August 9, 2016 Seattle Community Technology Advisory Board Meeting
Topics covered included: CTO Michael Mattmiller update on Next Generation Data Center and Data Camp; Tech Matching Fund grants Council meeting and Mayor’s reception update; Schools to Prison Pipeline Social Justice Hackathon by Miguel Willis; Give Safe by Jonathan Kumar; E-Gov, Digital Inclusion, Cable & Broadband, and Privacy Committees updates.
This meeting was held: August 9, 2016; 5:30-7:30 p.m., Seattle Municipal Tower, 700 Fifth Avenue, Suite 2750
Podcasts available at: http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/CTTAB/podcast/cttab.xml
Attending:
Board Members: Amy Hirotaka, Karia Wong, Christopher Alejano, Mark DeLoura, Joneil Sampana via Skype; Heather Lewis, Iga Fakayo Keme
Public: David Doyle, Dan Stiefel, Dorene Cornwell, Maureen Jones, Lloyd Douglas, Dan Moulton, Miguel Willis, Joel Richardson, Jonathan Kumar, Sarah Abramowitz, Vanessa Ingram, George Richardson, Cullen White, Andre Villasana
Staff: Michael Mattmiller, David Keyes, Virginia Gleason, Derrick Hall, Cass Magnuski
26 In Attendance
Meeting was called to order by Amy Hirotaka.
Introductions
Agenda and Minutes approved for the July meeting. Joneil Sampana abstained from minutes’ approval.
CTO Update
Michael Mattmiller: Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks to all CTAB members and the community that is here today. I’m trying to recall. I think I was not with you in June because I had an opportunity to participate in a conversation at Harvard around privacy and municipal data. It was very interesting. They seemed to be very impressed by our support within the City to focus on the Open Data program and to see enthusiasm from our departments about making more data sets available. Many of you were present when Mayor Murray declared that the City was officially open by preference and passed by executive order calling on all departments to fully implement the Open Data policy. Some of the hallmarks of that policy were to go out and inventory department data to understand what data sets were of interest and value to the public and to prioritize the schedule for getting that data onto data.seattle.gov, to always be thinking about publishing data in a machine readable format, so no more .PDFs where tables can’t be unlocked by various types of interfaces. And also thinking about published privacy. So, if there is a data set that perhaps could have some privacy harm, or could perhaps affect the security of critical infrastructure, to understand that before we make that data available to the public. Now, of course, that all sounds great, but the real work gets done by our Open Data Champions. The Open Data Executive Order called on every department to appoint an Open Data Champion who would actually go out and do the lift of this work. It’s something in addition to the day job of the individual. We asked departments to set aside up to a quarter of the employee’s time to take on this responsibility, but we know it’s still a large ask when you’ve got a lot going on. So, one of the things we try to think about is how do we invest in our Open Data Champions. How do we not only train them to follow our policies here in the City, but how do we help give them some value in exchange for this work they’re doing. And so, this year, Candace Faber and Bruce Blood within Seattle IT led an effort called Data Camp. It was a three-day workshop where individuals were trained on what Open Data is, kind of the heart of civic technology, and how we are trying to partner with our community to help us develop innovative technology solutions. And I should say that CTAB is one of those wonderful partners that we think a lot about. We also then went into what is this big concept of big data, and why is it that government needs to be thinking about becoming more data driven, and what role these individuals play in that process. And so we’ve taught things like how to use advanced functionality of Microsoft Excel. How do we use Tableau? We just made an investment in a Tableau server here in the City, and over next year, we look forward to rolling that more broadly to our departments. We also talked about the art of the possible. As these Open Data Champions are speaking with their contacts within the departments, if there are ideas for innovative uses of data, or opportunities to partner with the community, making sure they know how to get plugged into the staff and the City and help them do that.
I’m doing a huge disservice by not providing detail, but those are the types of things that we set as outcomes for Data Camp, not to mention just a general excitement within the City about Open Data and data in general. We’ve received tremendously position feedback from the staff who participated. I should also say that it wasn’t just our City staff who participated. We have staff from Tableau, from the University of Washington, from Microsoft, from Hack Oregon, and many other great organizations who helped provide additional context to these topics. We are now looking at how to keep that fresh. So, we’ve stood up what we call our Breakfast of Champions, to convene once a month and talk about status, and to generate ideas. You can actually watch Data Camp, if you’d like, if you go onto the Seattle Channel web site. You can watch the entire three days, if you’d like. Presentations from me and Mary Perry from SPD, who many of you have met. We look forward to continuing to provide value to our Open Data Champions, as well as tracking new thinking around data within the City.
So that’s something that happened since the last time we spoke. Also, I have been talking with you about the Next Generation Data Center since my first CTAB meeting back in June of 2014. We are very excited that after a very long road that started in 2012, we are getting ready to finish our NGDC project. For those ho aren’t familiar, in 2012, we had an incident in this building. The the primary City data center is located here, ad it has grown exponentially since 2001, when it first opened. And yet, we have’t kept the architectural and engineering standards of the infrastructure in this building in a state to support the data center. What that meant is that in 2012, the data center literally melted down. We had a failure of our main City power bus, as you may have heard in the media at the time. We had a very touch and go three days where it was unclear whether the City systems would remain up. Our Council really pushed to find out what was happening to the state of the art infrastructure of the City, and as a result sent us forward to replace our data center with twin co-location facilities and a project diet of $40 million to bring us into the new facilities. So, NGDC isn’t just about modernizing our data center, it’s been an opportunity for us to take a look at how we maintain our servers, the most critical infrastructure around technology. We replaced quite a bit of hardware. We are consolidating servers from about ten different locations, so we’re simplifying our hosting environment and processes. And thanks to some really trusting departments about how we become one IT, we are also moving to a shared service model that was unthinkable just even two years ago. Where instead of having a new data center where ten departments each run their own infrastructure and systems, we’re going to have one set of shared services that administers technology on behalf of the City. This has been truly an incredible effort, and I’m proud to report that we’re not only coming in under budget–and in our budget last year, we actually gave back some of the project money to the general fund and other departments, based on everyone’s willingness to be part of the shared super-structure.
For those who are familiar with the project, a couple of project updates: At this point, we have migration plans in place for all of our departments. We have three departments that completely finished their migration to the new data center. Then we have five departments that are between 80 and 100 percent complete. We had planned on finishing all of our migrations by the end of this month. However, we have now made or are considering a change order for three exceptions. The first exception is for Seattle City Light. As many of you know, we are getting very close to going live on our new customer utility billing system. That project has had its challenges and is somewhat behind schedule. Rather than migrate their old billing system which is located in the data center, we are going to wait until after the new system goes live, so that way we are migrating a fully productive system. We also are recommending a change to our team that our old back up system–we’re running IBM Tivoli system manager. Rather than move that to do the new data center, we are going to wait until our back up system ages out in 60 days and let that equipment be retired in place. That 60 day period from the go live of our new backup solution is September 7. So it will keep running here until September 2. The third exception is one that, to be candid, I’m not crazy about, but Seattle City Light has a number of servers that they should have begun slating to migration last year, just based on the volume and complexity. And unfortunately, that effort did not start as it was supposed to. Based on the intense focus on NCIS, and based upon all of our intense focus on IT consolidation, we in Seattle IT just simply missed it. We were not picking up on the fact that they were not where they were supposed to be. So, as a result, we have a pending change order to hold that chunk of servers out of this project. Those servers are not located in the old data center. They are located in two other sites, one the north service center, and one on the 33rd floor of this building. We are working with City Light to determine the appropriate time frame to migrate those servers when we have time to complete due diligence on what the cost would be. I can provide an update at our next meeting. Obviously, I don’t quite have that yet, but we’re reviewing the change order.
So, these were the two big updates that I wanted to share with you today, just based on how things are going. At our next meeting, I’ll be able to provide a fuller update on NCIS, that big utility billing system. We just have a lot of great things going on in Seattle IT right now, and I look forward to the continued advice from this group, especially as it pertains to Open Data, and our Smart Cities work. And thank you for the great memo that’s in my inbox with recommendations on Smart Cities, which I haven’t had a chance to read yet, as I catch up from vacation, but I look forward to that.
David Keyes: I have a quick comment. Can you tell us more about Tableau, and Socrata integrations?
Michael Mattmiller: The decision to purchase the Tableau server was made last month after a review process, where we looked at several popular modern visualization tools. The immediate necessity was based on a project running in our Seattle Police Department called our data analytics program. We are building out a data warehouse to help comply with the Department of Justice consent decree where they will monitor excessive use of force scenarios. We picked Tableau as the visualization tool. At the same time, our Seattle City Light corporate performance team has been looking for a similar tool. So they were able to go in together to help fund the purchase of this now City-wide resource. Those two departments are going to be early adopters of it, and we have a position request within the Q2 supplemental budget that is before Council right now, which is essential our PI product manager. So we’ll go out in the City and evangelize this resource, and help departments think about the right way to use it. We do not have a strategy or thinking yet around the relationship to the Open Data programs specifically, however, the server is technically capable of enabling public facing web interactive Tableau workbooks.
Karia Wong: We’re in the first year of technology consolidation. What is the next step? The reason I’m asking is I’m wondering if it’s similar to Washington Connections, a platform for people to apply for programs and service at one place.
Michael Mattmiller: That’s a great question. I’ll be honest. I don’t know much about Washington Connections, but I’d love to learn more. With IT consolidation, when the Mayor announced in May of 2015 that we are going to consolidate our IT staff from across 15 executive partners, we developed a three-year timeline to affect the integration of the staff. So, on April 6 of this year, if you were an IT professional for the City, you became part of Seattle IT, but you didn’t move desks, you didn’t change your supervisor by and large, and you kept doing what you were doing. That three year runway was our process of integrating people performing similar work. In 2016, we are integrating those staff who deliver largely digital structure-related services. So, the network team, the help desk, service desk, those things. We are doing well. We’ve run what we call non-service design processes. We’ve taken staff from nine different services, brought them together to define structure and best practices. Tara Duckworth is our new director of applications here in the City. She was formerly the applications manager of Seattle City Light. She came to us from a career at Safeco before that, and other places. Tara has the exciting, or as some people would say, unenviable job of thinking about how do we structure for the first time in the City one division for 250 or so application development operations to support the staff. She has started to draft that out. We’re going back and forth to fine tune it. And we look forward to announcing that to the City I believe in October, which is when we’re going to finalize that. The Orc structure is going to help drive some of the governance and management practices as well as making sure that we’re clustering people with the right expertise to [unintelligible]. What we’re looking to for 2018 is great. We’ve now got infrastructure and a consistent structure, we’ve got applications in the structure we want. How do we start to unlock value. I think that what you’re hinting at is something really interesting, which is f you look at the state of IT, and specifically applications in the City today, we have 1200 enterprise applications. If that sounds like a big number, that is a very high number, probably an order of magnitude more than we need. So we have technical death, we have systems that need to be retired, not to mention that we have a whole lot of interfaces that don’t look like each other. So, there is a conversation to be had. How do we drive common user experience? It’s something that we know we need to be thinking about. We haven’t turned down that path yet, but it’s definitely on the radar. One thing that is on the radar is a project that we’re calling Permit System Integration. This is something that, with a grassroots effort, from staff across eight City departments that started last year, where the staff who were talking to each other said, “Hey! Our departments all implement a permit system.” They had some legacy systems retiring, there were some new permitting or regulatory processes coming to fruition. So they came together and said let’s try and drive a common solution, with one customer portal, and work flows on the back end that are flexible enough that we can route inter-departmentally. The solution that was selected initially during competitive bid is called Accela. It’s a vendor that has a great deal of experience making permitting and regulatory software for state and local governments. We have the Seattle Department of Constructions and Inspections (SDCI) which is going live with regulatory and permitting processes on Accela this year. We currently have Architect and [unintelligible] started projects that use Accela as a solution for functions at Fire, FAS, SPU, and others. But the take away is a great thing. By having one approach in coordinating means that we will have a one-stop portal to people who have to interact with permitting processes across those departments. Knock on wood, we will be able to drive from a business perspective this notion that if there is a step in the process that touches SPU, but is generally owned by SDCI, we don’t want to have a separate application. We want to route that internally. We are just at the planning stages of how this effort is going to come together, but it is something that we’re very excited about.
Karia Wong: With Washington Connection, what you see is a list of programs, and you just check a box. When you click, it asks you to fill out some forms and you automatically apply to the programs that you checked.
Amy Hirotaka: We’re actually a little overtime with Michael, but are there any questions from folks here? No? Thank you, Michael. Since you’re still here, I’d like to thank Iga for her service on CTAB. This is her last meeting as our Get Engaged member. I do think that she will likely be still engaged with the Privacy Committee, but I hope everyone will join me in thanking Iga. (applause) The next item on our agenda is the Tech Matching Fund grants.
David Keyes: Do you want to have the folks who came in later introduce themselves?
Amy Hirotaka: Sure. And we also forgot Joneil on the phone.
More Introductions
Tech Matching Fund Update
David Keyes: We have just coming up ten matching fund projects that CTAB and Michael and the Mayor have forwarded to City Council for approval. Next Wednesday, August 17, those come to City Council for a vote. We will have the grantee organizations there. we’re going to do a photo with Councilmember Harrell about 1:45 in the City Hall lobby on the steps. We don’t have an agenda yet for that committee meeting, but we’ll send that out when we get that so we’ll know exactly where on the agenda the Tech Matching Fund grants are. And then the Mayor and Michael are hosting a reception at 3:00 upstairs in the Mayor’s conference room on the seventh floor. It’s a great opportunity to celebrate and meet the folks who are going to be implementing those projects, get a chance to connect with them. For folks like Mark, and all you others who read those applications, there are real people behind those.
Amy Hirotaka: Any questions about that? Let’s move on to public comments and announcements. First we have Miguel Willis, talking about the Schools to Prison Pipeline Social Justice Hackathon.
Public Comments and Announcements
Prison Pipeline Social Justice Hackathon
Miguel Willis: I’m organizing a hackathon. We did this last year with the Social Justice Hackathon. We built digital solutions to increase our access to social justice. This year, we want to work with disrupting the school to prison pipeline and creating digital solutions for after school. Our goal is to have youth involved at every stage in terms of organizing, creating solutions, and also have some kind of education track alongside the hackathon. Digital solutions, data sets around the problem, just to provide an example, to seal a juvenile record. It’s a very tedious process, but it doesn’t involve analysis. I invite everyone here to offer your thoughts, and I definitely invite everyone to come out. I’ll provide more information to David Keyes, and he will send it out to you. Are there any questions?
David Keyes: So that’s going to be a 48 hour thing? What is the date?
Miguel Willis: The date is October 7-9. The first meeting is on Friday, when we really want to focus on the youth. We’re going to have youth focus on poetry, spoken word, networking. [unintelligible]
David Keyes: Where is it going to be?
Miguel Willis: It’s going to be at Code Fellows across the street from the Space Needle. {2901 3rd Ave #300, Seattle, WA}. I’ll send the information to David Keyes.
Heather Lewis: And I’ll post it on Twitter, as well.
David Keyes: Is there a web site?
Miguel Willis: Yes. We just have a registration page right now.
Amy Hirotaka: Thank you, Miguel. Are there any questions? So, Jonathan Kumar will talk about Give Safe.
Give Safe
Jonathan Kumar: On your way over here this morning, whether you knew it or didn’t, passed someone experiencing homelessness. Maybe you thought, “Gosh, I’d like to help, but I don’t have time to talk right now. I don’t have any bills on me. Or I’m not sure that cash is the best way to serve that person.” That is the interaction that I thought about for about the last year. Thinking about how we can make that more humane and give more dignity to that interaction or conversation. I experienced that a lot growing up in Chicago, and now spending time here in Seattle.
There was a case study in London a couple of years ago, where they identified 15 individuals experiencing homelessness, and gave them about $3,000 to spend any way they wanted. It wasn’t in cash, but was essentially in credit that could be used any way they liked, as long as they sat down with a counselor and developed an action plan for these funds. So they had the choice as to how they wanted to use the funds. they took a look at these 15 individuals a year later, and 11 of them were in chosen housing, and seven of them had [unintelligible] appointment. Those are pretty cool outcomes, and for me, it suggested that financial resources plus relational guidance can really lead to some incredible outcomes. We’re trying to replicate that here by distributing these tiny necklaces called beacons. We can pass that around. Essentially, we give that necklace to individuals through outreach with the Union Gospel Mission, and if someone has one of those beacons, and you guy have the Give Safe app, ad you pas within a 20 yard radius of those necklaces, you’re going to get a notification and a way to give through that flexible fund through the beacon used by any of our vendor partners for things like haircuts, bus fare, clothing, coffee, food at a restaurant. And you can also apply for more strategic needs like an application fee, rent, Greyhound tickets, things of that nature. We’ve been working on this for a while and as we think about how to interact with the City, we’ll be providing a lot of rich data as to how individuals are spending the money, where these interactions are happening, demographics, things of that nature. We’re also looking for ways to make a PSA to people on buses and trains. When you see someone who is experiencing homelessness you don’t have to ignore them. You don’t have to give spare change. You can invest in them strategically through this app called Give Safe. So, we’re here looking for advocates and partners as we try to offer this tool to Seattle to take personal responsibility. I’m happy to field any questions.
Virginia Gleason: Have you met with Sally Bagshaw’s office at City Council? I know she’d be happy to meet with you. She chairs our committee on that and this would be something I know that she would be happy to know about.
Jonathan Kumar: Sure, I’d be happy to.
David Keyes: How many organizations have adopted this so far?
Jonathan Kumar: We just started handing out beacons last Thursday night with the Union Gospel Mission. I think we have 16 out there right now. We’ll be working this week to do another distribution. We have enough beacons for 100 right now. That’s our pilot to see if we can really change some outcomes. We had people actually donate $2,000 to be shared among these individuals. So, it’s a great start and we’re excited to see what sort of outcomes come about from this money that’s put in their hands in an accountable, strategic way.
Dorene Cornwell: Do you have any sense of how many people you’ve gotten beacons are actually working?
Jonathan Kumar: Yes. It’s interesting. Sometimes the working poor are left out because they’re working from 8:00 to 6:00 and they’re missing out of a lot of services. They can’t afford to miss work. The 16 that we started with, I don’t think — there may be a few that are employed, mostly of them are unemployed. Part of the purpose of this beacon is actually to get them to ask for services more. We turn the beacons off monthly, and to get them reactivated they have to have a touchpoint, have a conversation with someone at one of our nonprofits. So that is another data point. That is another opportunity for relationship building. It hasn’t necessarily been targeted.
Dan Stiefel: I’m just curious how the money is divided. If you have $2,000, and you have 20 beacons, does that mean that each of the 20 can draw $100? And that can change as your funds change?
Jonathan Kumar: What we tried to do with those initial donations was to just cede $40 on each of the first so many beacons. That was a campaign that we did. The first 50 beacons have $40 on them, immediately available to spend.
Dan Stiefel: And as the fund increases, their amount increases? How do you regulate that?
Jonathan Kumar: Yes. If we didn’t get any more donations, then the 51st beacon wouldn’t have anything on it. But we plan on making more opportunities for people to donate directly to a person.
Dan Stiefel: So, funds could go to one individual who is targeted.
Jonathan Kumar: Yes. We are not planning on splitting that. It will allow people to invest directly. If there is a Real Change vendor, or there’s a person who is on a corner every day, we’d love to just sponsor them $1,000, or whatever it is.
Dorene Cornwell: And is this concentrated for right now, downtown?
Jonathan Kumar: Yes.
Amy Hirotaka: Thank you, Jonathan. We have just a couple more moments for other announcements that any folks would like to make? Public comment?
Comment: I’m with an organization called Puget Soundoff, where we teach teens in our digital equity internship where they create video projects about topics they are passionate about. We are holding the #SeattlesDigitalBattle Film Festival on Monday, August 15, 3-5 p.m., 2100 24th Avenue S., Seattle, Board Room. They will be showing all of the videos and there will be a raffle. A lot of these kids didn’t know how to use any technology at all. And just through the summer, they are able to make full-fledged video projects with sound, music, etc. They’re doing something I did in college, but I worked for like, a year on it.
David Keyes: That’s also one the events listed on the back of the agenda. I put a bunch of stuff onteh back of the agenda.
Lloyd Douglas: This is more of a question than a comment. Does CTAB advise putting equipment in all the conference rooms for the design review meetings?
Amy Hirotaka: I don’t think, historically, we have. Would that be outside the scope of what we do?
Michael Mattmiller: The CTO ordinance does include audio/visual equipment, so it does fall under the purview of the CTO to affect those areas. So, yes, I’d welcome advisement.
Amy Hirotaka: Any other questions or comments? Dorene?
Dorene Cornwell: I just want to say thank you to the City. I read the comments that the City submitted to HUD about HUD planning about accessibility planning and making broadband a part of the planning. I really appreciate the City taking the time. I might have said it differently, but I really appreciate the effort.
David Keyes: Back then, we submitted two sets of comments. HUD had a proceeding to get input. One of them was on whether or not, and how we should include broadband infrastructure into HUD funded new and substantially rehabilitated housing, multi-family housing. And then the second one was whether or not to, and how to include, broadband access and adoption into the HUD consolidated plans that cities write and have to renew every four years. I’ve got a copy of those to hand around at the break.
Dan Moulton: I’d like to add that the piece that David Keyes did, if you search through that, you can find other opportunities for challenge grants and people can go through the innovation program, etc., for HUD and for low income people gaining access to broadband. So there are opportunities there for granting challenges, and innovation to spark peoples’ minds on this topic. Again, they did a great job.
Dorene Cornwell: There’s this thing called the Access Board, which basically deals with accessibility standards in construction. It’s one of those places that involves architects and designers for people with disabilites. And they had a meeting in Seattle, and one of the things they were talking about is that all of the other agencies in the federal government used one standard for accessibility and HUD actually uses a different, out of date standard for construction. It has to do with construction, but as far as I know, HUD is the only agency that builds residential housing. So I think it’s really important to address the need for broadband to be structured into residential housing.
David Keyes: Take a look at what is in the back here. Seattle Globalists showcase the Yesler Terrace. It should be an event coming this Thursday. It should be really neat. They’ve been doing a lot of documenting of the whole change around Yesler Terrace and the community there. Also the Y Tech, and also the South Park one in September. These are all projects that we use some of the cable funds to support. Those are all youth media showcases. And then the Technology in Justice symposium: the Access to Justice principles, which the state supreme court adopted, provide guidelines for the justice system to incorporate technology and evaluate technology and privacy principles, and so on. As the justice system uses technology, so the symposium in September is in part kind of a review of that whole set of principles, which is now about eight years old. there will be some great presenters there, also, and a great chance to hook up with the state Access to Justice board tech committee, and others.
Dan Moulton: I don’t have it with me, but I have noticed that there is going to be in Seattle a discussion of income and access to health care. There will be some reverse pitches for that aspect going on next month in September and October. [unintelligible] Data blocking is a huge issue in our welfare system, and the majority of the people who are in King County Jail all have medical issues. They have difficulty in how that data flows out, especially if they’re homeless. If anybody is interested in those challenge grants, behavioral health and low income access to health care, I can connect you.
Amy Hirotaka: Thank you, Dan. If you could give that information to David, he can probably distribute it. With that, we will take a break. We’re running just a couple of minutes late, so we’ll take an eight-minute break.
BREAK
Amy Hirotaka: Let’s get started again. Please take your seats. We have a special “show and tell” from David.
David Keyes: The FCC recently released and posted this map that integrates some of where broadband access and adoption is to different health measures. It’s not a perfect thing, because the data and the detail about the broadband access is pretty limited. But they’re taking it from the FCC reports. Under the broadband access, you can pull up rural internet access adoption download and upload speeds. Then, in this health column, there are a bunch of different measures and filters. You can pull up rate of diabetes, obesity, physician access, preventable hospitalization, sick day reports. It’s a really interesting piece. I’ll send out the link to it, or if you did this search on mapping broadband health, you’ll find it. It’s really interesting to play around with, and look at. It’s the first iteration to mash up the data.
Dan Moulton: I would question that the data is timely. Do they admit that? It can be a great start for data scientists. Because it can give you some false impressions, if the data is not quite accurate. But a wonderful start, as nobody else has done this.
David Keyes: Yes. It’s really an interesting start.
Amy Hirotaka: Let’s move on to Committee Reports. The first committee to be reporting will be E-Gov, and if you could also include in your comments the date and time of your next meeting, and location, that would be great.
E-GOV COMMITTEE REPORT
Heather Lewis: Thank you, Dan, for organizing our next E-Gov meeting. We are trying to get across the City. We are trying to be more accessible. Something that we are going to do is to host traveling meetings. Our next E-Gov Committee meeting will be Tuesday, August 23, from 6:30 to 7:45 p.m. at Rainier Beach Public Library, which we will post via Twitter. In terms of a recap of where we are, the only thing we have to report is David Doyle was kind enough to do most of the work on a memo that we have sent direct to Michael Mattmiller and Jim Loter on best practices for city/citizen communication, civic engagement initiatives and projects. So, where we hear back the comments, we will share that with this board.
David Keyes: Do you have any particular topic to highlight, or priorities for the coming meeting?
Heather Lewis: Yes. We typically send out our agenda about a week ahead of time. We’ll be happy to share that with you.
David Keyes: Yes, I was just thinking that if you send that to me, I can send it out to the broader CTAB members list.
Heather Lewis: Okay, thanks. That would be great.
Amy Hirotaka: Thank you, Heather. Karia! Cable and Broadband Committee.
CABLE AND BROADBAND COMMITTEE UPDATE
Karia Wong: In our last meeting, we have been talking about the Wave franchise renewal, and what needs to be done. So, we are trying to organize our goal and to identify our roles. In addition, we shared our concerns about the customer service experience with Century Link, and brainstorming ways to be able to enact improvement of the customer service of Century Link. We actually have a new location. Thank you, David, for making that possible. We were meeting at the City for our monthly meeting and we will continue to meet there because it is a very convenient location for everybody. Hopefully, it will be our permanent location. In terms of the Wave franchise renewal timeline, we don’t have a consolidated plan yet, but we hope to have the first draft of the official statement by September, and then we will be able to share it in our October meeting, with everybody, so that you can comment on it. We are trying to identify a way for us to work as a group, because everybody has been busy. It’s really hard to get the whole committee together physically. So, hopefully with the online collaboration tools, everyone will be able to share their comments or feedback on certain issues, and also recommendations that we will make on franchise renewal. Our next meeting will be the last Monday, which is the 29th. We are meeting at 6:30 at the City Hall. I can’t remember the room number. We will send out a reminder later.
Amy Hirotaka: It’s the Boards and Commissions room. It’s on the lower level, I think it’s lower level two. Sometimes City Hall is over at 6:30 and sometimes it’s not. But if you buzz the security guard, he just looks at you in the camera and let’s you in. It’s pretty easy to get in.
Karia Wong: And everyone is welcome to join.
David Keyes: Virginia got some clarification that we could use this building, too.
Amy Hirotaka: We tried that here on the 27th floor with Tony. And the elevator was a mess. Every time someone wanted to come up, we had to go find the security guard. There had to be one at the desk, so the other one was gone. Everyone got up here by the time the meeting was over.
Dan Stiefel: The lobby downstairs is good. We used that a few times, then we found out that that can’t be done properly without having a City staff member in attendance.
Virginia Gleason: In working out the elevator issues, the 40th floor conference rooms can be used without any City staff. And you can just make sure you close the door when you leave. I’m going to keep working with the security folks in the building to see if they can’t be there for the first ten or fifteen minutes of your meeting, when people might be coming, to make sure they have two guards down there.
Dan Stiefel: Is there any chance that that can be worked out for that lobby area on the second level? That worked so well, at least for us.
Virginia Gleason: I’ll ask. When I talked to him the first time, he just said the 40th floor rooms, but I’ll ask him.
Dan Stiefel: With the elevator, we would start getting into a real problem. I’m skeptical as to whether we can consistently solve that.
Karia Wong: We were told by the security guard that the building is actually closed to the public by 7:00 in the evening.
Virginia Gleason: Yes, and there are some exceptions. And one is the 40th floor conference rooms.
Dan Moulton: For the project management roundtable for a number of years, we used the 40th floor. And I can tell you that the elevators are not a problem. The lights will go out at 7:00, just like they do here, to tell you to get out.
Virginia Gleason: We can find out on that floor where the over-ride is, like we have to do here.
Dan Moulton: We used it because the one on 40 is very large. So, I can attest to what you’re saying, that the elevators do work.
David Keyes: I’m just waiting for the final confirmation of the time that we have sent Century Link to come here in September. To give a report in terms of the rollout of their fiber service, Prism, and their low income internet program. You might want to come up with questions ahead of time for what you want to ask Century Link, and optionally, could submit them ahead of time. This committee might help to get it better organized for that meeting. So they can bring data and stuff.
Amy Hirotaka: All right. I’m not sure that we have a Digital Inclusion Committee update. I think it would be from Nourisha or Jose. Neither are here. How about the Tech Matching Fund, David?
DIGITAL INCLUSION COMMITTEE UPDATE
David Keyes: There hasn’t been a meeting of the Digital Inclusion meeting. I’ll just mention in that environment, we’ve been working a lot with Seattle Housing Authority in trying to get the rollout of the Connect Home project. This is to help 400 families in five housing to get internet access and apply the grant they got from Google to help underwrite those costs. Also, we have 100 refurbished laptops or desk tops to give to families this year, working with Interconnection. So, we’ve just about gotten in place the Interconnection mechanics, working initially with New Holly. Then, we hit a bump with Comcast in getting accurate data about the households that don’t have internet that would be eligible. So, we’re actually meeting with national HUD, and Comcast folks disagreed about that. So you folks know, Comcast nationally launched or announced that they were rolling out the public housing program nationally. So, public housing residents across the country are now eligible for the $10 Internet Essentials, and they are expanding it to some Section 8 also, which is nice.
Chris Alejano: Do you know when the next meeting is for Digital Inclusion?
David Keyes: I’m not sure. We’ll connect with Nourisha and Jose.
Amy Hirotaka: All right! Privacy. I’m not sure if there has actually been a first committee meeting yet, but are there any updates?
PRIVACY COMMITTEE UPDATE
Iga Fakayo Keme: As I stated in the beginning when I introduced myself, I’m working with another community member, Christopher Sheats, in restarting the Privacy Committee. We are attempting to set up a time to meet with the new Chief Privacy Officer, Susan Goodman, for the City of Seattle. Once we meet with her, and find out what her short-term and long-term goals are for the City, Christopher and I will sit down and develop our plan of attack as far as the committee goes. We intend to meet with Sue no later than the end of this month. And then, we’ll plan to have a meeting either in September or October.
Amy Hirotaka: Thanks.
David Keyes: Let me know if I can do anything to help facilitate that.
Amy Hirotaka: Moving on to Review of CTAB Bylaws
REVIEW OF CTAB BYLAWS
David Keyes: Okay, everybody get up and do your bylaw dance. (laughs)
Vanessa Ingram: Is that jumping up and down and screaming?
David Keyes: Yes. That’s the board rule for consensus. For those who are paying lesser attention to it, I’ll just pass this around. I brought a couple of the HUD comments, and a couple of the posters and info about upcoming events.
To set the stage on it, the board, a few years ago, (the bylaws have had a couple of iterations) particularly looked at decision making, and added some elements about consensus decision making, what to do in terms of voting for policy. We have added sections about conflict of interest as they apply mainly when you are making decisions around funding, those kinds of issues came in force when we were doing the Tech Matching Fund reviews. We lowered the quorum a little bit to make it easier when fewer folks show up at a meeting. They also did something that allowed the board to basically create other officers if they wanted to. First line, officers; second line, the board may add additional roles, as needed, to assist the chair, and vice chair. Last year, the whole Municipal Code that creates CTAB was changed, along with Cable Code revisions. They created a separate section adjoining the Information Technology Department, and changed some elements of the board, not a lot in terms of the overall makeup, but clarifying and keeping things up to date in terms of what the board will cover. We also changed the name of the board from Citizens Technology and Telecommunications Advisory Board, which unless you’ve been saying it 1,000 times, does not roll off your tongue, to Community Technology Advisory Board, which is what the board wanted to change it to. And to make it simpler, to recognize that not all residents are citizens. That’s the only change that’s been made since we updated the Cable Code. To this Rules of Procedure, I just went in and change the name. I thought it would be worth a look back. I know some things have come up that the board has talked about, like electronic participation. How do we fold that in so that’s enabled to the degree possible. Is there something you want to change about meeting notices, since that’s more electronic? There are things about decision making and process. I thought this was a time to do a little look-back. I know that most of the board members have now gone through the City’s onboarding training, too. We haven’t heard much feedback from that. Hopefully, that was helpful. You’re all now informed and running scared about public disclosure.
Karia Wong: I’m glad that there is no quiz.
Joneil Sampana: Do you have a copy of those bylaws that I can access electronically?
David Keyes: Yes. And they’re also on the web site. They’re under the About the Board section. Oh, it’s What We Do, Committees. That link. And then, right under the first paragraph on What We Do, there is a thing that says ‘See Our Charter and Board Rules.’
Joneil Sampana: Appreciate it very much. I see it now.
David Keyes: And I do have a Word doc, so if folks want to do a ‘track changes’ or something, I can send that around, too.
Mark DeLoura: Uh oh. Rules link is broken.
David Keyes: Broken? It is broken, huh. Okay, I’ll send it over right now and fix that. Tta must have happened as they were transitioning to the consolidated IT web site. Joneil, I’ll send it off to you right now. And there was a stack of them in print copy over there. I guess Virginia, also as you’re looking at other governance and City rules, if there are other thoughts you might have on how to conform?
Virginia Gleason: I went through them in quite a bit of detail because I hadn’t gone through them before. The only thing I was wondering about was the thing that David brought up about having some guidance about electronic participation, and whether you wanted it limited to a certain number of meetings, up to two or three meetings a year or something. And then I was looking at Adoption or Amendments to the Rules of Procedure requiring 60 percent of the board and so, the numbers for the quorum and the percentages are what I look at as the things that can trip you up. Try to have the right number of people here and then you’ll have the right percentage for votes. So looking back on some of your previous votes just to see how close you were, and if you want to make any adjustments, either to those percentages or something more about expectations of the board members, if that had been a problem. I was kind of working backwards, and I don’t know on the individual votes if you keep any record of if there ever was a time when you didn’t have either the appropriate quorum, or if you actually had to count the votes, whether you had enough. Those are the only housekeeping items that I thought of. But, other than that, I thought it was a pretty good set of bylaws, updated to reflect any changes. So, pretty good.
Amy Hirotaka: David, what do you feel that next steps are for us, then, to have the board go through these. I do feel that I have to look at them, but looking back specifically at the quorum number and the votes, I think is the most pressing item. Also attendance rules for board members. I’ve never actually carefully looked at that. I don’t think we’ve ever been super strict on that. Two in a row, right? I think it would be a good idea for all of us to familiarize ourselves with this. And then if there are any red flags, Jose and I can take a look at votes in the past, looking back at the minutes to see if we need to have anything changed there. Certainly, Jose and I can be points of contact for CTAB members so you can email us for anything and then we can work with you. Sound good? I would like to have a deadline for getting comments to me within the next couple of weeks. So, if there’s anything to change, we can talk about it at the next meeting. Two weeks from today would be Tuesday, August 23. So, if folks would take a look by then….
David Keyes: Yes, according to our meeting agenda, I think our timing is probably a little bit different. The procedure is we post it to the web site. We’re required legally to give 24 hours’ notice. We try to give seven days if we can, to get the agenda set. Then it goes out electronically. This has a thing about how people request items on the agenda. It’s informal, but if a request comes to a staff person or a CTAB member, they can ask that it be placed on the agenda if it has a particular deadline, like a comment that needs to be filed or something. I think the way the committees work is to typically, if it’s something that can go that needs discussion, it would get either referred to committee or recommendation coming from the appropriate committee to make the most efficient use or fully vetting of issues as they come in. That seems to be working fairly well, the way franchise stuff is being discussed with Cable Broadband being first, that can spend the time to discuss it.
Amy Hirotaka: Any questions or comments from CTAB members?
Chris Alejano: Which section discusses digital virtual participation?
David Keyes: One would be attendance and quorum. We made the assumption–and I’m glad that Joneil is on electronically here–we should definitely try and take a vote tonight so we can debate whether or not Joneil electronically is present. Maybe we do want to really be proactive in acknowledging that somebody is attending virtually. I think that would probably be adding something to the quorum section in terms of what attendance is.
Virginia Gleason: You could also put it under 4.3 and then have it be ‘C.’ And say that attendance is attendance but as attendance as part of a quorum, I think you need to add that as a single line under 4.3.
Chris Alejano: My preference is to, as much as I’d like to read in entirety the bylaws, it would be nice if there were certain sections that we can just hone in on, and maybe even recommended language that staff or David can provide. I trust that judgment. It doesn’t sound like there’s a whole lot there that needs to be changed.
David Keyes: It’s important to hear whatever context you want to be reflected, and then we can word craft it and figure out exactly where to place it. The other one that does come up is still a little bit challenging, but interesting, is around having discussion of items, the deliberation components. Without the meanings, right now, you can’t vote unless there is at least one person present, or in our open forum to participate. It might be interesting to say is there a procedure you want to use for online deliberation or acknowledgement, which gets voted on electronically and read in, and comment received at the next meeting. There may be a place to push that a little bit. Even you guys having your expertise and interest. In talking to the law department and the state previously that the state laws don’t really address it well. In some sense, it’s kind of an interesting opportunity to put something in. We could be leading in that regard, too. Maybe just bat around what some of those goals are around allowing electronic discussion and deliberation.
Amy Hirotaka: That’s been a consistent issue with us, too. We might have something, especially with the FCC comments, that needed to be approved by CTAB. I think we need to do that in a formal meeting, instead of cutting it really close as far as timing was concerned. So, think about that and how we might be able to attempt to still have room for public engagement and comment, but still not have to do it in a formal meeting.
David Keyes: But then, is there a distinction when when an action has to be taken between meetings for CTAB to be able to comment and participate? Something that requires action between meetings. And maybe that could get electronically posted for a day or two days, where possible. Maybe there is something to write so we can still respect where we need to do some engagement.
I don’t think it’s necessary to make huge tweaks, just take a look at the whole voting thing. I don’t that that functionally, it’s been a big issue or that we really followed this. May as well just update it or change it. I think that’s it.
Amy Hirotaka: If we’re looking at wrapping up the meeting, as far as events are concerned that folks might want to see, you’re on that, David. Also, I know that our CTAB Twitter account should be tweeting out these events. So, I wonder what is the best way, Heather, for both things to happen.
Heather Lewis: You can send these things to me or Sarah Abramowitz, information on any events you’d like posted.
Amy Hirotaka: Yes? Okay.
David Keyes: As I send out notices for things, I’m trying to think how to make it more valuable and keep folks up to date on the opportunities. As you hear of things, send them to me. I have the CTAB member list, our working list of members. the broader CTAB distribution list has about 300-400 people, so there’s a large distribution list that we can utilize. And then the committees have some listservs. I think, probably, the CTAB broadband one is the most active. I do want to encourage you also to be posting any notes, even if they’re short scribbles so CTAB members have or can set you up with an account to the WordPress site. This is part of the social media strategy here. When things are coming out of meetings, they can get posted to the blog site as just a quick post, then Heather or Sarah could Tweet them out as a notice or update on something. That helps when folks haven’t had a chance to see what’s going on.
Amy Hirotaka: Anything else, folks?
David Keyes: Quick wrap up. Michael is going to do an update for the utility billing program. He’s got to review the Smart Cities. When Amy and Virginia and I look at future meetings, Tara Duckworth, the new Applications Director for the City, have her come to one of the future meetings. I know we have information to send out from Miguel and Jonathan and send out the links to those announcement applications. I’ll send a link to the broadband map here. Couple meetings coming up: I’ll send that out and check with Jose and Nourisha on the Digital Inclusion committee date. And Iga, make sure you are connecting with Susan Goodman.
Amy Hirotaka: Yes, they are. Susan has been proactive about trying to schedule a meeting and they are trying to find dates to meet.
David Keyes: Also, to get comments to Amy on the rules by August 23.
Amy Hirotaka: Yes. And I’ll send a reminder to folks, too. Meeting adjourned at 7:34 p.m.