October 13, 2015 CTAB Meeting Minutes
City of Seattle Citizens Technology Advisory Board (CTAB)
The group heard updates from Chief Technology Officer Michael Mattmiller; a Seattle Channel Diversity Report by John Giamberso; a Cable and Broadband Report from Amy Hirotaka; a Digital Inclusion Committee Report submitted by Jose Vasquez; and a report on the E-Gov Committee from Joneil Sampana. There was a discussion on board development, member composition, needs, a review of past recruitment strategies and ideas for publicizing. There was an administration discussion led by Nourisha Wells, and a discussion on board elections.
This meeting was held: October 13, 2015; 6:00-8:05 p.m., Seattle Municipal Tower, 700 Fifth Avenue, Suite 2750
Podcasts available at: http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/CTTAB/podcast/cttab.xml
Attending:
Board Members: Nourisha Wells, Beryl Fernandes via phone, Joneil Sampana, Karia Wong, Amy Hirotaka, Iga Fikayo Keme, Dana Lewis
Public: Christopher Sheats (Seattle Privacy Coalition); Jan Bultmann (Seattle Privacy Coalition); Phil Mocek (Seattle Privacy Coalition); David Robinson (Seattle Privacy Coalition); Sam McVeety, Lloyd Douglas, Dorene Cornwell, Luke Swart (Open Seattle), John LeFevre (Seattle Privacy Coalition); Nancy Sherman, Janice Tofle, Heather Lewis (UW CoMotion), Mary Alice, Tim
Staff: Michael Mattmiller, Kendee Yamaguchi, David Keyes, John Giamberso, Derrick Hall, Cass Magnuski
25 In Attendance
(Note that “unintelligible” in these minutes means that the voice level and clarity on the recording was not sufficient for transcription.)
Meeting was called to order by Nourisha Wells.
Introductions
Agenda was approved.
Nourisha Wells: If you have had a chance to look over the agenda, we need a motion to approve.
Agenda was approved.
Nourisha Wells: We want to invite people to Tweet the meeting. The hashtag is #seatechboard and that’s also our handle on Twitter. We also need to approve the minutes. Is there a motion to approve?
David Keyes: One comment or clarification. I noticed that there was some discussion last month from Kathy Putt from Comcast about the origin of the Internet Essentials program. To clarify, Internet Essentials was launched as a condition or voluntary, depending upon whether you ask Comcast or the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), of Comcast’s 2011 acquisition of NBC Universal. That was in the proceedings of the FCC and the City’s resolution that Bruce Harrell introduced about the great student initiative was in September of 2011. So, January 2011, the Comcast program was launched; September 2011, the City program was introduced. (Added to September 2015 CTAB minutes by D.H. Cass Magnuski)
Joneil Sampana: Was that a City resolution? Was this Bruce Harrell’s idea?
David Keyes: Yes. I’m not sure what conversations may have happened elsewhere, but just in terms of being established. The Internet Essentials program was established before the student initiative.
Nourisha Wells: Do we have a motion to approve the minutes?
Joneil Sampana: I move to approve the minutes with this additional footnote to page 12.
Amy Hirotaka: I second.
Minutes were approved with the above change.
Nourisha Wells: We have a full agenda, so we’ll start with Chief Technology Officer Michael Mattmiller who will give us his update.
CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER UPDATE
Michael Mattmiller: Thank you, Nourisha, and good evening. It has been a busy month, and we’re very excited about the number of initiatives going on in the City. I know Privacy is one and we’ll save that one for a second here. Today was our fourth monthly IT consolidation town hall. As I talked to CTAB about before, one of largest projects right now is the announcement that Mayor Murray has proposed the consolidation of IT professionals in the City into one new department: the Seattle Information Technology Department. The legislation decreeing that new department was included in the Mayor’s budget that went to Council on September 28. And we are very pleased to be in a dialog with our employees across the 15 departments with the IT professionals who are in scope for this consolidation. We are engaged in a number of activities to plan out this new department. We have three transition teams that are meeting at the moment. These transition teams are comprised of staff from across the City, who are helping to build out our new Human Resources (HR) processes, our financial processes. As you can imagine, when you have 28 departments in the City, there is a lot of minutiae in process that has to be accounted for in setting up the new department. Everything from how do employees charge their time to projects, to what are the right workplace rules, and on down to how we even access our computers. So, I’m really please for all of the effort that our employees are putting into these processes. I had the opportunity to sit at the table last week for budget with Ben Noble, and we presented to Council on the status of consolidation and why we’re consolidating. We’re still very focused on five goals: 1) creating capacity so we can continue to take on the technology projects that will make us a more innovative City; 2) developing standard processes and technology architecture standards so that we can move more quickly on projects and give staff more training in common approaches across departments; 3) making sure we’re planning more strategic support for departments; 4) being very focused on the privacy and security of the data entrusted to us; and lastly, 5) making sure we can focus on developing our City workforce.
A couple of the things that I was very excited about, related to consolidation as we sat at the budget table last week. The first is our Next Generation Data Center Project. Because our employees are beginning to work together and plan for how best to meet our cross-City needs, we are actually able to reduce some of our cost for that project. So, the Mayor’s budget actually gives back nearly $750,000 in savings because we are going to have some sharing of structure and services that we were not originally planning for. Similarly, there are some new projects that will be coming together. We have a system called MSys, that’s their Port management system that we will begin assessing how to go about modernizing that system. Seattle IT will help with that as well as the digital data analytics platform project for the police department that we will be assisting with.
So, some very exciting times for the new Seattle IT that’s coming together. I know that there is going to be a number of conversations today about other things going on. I think it’s our Digital Equity update today?
David Keyes: Jose is not here, but he has shared a Digital Inclusion report.
Michael Mattmiller: So I’m sure that will be covered, as well as we’re continuing to work on some other projects related to Open Data that we’ll talk more about in the coming meetings. So, Joneil, thank you for the invitation. I look forward to chatting with the committee about our work in that area.
I’m guessing a number of folks didn’t have the opportunity to see, yesterday, that Ginger Armbruster and I were at Council to announce the new privacy program that we’ve been working on over the past year. Right off the bat, I do want to thank everyone from CTAB and the Seattle Privacy Coalition, and other groups that have offered advice and input into that process. I’ll be the first to say that this is a soft launch. We recognize that we have more work to do to educate people in the City. And we’re going to continue to refine our processes, but at this point, we’re excited to be starting down the path of educating our City employees and departments about our privacy commitments that we are making.
[See more about this at: http://www.seattle.gov/information-technology/privacy-program] See also the Privacy Program report (pdf)
So, what does it mean to have a privacy program? On a high level, what we are doing is we have put forth a budget request to have a Chief Privacy Officer in the City. And that’s in addition to the role–yes, thank you, Jan. And Jan, I have to give you a shout out. I was talking to a colleague in the privacy industry about the announcement of the program, and they said, ‘Wow!’ A chief privacy officer in the City. That seems like a really bold step and strong commitment with the implication of, “Why are you doing that?” And I said, that’s what is appropriate for our community and for our City, and I’m pleased to have the support of our Mayor and Council to take that bold step and have a chief privacy officer. Presuming the budget passes, but I’m optimistic.–So, I’m very pleased about that. That role is in addition to the privacy program manager. Many of you know Ginger (Armbruster). So we have those two people, who are going to, from a central perspective, be helping ensure we have the right policies and procedures that can be promulgated City-wide. We’ve also put an ‘ask’ out to departments that they identify a person in their department who will serve as a privacy champion for that department. That will be someone that we invest in with a little bit more training than the average City employee. That person will be the first point of contact that when a department has a new project that collects or uses information or uses a new piece of technology, that that individual does an initial privacy review to see what potential privacy risks might be. And then, depending on the potential for privacy risks, if there is something that is a characteristic of that project that requires more attention or a higher level of skill, that will be sent to the privacy program manager and the chief privacy officer to conduct a full privacy impact assessment. So, we are putting in place a system of reviews to make sure that we identify privacy risks, we come up with the right mitigation strategies. The other component of the program, out of the gate, will be an effort to train every City employee who touches personal information on privacy practices and our new privacy program, and that, if passed through the Mayor’s budget, will become effective in January. And, Ginger has been hard at work with the appropriate staff to develop the content for that training. In time, we do want to work with departments, to go back and look at all of the data that they have collected to understand what data we hold, what its use is, and what is the right retention in making sure that we’re observing those practices. We’re very focused, as well, on communicating and helping to drive across for 11,000 employees the concepts of data minimization. If we don’t need to collect a piece of information, we shouldn’t collect that piece of information. Making sure that we are consistently providing a notice of consent experience to the extent we can, and living out the rest of the privacy principles that so many folks in this room provided input to back in March.
So, this is a first step. I look forward to your feedback. I also ask for your patience and support that as we go out and begin to work with our 11,000 employees in the City. This will be a process that takes some time to fully take hold and take effect, but we have the right support from our elected officials and from our department heads that we will be moving this forward and driving it into our City’s fabric over the coming months and years.
Those are a couple of things that are top of mind for me.
Nourisha Wells: Anyone have any questions?
David Robinson: I’m with the Seattle Privacy Coalition. Thanks for all of your work with this. This is an enormous step. We should be really proud as Seattleites. There were no examples of this in any of the other states. I know that you are aware of some of the false starts, stumbles, and obstacles that have already surfaced. Last time you talked about the traffic system around the City, and I know you’re aware of that and are working on that. I wanted to push the point a little bit, though, and note that to some extent, the problems you’re going to face in the City culture as it exists are not entirely IT-related even. They’re not entirely technical-related. But they’re certainly hinge on that. The first example, is the ongoing mystery of exactly how the ATF cameras got on the Seattle City Light poles. There was an interesting Capitol Hill blog article the other day in which Phil, here, filed a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request. And it turns out that there was no written agreement and that City Light, when responding for information about cooperation with ATF sort of stepped into the role of lawyer in interpreting the regulation. So that we have this statement. It was more informal. Seattle City Light (SCL) spokesman Scott Thompson told the blog, “ATF definitely agreed to let them place the cameras on our poles. Thompson said “such verbal agreements are within the authority of the SCL general manager.” SCL did not notify City Council or the City attorney about the ATF request. A 2013 ordinance requires City agencies to notify City Council if they’re using surveillance equipment. According to Thompson, since that’s the only equipment for assisting gathering surveillance, there was no reason for notifying City Council. We were merely allowing them to use the poles.” So some of us thought, well, I guess those poles are up for grabs! So that seems to be a pretty serious bit of stonewalling. Or maybe it’s just a misunderstanding.
The other case is another one we’ve been discussing. A document emerged the other day that some people in the police department have been seeking to evade public records requests, or preclude them by hding discussions they’re having. For example, this was an email from Detective Karen Haverty. She writes to a list called Fitlist, which is the fraud identity theft list. Very long mailing list. She writes, “As has long been a worry, the confidentiality of the Fitlist has been compromised. In fact, the subject line is “Fitlist Compromised.’ In spite of admonitions to not mention the list in courts and expose the emails in a secure manner, someone from the activist site, riseup.net, has obtained an email that has the request email address and he has requested permission to join the list. He refuses to expose his name, or from where he obtained the address. The admonition on the rules page to not disclose this list was to prevent it from becoming a target for FOIA requests. If requests are coming in, I can see this list being dissolved.” [unintelligible] I think that that is a pretty good example of the resistance you’re going to see throughout the City. With all of your technical acumen and organizational skills, I think you’re going to need the backing of the Mayor to make any inroads to that type of culture.
Michael Mattmiller: I think that those are great points. You raise a very good point, which is that this is not a technology problem This is a people and education opportunity. I’ll be optimistic for a moment. We are very grateful to have the support of the Mayor and the Council in this effort. Councilmember Harrell has asked to be kept apprised of our progress and how departments are doing. We’ve already had conversations, as well, with the City auditor to understand, as we move forward, what is the right way to assess, or how to be accountable in a transparent manner for how we’re performing. Again, I’ll be honest and say we need some ramp time before we can demonstrate accountability, but we’re thinking about what does that look like as we move forward. we’re not going to change the hearts and minds quickly. It’s not something that we can get out and talk to 11,000 people one on one and say why this commitment is important in a manner like we’re having here. But what we can do is through trainings, through–actually, I’ve lost my wallet card. Did I show you my privacy principles wallet card? We ran up a small batch with our principles. And we have an order in right now to make sure that the print is legible in small size. But we want to have enough to give to City employees so that if you have to make a decision, you’ve actually got a quick reference to say, “Did you think about these six things?”
And so, in time, we want to change that mind set. One of the things I’m very encouraged by is something as simple as reaching out for help. That is not necessarily in our City nature to go outside your department when you’re embarking on a new project or you’re thinking about a new system or a new business process. But even since we’ve gone to Council and announced that we’re working on this privacy program, we’ve started to have departments proactively reach out to us, to Ginger. Technically, we launched this program Monday, or we announced our intention on January 1 to launch this privacy program. And Ginger’s already got a list of touchpoints to departments about wanting help on doing the right thing around privacy. Is it every department on everything that’s happened in the last year? Not yet. But it’s a start. So I fully recognize our need to make this about people and about education and helping departments understand why we need to do the right thing and what that looks like. And I look forward to keeping this group apprised on how that’s going.
Phil Mocek: I’ve seen several references to privacy impact assessment. Where is that published?
Michael Mattmiller: Seattle.gov/privacy. We put together a document that has the TIA in it, and it has descriptions of what’s in the toolkit. We tried to pull out as much content as possible. I know that they were putting the finishing touches on the web site, so if you don’t see….
Comment: The toolkit is not on the web site.
Michael Mattmiller: Okay. I will work with David Keyes and make sure we send that out to the list, and it will be posted shortly.
Nancy Sherman: I wanted to commend you for all of these privacy initiatives. I think they sound great. I wanted to ask whether there is any thought of extending this to businesses and organizations that the City does business with, or that they give money to. And the Comcast franchise is coming up. Are we going to ask if Comcast can do a low income discount [unintelligible]. I would suggest that if you say that’s fine, but once you’ve vetted that person and approved them for a low income discount, get their DSHS client number or whatever it is that they had gathered in the first place. Another example would be the City: HSD gives a lot of money to various low income and homeless organizations, and again there’s information on people, general privacy issues that folks run into. So I would suggest that the City has a certain amount of leverage with those they do business with. And I wonder whether you will expand the privacy guidelines [to them].
Michael Mattmiller: That’s a great point. I believe it’s principle number five in our privacy principles is about information sharing. We do have partners with whom we share our information and it would behoove them to honor our privacy principles as well. When I say, ‘share information,’ if we think about running a business or running an organization like a city, we don’t do everything ourselves. For example, we’re moving our email to Office 365, which means a portion of our information [unintelligible]. In our contract, we have very strong protections that say our data is our data and that it simply sits on a Microsoft server and there are very limited rights they have to access it, and when we delete it, they don’t retain a copy of it. So, Ginger has been working with our contracting folks on the right contractual language we want to drive in the future to make sure that we do protect our ownership of the data and our privacy principles. You raised a great point with the Comcast franchise, and I’m not going to be able to speak authoritatively–Tony can probably get us more information–but we actually do have one of the strongest consumer protection ordinances when it comes to cable television. One of the strongest in the nation. It does have a provision that every quarter, Comcast has to report to us their data privacy practices, and if they share information, with whom and why. That is something that I won’t say it’s where we want it to be going forward, but it’s definitely somewhere that gives us that ability to understand why and follow up if we don’t feel that that’s appropriate.
Nancy Sherman: [unintelligible]
Michael Mattmiller: That’s an interesting question. That is a step that we haven’t gone to them with.
Nancy Sherman: A great deal of information is gathered as part of the King County homelessness initiative and a very extensive privacy requirement, but nevertheless, the City is helping to fund those organizations and would have a chance to perhaps weigh in on their privacy practices.
Michael Mattmiller: That’s a good question. A very good idea.
Tim: [unintelligible]
Michael Mattmiller: The question is about having a transparency officer. Tell me more about what your vision is.
Tim: [unintelligible]
Michael Mattmiller: It’s a really interesting idea, and I forget if I’ve spoken to this group about it, but we do have our research partnership with the University of Washington around open data. And if the link hasn’t been sent around, I’ll make sure David Keyes gets that, as well. It’s really fascinating. The lead investigators came up with this concept of how governments share information. That either we push it through an open data portal or something similar. Individuals pull the information, like a public disclosure FOIA request, and then lastly spill, where unintentional information is made public. We do try and push some information to that. I was really thrilled in chatting with Bruce Blood this week. Bruce is our open data manager. We’re up to 429 data sets that we make available on data.seattle,gov. We have a goal to continue increasing that. We are now sixth on Code for America’s open data census in the country. We’d like to be higher. We are working on that. At the same time, we also make maps available through our ESRI platform. We do a number of other things to get data out into the hands of the public. Performance.seattle.gov around that. For those who haven’t seen it yet, SDOT has put out their capital projects dashboard so you can see how those projects are performing and where they are in accordance with their established budgets. One of the things that I am looking forward to, as well as making sure that we are interacting with our civic technology community, because there are so many people in our City that can do great things with the data–the non-privacy impacting data, of course–that we have in the City. And we want to encourage those types of things, making sure the community knows what’s out there and how to leverage it. There’s a great quote that our USCTO Meg Smith said that is worth repeating, which is that government should be more API and less RFP. (laughter in the room) I said that in a meeting last week and got blank stares. Makes me feel a bit better. But it’s very true. I think to that end for transparency there is an opportunity for us to really focus on putting data out there, of course recognizing that we do want to protect privacy as well. And we are thankful for the guidance that the folks at the University of Washington are giving us to make sure that we can balance those two objectives. And I will take that idea for a transparency officer to the powers that be.
Jan Bultmann: I remember when you started and you made some statements to the newspapers about the establishment of privacy, and I thought, wow, he’s really (unintelligible). And I want to thank you so much for being true to your word and making this issue an acute priority. I know that the City of Seattle is joining with UW in the Smart Cities initiative, and I was wondering if there is any overlap between the privacy initiative and the Smart Cities, or if they will be talking to each other.
Michael Mattmiller: Well, first thank you for the first statement. I will caveat by saying we’ve only been able to accomplish this with support from Mayor Murray and the Council being right behind us and saying this is the right thing to do. Then again, I come to this meeting asking for support from everyone in this room to recognize that this is a journey. The City is a rather large ship to turn, and this is a first step. We want to continue evolving this program and continue to bring people with us as we are able to educate our City work force and make progress. To your second point, the answer is yes. For those who haven’t heard, as part of the White House Smart Cities Initiative that was announced on September 14. The White House announced what is called the Metro Lab Network. This concept of pairing cities with universities to help drive new Smart Cities innovations in a sustainable manner. One of the challenges of Smart Cities projects that the White House recognized is that a company like a Siemens or an Itron can come in and charge a city $3 million, $5 million–who knows how much money to do a cool, innovative project putting censors in the belt environment, reduce energy consumption, or improve transportation, but these systems are very expensive. They’re one-offs and they’re hard to sustain when funding dries up. Yet we have these brilliant research institutions who could do great work, and yet that great work doesn’t always find a home, getting operationalized in our cities, which are the future labs of how we’re going to live and work. As fifty million more people move into urban areas over the next fifty years — sorry, I forget the stat. So, we were honored to be selected with the University of Washington for this Metro Lab Network partnership which coincides with the creation of a new lab at the University of Washington called Urban@UW, which is their effort to create a multi-disciplinary approach to study urban issues and to how to make places like the City of Seattle better places to live. Thaisa Way is the director of the lab. Great folks like Bill Howe and Vikram Jandhyala and a number of other folks who are involved in the effort. And there will be a launch event on October 29, where interim president Ana Mari Cauce and Mayor Murray will be talking about our partnership and why this work is so important. It’s interesting why it’s so important…
Comment: She just got the job.
Michael Mattmiller: Did they announce it? President Cauce! Very excited to hear that. One of the interesting things about the partnership is that we’ve committed to work on three initiatives together with the university over the next year. And in talking with Thaisa, Bill, and others, we recognize that in Seattle, it’s not enough just to have a Smart City. We have to have a socially just Smart City. It’s very important to us to have digital equity and recognize our Race and Social Justice Initiative. So we want to make sure that any projects we take on are considering social justice. Given our partnership on privacy with UW over the past year, we are looking to make that as one of our hallmark projects, about how it is we protect the public’s information as we work on Smart Cities type initiatives. So, for example, if we’re going to put a censor in the bill for firemen, have we assessed the privacy risks through our privacy review process, and have we mitigated any harm? So, more to come on that front, but definitely, Jan, you’re spot on. Partnership privacy is not only going to be a consideration, but one of the hallmarks of our relationship.
Nourisha Wells: Do we have any announcements?
David Keyes: There was a flyer printed there for the October 24 Seattle at Work. This is part of a series the Mayor is doing. They’re doing a little bit of alternating between having forums and resource tables at different community centers and downtown here. So October 24, it will be at Meadowbrook Community Center. Derrick will be there, but there are flyers there and I’ll send it out to the list also.
And then, maybe we just want to do introductions for folks who came in a little bit later?
INTRODUCTIONS FOR LATE COMERS
Nourisha Wells: Next, we’ll have the Seattle Channel Diversity Report from John Giamberso.
Seattle Channel Diversity Report
[See this report at http://ctab.seattle.gov/?p=485]
John Giamberso: For those of you who don’t know me, I’m John Giamberso, general manager of the Seattle Channel. And if you don’t know about the Seattle Channel, there’s a handout right here on the table that you can take on your way out or just ask me some questions.
As the City’s Seattle Channel, we are charged under the Race and Social Justice Initiative to make sure that we cover people of color and underserved communities. And the way we do that is we track our programs. This is a semi-annual report. I do this twice a year. This is for the first two quarters of the year. And then, probably in January or February, I’ll do a report for all of 2015. Basically, our methodology is to count the number of people of color that we have on our shows, and also the number of issues that relate to people of color or underserved communities. What we do is to take each of our shows, we take the total number of shows and then we measure how many people of color are on camera, or how many issues have content that relates to people of color. This is a list of all our shows. Let me explain a little bit what long form is. Long form is basically gavel to gavel coverage of interesting speakers, lecturers, celebrities, politicians who come to town. It’s titled American Podium or Town Square. Take that as an example, just to walk you through some of the details. We have 52 shows of Town Square or American Podium. Of those 52 shows, 39 had content that was relevant to people of color or underserved communities. Thirty-seven of those shows had people of color on camera. So you can see that percentages for most of the shows are well above the demographics of the City of Seattle. I think we’re tracking pretty well in meeting our recent social justice initiative in making sure that we cover people who are left out of the usual local broadcast coverage and making sure that we are highlighting underserved communities. Just to take another example, we look at Community Stories. Community Stories is a documentary series which we pick out of underserved communities. Typically, Community Stories comes in at 100 percent. In the first two quarters, we’ve done two documentaries and they were both about people of color. It won’t always be that, but that helps us focus our energies on underserved communities.
We also look at different ways that we can serve communities of color. So we had an Asian-American History Month, we have a Black History Month, we have Latino Heritage Month. We just did a show on indigenous peoples in keeping with Indigenous People Day.
The City also funds another channel. It’s the Public Access Channel, where anybody, at very little cost, can come and make a program about their issues that are dear to their hearts. Any questions, comments?
Amy Hirotaka: Do you have a goal percentage that you’re trying to reach?
John Giamberso: We use the US Census demographics as our benchmark.
Beryl Fernandes: (by phone) I’m catching about one in every ten words. Just to share my observations about the Seattle Channel, over the last several months, maybe year, I really love the Community Stories that are coming out. I love that you’re bringing in people who don’t necessarily have big names out there but are doing wonderful things throughout the community. A lot of them are young people, who just haven’t had a lot of exposure before. And Telemann, with his interviews of politicians and candidates–so skillful and just a pleasure to watch.
John Giamberso: You know he’s interviewing our bosses who are applying for their jobs. So, it is a tricky situation. What Beryl is referring to is we have a program called City Inside Out, and we’re covering each of the district races. So, recently we had Tim Burgess, who is running for at-large Councilmember. We had him on our show, debating (his opponent). So, thank you, Beryl, I’ll pass that on to Brian.
Beryl Fernandes: (by phone) Yes, and Eric Liu as well. I saw him bring on people who did not have big names in the community, and who do outstanding work. And I hope we continue to do that. Get out there and identify people in marginalized communities who might not otherwise have been recognized, and give them that kind of recognition. So, kudos!
John Giamberso: All right, Beryl. I appreciate that. Any other questions?
Nancy Sherman: How do you define ‘underserved communities?’
John Giamberso: Typically, what we do is, especially for Community Stories, we work with partners like the wing Luke Museum, or Reel Grrls, or 911, community organizations that we are in contact with or in partnerships with, and they usually bring forward people who are doing work that has not been highlighted.
Nancy Sherman: That’s not quite what I was looking for. When you’re charged with making sure that you report on race and underserved communities, how do you define what is an underserved community? Is it based on census data, or ….
John Giamberso: Well, I think it’s actually more informal than that. It’s more that our producers are always looking for stories. If we talk about Community Stories, or if we talk about some of the shows that Beryl was talking about, like Seattle Voices, those producers are charged with going out and finding people who are in underserved communities. But I do not have….
Nancy Sherman: I understand, but if you can’t define it, I don’t know how you’re going to be able to make sure that you do it thoroughly. So that’s one thing. Another question that I’d like to know is when you’re counting faces or content for your report, what’s on your criteria list for an underserved community?
John Giamberso: We count the people of color and we count for content that is relevant to people of color in underserved communities.
Nancy Sherman: I know. I’m asking specifically about underserved communities. What’s the criteria? So if I was the person that was helping you produce this report, and you said, ‘watch these shows,’ and count every time you see content or see a face. What would you tell me to look for? What would be on the criteria list? Would you be telling me to look for people who are physically disabled? Would you be telling me to look for people who identify as being immigrants? Would you be telling me to look for people who are a religious minority? What’s on your criteria list?
John Giamberso: I think that we’re going to have to develop a more formal list. Basically, how the process works is, again, producers go out into communities and based on their perceptions, that’s how we report it out. So I think you bring up a good point and I think going forward, we’ll need to develop some criteria that meets your issue.
Nancy Sherman: I just want to remind you that I’ve said many of these same things the last time you were here. I hope that you will make sure that you cover all minority and underserved communities. [unintelligible]
John Giamberso: I’d like to give you a call and get your input. Any other questions?
Nourisha Wells: Next, we’ll have our update from the Cable and Broadband Committee.
Cable and Broadband Committee Update
Amy Hirotaka: The hearing that was meant to happen on November 18 has been cancelled. There has been no re-schedule yet, so I won’t be presenting a draft today for CTAB to approve. The Broadband Committee has been at work creating a position statement, however we have not yet seen the actual agreement, so it’s hard to comment on actual items that are listed in it. People like Janice have been very helpful in putting together a list of folks who were hoping to get together to submit their own letters, and also potentially attend the meeting if they care to give comment. But again, all of this is in a holding pattern as everything is going to be rescheduled.
Nourisha Wells: You asked to move the meeting for this month?
Amy Hirotaka: Yes. I am out of town for work on the last Monday of this month, so I sent an email around to the Broadband Committee asking if we could move it to Tuesday. If everybody could reply to that email, we’ll figure out whether or not to hold it without me or to wait for me and do it the day after.
Nourisha Wells: And who is your co-chair?
Amy Hirotaka: Dan Stiefel. I’ll wait for him to reply as well.
Nourisha Wells: Any questions?
Janice Bultmann: I have a comment. They actually cancelled three meetings–three public safety meetings, so it’s really up in the air at this point–through the middle of December, right?
Dorene Cornwell: The question would be are they actually going to hold any public hearings.
Kendee Yamaguchi: Obviously, we recognize the public comment period, and whether it’s legal to step around that. Last time we touched base, they were trying schedule something to meet those requirements. So we don’t have a firm date to be able to share back at this meeting, but we did do a touch point to see if we would be able to share at this meeting, but there isn’t a precise date. [unintelligible]
Nourisha Wells: Any other questions? No? I’m going to pass around the Digital Inclusion Committee update. Jose Vasquez wasn’t able to make it. I just want to give everyone a few minutes to read through, just in case you didn’t get to see it. He sent it out a little late. So you can pass that around and take a few minutes to look it over.
David Keyes: And we can just put this document into the minutes. It’s probably worth just mentioning a couple of highlights from it. There is another meeting of the committee next Tuesday at 6:00 p.m. at the Beacon Hill Library, so folks are invited to join the Digital Inclusion Committee meeting there. There was some discussion but they didn’t vote on any language change. They didn’t get any significant time to discuss the TMF criteria. They will come back to the board with something. There was some discussion with the Broadband Committee. A couple of members of the Broadband Committee were at the last Digital Inclusion Committee meeting to work together on the position statement about low income broadband programs. We;ve actually taken one of those comments–we started to look at that, too–and take some of that back to the work group on the Digital Equity Initiative around connectivity. I know that the work groups have been meeting to work on particular action strategies, just to hone that in and take some of the input. So coming back, we’ll have those strategies as they’re being worked on, and that’s taking the input from earlier CTAB meetings and so on.
Nourisha Wells: I think there’s a question regarding the location of the next meeting. It will be at the Douglass Truth Library on the 20th.
Digital Inclusion Committee Update
Via email from José Manuel Vasquez. 10-13-15
TMF Criteria
We did not get a chance to discuss and vote on any language change at the last meeting. However, based on conversations we’ve been having it seems like there are concerns with the language being too restrictive. We will continue to discuss this further to find out the best strategy to be supportive of building the capacity of our community organizations and marginalized groups, which supports the purpose of the TMF.
I believe that being strategic about the review process and inviting a more diverse group of review committee members will help with this. This is something that we can begin implementing and working with city staff to make it a priority to include folks from under-represented communities. If you know of anybody who is interested in participating in next year’s review committee please have them contact me. I want to start recruiting and discussing next year’s process relatively soon.
The DI committee will continue discussing and we will update the CTAB board once something is agreed upon.
Low-income broadband program
DI committee is collaborating with the Broadband committee to draft and submit a position statement for low-income broadband programs. Several ideas were discussed at our last meeting, amongst them;
– Including more non-traditional tech organizations in the enrollment process
– Focusing on the needs of the residents that would be affected by these programs, rather than on the needs of the companies.
– Encouraging ISPs to expand their programs and facilitating the enrollment requirements. Possible expanding the program criteria and standardizing the enrollment process. An example that was brought up was doing something like what DSHS is doing with WashingtonConnections.org
Digital Equity Initiative
Work groups have been meeting to discuss particular action strategies from the Digital Equity Initiative. We are including one of these discussions at our next DI committee meeting next week.
Next Meeting
We will be meeting on a different date and different location this month. Our next DI committee meeting will be on Tuesday 10/20 at 6pm at the Douglas-Truth Library on 23rd and Yesler. Next month we will also meet a week earlier due to Thanksgiving. November’s meeting will be on 11/17 at 6pm at the Beacon Hill Library.
Again, sorry for having to miss tonight’s meeting. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
Thanks.
Nourisha Wells: We will go ahead and break for five minutes. Feel free to sign in if you didn’t sign in previously. And enjoy the refreshments.
FIVE MINUTE BREAK
Nourisha Wells: Beryl, can you hear us?
Derrick Hall: She should be able to.
Nourisha Wells: Beryl, are you ready for your Privacy Committee Report? [No answer.] Okay, let’s move ahead to E-Gov, Joneil, and then I’ll send her an email to see if there are some technical things going on.
E-GOV COMMITTEE UPDATE
Joneil Sampana: For a quick recap of this month’s E-Gov Committee meeting, there are actually the minutes on our blog. So if you want to look at that for specific details to URL links that we were talking about regarding new tools in the City for citizen engagement. Some of the key things that we talked about was a recap of the Washington State gathering called Full Contact, hosted by the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA). It was a cross sector coming together of different individuals–about 250–talking about specific social issues happening within Seattle. That’s from broadband to sustainability to engagement. Really an interesting way for folks to come together and talk about solution creation as colleagues and peers within a 24-hour work session. From that day, there was, I think, 12 action teams that were working on specific social issues that WTIA identified. Everything from broadband to Smart Cities to education to recruiting. And they created a work stream that WTIA was hoping to continue throughout the next 12 months. So it’s not just coming together and talking, it was actually creating an action plan. So again, an innovative way to come together from different sectors. We’d like to actually leverage that mindset, that platform, to do smaller scale action planning, very similar to what you will see and hear about with Urban@UW. Michael Mattmiller brought that up regarding the University of Washington’s effort to do the very same thing on the 29th. They’ll be bringing together interested citizens, industry leaders, academic leaders to come together to solve six issues. They’re going to try to leverage what we’ve done with the WTIA, bring new members to the conversation. So mark your calendars. If you need more information, we’ll post that event for the 29th of October.
Other things that we were talking about was a new work stream. It’s Smart Cities. So, as you know, Seattle has been identified as one of the White House’s initiative Smart Cities for 2016. And in April, we’ll get awarded ten censor boxes from the University of Chicago. What we are able to do with the boxes is pick from a menu of censors that were created. There are well over a hundred of those. But folks in specific neighborhoods in Seattle identified specific issues that they want to solve through data, through work load, through analysis, and then share that problem with this larger body, vote on it, and then we” take a task team to actually identify the tools that we’ll be using–the censors–how we will manage this problem solving effort. And then, work it through for best practices that other cities are doing. So another innovative idea to bring problem solving to the masses. That kickoff will be on the 29th. And if you come to the next E-Gov meeting, both Michael and Thaisa Way will be at the meeting, sharing more about the rules of engagement for the Smart Cities initiative.
That’s the 4th Tuesday of the month, and the location is probably going to be 320 Westlake down in the South Lake Union neighborhood.
For more details, links and updates, please feel free to jump on the web blog. Any questions?
If you join our distribution list, you’ll get those minutes right after the meeting.
Janice Tofle: There’s always a problem with mobility. As a person with disability, I served on the [unintelligible] steering committee. There was a huge issue with sidewalks, curbs, it goes on and on. It’s really important to have their input on how they can best be participants and to have their voices heard.
Joneil Sampana: That’s a great point. We’re getting ready to go to this commission to commission meeting. A gentleman that was there represented that commission and sat down and talked about their charter.
Dorene Cornwell: One of the things that I think would be cool is just to look at what comes in this geographic distribution list and fix it. And also following up on Janice’s point about people with disabilities, somebody actually got sued. I can’t remember the names. #crappycurb is getting a lot of attention for curb cuts that are noncompliant and power boxes that are here on the edge of this building. Part of the point for me is to mobilize quickly and be able to deal with some of this stuff and identify high traffic areas and places that are problematic. Where is the location and how many different accidents happen at that location [unintelligible]. I’m interested in this and I will note it on my calendar.
Joneil Sampana: Yes, and bring those ideas, those concerns. But also some thoughts you might have for possible solutions or work efforts that we can focus on. That would be really helpful. This is a big problem.
Janice Tofle: Are you working with the Department of Neighborhoods (DON) on it?
Joneil Sampana: No, what I was saying is we’re just connected to the commissions, but there’s no official work stream around that. The only work stream that we’ve gotten from Michael has been Smart Cities. Any last questions?
Tim: When I think of Smart Cities, one of the things that really comes to mind is self-driving cars. I notice that certain cities are gearing up for the testing of these vehicles, and I’m really surprised that Seattle is not one. Austin and some others. Is there anything Seattle can do to bring this test here?
Joneil Sampana: That’s kind of out of my visibility. Actually, we had a question about that. Let’s not be on that list. Let’s learn from the others. Let’s be a little more conservative about that.
Nourisha Wells: I think that’s a great question for Michael that I think we can pass through. Maybe he can address it at the next meeting. We still haven’t heard from Beryl, so I’m not sure if she is no longer with us on the line, or if she’s having technical difficulties.
We’ll move on to the board development conversation. We have three board positions that will be open. So we wanted to talk a little bit about how we want to go about recruiting for those positions, things that should be considered in building out the composition of the board. Last month, we talked about some potential holes that we thought should be filled. And so we want to just kind of think about that. What do you feel that you add to the board? What do you think is missing? We just want to have that conversation. And then, think about ways that we can recruit for those openings. What areas we need to target, what organizations we should be reaching out to and that kind of thing. So, we’re going to open it up for conversation.
What are some holes we see that need to be filled? Where are some areas that we could use on the board? Both in terms of skill and diversity. It does require input. It’s not optional.
Nancy Sherman: I’m guessing, but what I would like to suggest that you need on the board now is number one, some low income folks. And number two, some folks over 35. The folks who like to show up and sit in the seats up against the wall. The folks that you’re supposed to be serving. I think it’s a little hard for folks who have never been on the other side of the digital divide because of their age and access to technology, to really understand or to be connected to those folks who are not on the right side of the digital divide. And even folks who are connected but who are older and can remember a day when we didn’t have cell phones and didn’t have a computer on their desks. We need to remember that there are still folks out there in Seattle who still have landlines, who have very slow internet, or who don’t have computers at all, like the folks in my building.
Janice Tofle: I just read a statistic today that I wasn’t aware of. There are 600 children between K through 12 who are homeless, so the Comcast Internet Essentials, obviously, takes care of those folks, but there are 900 seniors. I didn’t know that number was that high. That’s huge. I suggest that we find somebody from the Office for Senior Citizens. They train for basic skills there. There might be an individual who is in touch with those people, that would really understand the needs.
Dorene Cornwell: I’m going to be a little bit counter to the thread of this conversation. I think if there were somebody from Amazon or Google or Wave or any of the giant technology companies who are willing to come and sit in a room with these people that they would learn a lot. I don’t know how to put out feelers. I actually do know some people who work at some of those places. And I don’t know that CTAB is going to come up in conversations but I would encourage them to apply. Even when I go to the open data meetups, there are people who can talk technology really well, and sometimes you can do a lot with the right combination of people who do that, but having a broader perspective is a good thing. So I’m for both. I do think we should nominate some folks from the Office for Senior Citizens who might be willing.
Nourisha Wells: I’ll read Beryl’s comment. I haven’t been able to get her reconnected. She recommended that we recruit people with strong, proven ties to Seattle’s local, low income, marginalized community, i.e., people with disabilities, seniors, people of color, youth from low income, especially African American communities, LGBT communities, etc. I think that is continuing the wavelength everyone is on. That being said, what are some potential organizations that we can maybe reach out to to notify them that this is an option, that we’re going to be taking applications.
Janice Toefle: REWA.org (Refugee Women’s Alliance)
Joneil Sampana: In that same spirit, folks from those TMF grantees both current and past.
Nancy Sherman: The big low income housing providers. Many of them have computer labs that were started by residents, so there you would have people who are both low income residents but also are active in their communities.
Nourisha Wells: Any others?
Joneil Sampana: On the opposite side, how about individuals from the Open Seattle community. We have a lot of participants here, the usual suspects. But serving in a board position would be value-added, a direct connection to that movement.
Nourisha Wells: Any that we missed?
Janice Tofle: Facebook is a good place to look [unintelligible]
Karia Wong: I’m thinking about representation from other City departments, like Human Services and maybe, Housing. Even the schools. Because I think it’s important that we be able to connect everyone. I think they could serve us well because they are in touch with all different people from day to day.
Nourisha Wells: The positions that are allocated, Get Engaged for the under-thirty, and then there’s an education (slot). What other positions are already allocated?
David Keyes: The ones that are designated are Get Engaged. Iga has that position right now. Education, which Carmen Rahm is currently filling through January 17. And then the Public Access position, which historically started out as Public Access TV, and then was broadened to simply Public Access to technology. Those are the three designated positions. The others are at-large, appointed by the Mayor or Council. Right now, other City staff, we could invite them in. It would be good if we had Transportation here, and so on.
Nourisha Wells: I think another way to get that audience would be to go after the organizations, the nonprofits and those kinds of organizations that work with those City departments.
David Keyes: I’m guessing that many in the housing community, whether you’re a housing developer or a nonprofit low income housing provider, or an agency or City staff around housing, seldom have opportunities in forums to talk about digital equity and broadband needs.
Nourisha Wells: I think we have the start of a good list that we’ll send around, that people can add to for that. And then we can send out the application. Because there’s also a formal review process that we want to talk about: what has happened in the past; who gets to sit on the panel for reviewing applications.
David Keyes: It has really varied a lot. We typically meet following the outreach process to get applications, and people will have had to submit a letter and a resume. I actually wanted to ask you about the format for that and get a little feedback. There are two phases. One is just initial review of candidates. We’ve had anywhere from 10 to 15 to 70 candidates come in for a cycle. There is that initial screening and ranking that we’ve had some CTAB members participate in. And then we’ve made the list of people available for CTAB to comment on. And then we’ve had a couple people participate in interviews, depending upon availability. Sometimes those interviews have had representatives from the City Council chair, the Office of Technology Committee chair, and sometimes someone from the Mayor’s office. Typically, the goal, in part, is to come out with a small number of recommendations to forward to either City Council or Mayor, for them to decide who they want to appoint. Any positions have to get confirmed by the Council, as you all know because you’ve been through that. So the City Council positions are kind of direct. For the Mayor ones, they send recommendations over for Council approval, as just recently happened with Iga.
Nourisha Wells: So, you guys have a copy of the previous recruitment announcement?
David Keyes: Yes, I did send this out. I guess one of my questions is, one of the things I would like to do when we send this out–when we get a lot of applications and there are lots of different forms, it’s easier to process them through if they’re all in roughly the same format. One question is whether we should require things to be submitted in PDF or Word, with the option to get help if they need it. Certainly, if we could have something in a consistent format, that would make the reviewing a lot easier to post and go through. That’s something I wanted to bounce off you guys. And then, this announcement and thoughts and feedback.
Nourisha Wells: Does anyone have any feedback?
Dana Lewis: If the only format you’re talking about is PDF, I think that’s one thing. If we start covering more formats within the resume, I think that starts to get frustrating. [unintelligible]
David Keyes: But you think doing it as a PDF and people could get the help if they needed to?
Dana Lewis: I think that’s pretty universal, but…Yes, because you could use various word processing applications [unintelligible].
Karia Wong: I’m thinking about maybe an online form for people just to fill out. If they have the resume ready, they could just copy and paste. And on the back end, we could just collect those and put them in a table and compare.
Dana Lewis: My only concern is if people have a nontraditional background, if it’s really that they’re more passionate about stuff but without the formal experience, I think that’s sometimes intimidating.
Karia Wong: It’s just space on that experience. People who are not technology-savvy. Creating a PDF file might be challenging for them because they have to have the right software. They have to have the software to save the stuff into PDF.
Amy Hirotaka: I’d agree with you, but I think the good thing about PDF is you can use free software, too. And if we offered to help, I think that’s about the best that we can do.
Karia Wong: Yes. Unless we can help, otherwise it will be challenging, even for us to explain to people we know. You can get free software. It takes a while for them to get it, and then to actually use it. It’s not like a big deal for us but for people who are not [updated] on word processing or publishing, it will be a challenge. they might think, should I step back because it is a challenge to do it? Will I be able to fit into the environment? But if there’s a form for questions, for people just to answer them, it will be less intimidating because they are just answering questions.
Nourisha Wells: I’m really excited about that, too. A resume, if we’re trying to target specific audiences, maybe doing the resume as a requirement is not going to be the best approach. Maybe it is answering a couple of questions, that could say, why are you interested in sitting on the board. If we have that kind of format, then we could do that instead of requiring a resume. And I wonder if that would change the types of submissions and the number for that specific area that we’re trying to target.
Dana Lewis: I will say as somebody who has been around interviews before, when you get the resume, because people have such widely varied experience, you look at the resume just to get a picture of who they are and what their passion is, but you spend more time in the interview just trying to get to the basic information that I think that type of process would work from the ‘get go.’
Joneil Sampana: Going back to some of the other processes, did all of the candidates have a professional social media presence that would serve?
Dana Lewis: Did we ever ask that? I think some people had it on their resumes.
Comment: I wouldn’t like to see us make that as a requirement.
Joneil Sampana: I wouldn’t either. But I like the idea of having a survey oriented model of typing it in, but the help a certain person needs, if they don’t have a digital presence, that’s going to open a lot of conversations to even consider that. To get to the ‘what kind of perspective can this person bring to the table’ is important.
Karia Wong: To me, I think the most important questions to ask are ‘what makes you think you can make contributions to this board?’ That’s the most important question. The other is experience that you think will make you able to contribute or to share.
Dana Lewis: I’ll tell you one thing that just resonated. You’ve been talking about resumes and experience, and I think those my trigger words. When you talk about perspective to me, that’s a little bit more inclusive. Experience feels like a work, professional thing. It isn’t necessarily what we are looking for. So I like focusing on perspective, or why you would like to serve. That to me would help to reach these audiences and get them to really share their assets , and not just be a traditional professional career.
Nourisha Wells: So, then is there a required form that we have to use, or would we have to vote to change that form?
David Keyes: Typically, right now, everything that goes to Council is a letter of interest where a resume is attached. It’s not to say that–I don’t know that it’s codified.
Dana Lewis: I don’t think it would be.
David Keyes: I would think not either. I think it’s just the expectation for what is in the clerk’s packet that goes there.
Nourisha Wells: I think if we ask the right questions, then we get both.
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