Topics covered included: Intro of Digital Engagement Director Jim Loter; Broadband Speed Test Map and Open Data Initiative by Bruce Blood; David Keyes presented the Digital Equity launch and HUD ConnectHome project; Tony Perez discussed the Wave franchise renewal schedule; John Giamberso made a Seattle Channel Diversity report; David Keyes discussed the upcoming Technology Matching Fund cycle.
This meeting was held: March 8, 2016; 6:00-8:00 p.m., Seattle Municipal Tower, 700 Fifth Avenue, Suite 2750
Podcasts available at: http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/CTTAB/podcast/cttab.xml
Attending: 24
Board Members: Amy Hirotaka, Joneil Sampana, Karia Wong, Iga Fikayo Keme, Carmen Rahm
Public: Heather Griswold, David Doyle, Maureen Jones (Solid Ground), Henok Kidane, Dashiell Milliman Jarvis, Kate Schneier, Heather Lewis, Sarah Abramawitz, Mohamud Yussuf, Dan Moulton, Kevin O’Boyle, Dan Stiefel, Carmen Rahm, Dorene Cornwell
Staff: Jim Loter, John Giamberso, Tony Perez, Bruce Blood David Keyes, Vicky Yuki, Cass Magnuski
Meeting was called to order by Amy Hirotaka.
Introductions
Agenda and Minutes approved with one name correction for the January minutes.
INTRODUCTON OF JIM LOTER, DOIT DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT
Jim Loter: Welcome. Under my most previous hat as director of IT for the Seattle Public Library, I’ve been at a few CTAB meetings, but I think under mostly different membership. I was with the library for the last five years and was very active in contributing to public computing and public internet access initiatives the library offers. Almost from day one, I started working with David Keyes and the staff of Community Technology with Vicky Yuki and others. I worked on some Digital Inclusion stuff with Amy Hirotaka back in the day and am very excited about the opportunity now to be here, actively involved in the Digital Equity Initiative with the City, working with John Giamberso, Tony Perez, and Bruce Blood and whole Digital Engagement team. I look forward to being here at CTAB every month and getting to know everybody here.
Carmen Rahm: What all falls under Digital Engagement?
Jim Loter: I think the unifying principle behind that is the technology services that the City of Seattle provides to the community, to the public. Seattle Channel, Office of Cable Communications, the Open Data Platform. The representative from the Web Team isn’t here today, but that’s a unit that’s within Digital Engagement. And then, of course, Community Technology. Those are the organizational boxes, but I think in general, certainly the Digital Equity Initiative is a primary movement right now, and will be for the foreseeable future. The Open Data Platform that Bruce blood is going to talk about is a very exciting initiative that we’re running. As I see it, it’s a collective and collaborative effort, including CTAB, to ensure that the City’s IT resources are used to help improve the ways in which people can engage with City government.
Carmen Rahm: Mobile applications and things like that to help citizens access City services would be under you?
Jim Loter: That would be a collaboration with our Applications Team. To the extent that the Web Team runs some of that stuff now, yes. Social media, that’s something that’s done throughout the City, but it’s an area that I hope to bring a little bit more of a strategic focus, which sounds very corporate, but I think a more intentional focus to the way that social media is used to help people engage. But the three pillars of the Digital Equity platform are connectivity, skills or literacy, and devices. And through really understanding that, our job is to advocate for the expansion of those services in the community, and to help people get access to information and be able to perform critical life skills online, whether that’s an application provided by the City, or something that we act in support of.
Joneil Sampana: Can we figure out a kind of scorecard starting from today to six months from now to a year, through which your impact or the team’s impact could be gauged?
Jim Loter: That’s a good question. The Digital Equity Initiative has laid out some of those success metrics for us, and DoIT, which will soon be Seattle IT, is in the process of adopting some performance measures. So, internally, for our operations, that’s the traditional metrics of up time, speed. But for Digital Engagement, it’s all about the impact that we’re having in the community. I haven’t filled in the numbers yet, or defined what that framework is, but there’s an active project within the department to do that, and it’s something that I hope to be able to bring back to this group within a couple of months. I’ve been on the job for about three weeks.
Amy Hirotaka: Any other questions for Jim?
Jim Loter: @jimloter on Twitter
Amy Hirotaka: Well, thank you, Jim. We look forward to working with you. A few other folks stepped in, so if you want to introduce yourselves, feel free.
More Introductions
Amy Hirotaka: I will now turn it over to Bruce Blood.
BRUCE BLOOD ON THE BROADBAND MAP
Bruce Blood: First thing, it’s actually the Broadband Speed Test. There are two maps involved. We branded it as the Broadband Speed Test, because that’s actually what we’re trying to focus on. I’m going to give you some background. Basically, this started as an idea that came out of a hack-a-thon last early May, where some people from the Open Technology Institute (OTI), a nonprofit based in Washington, DC, came and worked with the folks from what was then Code for Seattle, but now is Open Seattle. They started this idea of putting a speed test in a map that would show the results of that speed test for broadband speeds. As it evolved, it really became much more of a partnership just between the City of Seattle and OTI, and we’ve gone through a number of iterations in terms of what we wanted this to be. It is based on a software that was developed by M-LAB, a consortium of nonprofits–Open Technology is part of that and a major funder of M-Lab. But M-Lab developed the software. And the interesting thing about this particular type of test, our speed test as opposed to others is what OOKLA does is it never leaves the particular network you happen to be attached to. So, if you’re on Comcast, basically it just measures the speed from you to Comcast and back. It doesn’t go out to the other side. And what the M-Lab test does is it goes from wherever you happen to be through your internet provider out to M-Lab servers, which they have all over the country. They have five here in Seattle. It measures the speed to their servers and then back to you. Both of them are accurate and both will give you a feeling for the speed, but we feel the M-Lab test does reflect the actual experience that users have. I think the results are bearing that out pretty well.
We can do a test on the City network. [Bruce Blood and David Keyes demonstrate.] The one bug we found is when you have a connection with lots of people. as the City’s is, sometimes it gets held up. As we speak, through the City’s wireless at this point, that was your download/upload speed.
On a month to month basis, we put the results out. Once again, until we actually get the bandwidth, you won’t see a lot of these census blocks filled in. If you click on some of those colored blocks, it will show you the median down and up; the maximum, which is really interesting–obviously somebody’s got a gigabit connection there; and then the average round trip time. That’s really basically it.
Now the fun part is that we collect all of these. M-Lab has this huge worldwide database that is collecting all the results of many tests in many places, but ours takes this and throws it out on http://data.seattle.gov. We have the data uploaded once a day, and it’s available for anyone to use. I have just started grabbing it and doing some pivot tables on it and getting some feel for what the actual averages are. It looks like, contrary to what the common perception is, the internet providers are actually doing a pretty good job. They are not advertising more than they are delivering. That’s one definition of doing a pretty good job. There are exceptions, of course.
In ‘About the Speedtest,’ it tells in pretty great detail how it works, what it measures and doesn’t measure, why the test results are different, and if your internet provider isn’t giving you the best service, what you can do. And you’ll notice that this actually aims people at the federal government, where they really do have jurisdiction over this, and keeps the phone calls to Tony and his gang down to a minimum.
The last piece is a gigabit availability map. We’re just about ready to update this. We will update this every six months, as the main three internet providers build it out. We’re only going to do residential. We don’t say that now, but we will soon.
there are other internet providers that obviously provide connection to multi-unit and commercial buildings. There are many of those. We decided not to put them on the map because it’s really difficult to map that stuff. It’s going to be on a building by building basis. What we will do is, if they choose to participate, we’ll take their information, put it in a table. We have some data on them because people test the data, and we’ll use that if we have enough instances, we’ll include them.
Henok Kidane: You said earlier that the information would be posted on http://data.seattle.gov, where would that be?
Bruce Blood: I believe it’s under City Business. The best thing would be to search for it. There probably is a direct link in the About page.
Amy Hirotaka: It is under City Business. It’s http://data.seattle.gov/broadband.
Henok Kidane: I think it would be useful to see it on a City-wide basis. Is there anything in place to try to use it in some fashion?
Bruce Blood: We are aware of that. We have not actually done any kind of real promotion on it yet. We’re aware that there is a certain amount of controversy on this, and we wanted to get it settled in for a couple of months. We would expect April or early May to start doing some serious outreach.
Henok Kidane: My last question would be, since we’re trying to find out whether the ISPs are providing what they advertise, is there any link that you could provide [unintelligible].
Bruce Blood: Yes, we can do that.
Joneil Sampana: Bruce, I think he was referring to the controversy surrounding promoting this site?
Bruce Blood: Originally, when we put this out there, we got push back from the providers. We worked with them. Part of having the map is specifically addressing Century Link’s concerns. Obviously, the providers want to be shown in the best light they possibly can, especially since they are in direct competition with one another. We wanted to make sure that the City had a message that we all could agree on. There was some internal discussion about that, but this was the compromise.
Joneil Sampana: So the controversy has come from the providers, not the citizens?
Bruce Blood: No. The citizens only want more, and we understand that, as well.
Carmen Rahm: When it says, ‘Go to the FCC,’ is there something up there that says … first thing should say to contact your ISP. From the school district, I’ve had some real hard times up to this point working with my folks in the district, who say, there’s a site up there where you can get low cost broadband and things like that, and I can’t promote any businesses. What I want to do on the IT side and on the school side is to say, ‘Look into the City’s new low cost broadband initiative.’ And if I’m promoting the City’s initiative, I’m not promoting a vendor. It could say, “If you already have broadband, check out the City’s site and check out your connection and your broadband speed and things like that.
Bruce Blood: Obviously, we appreciate that. We’re still tweaking on this quite a bit, actually. It still might be beta, but we’re getting pretty close. We’re still making changes. any suggestions you have as you go through it, let me know.
Carmen Rahm: We just lost our internal {unintelligible} as our framework is our internal service catalog for staff, and then we just lost our external service catalog, where parents, students, and the community can come to it. I’m thinking right now that we add one onto this: Broadband access for home. They can click on it, and we do not provide broadband access for home, but if you live in the City of Seattle, here are some options you have. Please visit this City web site. And if there are things that you guys can provide, that our customers might think, well why aren’t you providing that, we can link to them through our public service catalog. I think that would be pretty powerful.
Jim Loter: Could you go back to the opening page there? There is a little preamble here on Speed Test that also gets to some of the service providers’ concerns about this. They’ll say, just because your Speed Test shows this, doesn’t mean it’s our service. It could be your router. So we tried to address through the language all the variables that could impact speed on any network. They have a point but they’re also still probably the primary limiter on the network. The results have to be take with a grain of salt.
Amy Hirotaka: I’m without my timekeeper today. If we want Bruce Blood to have enough time to talk about the Open Data Initiative, we should probably move on.
Bruce Blood: If you have any questions on this, you can contact me at bruce.blood@seattle.gov.
OPEN DATA INITIATIVE UPDATE WITH BRUCE BLOOD
Bruce Blood: I’ve been working on these two items for ten months. You’d think you could stagger them, but no. The Open Data Initiative went live on exactly the day the Broadband Map went live. We finalized the Open Data Policy in the middle of February. Then we had a very successful executive order signing event on the 26th, and at http://seattle.gov/opendata, you will find that and the overview of the signing off on the policy. What this means is we now have an Open Data Policy, and the highlight of it is that we are opening. The departments are required to make their data open by preference. Not by default, by preference. It’s pretty key that you understand what we’re talking about here. That is how we built in the caveat that all of our data would be reviewed for privacy issues and for security issues. We’ll go through a process. We’re actually getting some other things involved there where we will make sure the metadata is all up to snuff. May aren’t at this point, so we’ll be cleaning that up. But mostly, every data set has been reviewed for privacy issues, and we’re not talking only internal to that data, but also as near as we can by judging whether anything could be cross referenced with other data sites. The procedures for all of that are being developed as we speak. We’re hopeful to have a Chief Privacy Officer on board soon, and that person and I will be joined at the hip. we will be working together a lot to figure out how to make that roll smoothly. Frankly, it’s pretty easy to tell what kind of data sets we aren’t going to put out there. A number of data sets just don’t have any privacy or security risks at all, so that’s not a problem. There’s a perhaps a 20 percent gray area that will need to be talked about and will be evolving in our policy over time. For instance, sometimes we will put out your personally identifiable information if for instance a series of public disclosure requests have already put that data out on the street. Then the advantage becomes that we have better control over it if we put that same data out of data.seattle.gov or maybe even in some sort of redacted form. Ideally, we cut down on the public disclosure requests,, which very frankly, are overwhelming. It’s not fun.
What’s coming up is that in the next couple of weeks, we are essentially going to be engaging with the directors of the various departments. They are on the hook to identify in every executive department an open data champion. That open data champion is essentially me, the Open Data Manager, on the department. Those people will be my partners. They will be responsible for developing a comprehensive data inventory. From that data inventory, using input from any number of different sources, but including the community, prioritizing the data sets that they will start publishing. The open data champions are supposed to be named by May 1 In the second week of June, we will have what we call Data Camp, which is a big conference/training sessions for the open data champions, and selected others, as well. It’s going to be a three-day event. Hopefully, it will culminate on Wednesday, and we’ll run them through the full process. Departments will be expected to have their preliminary plans done in the fourth quarter.
We’ve committed to putting up 75 new data sets. Frankly, we’re almost there now.
Signing that executive orders means that this is real, 450 data sets into it. It will do a number of things. One, it will make the data better, easier to find, and better organized because we will have procedures in place, and the metadata will be required. In fact, before they ever submit a data set to me, they need to have figured out their metadata. That hasn’t been enforced a lot.
Amy Hirotaka: I think we’re running pretty tight on time.
Bruce Blood: A couple of quick things. Candace Faber is the outreach side of this and we are already engaging the community in ways, because of Candace, that we haven’t done before. And that’s great. We’re going to be actively taking their input to help us prioritize data sets. And by the way, the Mayor has told all departments that they will do this. Questions:
Joneil Sampana: I have two questions, the first one about policy. When each department comes up with their data policy, could they share it with the community under data.seattle.gov?
Bruce Blood: Do you mean their data plan? Because the policy won’t change. The policy is already there, so they will put a plan together. The answer is yes.
Joneil Sampana: Let me clarify about policy. You have an overarching policy. Will each department, based on one example you gave, within the City of Seattle departments, is everybody going to be doing it the same way?
Jim Loter: I think there’s an overlay with the privacy policy that does grant each department a certain degree–or provides each department with some guidelines for what data they manage that they might have to redact or not make available publicly. It’s not necessarily a policy, but I think each department going to follow a set of guidelines that are specific to its data set, but that do not conflict with the overarching privacy policy or the open data policy. They can’t pass a policy that says that all of our data is private because these are local decisions we’re making. They have to be consistent with the City’s privacy policy. And when that Chief Privacy Policy officer is in place, we will be working very closely with that office to ensure that the privacy policy is consistently followed. So, yes, some departments might use some policy to influence some decisions they make about what data they redact, and what data they release in what order.
Joneil Sampana: If I see a data set, some agencies might put a definition of what a data set means and there is no interpretation of what that field represents, is that going to be a standard across the board when you publish it?
Bruce Blood: As much as possible. That’s part of the metadata requirements we’re going to be imposing.
Jim Loter: We need to develop a master data management plan that addresses the common elements that relate data sets to each other, and also issue standards that speak to the point that you’re making. To use a simple example, if one department has last name first, first name, and the other department doesn’t, then suddenly those two {unintelligible}. So we’re already seeing that in a lot of places, and so, as Bruce mentioned, this is very much an agile development process. In other words, we’re making it up as we go along. I think over the next probably six to 12 months, you’ll see a lot of that development. The reason I say that we’re making it up as we go along–I’m being a little bit flippant, but sometimes you can only make decisions once you’re actually looking at the data sets. And so the first stage is to identify the departmental contacts. and to work with them collaboratively to identify some high priority data sets. So we get to chime in on what we think is high priority based on what we hear from the community. They get to chime in on what they think is high priority, because they know their data best. So, I think it’s a good system that we’ve set up. And I think it will be very iterative as we build this out. To say that a decision made six months ago turns out to be a bad one, let’s make a new one going forward. There’s not a lot that we can know ahead of time, before we start getting our hands dirty with the data.
Heather Lewis: What can we do to help make sure you know what data sets we’re interested in. Is there a survey or something that you’re going to send out?
Bruce Blood: We could do a survey. I haven’t really thought about it. The easiest way is to send me an email with suggestions. We do keep track of those. And also, it really does help if I go and say ‘this data set has been requested repeatedly over the last year. Once we get this going, that will be fodder for the department to go after that.
Joneil Sampana: Can this go out externally? Is there a way to get a calendar of those touch points so that the citizens can come to those outreach moments?
Bruce Blood: Yes, we’re working on that, actually. There will be a civic tech web site. We’re redoing what will be the Seattle IT web site, and the Open Data web site, and civic tech contact.
Jim Loter: She’s also tweeting under a separate account now, so she’s out there twice. Candace Faber and Seattle Civic Tech, or something like that.
Amy Hirotaka: Thank you so much. We will move now to David Keyes and the Digital Equity launch.
DAVID KEYES DISCUSSES THE DIGITAL EQUITY LAUNCH
David Keyes: At the last meeting and the meeting before, we talked about the strategies, and I handed those out. For folks who weren’t here for that, during the break I can grab some copies of the Digital Equity strategies. The Mayor has signed off on the strategies moving forward, and we’ve set a date for the launch of the Digital Equity actions for March 22, at 1:00 p.m. in the Bertha Knight Landis Room at City Hall. We’ll have some announcements there and refreshments. You can go to either one. In some ways, that’s really the beginning of the work on implementation. As I mentioned, we started talking with some folks about the elements of that and how to work together. There’s lots of road to go. Within the strategies, there are three major areas: connectivity, digital skills training, and devices and tech support. Connectivity includes low income internet services, WiFi and so on. There are probably about 20 actual strategies to implement, which will happen over the next few years. We’ll be back to having CTAB and community members involved in that implementation. As you work with organizations and companies, there are opportunities there.
One of the things that we’ve been working on that in part also came up during the community discussions here and elsewhere. The project was helping public housing residents. Some of you may know that we’ve launched a project this past year that’s part of a 26-city demonstration project with HUD, called the Connect Home Project, that’s to work with broadband deployment and adoption. Part of that work was to develop some strategies to reach out to connect public housing residents, working with Seattle Housing Authority. You’ll probably hear some more about that. We’re working on convening, giving an opportunity to connect Seattle Housing Authority staff, initially, and connect some resident councils with education providers. We’ve got folks like Best Buy that are interested in providing things. Some other companies, some other learning services like Mouse education for early learners, who are interested in providing resources. W’e’re going to be having a convening in April. That’s another opportunity to connect those dots together around that aspect of helping public housing residents with connectivity and skills. Those are the two major things right now. I will mention also, another thing on low income internet. The FCC today just announced the first stage and put out their first announcement about the upcoming Lifeline Broadband Program, where they’re going to take their Lifeline telephone and make that eligible for broadband. I did a quick print out of the initial thing that came from the FCC. The full order is due on March 31. There are some significant things on expanding eligibility and naming multiple providers to participate in what is basically a $10 a month subsidy for broadband for low income residents. There’s a fact sheet from the FCC on the table there. I also printed out — not endorsing it necessarily–a group called Connected Nation distributed something through the Digital Inclusion Alliance today. This is their fact sheet. It has a slightly clearer explanation on it.
Amy Hirotaka: Are there any questions for David?
Carmen Rahm: Regarding the Mayor’s thing on March 22, should the school district be there? If I can convince the superintendent to be there, it would be nice if there was a little bit of acknowledgement. I’d hate to have him show up and nobody notice.
David Keyes: Absolutely. Let me know if he can come. We’re working on finalizing the program right now. I’ll be sending it out through the CTAB list and email so you all have an alert on it. But I think it’s also an opportunity both to celebrate together and thanks for all the work, but also to have people publicly say that they are committed to working together with us and are moving forward on the Digital Equity Initiative.
Carmen Rahm: The Digital Equity Committee members that were there, are they going to be invited to attend?
David Keyes: Yes. We have CTAB, about 25 Digital Equity committee members, round tables–there were over 100 people. We’ll have folks from the nonprofits, and the companies will also be participating.
Mohamud Yussuf: [unintelligible]
David Keyes: Comcast was part of our Digital Equity Initiative work, as was Century Link, as well, and Verizon, in terms of providers. Comcast is likely to be there with an announcement about their Internet Essentials program, and some other aspects. Some of you may remember that during franchise negotiations, one of the things that we agreed with Comcast that was announced early in December that they were rolling out a senior program. I think our role, as we have done all along, is let’s encourage competition, affordability. I know that there’s been discussion between the Cable and Broadband Committee about some of the bariers to people signing up, and trying to resolve ways that we can help facilitate that. This will also be a chance to talk to them as well. I hope that we will see more low income programs; we still have a need to more fully address that.
Amy Hirotaka: Thank you, David. At this point, we’ll take public comments.
PUBLIC COMMENTARY AND ANNOUNCEMENT
Heather Lewis: The E-Gov Committee is trying to expand it’s social media presence, and is using it’s Twitter account in actively engaging the community. So if anyone wants to volunteer? We would like to be promoting various community events and the TMF and the internship program, and anything else that falls in line with the mission of CTAB. We also will be using a listening tool to gauge sentiment. We will be sending what we have to the board.
Amy Hirotaka: Great! And if folks want to contact you, who should they contact?
Heather Lewis: I’ll write it on the board.
BREAK
WAVE FRANCHISE RENEWAL WITH TONY PEREZ
Tony Perez: I have a short PowerPoint
Download (PPTX, 77KB)
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Wave is right now the sole provider cable and wired internet and TV in the central area of Beacon Hill, and Century Link is going to make some inroads there. The schedule for the Wave renewal. Some of you are familiar with this because last year we had a really busy year with the Comcast franchise renewal, the Century Link franchise, and the Cable Code amendments. We have one more franchise to go. These renewals typically last in Seattle for about 10 years. Before concluding with the schedule, I will spend a few minutes providing you with a contextual framework for how this renewal takes place. Briefly, there’s a federal framework under which we operate renewal and generally, renewal period begins three years prior to the expiration of the franchise. Wave’s franchise expires November 11, 2017. I won’t spend too much time discussing formal renewals rule, but the informal rule is what happens about 95 percent of the time. Informal just means that you negotiated a deal that everybody is happy with. In the event you can’t reach a deal, federal law provides what is called a formal renewal process. Everyone tries to avoid that. The main reason is because it’s a very contentious, expensive undertaking and at the end of the day, a judge could wind up deciding what each side gets. So nobody wants to do that. You lose control of the process. These processes do run concurrently and we have to comply with all these obligations.
Now in black down here, it starts three years before franchise expiration. Wave triggered the renewal in December of 2014. They sent us a letter saying, “We want to renew. We reserve all of our rights under the formal process, but we look forward to reaching an agreement with you via the informal rules.’ That’s fairly standard. Because they sent us this letter, we had a six month window, according to renewal law, to respond to them. Typically, the response is telling them that we have initiated a community needs ascertainment to assess the related needs of our community and to assess the extent of ways of compliance with the franchise contract. Just to play it safe, we had a small community meeting in May of last year, as a signal to Wave that we have complied with the initial requirements.
Next slide. This is just to give you an idea of what we want to avoid in the formal process. We can discuss that with the Cable and Broadband Committee at some point.
Next slide. There are certain things that we can ask for in franchises–certain things that we can’t. One of the things we can ask for is adequate network capacity for carrying channels, carrying HD, things like that, channel capacity, public education and government channels. Seattle Channel takes advantage of that, UW channels, Seattle Public Schools has a channel. So, we get bandwidth for these public channels. We can also require certain categories of programming. We can say that they have to provide public affairs programming. They have to provide Canadian programming, and programming that is relevant to minority communities, also news, sports, weather. We can’t say, ‘You have to provide this specific channel, such as The Wrestling Channel.’ We can’t say that, but we can say they have to provide sports. We can say that they have to provide Canadian programming. We’re a border state, so people really care about that, especially hockey fans. So we negotiated for Canadian programming. We can’t demand that they install fiber and get rid of their copper. Those are the kind of things that we can’t do. We can’t require or regulate internet, as we were mentioning earlier. But, we are probably the first community, even back in 2005, that said we’re not going to limit the scope of our inquiry in the needs assessment just to cable, because we can’t pretend that these cable companies don’t also provide internet. When we do our needs assessment, we don’t limit it to cable. We look at internet, too, and we’ve done really well–better than most communities–in negotiating internet benefits through our cable franchises. So keep that in mind.
Next slide: An example of some of the benefits in the current Wave franchise that we negotiated with its predecessor, which was Broadstripe and Millennium Media. They didn’t have a basic service tier, because as a small cable operator, they’re not required to have one, like Comcast is. But we were able to negotiate for a more affordable tier with them. We got the cable discount, a match with what Comcast provides. We were able to get complementary cable modem service to nonprofits. We wouldn’t get that if we didn’t ask for it. And we pretended that that wasn’t impossible. We got fiber connection to Town Hall. The message is when we work with CTAB, we’re really looking at what community needs and interests can be addressed over Wave’s pipe. How can we get creative, looking at those things?
Next slide: Potential opportunities for CTAB: You will be one of the key stakeholders groups where we will talk with you as representatives of the community to learn a little bit about what you think the needs and interests of the community are. We also want to get your help, either through participating or attending two general community meetings in the central area. We still need to schedule those. And we’re also going to have a series of meetings with specific stakeholder groups. We had some really good feedback with the Somali community over the Comcast renewal, for example. So help us to get out the word and inform people. Encourage them to take the online survey we will have on the subject. We had 9,000 respondents to the Comcast online survey. We were really happy with that. If we can get anywhere near that with this process that would be great. Again, in the past, Council has worked with CTAB to preside over these community meetings. Some of you are appointed by Council. Whether or not that is something Council wants to do, it’s up to you.
Amy Hirotaka: And is that something we can follow up with you about?
Tony Perez: Sure! Next slide: This is our high level timeline. This is our process. Basically, the needs assessments, which will include surveys, community meetings, we send cards to all the people ho contact us with complaints or questions about Wave service. We try to cover the waterfront, if you will, in getting feedback. We’ll also be doing legal, technical, and financial review. That’s the second prong of the ascertainment to determine how well they have complied with the law. We’re going to be doing a legal review. We’re going to be hiring an engineering consultant to assess the capability of the Wave network, and also examine how to make sure they comply with all construction and safety standards for the attachments on the poles.. And we’ll do a financial review to make sure that they pay all of the franchise fees and taxes they owe the City. The last time we did a review, they owed us a million dollars. We settled for three-quarters of a million. Take that as a win. In the latter part of this year, we’re going to start getting into negotiations in earnest and we need a new franchise in place. We probably have to get Council action in June or July of 2017 because Council is in budget season in September and October. They don’t want to do anything else. So, we can’t wait until October to submit the legislation. It’s going to have to be a little earlier, because the legislative process year is very time consuming. The moment we drop legislation, the Council can’t act on it until 30 days after it’s been introduced. They have to have public hearings. And then even after they grant the franchise, it’s not effective for another 30 days. So we have to take all of these time constraints into that, making sure that there’s a new franchise in place before November, when it’s effective.
Question: Did Wave have any interest in expanding the areas where they want to provide service? It seems like you’d want to encourage expansion.
Tony Perez: Yes. They have indicated that they are interested in doing that. Whether it comes together, we’ll find out. But what we did do last year in the Cable Code amendments, we eliminated the Cable Franchise Districts. There is nothing preventing Wave now from serving any part of the City. We hope that they meant it when they said they wanted to. They have a franchise right now. They can go build. We would welcome that. Whether three providers can make it in a specific neighborhood, that remains to be seen.
Question: Follow up: I supposed that they were doing some sort of pilot project over in Eastlake for gigabit service. It seems like nothing has happened over the last year. I’m wondering if, as part of this negotiation, there is anything the City can do to encourage them to do something on that front.
Tony Perez: I think Wave would say one way you can help us is by eliminating onerous permitting requirements. Obviously, we can’t do that, but to the extent that we can listen and where it makes some common sense, changes to streamline the process–we’ve done a lot of that. I suspect that at the end of the day, it’s capital constraints that prevent them from moving forward, not anything that the City is doing. That’s my opinion.
Dorene Cornwell: I was in a meeting this afternoon where there was a question about bulk internet. It came up through the Seattle Housing Authority and other low income groups. What is the conversation we can have to make sure that the buildings get wired? I was asked whether my building was interested in bulk internet. I said, of course, but [unintelligible].
Tony Perez: David Keyes and I were talking about the same thing at lunch today. The companies like doing bulk buildings because it’s a guaranteed income stream. But the road block has been the Seattle Housing Authority. It might be worth another conversation because the discounts are significant.
Jim Loter: We have brought it up a couple of times. The service providers typically require something to limit their liability, which would be an investment from the housing authority. And that’s a risk. I’m not saying it’s a risk they’ll never be willing to take, but …
Dorene Cornwell: That piece is helpful. This afternoon, what I was hearing from other residents is that it’s not acceptable.
Amy Hirotaka: Thank you. We really have to move on. We obviously have a direct line to Tony, because he comes to our meetings. And if there’s time at the end, we’ll come back to it. Let’s move on to John Giamberso and his talk about Seattle Channel’s Diversity Report.
JOHN GIAMBERSO DISCUSSES SEATTLE CHANNEL’S DIVERSITY
John Giamberso: Before I get into it, for those of you who don’t know about the Seattle Channel, there is a one-pager up here. Seattle Channel is mandated to cover civics, culture, and communities of the City. We do all the meetings, all the press conferences. We cover the Art Zone. If you haven’t watched the Seattle Channel, http://seattlechannel.org is the place to go. Enjoy yourselves. We have a lot of programming going on.
Part of our mandate in covering the City is to make sure that it’s diverse. And the way we do that is we actually count the number of programs that have people of color on it, or content that has relevance to people of color. when we collect the data, every producer, when they do a show, check a box saying, yes, this has a person of color in it, or this has content that people want to know about. And that data is collected by our operations manager and our production manager. They put the data together in a report that I bring to you twice a year. That’s a way that we can see how we’re matching the demographics of the City. To jump to the end, the latest report show that we do match the demographics of the City. That means we have the same or more percentage of people of color on the channel that actually live in the City.
Basically, we break up all of our shows into different formats: our Art Zone; Book Lust; City Inside Out; City Stream. And we know the total number of segments. To speed the process up, what I’m going to do is I put 2014 on. You can look at that later.Let’s just dive into one show from 2015, and I’ll show you how we do it.
Let’s just take Art Zone with Nancy Guppy, one of our great shows. Nancy covers the art scene in Seattle. In 2015, she did 25 shows and segments. Just to clarify that, Art Zone is a show with a couple of different stand alone segments. So not only do we play the show, but we also play the segments. So, the same person of color could get counted twice if they’re in the show and also that segment. There were 25 shows. Thirteen of them had content that was relevant to people of color, which amounted to 52 percent. And 20 of the shows had a person of color on the show. So hat led to 80 percent of the shows. That’s the same thing we do for all of the shows. Seattle Speaks, Civic Cocktail, Seattle Voices, City Stream, Book Lust. I’m available for questions, if you really want to dig into the methodology of this: how we count and how we determine what an under-served neighborhood is, or any questions like that. But I do this report twice a year to CTAB. It’s a way of us validating that we are meeting the Race and Social Justice Initiative of the City, and that the channel does reflect the diversity of the City.
Question: Do you have data on the demographics of the people watching the shows?
John Giamberso: We’ve had a hard time getting that data. We’ve had some of the demographics from the Technology Indicators survey that shows us who is watching the channel. But the last survey was done in 2014, and that report is on our web site. It does show that the channel is watched primarily by…it skews to over 50; it skews to people of color. So, older people and people of color are one of the main demographics in that survey.
Heather Griswold: For a show like Book Lust, I see this past year, on camera, she actually had a change. It was down from 17 percent to zero percent. For a stat like that, are there things you do as an organization to promote that to work to change that. What are the options there?
John Giamberso: For Book Lust, there was content, but there were no people of color on Nancy Pearl’s show. We do talk to Nancy about that. Part of it is the dynamics. She basically takes authors who are coming in on book tours, so it is mostly people who are outside the City. We’ve worked with her to bring that percentage up. And that’s exactly why we do this, so that we can say, ‘where are we failing?’ This gives us the chance in 2016 to sit down and talk to Nancy and encourage her. That’s been pretty effective at different times, especially with low numbers of shows. If you only do two shows a year, it can get a little tricky. But that’s one of the main things so we know we’re coming up short.
Amy Hirotaka: Thank you, John. David, we’ll move on to the Tech Matching Fund update. I know that Jose is not here, but I know you can speak to it. We can reconvene with Jose later on, if he has other updates.
DAVID KEYES UPDATE ON THE TECHNOLOGY MATCHING FUND
David Keyes: For the Technology Matching Fund (TMF) grant program, this year we have $320,000 allocated again for community grants. We delayed it some, as we got approval on the Digital Equity Initiative, and so that we can tie it to the strategies and goals for the Digital Equity Initiative. I grabbed some copies of the strategies and put them over on the table. Right now, what you’ll see coming out this year is that we’re going to have a more direct tie between the connectivity, skills, and devices and technical support goals. It’s not too much different, but in one sense, it is. In the past, it has been literacy skills and civic participation. So we think we can address the civic things in different ways, and want to focus on the key Digital Equity plan goals that are moving forward. Maybe in the future we’ll do some more work on the civic targeting things. That’s not to say that some of the TMF projects will not have civic engagements projects, as we’ve seen in the past.
We want to really encourage partnerships. We’ve seen some really good partnerships in some of the grants before. I think, as we’re looking at implementing some of the strategies around connectivity, marketing the low income internet things, helping people get devices at home, doing things like ensuring that there are quality classes in coding or in teaching English as a Second Language with tech skills. We’ve seen some great skill building and some great resources in the community around that. We really want to encourage people to work together. To that extent, we’re going to be encouraging the collaborative partnership grants that have resource building and capacity building and expertise in them.
We’re going to raise it up to the $50,000 maximum, so we’ll probably do fewer grants, although we may reach just as many sites through the partnerships that happen. Part of our role as staff is to help facilitate–making some linkage between the organizations if they’re looking for something.
We also had the discussion with CTAB and the Digital Inclusion Committee in the past about trying to provide some of the technical assistance, and use our workshops as a place to better match people.
We’re going to launch the materials for the Tech Matching Fund at the Digital Equity launch on March 22. It will be up on the web site, and materials coming out just after that. We’re going to hold workshops in probably the second week in April. We’re just setting those specific dates, and again we do want to facilitate groups. Some of you who also have resources or projects, I just want to encourage you to come to those as well so that, even if you’re not the person submitting the grant, you could either partner or you could be a resource. Carmen, maybe there are things to think about in terms of the schools and how we can get out the information.
Carmen Rahm: I was going to approach it a little differently. I’m wondering if there’s any way that myself or my team can be aware of what the schools are submitting before we award them $50,000? Because that’s what happened last year, when all of a sudden, I’m paging through the awards, and I’m going, ‘Oh, you’ve got to be kidding. They awarded how much to whom for Chromebooks? Because that’s not something we support. And I know that it came in through the PTA. Even at the application level. I’m trying to get the word out but that’s a little bit tough.
David Keyes: We’re just about to put out the guidelines and such, and we can fold in some mechanism for notice to us of the ones involved in schools.
Carmen Rahm: Yes, it would be nice to have something that says, “If your request is associated with Seattle Public Schools, you need to get Carmen Rahm’s signature before you can submit this. It seems like overkill, but it’s not.
Question: What’s the association with the schools?
Carmen Rahm: They buy the computers, give them to the schools, and now you have to support them. The application came in from the PTA, to buy ‘x’ number of computers and put them in the classroom for a special program. And all of a sudden, 50 computers–in this case it’s Chromebooks–that we don’t support in the school district. I like the school, but it’s the same school that I went into one day and found that every kid has a computer. And I said, how did that happen? And it wasn’t a computer. It was a Kindle. Because one of their parents worked for Amazon, and they had a warehouse full of old Kindles nobody was using. So they dropped 1,500 off at the school.
Dorene Cornwell: I want to make a suggestion that maybe the TMF guidelines when they go out say something about it. Because I’m sure that the school district isn’t the only organization where there are some technology standards, and so if you’re going to be partnering with an organization, or serving a specific school, please show evidence that you considered technology standards. I understand that tech support can’t handle 50 devices running on different technologies.
Jim Loter: I’m glad you brought it up, because I’m not sure what our authority would be to make any requirements. But certainly we can issue guidelines that if you are making a grant application on behalf of an organization or whatever. That certainly happens elsewhere besides schools.
Vicky Yuki: We were considering a lot of these, and hopefully, the collaborative nature of the grants that come through that they will take into account partner needs, and also their abilities to be able to provide support. I’d welcome any content ideas. If you have ideas about types of programming, or stuff you would like to see, whether it’s around STEM or device type programs, assistive technology and such. I think there are a lot of categories, but how we work as partners throughout the City is important.
David Keyes: To finish up the schedule, we’ll have the workshops the second week in April, and May 4, will be t he deadline for the applications. And then we come to you all for the review. The month of May into early June is the time for the Digital Inclusion Committee to do the reviews of the applications and come up with recommendations. The review committee’s recommendations will come here for the June CTAB meeting to be voted on. Then, we have to go through the legislation process. We know that that will come to the City Council committee on August 17. Second Tuesday in June, they’ll come here, and then we’ll present to City Council August 17. Then, because of the holidays, the expectation is that it’s going to come to the full Council for a vote on September 6, the day after Labor Day.
That’s the basic process in terms of CTAB’s work and what is coming up. We’ll certainly send stuff out to help get the word out. We always have the review committee that’s composed of CTAB members and other community members that are interested in helping out. If you’re interested in reviewing, Nourisha is having the Digital Inclusion Committee, so contact Nourisha or Jose Vasquez, or if you want to let us know toniight, let Vicky Yuki or I know, or drop us an email.
Jim Loter: I just want to say that David Keyes, Vicky Yuki, Delia Burke, on Community Technology, really deserve a lot of credit for pulling this cycle together this year, because we were delayed. And I think they came up with a number of really creative ideas to give CTAB members–to not require you to have less than a week to review the proposals, and to not compress some of the outreach time.
David Keyes: Thank you. And that said, we’ll also be working towards next year’s program. That’s a place to put on your thinking caps, and we’ll come back to you. Some things like doing a quick hit grant to help with equipment maybe. We’re just starting to look at what to do for next year.
Amy Hirotaka: Did you cover some of the main differences between what the form looked like before and what it’s going to look like now, as far as requirements go? I assume it’s the same, but we were just waiting on the Digital Equity Initiative.
David Keyes: In some sense, we’re trying to minimize changes this year, for a few reasons. One is that Council is expecting it, the other is that we have limited capacity as to rolling it out. And we want to have enough time to do the education work with the community. Much of the format is the same. In terms of eligibility, we’re not making a major change to that. It’s still community driven projects coming from nonprofits. People could always partner with others, but it still has at its core that fundamental community driven projects, but we’re aiming that those strategies and goals that have been more defined in the Digital Equity plan. I think there is a piece moving forward that we’ve been talking about. How do we really help guide and ensure that people who are going through skills training are reaching certain levels of competencies. What does that mean? What is the degree between encouraging and pushing standards? We know that we helped about 4,000 people last year. It would be great to be able to articulate that 3,000 completed STEM training through this. 40,000 did ESL and tech competency. Looking for ways to measure impact from that learning, and that investment, and set a bar. Places like North Star, Minnesota Digital Literacy Consortium standards or other coding standards.
Amy Hirotaka: Any other questions for David?
Mohamud Yussef: I have a question. [unintelligible]
David Keyes: We changed it last year. Now it is a half to one match.
Carmen Rahm: As part of the Digital Equity, is the City aware, or do you guys coordinate any refurbishment and reutilization of computers to get computers into the hands of those who can’t afford them? The reason I’m asking, is that I’ve got a couple of parents who are really hard on my case, asking why we are getting rid of the computers in the schools. Why aren’t I refurbishing and giving them out to families? I would be happy to do that. These computers are eight years old. Half of the keys are missing. They won’t run any of the latest operating systems, so I am not going to do anything those to get them into the hands of families. I would love to be able to go back and say, ‘On the City’s site, there is a link where not only can you get low cost broadband, but there’s also a link to where to get refurbished computers. I could put that on the schools’ web site.
David Keyes: We’ve been working with Interconnection. They participated in the Digital Equity Initiative. Interconnection is a large refurbisher and recycler of computers. What has been great about them is that we’ve tied them to some of the TMF projects in the past. Our goal wit the Digital Equity Initiative is let’s try to increase the stream and ensure that there are quality refurbished computers coming out, and trying to make that as accessible as possible.
Carmen Rahm: Do you have a link?
David Keyes: Yes. http://interconnection.org/
Carmen Rahm: So, I can link to the City’s site and say, look what the City’s got. But if I link to anything that’s viewed as a business, we get our hands slapped and told we can’t do that.
David Keyes: If, in the Digital Equity thing, one of the strategies on working on this refurbishment is if we can get more companies and individuals to donate computers and designate them for City refurbishing to go to low income folks, we can bring down the cost for distributing them and for Interconnection to get them back out and make them more available for families.
Dan Moulton: Does Interconnection still have the program that if you’re really low income that you can volunteer and also be trained?
Maureen Jones: No. That went away because it was too difficult. They’re going to start up offering internet again, but they have to be paid up front. And you have to buy the modem. It’s a lot of money for our people, so I want to work with a bank, and they can take on that.
David Keyes: This is the Mobile Citizen service that went away as Clearwire. Now it’s Sprint. They offer MiFi $10/month service.
Amy Hirotaka: Any other questions for David? Moving on to any other updates. Also, I was trying to capture action items during the meeting. We have feedback about Open Seattle. For the Broadband Map, you can email Bruce Blood at bruce.blood@seattle.gov. And David captured the email addresses on the board. For E-Gov, email Heather Lewis with any ideas. Keep a look out also for CTAB Twitter, because it’s going to be awesome. Follow it on Twitter. It’s @seattletechboard. Email John Giamberso with any questions or feedback at john.giamberso@seattle.gov. As far as TMF goes, I’m assuming that if you’d like to volunteer to review the applications, see David Keyes or Vicky Yuki now.
Joneil Sampana: For anyone who would like to participate in the E-Gov Committee, we are meeting the fourth Tuesday of the month at Impact Hub in Pioneer Square. 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
Amy Hirotaka: And the fourth Monday of the month is always the Broadband Committee. We are searching for a new location.
Carmen Rahm: I have one last announcement, and I want to make sure it gets into the minutes. Fro my department, I would like to personally thank everyone in the City who voted for the levies for the schools, and the Technology Levy. I came here two years ago thinking, ‘Wow! Seattle! We’re going to have the best of everything!’ But Seattle Public Schools has the worst of everything. That’s going to change. We’ve got our plan. We’ve got phenomenal vision for technology that our parents and our students helped to put together. We just released it in our video, and I’ll get it to David with the link so that everybody can see the things that we want to do and are going to do because the students have asked for it, and the parents have asked for it. It’s not holographic teachers in the classroom or things like that. We’re not talking Star Trek quite yet. But we’re talking about getting the right technology into the hands–from the time the student gets up to the minute they go to bed at night. I just want to thank everyone who participated in that and voted for the levies. You put a lot of trust in me and my staff, and we won’t let you down.
David Keyes: Brainstorm is about to come out and you’ll be getting it, but you know we’re doing this consolidation between moving from DoIT to Seattle IT. Megan Coppersmith, our public information adviser, just sent out a survey looking for feedback on what that new web site should look like in content. We would welcome and love your participation. I’ll send this out, too.
Amy Hirotaka: Thank you. Does anyone have agenda items for next month? If so, please feel free to email me or David.
David Keyes: By the way, we do know that Comcast is going to be here next month.
Amy Hirotaka: Yes, and it would be good to invite someone from Wave at some point. Thank you, everyone. Meeting adjourned.
MEETING ADJOURNED