Topics covered included: Update by Chief Technology Officer Michael Mattmiller; Candace Faber spoke about Seattle civic technology advocate work; Hans Hechtman and Terry Davis outlined the Comcast Internet Essentials program; Carmen Rahm addressed Seattle Public Schools’ tech vision and update; Joneil Sampana and Heather Lewis gave an update on the E-Gov Committee; Cable and Broadband Committee Update; Jose Vasquez gave the Digital Inclusion Committee update.
This meeting was held: May 10, 2016; 6:00-7:30 p.m., Seattle Municipal Tower, 700 Fifth Avenue, Suite 2750
Podcasts available at: http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/CTTAB/podcast/cttab.xml
Follow or post to @seatechboard / #seatechboard on Twitter.
Attending:
Board Members: Amy Hirotaka, Joneil Sampana via phone, Karia Wong, Iga Fikayo Keme, Jose Vasquez, Carmen Rahm, Chris Alejano, Mark DeLoura, Heather Lewis
Public: David Doyle, Dan Moulton, Dan Stiefel, Dorene Cornwell, Lloyd Douglas, Graham Pruss (WeCount), Christopher Sheats, Sarah Abramowitz (Ross Strategic), Ann Summy, Kate Schneier (YMCA).
Staff: Michael Mattmiller via Skype, Virginia Gleason, David Keyes, Derrick Hall, Cass Magnuski
24 In Attendance
Meeting was called to order by Amy Hirotaka.
Introductions
Agenda and Minutes approved for the April minutes.
CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER REPORT
Michael Mattmiller: Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for letting me join you virtually this month. There are just a few things that I want to update you on. The first, we had a very successful vendor forum today in City Hall. This was the second year we partnered with King County to talk about what our departments are doing. Seattle IT and King County IT. They make sure that the many different vendors, companies and consulting firms that would like to partner and do work for the City understand what we’re thinking and planning to do. In particular, this event is a great way to build relationships and make sure that we are aware of the smaller businesses that may not have the depth of experience in responding to RFPs and other traditional procurement vehicles. Our City procurement rules do give us the flexibility to work with smaller firms. In some cases, there’s even a direct voucher scenario so that we can really make sure that we are advancing smaller firms and not burdening them with the greater complexity that our larger projects have. One of the reasons that I was so excited about today was the opportunity to tell our story about WMBE contracts. That’s Women and Minority Owned Businesses. Within the Seattle IT Department, we have a proven track record of giving a significant portion of our awards to WMBE firms. I don’t have the exact numbers from last year, but it was something like 13 percent of our consulting and 11 percent for our goods. We’re always trying to improve those numbers. That’s why today was an opportunity for us to let folks know how to be more successful, to talk about how we would like to see more WMBE partners, and to also encourage larger firms that perhaps we have done work with in the past or that we might use in the future to form relationships with WMBE firms so they can partner and make sure that the work is being spread around.
The other thing to update you on is that I was thrilled that last week Susan Goodman started as our City’s Chief Privacy Officer. I know that this has been a long process to get this role filled, but we wanted to make sure that we got the right candidate, and I do think that Susan is that person. I hope to have her at a future CTAB meeting, but to tell you a little bit about her background, she started her career in Government Records Management in a county in upstate New York, has a depth of experience around issues related to retention, public disclosure, transparency. She actually then went into the commercial sector in records management and privacy for banks, like Bank of America, and then for Consumer Reports, before going to the City, and now with us here at the City of Seattle. So stay tuned for more information as Susan gets up to speed. As you can imagine, with all of the great work that went on last year related to privacy, including the contributions of CTAB. She’s drinking from the firehose and getting up to speed very quickly.
In other news, I’m very proud that the new Seattle IT recently submitted its first budget to the City Budget Office. If that sounds trivial, just think of what we’ve gone through over the past few months in Seattle IT. We’ve brought together 650 staff in 15 departments. Each of those 15 departments had different ways of accounting for technology. And now we’ve been able to put that all together for one overall picture of IT spending for the City, as well as to shape priorities for the future. We will be going through a process to develop our Seattle IT agenda for the next two years. I’ve been given a very brief heads about for that process. And I see that Virginia Gleason is in the room. Virginia, do you want to wave? Virginia is our new governance adviser and she’s gong to be leading that effort to speak with all of our stakeholders and make sure that we get a variety of views. And then we hope to lock on the high level priorities by this July, so we can begin to move forward with planning.
Those are just a few of the things that are top of mind for me. Last thing I’ll share with you is that I am actually in San Diego right now, where we will be having a meeting with the Metro Lab Network Steering Committee. I know I talked a little bit about Metro Lab in the past. It’s the network of cities and universities who are partnering to deliver Smart Cities solutions. We were thrilled when last week, Governor Martin O’Malley was named as the chair of the Metro Lab Network. We’ll be meeting with him tomorrow to talk about his vision and plans for the organization and make sure that what we’re doing in Seattle not only aligns with those, but is providing real benefits to our community, the City, and university. I can’t wait to share the update with you next time we chat. And I’d be happy to take any questions.
Christopher Sheats: Was there a press release for Susan?
Michael Mattmiller: There has not been yet. We are working on that and expect to have it out in the next week or so.
Amy Hirotaka: Are there any other questions for Michael? Okay, thank you, Michael. So, Virginia, welcome!
INTRODUCTION TO VIRGINIA GLEASON, NEW SEATTLE IT GOVERNANCE ADVISER
Virginia Gleason: I’ve been at Seattle IT for a month. I came from working for the Mayor, and also at the Police Department, since shortly after the Mayor was elected. Previous to that, I worked for the King County Sheriff’s Office for eight or nine years; before that, the Port of Seattle, and then before that, I was a prosecutor, and also in private practice. The theme that is consistent throughout–the work that I’ve done over the last 20 to 25 years–is that I come into various government organizations and I put structure to processes. And I have to say after a month with Seattle IT, this is so much better than dealing with law enforcement processes. I like it a lot better. I’m finding out that there are some areas where we can start to develop a framework for governance that I think will be very helpful in putting all of these 15 IT departments that we have together and aligning some of their practices and priorities with the City’s strategic goals as well as the Seattle IT strategies. It’s going to take a while to bring that kind of structure to a number of departments that have all come together. We are going to start slowly and make sure that we’re providing the right balance of structure to be responsible with the IT portfolio, without micro-managing individual departments, and creating processes that are going to be getting projects done more difficult. Part of the idea of having centralized IT was going to be a benefit and we were going to be combining resources from all these different departments and having them centrally. But it will probably take a little while for that to level out so that people feel that their projects are coming into the queue in an appropriate place and being managed along the way. So, I’m helping to put together some of those processes.
The three main governance bodies that we look to in Seattle IT: There is the Mayor’s IT sub-cabinet (MITS), which is ten of the department directors; there is a business steering committee; and then CTAB advises the Mayor and the City Council. So we want to make sure that we’re keeping you advised of what the other governance bodies are doing as well so that you understand how they are putting their strategic priorities together and how we’re going to knit this new IT department together and make it function well. One of the things that we’re doing is that I’m going to be doing a very short summary of your minutes each month and sharing that with the business steering committee just so that there is another avenue for them to get feedback about what you’re doing with this group. I don’t know if they read the long minutes, but I want to make sure that we at least draw their attention to what the activity of this group is.
One of the very key parts of our governance is this business steering committee, which is made up of representatives from 12 different departments throughout the City–the larger departments and the budget office as well. And that group is going to play a really key role in some of the oversight and monitoring the progress of a lot of different projects as they go along. We’re developing exactly how that will work. They will start reviewing projects and taking a more significant role in the governance starting in about September. We’re going to spend the summer getting people familiar with the new consolidated IT group, and also develop our processes. Our goal is to have a really easy to follow, easy to find, understandable playbook for the largest and the smallest projects that will give a clear roadmap of how they need to go through the process and where the various stage gates are where they have to be reviewed and checked for alignment and budget and other technical standards. As we develop that over the next couple of months, I’ll be bringing it here to share with you and I would certainly appreciate any input that you have in regards to developing this governance process.
Anybody have any questions? I will be here at all of the CTAB meetings.
David Keyes: One of those goals then, is to think about aligning the timing, so that when there are policy decisions or input so that you guys are up to date on when that’s happening.
Virginia Gleason: And we’re organizing our policies and realizing that with all of these different departments there are a lot of inconsistent policies. So to figure out which ones need to be retired, and maybe how we can harmonize competing policies, we’ll be sharing some of the larger policies with you, as well. And we would also appreciate comments. One of the most significant policies that’s going to get an overhaul this summer and into the fall is going to be the social media policy. It’s a little bit in need of an update. And then we figure out how to have that balance of centralized IT of offering helpful guidance without micro-managing department activities, especially how it relates to how they interact with the community. Because each department has some of its own culture that they have in communicating with whomever their stakeholders are. So we’re going to be working closely with the Department of Neighborhoods. They’re going to be very involved in how that social media policy is developed, so that we’re making sure that we’re not putting any policies in the way of meaningful communication between the departments and the public.
Amy Hirotaka: And will you be soliciting feedback from CTAB at all of these junctures?
Virginia Gleason: Yes. I’m keeping the catalog of where we are going on the policies. I’m going to be putting together a year-long calendar of when we’re going to be submitting those–which ones will be going to MITS for approval and which ones don’t [need to go there]. And then figuring out the appropriate time to get feedback, and then how we want to package that to send the feedback on.
Christopher Sheats: A specific question: I was wondering if you had any input about the existing and/or future protections for internal/external processes.
Virginia Gleason: I don’t, specifically. We have a couple of different groups within the City that can respond to that better. The Ethics Office deals with whistle blower issues, and Civil Rights would be another. I can talk to you a little about that afterwards, but I know it’s a pretty well-developed process. Do you mean as it relates to IT or just in general?
Christopher Sheats: Well, I presume there is an IT component to any process, unless of course, it’s a verbal communication. My specific interest is in how someone can safely blow the whistle without internal retaliation, and providing structures internally.
Virginia Gleason: Yes. I can talk to you about that because that is a fairly well-developed process. I think I actually have some material that I can give you.
Christopher Sheats: And would this extend to contract workers as well?
Virginia Gleason: I assume so. It might depend upon what kind of contract. I’ll have to see.
Lloyd Douglas: What is the difference between the Mayor’s sub-cabinet and the business steering committee? Is the sub-cabinet just the department heads and the other one is business people?
Virginia Gleason: That’s a pretty good description. The Mayor’s IT sub-cabinet is kind of like a board of directors. They meet quarterly. I’ve been to one of their meetings so far. They were extremely well-prepared and had read all of the materials, which surprised me a little bit because I know that a lot of these folks have a lot going on. But we try to bring to them higher level policies and issues. Our goal is if at the business steering committee level there is not consensus about either approval of a policy or approval of a project, that that in limited instances they could almost be like a field board for that. But they only meet quarterly. So we don’t want to give them a large amount of work to do because it would slow our process down. For example, talking about what we would want to do with the strategic agenda, we’ll definitely bring it to them. And then, over the course of a year, policies that need their approval–maybe it’s about 10 that we would bring them. But the business steering committee would look at a lot more and have a lot more hands on portfolio review. The IT sub-cabinet wants to know the ones that are in trouble, with thresholds of dollar amount complexities as well as some of the security and privacy issues.
Chris Alejano: I’m new to CTAB. I’m just curious. You talked about communication from the minutes to MITS. What is the mechanism the other way from the business steering committee? Or is it even necessary? I don’t know how that interplays.
Virginia Gleason: They don’t have MITS so much as we have something that we prepare for them, which is all public information. We would be more than happy to share it with you so that you know what they’re looking at.
Chris Alejano: I just don’t know the history of how that interfaces with our work here.
Virginia Gleason: We do document. If there is something where they actually have to make a decision, such as approving a policy, that would be documented. So, one of the policies that we gave them last time was the policy on policies, because that was a good place to start. Here is how which policies need approval, where and how they’re going to be managed. And they made a couple of changes to it. But I think that’s a good idea, to keep that communication going both ways.
David Keyes: There have been a couple of iterations of sub-cabinets in different forms, so this is pretty new under this administration, the IT sub-cabinet. I think this will really help, having Virginia be our linkage between them. Typically, in the past, where CTAB has come up with a position around something, depending on who was along on the decision making, that may go to Council or may get fed to Mayor’s office. Sometimes it has been CTAB meeting directly with staff from Mayor’s office or Council members in the past. Typically, we would take that and share it with CTAB, fold it into a memo package or something like that. I think I would take this as a good opportunity to stay better aligned.
Virginia Gleason: We’re trying to work the three groups so that we share information on what we’re doing, and then also scheduling out quite a ways for that business steering committee as well as MITS, so Michael Mattmiller does most of the direct communication with MITS, but I put together the package of information, so I’m already working on the July meeting. We get them for 90 minutes, and try to make really good use of the time, but I know that they’re really interested in what advisory groups have to say and any input they have.
Joneil Sampana via phone: You mentioned the policy on policies. Is there a way for CTAB members to review that policy on policies and the other policies that you’ll be overseeing?
Virginia Gleason: Absolutely. I will work with Amy Hirotaka or whoever the appropriate person is to let you know the policy schedule that we have that goes to the more formal and share them with you. My goal is to share those with you before they’re adopted, so that you can give us any feedback that you think would be helpful before we present it up the chain for final approval.
Karia Wong: I’m just wondering what is the timeline for this strategic planning?
Virginia Gleason: We’re going to be talking about it with MITS in July, and so we would have an opportunity with this group in June. We’re having individual meetings with some of the department directors, and so far, they seem very pleased. Some of them have some questions about how things are categorized, so I think we’re trying to be a little artful in the way we describe some things. The single biggest question that has come up so far is how do we capture what our goals are related to mobility. And whether that sub-sets of other things, like public engagement, or should it be its own stand-alone item. I think that’s the single biggest group of comments we’ve gotten. But we will be bringing that here also for your comments.
Amy Hirotaka: Thank you. We will move on to WeCount and Graham Pruss.
WECOUNT HOMELESS NEEDS AND DONOR APP DEMO
(See wecount.org for more info and http://seattle.wecount.org for the application).
Graham Pruss: Thank you, everybody, for having us. I want to introduce myself briefly. I am the director of WeCount. I was the outreach specialist for the City of Seattle and for the Housing Alliance, people living in vehicles for several years. Over the past couple of years we have been thinking about these programs where they offer off-street parking for people in vehicles. I was one of the people who has helped move those things along. About a year ago, I started this company called WeCount with Jonathan Sposato, who is the founder of Geekwire Magazine, and a successful entrepreneur here in Seattle. I experienced homelessness as a teenager, as well as a social services dependent in my early to late teens and 20s. A lot of this comes out of that experience, as well as IT hardware and software development.
As we know, Seattle has a state of emergency regarding homelessness. The Mayor declared this back in December. This is to show the numbers that we are talking about. If you are not familiar with the numbers, the amount of people experiencing homelessness in Seattle, the number is 10,047 people documented. Actually, this is last year’s number, 2015. Since 1999, that is a 102 percent increase. This is one of the reasons why the Mayor has declared a state of emergency. That has helped to free up a lot of resources, and it allows for a lot more flexible spending within our City. Around these services as well as helps to align us with the West Coast organization of mayors who have to redirect the funding for these services back to the federal level, as our municipalities cannot handle this problem alone and we really need help from the federal government.
So what is WeCount? We are a nonprofit. We exist to strengthen the social safety net. We enable and empower people to make a difference in their communities, one on one. To help people donate directly to people in need and for people who are in need to express that need — physical, real needs–through a safe, confidential, secure way, and for people to do that exchange, that transaction, to be able to give, to donate directly to a person items in this safe way. We built upon our years of social service experience as well as about a full year of doing surveys with people who are experiencing homelessness as well as case managers executive directors, all the way down through social services agencies to really integrate what we are building in with current programs. So, we aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel. We’re trying to make this as unobtrusive as possible to really fit in with agencies that are doing the work on the ground and help augment their services. We built this through a data driven design process, which I think you might appreciate at this table. We try to do this work smart, not hard.
We are seeing our first big release this spring at the end of this month.
We have a short video that I’ll show you. It was made by a company called Killer Infographics. If you’re familiar with Killer Infographics, they do a lot of work with Buzzfeed infographics videos. We were lucky to be chosen as their nonprofit pro bono partner for 2016. This video shows a little bit of what we’re doing.
[Plays video]
This gets to what our core message is. It’s really about trying to change the conversation around public poverty and around getting people to reach out to other people in the community to increase the safety net on an individual, personal level. This is going to be spread to the internet soon, so hopefully you will see these up there. We’re also doing a big bus advertising campaign at the end of the month. Beginning next month, you’ll be seeing ads around this app. So let me show you a little bit about what WeCount is.
You heard that quote about how many people experiencing homelessness use the internet, or use smart phones. Some people are dubious of that, but some cities show that up to 90 percent of the people who are experiencing homelessness have access to the internet through a smart phone or the library. Libraries are a major touchpoint for people who are living on the streets. So we actually built WeCount to be a web app. It is a web site that is phone responsive. It looks great on your phone. It looks like a phone app, but it is made to be used on the web via the libraries. All that is required to use it is an email address and a confirmed phone number that we can send a text message to. We use that just to contact the individual. When a person uses it, they only have to enter their first name, their last initial, and their month and date of birth. And that’s to identify to an item. Other than that, we don’t ask for any kind of legally identifying information. We dobn’t ask for someone to show an ID. We don’t ask for somebody to prove that they are homeless. One of the big parts of using this app is that we want this to be egalitarian. When someone uses the system, you don’t log in as a donor or a seeker. You log in as a user. So one is encouraged to both offer items and to request items, and you can do both at the same time. You can request up to five items at any given time. You can offer as many items as you want. And then, it is confidential, secure, safe. We developed this with our social services providers and case managers as well as people experiencing homelessness. After many interviews about what sorts of needs people have. The actual list of items, about 200 items, that was developed by groups like Facing Homelessness in Seattle and formerly homeless in Seattle: Public Housing Alliance, Union Gospel Mission, and dozens of people who are experts.
So this is actually what it looks like. I could open it, but I don’t know how much time I have. Fifteen minutes? Oh, that’s great. So why don’t we open it?
We have entered a live beta test on this system. Since this last Monday, the system is up and running. Everyone who is in the system right now is actually a real person. These requests that you are going to see are live requests. I’m not actually going to make a request in the system because that would mean that I’m going to give items to someone. I have items I already have given. Click on ‘Give Something.’ Let’s say that someone wants to offer an item to someone in their community. Right when you go in, you can see some of the requests that have been made within the community already.
I should make this clear. We’re looking for people to donate new or gently used items. The idea is that instead of these things going to Goodwill, instead of them being thrown away or sold at a garage sale, we want to redirect some of those items in our own closets to help some people in our own community. And this goes to somebody who is maybe living on the street, or maybe they got off the street and now are living in the Frye Apartments or somewhere else.
So you can see that four people have asked for tents, four people have asked for laptops, three people have asked for cell phones, you got bed pillows, and sleeping bags. This is actually what the system looks like. You can go in, you can see. We asked people to only give things that are in good condition. First off, there are multiple categories of items, from your outdoor gear, to electronics, to home goods. Within each one, we show how many requests have been received. There are 13 in the outdoor gear.
Let’s say you want to give someone a tent. That would be under Shelter and Warmth. Right now we can see that there are four requests for tents, so that shows us that there is actually a need for that within our communities. So we can hit Yes. I can give a tent. And if we go back to View More Items, let’s say we want to give a backpack and bag. Let’s go down to Choose Our Options. If there are options that may be available, you can determine those. So, with a tent, the capacity is important, the size. You can set if you want to be offering a five-person tent. I can say my color is red, black, camouflage, a whole list. Same goes for the person who is requesting. It’s the identical process on both sides of offering and requesting. Select Locations, and these locations are set up all over the communities. For downtown, we have 14 sites that are set up for Seattle right now. We’ll have 28 by the end of the month. They are already partnered, but we haven’t yet installed at those sites, partially because we began our beta test this last week, so we started to slow and began our soft launch. But if you were to go through and select something, you can also select where to pick it up. Rainier Valley, for example.
This shows how it works. We built it to be really simple, very user-intuitive. And again to enable people to give within their communities.
One this about this that’s really neat is that after this connection is made, and the offer is in the system, we match the offer. It asks the person who wants to donate item, do you still want to give the item. They might have given it to someone else at this point, so you hit, Yes, you still want to give the item. We then say to the person who wants to get the item, do you still want to get this item. Once, that’s confirmed, and we know that there is interest in this item, we tell the person who is willing to donate it when and where they can drop it off. The item isn’t actually onsite until that person drops it off and it’s confirmed to the person who will pick it up. They’re told to drop it off at the Frye Apartments down on 2nd and Yesler, for example. When they get there, there is a bin very similar to this one right here, a 40 gallon recycling bin covered in WeCount stickers and instructions. When they get there, they have the person’s first name, their last initial, and the day and month of birth of the person they’re giving it to. They get that information to the person there. The person writes it on the sticker that we have provided, puts the item into the box. Then we remind them every three days to let us know if they’ve dropped off the item. Once they have, we then inform the person who requested the item that you’re item is now available. Here is where you can pick it up and the times you can do so. They then go in, and give their information, and they’re given the item. Once the person says they dropped off the item, we send them a message that says, ‘Thank you so much for giving your tent. When you did so, you dropped it off at the Frye Apartments. The Frye Apartments provides permanent, supportive housing for men and women in our communities. If you would like to volunteer or donate, here is how you do that, and here is how you can join their mailing list.’ It’s a set of information that that agency provides. Then, when the person confirms that they picked up the item, we send them a message that says, “We hope you enjoy your tent. If you’d like to send a message of thanks, here are four pre-written thank you notes. Just click one and say, ‘OK,’ and we’ll send it off.’ And then I get a message that says, “Graham says thank you so much for giving me that tent. It made a big difference in my life.” And so it brings it full circle.
The final little piece of this is that both parties are prompted to share their stories on social media. They actually can then say through Facebook or Twitter, “I just gave someone a tent in my community through Frye Apartments, and you can, too.” The reason for that is to surface the connections between people, to surface the social services they’re active in our communities, and also to connect people with those. So that, as we are bringing people to these locations–I should say that the sites are matched based on not just the location, but on the one that has the least amount of items. So, we’re trying to divvy people up between the system. So one part of that is also helping to de-silo people from within their local social services agencies, so that they are actually encouraged to go to a different social service agency to pick up an item, learn about other services that are there, as well as the individual who gives the item actually enters into a social service agency, learns about those services that are active in our community and how they can be part of it.
These are some of the partners that have already signed up. Public Housing Alliance, Low Income Housing Institute, DESC, UGM, and basically, what we want is we are looking for locations to expand this network. Like I said, we’re at about 30 locations right now in Seattle. We’re looking to grow that. We have locations in every neighborhood, except for SoDo and Georgetown. We’ve had a little bit of difficulty getting in there. So anybody who has any possible connections, we welcome them. We work with churches and congregations in general, of any religion. We also work with many different social service agencies and emergency shelters. We would also like to meet introductions that might be a good fit with that network for those locations, but also people who make connections to clients, such as the Union Gospel Mission, or community psychiatric clinics. These places would be good to use for a touchpoint. It’s mainly just getting the message out to people in need and those who want to help.
There is a huge amount of need in our community, as we know. But there is actually a huge amount of people who actually want to help. And that’s really what we built this for. We built this to help people who want to help others, to help our social services to do their jobs even better.
I think that’s it. Are there any questions?
Jose Vasquez: Do you have any locations in South Park?
Graham Pruss: We have one in White Center, but not in South Park. But we would like to have one in South Park. I have business cards that I’d love to hand out.
Amy Hirotaka: Are there any other questions for Graham?
Graham Pruss: Because the app is in beta test, the app is at http://seattle.wecount.org. If you go to WeCount.org, that’s a marketing web site, so you won’t see the app.
Christopher Sheats: Your presentation talked about confidentiality and security. One property of privacy is security, and you didn’t talk about privacy. One issue that I saw is that you put something into your account via ACTV. You didn’t use https.
Graham Pruss: Actually, it is https.
Christopher Sheats: Actually, it doesn’t upgrade to https. With my phone, I could have snagged your [unintelligible].
Mark DeLoura: How do you plan to surface the needs of the community, for people who maybe don’t have a [unintelligible].
Graham Pruss: Well, we’d love to have screens in, say, City Hall. What we’re going to be doing is a strong social media campaign. We’re also working with PR firms to do a national campaign around this and spread the word around. One of the things that Killer Infographics is creating for us is an analytics tool that will be embedded into the site. So, at some point down the line, you’ll be able to go in there and see not just what people have needs for, like you can now, but how those needs are being met. So you can see how they’re working within our community.
Amy Hirotaka: I think we have time for one more question and then we’ll move on.
David Keyes: Are you building in any other language interface?
Graham Pruss: We will be. We’re struggling to get this out the door right now. Our first plan is one in Spanish, we also want to include Arabic, as well as Cambodian and Russian. Because we are focused on Seattle and we’re trying to get to the primary languages that are spoken here. But that takes work. Once the English version is done, we’re planning on expanding.
Question: Are these donations tax deductible?
Graham Pruss: No. They are not. Because these are peer to peer donations. Generally if I give you something, I can’t collect a tax donation on it. It’s a little bit different than if you were to give it to Goodwill, because Goodwill takes that donation and sells it, and then uses the money to fund their stores. We actually give the items directly to the individual. Actually, we don’t even give it. You give it. We provide a space for you to give it.
PUBLIC COMMENT AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
Amy Hirotaka: Thank you very much, Graham. We really appreciate your taking the time to present this. We’ll also write your email address up there on the white board before the meeting ends. Now we’ll move on to Public Comments and Announcements. There is one thing that I wanted to share, which was the email that Sabrina sent David Keyes about the date change for this Digital Equity Committee meeting.
David Keyes: Kate Schneier is here, so she can talk about it, and also Get Engaged.
Kate Schneier: I came in a little late. I’m Kate Schneier and I work at the YMCA and I run the Get Engaged program. Get Engaged places young adults, ages 18-29, on boards and commissions each fall. It is an innovative program from the City of Seattle and the Metrocenter YMCA. Commissioners help shape policy decisions, make recommendations, and provide citizen participation in city government. If you know of anybody who is interested in applying for a program, they can go to https://getengaged.wordpress.com/ . The application is up there and contact information. I know that Sabrina Roach was here last month and told you about the Digital Equity meeting. We meeting tomorrow evening and we actually changed the [unintelligible]…. We rescheduled for September 21 at 6:30 p.m. The location right now is TBD.
Amy Hirotaka: Thank you. Any other public comments or announcements?
Christopher Sheats: You and I had a brief email conversation about the Privacy Committee and I just wanted to ask if there are any updates.
Amy Hirotaka: Yes. If you could stick around afterwards, we can talk about how to reinvigorate that committee. Iga had expressed an interest in privacy. I know that Christopher Sheats was also interested in the Privacy Committee. And with Beryl Fernandes’ term coming to an end, there haven’t been any meetings. So, we are potetntially re-starting the Privacy Committee. We’ll be talking more about it and will email everybody as soon as there is more information.
David Keyes: Just a couple of other quick notes. For Open Seattle tomorrow, there is a meet up there on research and data for the City here. Candace Faber will be there and I think they’re having somebody from the Department of Planning and Community Development. That’s at Socrata, and it’s by Open Seattle.
Carmen Rahm: I’ve got one quick announcement. I have to leave early tonight. Not only will I be leaving, but I won’t be returning ever. The reason for that is, unless something really weird happens over the next 24 hours, I’m going to be resigning from Seattle Public Schools on Thursday. I’ll be moving to a great, exciting, new position as CIO and Chief Digital Strategy Officer at Kent Public Schools, which is right in line with what I want to do. And it takes my 45 to 50 minute each direction commute every day down to 10 minutes, and that’s by bicycle. Four minutes if I go by car. So that’s what’s happening there, and I’m excited about that. Obviously, I won’t be here. I’m on this committee because of my role and my involvement with the schools. It’s been a good partnership. I know that I’ve taken a lot out of here that I could apply to the schools. We’ve been able to do a lot of good things. For those who don’t know, when this committee released the state of community technology with regards to Digital Equity, and information on broadband, that became my Bible. I carried it around with me. I gave our leadership copies of it. It really mirrored what I was hearing in the schools when I went out and visited with them. It really became that piece of paper that said what we’re hearing is true. What we need to do is real. Let’s partner with the City and move forward. With that, I guess I bid adieu. And if I show up next month, you’ll know that the school board didn’t approve me. I’m assuming that they’ll look at my paperwork and say, ‘Oh, Carmen Rahm. When is ‘she’ going to show up for work?’
Amy Hirotaka: Thank you, Carmen. I know everyone will join me in thanking Carmen.
Carmen Rahm: I did tell David Keyes that if the City allows this, because I know in my position you have to have the secret handshake and you have to be approved by City Council, just let me know. I think I’ve got some people on my leadership team at the district that would be happy to fill in and continue to support the committee, but also take the benefit back to the school district.
Amy Hirotaka: All right. Break time.
BREAK
Amy Hirotaka: Welcome back. First up after the break is the E-Gov update from Heather Lewis and Joneil Sampana.
E-GOV COMMITTEE UPDATE
Heather Lewis: I have two updates. The first is that the members of the E-Gov Committee have been working on the social engagement strategy. We have created an editorial calendar and we are posting within the CTAB Twitter account. We have 300 followers. So far, we’re getting some traction. We would love to hear from you. Right now, we’re copywriting the editorial calendar based on community calendars. But in this room I am certain that there are many more events that we’re unaware of, and stories we’re unaware of. We really would love to have content from this group. I’m going to put my email on the white board and if you could send any stories that occur between now and December 26. That’s our timeframe for the calendar at this point.
David Keyes: Is the calendar something that we should pull into the CTAB web site?
Heather Lewis: Yes. That’s a good idea.
Joneil Sampana via phone: You know, along those lines, you will notice on our CTAB web site, there is a calendar with one or two events. Is that the calendar that you’re talking about?
David Keyes: Yes. The City uses Trumba as its calendar application. So we automatically pull stuff in that’s categorized as tech from the City and from the library. So maybe we could figure out something different or integrate.
Heather Lewis: A lot of the events on the editorial calendar would probably function much better on a visual calendar. So if there was a way to tie our editorial calendar to your calendar, that would be good.
David Keyes: I can connect you with the web staff that knows the details of that application so they can figure out the best mechanism. The Trumba calendar, in general for the City, is open. Anybody can create an account and post on the City’s calendar. It’s just a question of how we aggregate that to a specific calendar.
Heather Lewis: Also, for all of you who have Twitter accounts, please follow us @seatechboard. Our other item on the E-Gov agenda is a position statement that we’ve been working on. It’s gone through five members of the UW committee at this point, and will be fact checked. I’ll send it over to Bruce Blood, Michael Mattmiller, and [unintelligible] for fact checking and then we will submit it to the board.
Amy Hirotaka: And is this something that you’re hoping that CTAB will formally propose as a body? Or is it just an FYI?
Heather Lewis: I think it’s more on an FYI side of things.
Amy Hirotaka: Great. Karia Wong will now update you on the Broadband Committee.
BROADBAND COMMITTEE UPDATE
Karia Wong: I have just two items. Last month, we had a brief overview on the Wave cable franchise from Tony Perez. He gave the timeline and asked how we can share our comments. While we were discussing our work, we were told that there were actually public hearing sections in June and July. We are proposing to have a public hearing combined with a CTAB meeting, somewhere in the Central District. We are looking for suggestions for a location. The reason is that we really want to hear from the current Wave customers on the service that they are receiving. During the meeting, we had a guest who shared her experience in senior housing in the ID area. How the service was priced and also other things. We believe that it’s important for us to get that information from other customers as well. That’s why we’re planning to have the July meeting somewhere in the Central District, where the Wave territory is.
The other thing is we have discussed how we can move forward to continue our plan in trying to get a better idea of how many people will actually benefit from the cable programs from Comcast and Century Link. So, we’re still discussing all the possibilities. One thing we were thinking about was to get an idea of what is the penetration rate for internet. We are also trying to figure out another way to get the real number of how many people are actually signing up for the internet access program. We are trying to put that information together to get a better picture of much access people are getting.
Amy Hirotaka: This reminds me that we wanted to announce the dates and times of meetings. So, Heather, could you give the dates and times when the E-Gov Committee meets.
Heather Lewis: Yes, we meet on the fourth Tuesday of the month. And the next meeting will be at the Westlake location of Microsoft, 320 Westlake Avenue. 7:00 p.m.
Amy Hirotaka: And Karia?
Karia Wong: The Broadband Committee usually meets on the last Monday of each month, but for this month, it’s May 30, which is also Memorial Day. So we are moving this one up a week to May 23, on the sixth floor of the Municipal Tower, which is this building, at 6:30 p.m.
David Keyes: So, just to clarify, the July CTAB meeting will actually be a combination of a meeting and a Wave community meeting here.
Karia Wong: We discussed the possibility of inviting the Councilmember to attend the meeting as well.
DIGITAL INCLUSION COMMITTEE
Jose Vasquez: The Digital Inclusion Committee Technology Matching Fund review committee is officially starting tomorrow. Some of you know we’re having the meeting here tomorrow at 6:00 p.m. We will do an overview on what is TMF, what are the criteria, scoring considerations, conflict of interest, the application process, and the timeline. We had a quick sneak peek at the application pool for this year. We have a total of 21 applicants for requested funds of $1,340,152.02. The total match that is being included by our community service organizations are $1,514,077.50. The average request was for $25,397.17. And the median request was $25,404. There were 22 past grantees, which were 54 percent of the applicants. And 19 new applicants to the matching fund. That’s pretty cool. Once we get through the first round of the review, we’ll come back at the June meeting–next meeting we’ll come back with a set of recommendations on which proposals we’ll be funding. So stay tuned.
David Keyes: So that will be a vote.
Dan Moulton: Do you have enough people for your review?
Jose Vasquez: Looks like we do, but we might be seeking more community participants. So, if anybody from the community at-large is interested, let me know.
Dan Moulton: I am. Except tomorrow night is also the same night as Open Seattle.
Jose Vasquez: All right. I’m meeting with Delia Burke on Thursday, so if you can email me the contact information, we can figure out how to maybe do a one on one orientation. If there is a need for any additional committee members, I think that’s doable.
Amy Hirotaka: Great! Thank you. The meeting tomorrow night is actually on the 24th floor. In Room 2474. We were going to talk about communication and social media strategy, but I think Heather Lewis covered it. I assume, since there has been a lot of tweets, that Joneil unearthed the Twitter password. I’m really excited to hear about that. I also would like, Heather, if you want us to share the burden of tweeting, if you want multiple people to have access to the account?
Heather Lewis: One thing that would be beneficial to know any sort of policy around retweets. Right now, we’ve been operating under the assumption that it would probably make sense to retweet City officials. We need a retweet list. Obviously, it needs to be nonpartisan. An approved list would probably be valuable.
David Keyes: Or some guidelines.
Amy Hirotaka: And somebody probably should get the password, to David Keyes or somebody.
David Keyes: Yes. We’re required, because at some level, it is an official City Twitter account–it’s yours to tweet on–but as a board and commission we have some responsibility to archive it. So if you can get the password from Joneil then we can set up an archive for that.
Christopher Sheats: Being in community technology, I advocate community members tweeting about CTAB work.
Amy Hirotaka: Yes, I agree. I think that we’re advising the City, are we technically beholding to the City’s social media policy? Are retweets considered endorsements? That’s what we have to figure out.
David Keyes: What our requirements are legally, in terms of our public disclosure and things like that, I think there’s a difference between that and what’s the content policy. It’s the board’s Twitter account, so we obviously want to work with you, but to Christopher’s point, it’s an opportunity to share a broader set of information that’s of interest to people. So, I don’t see it from wearing my City employee bureaucrat hat. I think we want to encourage information dissemination and dialogue. We certainly know from other social media use that you want to stay true to what you’re intending to reach in terms of followers and content and dialogue to keep people engaged and not overwhelmed by stuff. So that’s a fine balance, of course.
Christopher Sheats: Ultimately, is it worth retweeting, or not. Personally, from managing Twitter accounts for organizations similar to this, in my opinion, it is an inclusionary action and somewhat empowering, as well.
David Keyes: In terms of follow-up, I know that Mark DeLoura expressed some interest at the last meeting. Maybe Heather, Amy, and I could figure out a time to connect at a meeting. I think that you’re starting to head down that path. The other question we have is should we and how should we do a refresh on the web site and connect those things as well.
Amy Hirotaka: Any additional announcements or updates?
David Keyes: If people didn’t grab the flyer there. Beryl Fernandes, a former CTAB member, is working on a Privacy Forum. That’s set for June 8 at Town Hall. I’ll email that out to folks. There’s a flyer over here. Looks like an interesting program and I want to encourage folks to go and to share that around.
Another thing is about a week ago, we had a gathering for the HUD Connect Home project. That’s the project that is increasing access and adoption for public housing families. we had about 30 people or so, including some folks from GITHUB. They’re going to be doing a day or two of coding training and giving participants tablets at the end of that. We had Best Buy as a partner, so they’re also out at their Dev Shop here in Seattle and their stores are going to have volunteers come out to help. A number of community organizations are also involved. So, we’re going to be working with some of them on distribution of about 100 laptops that we have this year to go to public housing residents with this project. The three internet providers were there: Century Link, Comcast, and Interconnection, who is reselling the Mobile Citizen service. Just a great chance to get the community providers connected with some of that information. I think we’ll see more of those events coming up, potentially doing some outreach events in the five public housing districts, which are Rainier Vista, High Point, New Holly, Lake City Court, and Yesler Terrace, so southwest/southeast, and one in North Seattle. Those will be happening over the summer. Might be a chance to staff a table, share some information about opportunities. Kate, do you have anything to add to that?
Kate Schneier: It’s a good opportunity to connect.
David Keyes: Since we have the time, Kate just had this great event with Horn of Africa Services on Thursday. Do you want to say something about that?
Kate Schneier: The YMCA coordinates with Horn of Africa Services, through a program with the City Human Services office as a youth job readiness training consortium. Horn of Africa is one of five social services agencies that serve specific language areas. They contract out to us because they’re a smaller nonprofit. Usually it’s the other way around. We run an after school youth program for different east African countries: Somalia, Eritrea, and others. The youth we’re working with do a 12-hour job readiness training program, and a 60-hour internship. They’re wrapping up their current program, which was a photo project called Youth in South Seattle. They went out to interview and video and photograph people and did a presentation at the Columbia City Library. They also did white board animations that told the story of their lives, some challenge that they’ve overcome. They learned how to do all of this stuff. It was really a great event. It was good collaboration with the Seattle Public Library system. We had a great experience with Interconnection. I have a video that I can share with you. Five of them, through their internship, earned points that they can trade in for refurbished laptops. They picked those out at Interconnection.
[See examples of the immigrant whiteboard animations at https://www.youtube.com/user/pugetsoundoff]
Amy Hirotaka: Thank you, everyone. We will adjourn early and enjoy the sunshine.