle Channel was taping. I would hope that certain portions of that would be either edited out or censored. I don’t know which term you would use.
John Giamberso: Well, essentially we provide gavel to gavel coverage. So, it’s a Mayor’s press conference and this is what distinguishes us from other media outlets. Gavel to gavel, we do not edit. Last night, King County had a four-hour meetin