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Technology And Civic Engagement,” KUOW-FM Seattle, “Weekday” with Steve Scher, 4/30/10.

Transcript prepared by Countywide Community Forums Director Matt Rosenberg, who was a guest on this segment.

Steve Scher: "Technology and civic engagement, this hour on Weekday." We're 94.9 KUOW Seattle and kuow.org. I'm Steve Scher. You've seen those ads that Apple runs. Or I guess that Google Android phones and others run, too. Right? A little finger comes. Says, 'Do you need this? Well, there's an app for that.' Well, now civic engagement technologists are looking into using, are using, technology to create apps and programs on the computer to help all of us reach our government better. How are they working, what do they do, and what's the future? And also, which ones are you using, which we'll find out as well this hour, on Weekday. Matt Rosenberg is Executive Director of Countywide Community Forums, founder of Public Data Ferret, he's written for the Seattle Times, for Crosscut, also at Red State and Sound Politics. And now works with this organization. Good to see you."

Matt Rosenberg: "Good to see you."

Steve Scher: "Who runs Countywide Community Forums?"

Matt Rosenberg: "Countywide Community Forums is a privately underwritten program by a number of community people, but mainly the Spady family, Dick Spady of Dick's Drive-Ins, and he's been involved in better ways of community engagement for many years. We have a new round coming up May 1 through June 13, how to improve customer service and public trust in government in King County, partly by looking at how their Web site works for people. We're very excited about - "

Steve Scher: "How Dick's Web site works for people?"

Matt Rosenberg: "No. No no no. How the County Web site and other information (laughing). Dick's Web site is pretty cool. There's some old doo-wop music on it. But naw, we're not talking about that."

Steve Scher: "I gotcha. You'll tell me more about that. Sarah Schact is Founder and Director of Knowledge As Power, and organizer of the recent conference Open Gov West. Knowledge As Power, how would you describe it?

Sarah Schact: "Knowledge As Power is a free online service that allows Washingtonians to track any political issue going through the Washington State Legislature. We make it really easy to understand what's going on. We pull in legislative documents, we translate legalese terms into plain English, and we pull in video from TVW as well, and ensure that your communications to government are really easy for them to respond to, and understand what's going on with their citizens."

Steve Scher: "One thing about that, so one difference between me going to the state legislature and looking at their bills, and going to your Web site and looking at their bills, is, your bills make sense?"

Sarah Schact: (Laughs). "You know, it's hard to make every piece of legislation make sense. We translate individual words and we make sure that all the documents are in one place for you, and the video's in one place, and then you have a visual timeline of what's going on. It gives you kind of a roadmap of what's going on with your bill, and then updates that are personalized for you. So, it's a more personalized experience, and it's more for people who are new to the legislative process, who want something a little bit more user friendly."

Steve Scher: "Give me some other examples of some of the other different  apps we're talking about. I was thinking of these different apps, I know the one I use, designed to help me navigate the city better, is One Bus Away, since I always want to know if my 71 is coming when I want it to be coming. What are some other ones that you use."

Sarah Schact: "Something that I find very useful is Every Block. Every Block, you can download from the iTunes store, I think it may run on a couple of other mobile devices, but Every Block is great because it pulls in all of this information for you on news in your neighborhood. So it would pull in stuff from P-I.com, from Seattle Times, from local blogs, and it gives you data about where you're at, but useable data, so, restaurant health code ratings, all of this stuff. It basically gives you a map for the information in the neighborhood that you're in."

Steve Scher: "It is just for mobile apps, or is it also on the Web?"

Sarah Schact: "You know, I think they have some Web site functionality, but it's especially useful when you're in place, on a phone. But it does require a smart phone to run it."

Steve Scher: I see it does have, as you say, Web functionality. Give me some examples you use, Matt."

Matt Rosenberg: "Sure. I'm particularly interested in stuff that also runs on the Web. One thing that I really really like is King County Seattle Public Health database of restaurant inspections. In fact, I had a chance to write up a tutorial on how you can use that, at Public Data Ferret recently, and you can go by zip code or name, and everything that would be in the county records is right there for you, so you can see how they've been doing, if they've been improving. It's really quite a tool."

Steve Scher: "So that's a mobile app?"

Matt Rosenberg: "It's gonna be mobile soon, I'm sure, and I think it already is. But I like to use it on the Web myself."

Sarah Schact: "One of the exciting things that's going on is that Seattle is opening up its data, like a lot of cities, and so, more of that information Matt, that you mentioned, will be available for developers to create apps around. So if there is a mobile developer out there, there is a great data set."

Matt Rosenberg: "Totally."

Sarah Schact: "That could be, as we say, liberated."

Matt Rosenberg: "And that's made for mobile. Think about it. You're out in the city, looking for a place to eat. You may not have had a chance to check it back home on the Web, and you want to be able to access that stuff on your mobile. So, absolutely."

Steve Scher: "Every Block doesn't pull in that, restaurant health reports, yet?"

Sarah Schact: "Every Block does, but it's always, I think a lot of these apps are pretty new. And so as more governments put more and more of their data out there, they'll become so much better."

Matt Rosenberg: "There's bugginess right now, and I noticed that, going to the iTunes store, and looking at what people were saying about what's called the "Open 311," reporting potholes type of app in Pittsburgh. And even the one in Portland, a lot of the users were saying, 'Hey,' especially for the Pittsburgh one, 'Great idea. Awesome. This has to happen. But it's not working for me.' Um, they'll get better, as Sarah says."

Steve Scher: "Well, I see the one out of the City of Portland, has a 1.5 version, 'miscellaneous bug fixes and user interface improvements.' Well, what's that one? Have you used that one before, either of you?"

Sarah Schact: "I actually know the guys who helped develop that app."

Steve Scher: "Describe that one."

Sarah Schact: "So, the City of Portland's Citizens' Reports is really great. They launched it a few months ago, and it allowed people to report potholes, report graffiti, report some structural problems that were happening on city property, and report a range of other things that are kind of non-emergency reports. And it was sort of a victim of it's own success. I believe they received over 4,000 reports in the first month, and the agencies that would deal with those complaints came back to the developers and said, 'Whoa, we don't have the capacity. This is three years of work ahead of us that we've got in one month. So the City of Portland is trying to figure out how they integrate all of this new interaction with citizens, and it's a challenge, but I think it's one that they're really excited to meet. Some taxpayer money went into building that, and making it available to citizens to use."

Steve Scher: "Hmm. Tell me what Public Data Ferret does."

Matt Rosenberg: "We try to focus on public documents, public databases and data sets, and do what you might call 'last mile delivery.' There's already a lot of stuff, great stuff, out there on the Web available right now, whether it's available through mobile or Web apps, but there's so much data, and it's not always extremely well organized. A lot of people aren't aware of what's out there. There's something, for instance, The City of Seattle has called the 'Activity Locator' that shows you in any part of the city what sorts of building permit applications or land use permit applications are being sought. And you can drill down into shoreline-related permit applications, or stuff that's regulated under the state environmental protection act. There's just a million different ways to slice and dice that, and find out what's going on. And so we like to do tutorials on stuff like that, we like to highlight some of the latest news from our great State Auditor Brian Sonntag, (we) like to look at what the Government Accountability Office is doing in Washington, there's so much stuff that slips by. And this connects to the state of media right now. Legacy media's doing a great job in a difficult situation, but they just can't cover everything."

Steve Scher: "Well, how does it work?"

Matt Rosenberg: "How does it work? Sure. Well, first, you go to socialcapitalreview.org, and then you click on the ferret's face (laughs). That takes you to a searchable database where you click a box for jursidiction and topic. And what you get back are what I call neutral blogged synopses with links to the original sources. So what we'll do is say, here's this report from Brian Sonntag's office, in one case, about a performance audit of Seattle City Light, which we had a few weeks before the legacy media, and here's what it says, and here's a link to the original. So that's one example. Another will be, 'here's this great database they have with the restaurant inspections. Here's how to use it, here's what we found out running a sample in this particular zip code.' So, a whole lot of that, building our own database, but all drawn from public documents and public sources, highlighting openness and transparency. Our focus is, 'okay, there is already a great deal of transparency. What do you do with it?'"

Steve Scher: "What do you mean, you had it before the media, the performance audit of City Light?....

Matt Rosenberg: "Right, and again, not a big deal. I mean, you know, but yeah, stuff slips by. And there's a lot of stuff. You know, if you look at what comes out of an auditor's office, about 75 percent of the stuff would not rise to the level of being published, it's just too wonky, it's about improper accounting procedures. But about one of out of four reports that comes out of the state auditor's office, or the GAO, it's like, 'Hmmm. Wow. This really is news. So you want to get it out there when that happens."

Steve Scher: "So, when this comes up in Public Data Ferret, a performance audit of City of Seattle by Washington State Auditor, by Matt Rosenberg, you pulled out the key findings?

Matt Rosenberg: "Correct. And linked to the original, of course."

Steve Scher: "So, this is your information."

Matt Rosenberg: "It's a synopsis."

Steve Scher: "So, how many people do you have working for you?"

Matt Rosenberg: "Ha. Well, you know, I'm getting some U-Dub (University of Washington) students to help me out because this is not something that one person can do entirely by themselves. So, we're going to build a corps, and we're hoping to find neighborhood correspondents who will monitor their city councils, and this is key to me Steve, and it dovetails with the mission of Countywide Community Forums to get people involved in local and regional government. You'd be amazed what's put online every week, at the City of Redmond, the City of Shoreline, the City of Lake Forest Park. I discovered there's going to be a tax hike vote in August, in Lake Forest Park. I don't think anyone's reported on that yet, but we did at Public Data Ferret."

Steve Scher: "How do you see what you're doing, along the lines of what Matt is doing, Sarah. Is it similar, and do you see an expansion?"

Sarah Schact: "I see it as similar. I came up with the idea behind Knowledge As Power in 2000, and the technology wasn't available to launch it, and now we're sort of in late start-up mode with it, and trying it out with Washington state. We got a grant from mobilize.org to expand it to cover the Seattle City Council. So in the next few months, Knowledge As Power will be bringing Seattle residents personalized information about what's going on in Seattle City Council. And then over the next year or year-and-a-half, we'll be expanding out to three states in three cities. One of our funders is the Ford Foundation and they've been really supportive as we've been taking these kind of experimental steps and expanding. And we're going to be in the Pepsi "Refresh Everything" Challenge next month. I'm really excited about that. We'll be up for a $250,0000 grant..."

Steve Scher: "I'm just thinking you're going to be in some kind of race, or something..."

Sarah Schact: (Laughs) No....Non profits all over the country are competing for grants for community improvement-type projects. So, we'll be launching a mobile app for Knowledge As Power for the Washington legislature and the Seattle City Council and a bunch of other cities. So that's sort of our model for now."

Steve Scher: "That's sort of how you see yourselves expanding. That's Sarah Schact, who is Founder and Executive Director Of Knowledge As Power. Matt Rosenberg is Public Data Ferret. We'll take a break."

(News break).

Steve Scher: "We're taking a look at how technology is bringing more information to you, open government efforts. Matt Rosenberg is Executive Director of Countywide Community Forums and founder of Public Data Ferret, funded in large part by, through the folks at Dick's Drive-Ins. They have a foundation that they have.."

Matt Rosenberg: "They have a separate entity called the Forum Foundation that does some great work with teachers and students around the State Of The Union (speech)..."

Steve Scher: "That's not who's funding you though? The Forum Foundation?"

Matt Rosenberg: "No. This comes through Dick's, and other private donors in the community."

Steve Scher: "I just like throwing Dick's out there."

Matt Rosenberg: "Dick's is great. You know, they have built up so much good will over the years. It's a community institution, and you know, when I'm out there, like at the Mercer Island High School, talking about public engagement and public data, and I stop for a minute, because I want to tell them about Countywide Community Forums, the first thing I say is, 'Hey, has anybody heard of Dick's?' And the whole classroom just goes up for grabs. So, it's great."

Steve Scher: "I figured you'd say, 'free fries..."

Matt Rosenberg: "Best fries around."

Sarah Schact: "Free fries with your data!"

Steve Scher: "And Sarah Schact, Founder and Director of Knowledge As Power. And organizer of the recent conference Open Gov West. What was its purpose?"

Sarah Schact: "Open Gov West's purpose was two days of conference hosted at Seattle City Hall. We brought 280 government leaders together, non-profits, technologists, citizens, to talk about how as a region we can be coordinating ways to open up government information and modernizing technology for citizens and for government. And this has turned into meet-ups that are happening up and down the West Coast, and we'll actually have an Open Gov West meet-up at Twist from 6 to 8 p.m. on Monday night. And it's just building a community of people who want to work together on making government more accessible and efficient. We had some cool things come out of that. The province of British Columbia, Minister Ben Stewart came down, and made an announcement that B.C. is opening up its climate data to the public to create climate apps. And other cities up and down the West Coast are going to be opening up their data in coordination with British Columbia, to then have this huge set of West Coast climate data that's available for developers to create applications around."

Steve Scher: "Hmm. What are some of the programs or applications you're using or think we need? What's some of the government data you want to see released so it can be accessed by you? The City of Seattle's been working on some civic-minded technology as well, lately. KUOW producer Andrew Walsh visited the Department of Information Technology earlier this week to find out what's in the works."

Andrew Walsh: "Bill Schrier believes the Internet can help governments work better. He's the Chief Technology officer For The City Of Seattle. He and his colleagues recently submitted a proposal to Code For America. The San Francisco-based organization connects municipal governments with computer programmers and creates software aimed at improving civic life. Bill Schrier says Seattle's Code For America proposal would help neighbors stay connected."

Bill Schrier: "Think about block watches. Where people in a block or in a neighborhood help each other out, and help the police out, by reporting suspicious activities. Well Facebook, or something kind of like Facebook is a natural for that. It's about a group. A group of friends perhaps, or a group of neighbors that could actually exchange information about what's going on in their neighborhood. it could be things like police activity, but it could also be other things that aren't necessarily related to the city. it could look like a Facebook application, it could look something different, or standalone, it could look graphically on a map. It could map events, for example. If you've got some time this week to volunteer, what events could you just show up at in your  neighborhood? What blogs or what Web sites actually contain information about what those events are, and how you can get involved?"

Andrew Walsh: "The City also recently launched a Web site called data.seattle.gov. It's a project that took about 60 databases and opened them up to the public. The site is chock full of raw information."

Bill Schrier: "911 calls. What are the 911 calls to the fire department. What's the nature of them and where are they occurring. Building permits. Where are the building permits being issued in Seattle? Who's getting them and what are they for? What are the dollar values of those things? What are the locations of all the parks? What are the locations of all the historically significant buildings? What are the locations of the heritage trees? The idea is to put all that data out there so it's available to citizens but it's also available to application developers so somebody could develop an application where somebody could see that kind of information on your iPhone or your computer."

Andrew Walsh: "Schrier says nobody's created any applications yet specifically based on data.seattle.gov. but he says similar initiatives have led to cool mobile apps in cities like Boston, Washington D.C. and San Francisco. I asked him why Seattle, a technology hub, is playing catch-up."

Bill Schrier: "Seattle's a little bit behind simply because it takes time and effort to put this together, and it's part of an openness and transparency issue. Also, if you look at a city like Boston or San Francisco, they're cities and counties, so they have a much wider array of data sets available. Counties have property tax or parcel information, for example. So Seattle, being a city, has a smaller sub-set of data."

Andrew Walsh: "I was having a cup of coffee at Starbucks right before I came here, and I was looking out the window at the corner of Cherry and Fourth, and they were clearly getting ready for some kind of construction there and I don't know what they're doing. And I though, 'Huh. I wonder what they're about to do there.' And then I thought, is there an app for that?"

Bill Schrier: (Laughs). There should be an app for that. In other words, every building permit that has been applied for ought to be online, so you would be able to pull up your Windows skin phone or something similar, and it would tell from your location, what building permits are occurring with 200 feet or 500 feet. Now, the city's not going to develop that app, but if we put that data out there, apps developers, people who like to tinker with cell phone apps, ought to be able to do that."

Andrew Walsh: "Bill Schrier hopes that technologies like these can foster more civic engagement, and make help people shape government without having to jockey for the microphone at long town hall meetings. For KUOW, I'm Andrew Walsh."

Steve Scher: "So what does Code For America do? Let's find that out first. Jennifer Pahlka's on the phone. Hi Jennifer."

Jennifer Pahlka: "Hi, How are you?"

Steve Scher: "Could you tell us what Code for America does, and how you started?"

Jennifer Pahlka: 'Sure. Code For America is essentially a modified Teach For America, if you're familiar with that program, but for Web developers and designers. And the idea is that we can kind of call this Facebook generation to service. If you look at the problems that cities are facing right now, and they are facing significant problems, they are the kinds of problems that young talented Web designers and developers, who would maybe otherwise go do an Internet start-up, really know how to solve. It's problems of collective intelligence, citizen engagement, and just really getting people involved and participating. That' sort of what we call the world of Web. 2.0 has done very well. So Code For America is a way to call them to service and say, 'You could certainly go into the Web industry, and we hope that you'll do that eventually, but you may want to do a year building these Web apps to help rebuild our country.'"

Steve Scher: "And, examples, of where you've already got some folks working and put things in place?"

Jennifer Pahlka: "So, Code For America is very new. We started at the beginning of this year, and we're spending this year working to put together our first program. We put out a call for a city to participate, in January, to have them submit ideas for what Web applications they thought should be built, in February, and we were pleased, with only a month's notice, to get 11 applications. We asked them to put forth what they think would fit our criteria. And our criteria are that those Web applications need to make their cities more efficient, more transparent, more participatory, and also be able to be re-used by other cities, because when our fellows build them, after they're done they're open source and available to any other city who wants to use them."

 Steve Scher: "So you had, whaddaya got, 11 cities, Hartford, Boulder, Boston, Seattle's among those cities that have applied. Some of the samples, you've written, they've proposed, a mobile public safety application allowing police officer sin the field to access crime data in real time, residents to interact with police officers in their neighborhoods. So, what are some other examples of what cities are telling you they need?"

Jennifer Pahlka: "I'll take Boston, for example. They have a couple of things they want to do to make their Web site more useable for citizens. Maybe you've had this experience of going on to a city Web site and trying to figure out, say, trying to get a permit for something. There's what the Web site says you're supposed to do, and there's what your neighbor would tell you to do, if they had gone through the process. 'You really need to have this form. you really need to go between these hours. If you go without this form, you're not going to get anywhere, for instance. What if we let citizens notate the city Web sites, for instance. What if we actually let them leave a trail, like, 'this is how it really gets done.' So through user-generated content on their Web site, they're actually hoping to make it more personalized for each individual citizen. So, if you're a homeowner with a kid in school and a local business, the site should reflect the parts of the city that you're going to interact with most often. A lot of the projects are really around getting the citizens somewhat engaged and are really similar to Seattle."

Steve Scher: "Have you found cities have certain data they're not willing to let out, that you think they should be willing to let out? Have you come across that yet?"

Jennifer Pahlka: "No, I actually haven't seen that yet. There's certainly data that shouldn't be let out, in the sense that, all these data catalogues these cities are putting out, you need to have a nice filter of privacy on them so that personal information isn't  let out. But if a city is embarking on a data initiative as Seattle has and many of these others have, once they've gotten over that privacy and security hurdle, i have not seen resistance to particular data sets."

Steve Scher: "That's Jennifer Pahlka, she's Founder and Executive Director of Code For America, working to bring programmers together with cities and other municipalities and governments to help create information for citizens. Sarah Schact?"

Sarah Schact: "I think some of the challenges we're seeing in governments opening up their information..It's easier for them to open up data, because data is numbers that they happen to have, easily accessible in an internal database somewhere, so they can kind of throw it up on a 'your city's name here'.data.gov site. and that tends to be a bit easier. But the documents of government..so legislation, ordinances, you know, the things that you really need to read through to get the gist of, they're typically, originally made in (Microsoft) Word, in Word documents, just like everybody uses Word, governments are using Word. And then they usually have a really complicated process of getting that Word document somewhere else in some other format. And once it's in that other format, it's usually an image of a document. So they'll print something out and scan it and then put it up on the Web. And a computer looks at an image and it says 'hmm, that a photo,' and it doesn't know what's inside that photo, right? So, organizations like mine, we need legislative information and make that available to the public, and do cool things to make it more accessible, and we can't do that when governments have their information in these old formats, that are images. And so I think that documents are the next step, and figuring out a way to get hat information out of Word, and into what we call a computer readable format, a language that computers understand, is really important. So, right now, as far as I know, and Seattle's data site, we don't have the legislative information coming out of council. We're really trying to work with the City of Seattle to get that information out, and I've been pleased that they're being pretty responsive to that. But there's a lot of governments, New York in particular, New York got a ton of P.R. for its data site, but failed to put any city council information on it."

Steve Scher: "Which city"

Sarah Schact: "City of New York. Even San Francisco. San Francisco, real tech hub, they have a lot of brilliant people working there. but they are putting images of their city council documents up on their Web site, and there's quite a delay because they've got this really intensive process. They think it's really important to have a signature at the bottom of the page, on a passed bill, and I understand that, but again, a computer looks at that, and goes, 'Hmm. Picture.'"

Jennifer Pahlka: "If I could add to that, I hear Sarah's concern. and one of the reasons Code For America exists is to have these five fellows attached to the city for a year, because she's absolutely right and the fix for this is so much easier than it is to do a data catalogue. You simply put a 'print pdf' button on everyone's screen and teach them to use it. and it's not just that it's unavailable to the public, I was visiting our Oakland City Council a few months ago, and they can;t use their own City Council meeting notes, because as Sarah said, once it's an image, it's not searchable, they can;t look up easily when this issue came before council before, and it's a real problem for the officials, not just the public."

Steve Scher: "Matt Rosenberg?"

Matt Rosenberg: "Well, yeah. First, Jennifer hit on a couple of very important points. One is the idea of collaboration, or collective intelligence. That whether we're getting our information from mobile apps, or documents - where major improvements are needed, I agree very much with Sarah and Jennifer on that - what do we do with the information then? We need to make public policy better. In many cases. I also really appreciate that Jennifer mentioned that it's really important to look at how a city or a county Web site works. In fact, that is part of what's at the heart of our Round 5 for Countywide Community Forums. We hope people will plug in at communityforums.org. But, then, what kind of data do we really want, right? I would really like to see crime data mapped by neighborhood. If we can map the building permits - and we've got raw crime data - and I know the City of Seattle is moving toward this,  I would love to be able to go to a database cum mapping tool, and look up - just the way that I can look up the land use permit applications, and (can) look up building applications - look up what kinds of crimes have been occurring, like the next morning. You know, what would that do for our dialog around neighborhood public safety?"

Steve Scher: "I thought I had on my neighborhood map on Seattle.gov a link that takes me to some crime data. is it old data?"

Matt Rosenberg: "Of course you always want to keep up on this stuff, and see what the latest iterations are. No, it's not really really comprehensive and really really up to date now, and I think the thing that we want to see is to to see it broken down into categories, easily, like, you know, robberies, burglaries, violent crimes, property, vandalism, that kind of thing."

Steve Scher: "So let me ask each of you. What cities are ahead, and where does Seattle fit into this? Is Seattle behind at all? Jennifer Pahlka, what cities are really at the cutting edge of this?"

Jennifer Pahlka: "I think we've got a handful of cities that are very innovative. Seattle is certainly one of them. D.C. and Boston, to me are ones that are doing interesting things. D.C. obviously did the first data catalogue. It's been a while now, so they were quite a leader and continue to do some very interesting stuff. I'm seeing the Pacific Northwest and Colorado as the two leaders in collaboration. So it's not just that we want cities to innovate on their own, but when cities are looking at working with others and sharing code, sharing best practices, then we see more innovation there. And I see that among the work that Sarah's been driving there, and also Colorado has something called the C-Gate which is a collection of cities that share resources and they're doing a great job of that. So, a number of pockets of innovation around the country."

Steve Scher: "What about at the legislative level, Sarah, do you get what you need from the Washington state legislature and the secretary of state? I know this is one of his issues as well. And how does that compare with other states that you've looked at?"

Sarah Schact: "Washington state is certainly ahead of the game in that in 2007 they introduced a Web service, which is basically an information fire hydrant that we hook up to. It works great and it's a great standard, that if any other people from government are listening, you should really look at what Washington state's legislative service center has done there. Oregon has made some information available but not as full as Washington state. Texas and Tennessee, actually, have made more information from their legislatures available, but you have to ask for permission to that information, so that's a little odd. The New York State Senate, led by Andrew Hoppin, who was one of our keynotes at Open Gov West, has done a tremendous job. They overcame one of the most challenging political and technology situations I've ever seen in government - and I've been researching government information challenges for a decade now - and within a year, they turned it around, and took 1970s technology with a smattering of late 90s, and turned it into a fully modern legislative body."

Steve Scher: "Let me hold you there. Jennifer Pahlka, I appreciate you talking with us."

Jennifer Pahlka: "Great. Thanks for having me."

Steve Scher: "Jennifer Pahlka is Founder and Executive Director of Code For America, working to bring governments and coders into action, producing new apps. What apps to do you want to see from government? That's ahead."

(Break)

Steve Scher: "It's Weekday, I'm Steve Scher. How do you get data and developers to work together to create more civic engagement to get us more informed about what's happening in our neighborhood, on our street, in our cities, at our state level, and at our national level. We're looking at that, and seeing what's out there. What do you want to see, what applications and programs do you want to see coming from developers from developers, from these non-profits, or from government that would help you be a better citizen and maybe make government more efficient? Our number's 206-543-5869. We'd like your input, and also tell us what you're using. What's useful to you right now as an application or a program, that you're finding is getting you more information to share with your neighbors, to collaborate, or even to get government to work more efficiently. 1-800-289-5869. You can also e-mail us, weekday@kuow,org. This is a fine time to mention our Twitter feed weekdaykuow, you can find out what we're doing every day. I sent something out at 7:30 just to let you know what's going on. So you can check that out on Twitter, weekdaykuow."

We are talking with Matt Rosenberg, Executive Director, Countywide Community Forums, Founder of the Public Data Ferret, lets you find out what's been posted from government, by just doing some simple searches, and Sarah Schact, who's Founder and Executive Director of Knowledge As Power, working to get legislative information down into the hands of people, also organizer of the recent conference Open Gov West, and another one coming up, right, you said?"

Sarah Schact: "Our meet-up Monday at Twist."

Steve Scher: "So Andrew Walsh did a story for us, where he looked at a corner, and said. how can I find out what that building is, but there is a way to find out what that information is, there is an app for that, sort of?"

Matt Rosenberg: "There is online at least, and it will probably be mobile soon, if it's not yet. The "Activity Locator" at the Seattle Department of Planning and Development, it lets you go right in there with the address or the building permit number, if you jot that down when you walk by, and yeah, you can find out what it's all about, who the property owner is, where he lives, and what the previous permitting history is. It's an awesome tool."

Steve Scher: "So it gives me all that information, once I click on the - I see you go there and there's a whole, boy -"

Matt Rosenberg: "A lot of ways -"

Steve Scher: "All these permits issued, and then I can filter it, and then once I filter it out, I can then get actual information abut that particular project."

Matt Rosenberg: "You click on one of those little pop-up, like, talk bubbles, yeah, for an individual item you drill right down, and the history for that particular property, yeah."

Steve Scher: "And then, you were mentioning a couple of others during the break that you think are most useful?"

Matt Rosenberg: "Well, yeah, coming back to this idea of what's called "Open 311."Fix My Street in the U.K., and that's mainly a Web app right now. But that's the old, 'Okay, I want to report a pothole, or a broken streetlight, or fly dumping or graffiti, but if you go there, and you look around, it is just brilliantly simple in its interface, and they are getting a lot of use, and if you look, conveniently, they break out, 'okay, here's the stuff that government has fixed. They are getting response like you wouldn't believe. So as an accountability tool, I think it's just awesome. It's great."

Steve Scher: "So you were concerned about crime data, but at Seattle Every Block.com, if I plug in my zip code, I see i can find, for example, announcements, for example, 'we lost our keys in the vicinity of 65th and Roosevelt,' so people are using it for that, but also crime data, there's some updating of crime data?"

Sarah Schact: "There's some crime data that's being pulled in. So what goes in to the public stream for the Seattle Police Department gets posted up there. In addition to any crime information that's being reported on in the news."

Steve Scher: "Alright, let me read James here, James is in West Seattle. Hi James."

James (phone-in listener): "How you doin?"

Steve Scher: "Thanks for calling."

James: "I work in technology, and I missed the last 10 minutes of the (show) just walking from the car to my office, but what Sarah was saying about document availability and things like that, it's really refreshing to hear that someone in municipalities are thinking that far ahead, and it seems like a pretty easy problem to solve if there's cooperation. i think from the perspective of the user of this data, or the user of government in general, the difference between working with corporations and public organizations, whether it's government or anything else, it's frustrating. You know yesterday I had an experience with the DOT where it took me an hour and six phone calls over the course of an hour just to get the start date on some construction near my office, and if that information was available on a Web site, or even if they had a Twitter, or some e-mail information I wanted to sign up for, it would be great."

Steve Scher: "Because you just needed one little bit of information."

James: "Like what lanes are going to be closed and is my exit going to be available when I'm leaving work, was the information I wanted, so I guess the point I wanted to make was, Seattle is a tech-heavy city, and people come out of their offices every day knowing that these kinds of technology changes are saving their businesses tons and tons and tons of money. Now, I worked at an e-commerce company for a really long time, and we actually tracked how many fewer calls came into our customer support organization based on technology that we implemented, that was a metric that we tracked really really heavily. And it seems with Teabaggers pounding down doors on tax day and stuff like that, you know, if you pay forward maybe a year, I think the technology would optimize resources to the point where, looking over your shoulder after this stuff is implemented, you'll wonder how you did it any other way."

Steve Scher: "Matt Rosenberg?"

Matt Rosenberg: "Yeah. James, I think what you say is particularly important, especially wanting to be able to get a particular query answered quickly and efficiently. The buzz phrase that pops into my mind, when you were wondering about, where's the closure going to be, which lanes are going to be affected, "customizable query," right? And you're starting to see that, for instance at the restaurant inspection database you can do a customizable query by zip code or name of restaurant. Why not do that too, with road and lane closures? Have a tool out there."

Sarah Schact: "The app that I really want is I want government signs to have "QR" codes on them, which, if I'm allowed to geek out for a second, it's essentially a weird looking bar code, and in Japan and in Europe, QR codes are used on signs all the time. You take a photo of the QR code with your cell phone and you send it into your system and your app and it comes  back and tells you the information related to that code. So instead of going on to a site and searching around, and digging for the information, it could come to you just by snapping a photo."

Steve Scher: "What does QR stand for, query report?

Sarah Schact: "I think so. And there's apps on iTunes right now for QR codes."

Steve Scher: "We're going to go to the weather here in a moment, and I want to get two more calls I want to get in, or one more call, but I just have a quick question I want to get in on this. This is another avalanche of data, and I understand that Public Data Ferret's point is to help me with that. I understand that your point is to help me with that. But, so much data, so much information, how do I keep from getting overwhelmed by it?"

Matt Rosenberg: "Well I think one thing we need to do is connect the new push for citizen journalism and community media, with this. We need, also, para-professionals with a little bit of training, helping in the filtering and assigning meaning, interpreting and delivering this stuff to communities."

Steve Scher: "Is that an example of what you're doing with Public Data Ferret?"

Matt Rosenberg: "Well, yeah, and working with community bloggers, community news sites, and young folks, who are really starting to get interested in this. Here's how you make sense of this. Because, Sarah made this point, I think, in an op-ed in the Seattle Times just before the conference, the very point that you made Steve. You know, that  more data isn't always necessarily a good thing, it's got to be well organized and well presented. And I'd like to see the City of Seattle, for instance, put online its backlog of road maintenance projects, and parks maintenance, and then give me a way to search for that, the same way I can search for building permits. That has meaning, in neighborhoods."

Steve Scher: "The City of Seattle doesn't have the kind of app yet that Portland does, the potholes and streets and reporting that?"

Sarah Schact: "No. There's "SeeClickFix" but it's not integrated into Seattle's system yet. If you report on SeeClickFix then an e-mail is sent to the City of Seattle, but I would follow up with another report through their system at Seattle.gov. And to your point Steve, even though we have all of these apps and new tools, citizens may feel like they have to be on every one of them, or trying to understand everything that's going on in their neighborhood. and I think, really, you just need to focus in one the things that are really important to your life or your communities. So that may be one, two, three apps that you use consistently, and you really appreciate what they do for you on key issues in your life. I don't think that all of this information being available is going to turn us all into uber-citizens. But by all of us kind of scraping away at the challenges in our neighborhood that are important to us, we'll make a better community through these tools."

Steve Scher: "Alright. Now really quick here, just give me your app ideas. John, in Mount Baker?"

John (phone-in listener): "Real-time crime. The Fire Department does it on a street by street, ah, an actual address basis. There's no reason the police can't do it, and we do have the information, it was once given to (the Seattle neighborhood of) Columbia City Crime Watch through a Freedom Of Information Act (request). Two, cell phone reporting of graffiti that provides a snapshot plus address, and also has a database reflects city accountability in terms of addressing it."

Steve Scher: "Alright, sounds good. By the way, Andrew Walsh tells me that Bill Schrier from the City of Seattle says that idea is coming. So I appreciate that John." Bob on Vashon, what's your idea, what do we need?"

Bob: "If you're looking for a building permit, and you go in to the Web site, you could just put in your property ID number, parcel number, and it pre-loads all the information and takes you down a series of questions to figure out what kind of permit you need to apply for, or even if you need a permit."

Steve Scher: "Oh, that's a nice one. Alright. That's very good. and do we already have data on how areas voted. We have that data. is it being crunched in such a way that it's easily accessible?"

Sarah Schact: "Gosh, there's so many. and during election season i would have them at the top of my mind."

Steve Scher: "And are they mobile?"

Sarah Schact: "There's more apps which will tell you how red or blue the neighborhood is you're standing in is, and the political donations of houses on a block. So that's been really interesting to campaigns, as they send their staffers out to a neighborhood. They can see just how political leaning even a block is."

Steve Scher: "Well, alright. We will leave it there. I appreciate all your ideas. Send more in. These guys, we have links to all their work, and some of the other app developers as well at kuow.org. The more feedback and the more help, the better, I guess, yeah?"

Matt Rosenberg: "Absolutely. Crowdsourcing."

Steve Scher: "Matt Rosenberg, Public Data Ferret, Executive Director Countywide Community Forums, and Sarah Schact, Founder and Executive Director of Knowledge As Power, More information about what they're doing at kuow.org. thank you both.

Sarah Schact: "Thank you."

Matt Rosenberg: "Thank you. Steve."

Steve Scher: "It's Weekday."