The commission issued a report and recommendations in early 2013. And, much to my surprise, the Taveras administration actually tried to implement it. You could fill the library at Alexandria with the commission and consultant reports that were written and immediately shelved. (Commerce RI’s 2010 Roadmap to a Green Economy comes to mind…)

The push toward implementation shows that Taveras and his administration took these issues seriously, as they rightly should. It is a pity that he won’t be able to pick up on the good work done on this front by Governor Chafee at the state level, but I digress.

Open data and information technology are the kinds of tedious, nerdy things that nobody cares or thinks much about—much like highway bridges—until they break. Then everybody freaks the hell out. The fact is that open access to government data or the lack thereof has a profound effect on regular people.

Would you like to log in to your account with the city government and see all your stuff there on a single page? When I say “your stuff” I mean your car tax, your property tax, your parking tickets, your application for a vendors license, your building permits, your communications with public works about that dead tree that’s about to take down the utility lines, etc. Yeah, that stuff.

I certainly would, but I can’t. And it’s not like I haven’t tried. On the commission, my main job was constantly to advocate that the city provide basic web services for residents and develop an internal capability to do so instead of paying ridiculous money to third parties that provide mediocre, rapidly obsolete systems. Sensible and cost-effective as this might be, it remains just a distant possibility. Many things need to change—especially the knowledge and attitudes of city councilors, department heads and…well, everybody in government that can’t make a web page with a text document.

The ugly reality of IT in Providence city government

Your Frymaster also enjoyed a courtesy interview for the role of Chief Information Officer for the city, but I was never really in the race. Jim Silveria, who landed that job and also served on the commission, has done his best to deliver on the commission’s recommendations. This is no slight to Jim. It’s an indictment of the inertia, entrenched interests, lack of resources and lack of capability of existing resources within city government.

I would not have made the same decisions that Jim has, and that’s probably why he got the job instead of me. But at least he made decisions and moved the situation forward in a significant way.

Providence now has an open data portal, an open meetings portal, live streaming and archived video of council meetings and highly-transparent, browsable repository of all the bids to all the city’s RFPs since they started using the system earlier this year. Not for nothin’, but that’s serious progress.

Here’s the thing: all of those new services—just like the previously existing services for paying parking tickets, taxes and your water bill—are from third parties. Expansion of the city’s internal capabilities has been virtually nil. (NB: the RFP repository was developed in-house by the city of Newport, so it can be done—even in RI. Also, using Ustream and Vimeo for the video is kind of a no-brainer.)

While it’s true that outdated job descriptions and overall municipal employees union intransigence hold the city back, the primary cause is a catch-22 in which a lack of resources leads to inefficient use of the resources that are available. This problem stems from an overall lack of understanding at the highest levels (in this case, the city council, department heads and possibly even the executive administration) of the importance of investing in technology and tech-savvy people.

By no means is Providence alone in this regard. Most governments and most corporations have the same problem. This 2008 article by the internationally renowned IT pioneer JP Rangaswami sums it up pretty well. JP starts by repeating one of his favorite quotes, itself from years before:

When you turn down a request for funding an R&D [read: IT] project, you are right 90% of the time. That’s a far higher rate of decision accuracy than you get anywhere else, so you do it.

And that’s fine. Except for the 10% of the time you’re wrong. When you’re wrong, you lose the company.

~ Howard Schneiderman [editorial comment is mine]

If you go read that article, scroll down to the comments. Somebody you know might have weighed in…

“There’s two ways to do things: the right way and
the Army way”

My father used that well-trod quip anytime I tried to cut corners or get away with a half-assed effort. At its core is the recognition that institutions have a hard time changing their thinking and making the tough decision to do what’s best in the long run. Corporations have quarterly reports to shareholders; governments have elections. Doing today the same thing you did yesterday and kicking the can down the road remain the default options for almost every leader everywhere.

And more’s the pity.

In the case of the city of Providence, the combination of an inflexible union, a poorly informed city council, resistant department heads and the absence of a breakthrough leader that could change those three previous items has created the situation where you cannot do things the right way; you can only do things the Army way. Specifically, the city can’t hire a qualified IT person for $100,000 per year, but the city can pay an outsider vendor $100,000 a year to do what the qualified IT person could do in a couple of months.

Thus our tax dollars—that could be paying local people and small IT firms to do great work, as I have repeatedly advocated—go to massive, far off corporations that give us mediocre systems. Just imagine what the city pays in licensing fees just for Microsoft Office. Right?

Code Island, civic hackers and open data

In 2014, Code for America sent a cohort of fellows to work with the state of Rhode Island and created the first state-level “brigade,” Code Island. (All previous brigades worked at the municipal level.) Yours truly serves as the official brigade Storyteller, a CfA-required position for all brigades that roughly translates as communications resource. Open Providence commission chair John Marion and commissioner Nelson Rocha also play active roles. Shawn Selleck, the civic innovation consultant to the city of Providence who has helped Jim Silveria fight the good fight at City Hall, is the brigade’s official Community Organizer.

CfA and its brigades are known as “civic hackers,” computer systems developers and designers that volunteer their time and talent to produce web- and mobile-enabled software applications that let regular people see and use government data. Code Island is greatly enabled by Jim Silveria and Thom Guertin, a Woonsocket native and RI’s Chief Digital Officer.

Code Island has several development projects in process, the most ambitious being a visualization tool that will let users slice and dice the five years of state budget data recently released on the state’s transparency portal. Our tool will provide far greater detail and flexibility that the state’s visualization. Again, this is no slight to RI.gov or Thom and his team. They can only do so much, and by making the data accessible to us, they enable us to take it to the next level.

This is how civic hacking works: open data + free apps = teh awesome.

Code Island wants the candidates on the record

Last week, the brigade sent the three major candidates for mayor of Providence a questionnaire, asking them to go on the record about how they would approach the issue of open data. We focused only on the city of Providence because, despite the significant progress that the Taveras administration has made, we still rate just a D+ for spending transparency, according to RIPIRG.

It’s not like RIPIRG has an ax to grind on this. The rating is in line with the open data census that the Open Knowledge Foundation runs. We rank #41 with a score of 230 compared with New York City, the national leader, with a score over 1600.

The sad fact is that Providence is woefully behind the curve. For a place that fancies itself a geeky little IT haven, that’s fairly pathetic. Yes, IT is nerdy and hard to understand. Yes, hiring people is more complicated than paying a vendor. Yes, EVERYBODY in IT needs to be on a lifelong learning path of continuous improvement.

Yes, yes, yes to everything that is difficult and complicated and…the right thing to do. So, candidates, is any of you willing to push through the inertia so that Providence can finally stop doing IT the Army way?

So far, nobody has given us a response. Jorge Elorza, unsurprisingly, has listed continuing and accelerating implementation of the Open Providence report as part of his ethics agenda. He even specifies creation of a dashboard, which is that thing where you log in to your account and see all your stuff.

I’ve only been pushing for a dashboard for, I dunno, a decade. Can we please?

[Neither your Frymaster nor RI Future in general support the raw posting of press releases. But seein’ as how I wrote this press release, I say “fair game!” Please re-blog this far and wide. (Lookin’ at you, Righty.)]

Code Island, Rhode Island’s newly established Code for America brigade, will host a National Day of Civic Hacking event at 1:00 pm on Sunday, June 1, at Brown University’s Tri Lab located at 10 Davol Square. The event will focus on adding content to the Rhode Island community wiki, which the brigade is developing.

“We tried to create a new type of hacking event that will attract a wide range of people,” said Ryan Kelly, one of Code Island’s co-captains. “You don’t need to know how to code to participate and make a positive impact. You just need to know something about Rhode Island. And if you do know how to code, there’s plenty for you to help with as well.”

The National Day of Civic Hacking is an annual event started in 2013 to help motivated citizens work with local, state and federal governments as well as private organizations with the common goal of improving their communities through technology. The Code Island event is one of approximately 100 events taking place across the country.

A wiki is a website that anybody can edit using an Internet browser. Community-based wikis can provide a deep level of information about specific aspects of a community in a single website. “The wiki lets us pull together information about all the different cities and towns as well as state and regional issues,” said David Johnson, the other co-captain. “Once a page is created, anybody can add more information, so there’s no limit to how detailed the page can become.” The Rhode Island community wiki is located at www.localwiki.net/ri, and those interested can edit it now or at any time.

Code Island was started in February, 2014, when national non-profit organization Code for America assigned three Fellows to create a “brigade” in Rhode Island to help state and municipal governments improve the technology-based services they provide. Code for America has established dozens of brigades across the country, but always at the municipal level. Code Island is the first state-level brigade, and Code for America selected Rhode Island as the state-level pilot site specifically for its small size.

Code Island has already established a partnership with the Rhode Island state government through the Office of Digital Excellence and Chief Digital Officer Thom Guertin, who is a regular participant. “The state and local agencies have essentially welcomed us to bring our technical expertise to the table and develop solutions for civic issues,” Mr. Johnson commented. “It’s really a unique opportunity, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

In addition to the community wiki, Code Island brigade members are working on projects that include creating a tool to let residents examine state finances as if looking at a checkbook register and helping improve information services that connect job seekers with jobs and job skills training.

The state’s Open Meetings law requires most governmental bodies to post meeting notices and agendas at least 48 hours in advance. While the General Assembly is exempt from the law, the House and the Senate do issue meeting notices in accordance with their own rules. We monitored that activity in order to produce the “Access 2012” report.

Accountability is a crucial gauge of government’s willingness to keep the public informed about its work.”

In developing the data, we reviewed meeting notices and agendas for 438 legislative meetings in 2012. As in previous years, nearly all the violations came in the last days of the session. Fifteen of the 19 total violations occurred during the 48 hours before the General Assembly recessed in the early-morning hours of June 13.

Broken out by chamber, House compliance was 94 percent and Senate compliance was 97 percent in 2012.  Among the some of the legislature’s most prominent committees, House Finance complied 94 percent of the time while Senate Judiciary had a 97 percent compliance rate.

We began issuing annual “Access” reports in 1997.

We give the public access to legislative meeting notices and agendas and maintain a searchable database of meeting notices, agendas and minutes for most other state and municipal agencies, commissions, boards and departments.

Many would say that all council meetings in West Warwick fall under the category of circus-like entertainment but this one in particular had the extra feeling from the outset as members of the high school band program jammed in the corridors while cheerleaders and athletes performed feats in the parking lot.

What prompted this performance was the school committee slashing $1 million dollars from its budget and in effect ending school sports and afterschool programs. This action was necessitated when the town council cut five percent from the school budget. Previously in 2010, the council tried to do the same thing but was voted down by the residents.

For the past two years, the council has been “willfully underfunding,” the school department, depriving students and educators of the tools they need to succeed, in a court ruling by Superior Court Judge Rubine. In that time period, the town council created an escrow account that now holds $2.8 million dollars with no specific purpose; the money is sitting there while school sports are on the line and music and art programs are about to be cut.

In the meantime, it appears as if the teachers will not even be paid as the well has run dry and the council will not direct the town finance director to release the money to the school account. Sean Doyle, President of the West Warwick Teachers’ Alliance, has indicated the teachers will file a suit with the state Department of Labor and Training to force payment.

“Padula would rather pay fines than teachers,” stated Doyle.

That brings us back to Tuesday night’s meeting. Once the meeting was called to order at 7:13, Council President Padula launched into a prayer asking for help to solve the crisis facing them. The council then sat down before realizing they had to perform the “Pledge of Allegiance.” After finishing the pledge, George Landrie, a Warwick teacher and skilled musician launched into a stirring rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner,” highlighting just what the children of West Warwick would be losing if the town council persisted in preventing the money from reverting back to the school committee.

 Tact not being one of Mr. Padula’s greatest assets, his first comment to the assembled crowd alerted them to the fact that they weren’t on the agenda. hearing the wave of dissent well up quickly, he then let them know that after some perfunctory items on the agenda, he’d give everyone a chance to be heard. Before allowing anyone to be heard, however, Mr. Padula read a prepared statement in which he stumbled several times, had a very difficult time pronouncing the word “scholastic,” and ended up claiming that he was nervous.

Anyone who knows Angelo Padula though, knows he’s not the jittery type and his claim of being nervous rang seriously disingenuous. If anything, the town council president’s inability to read his own statement just highlights the need for more money being spent on education. During his tirade, he was never nervous about bashing the school committee or teachers’ union and his disdain for the assembled constituency rose to the surface several occasions as he referred to the audience multiple times as “You people.” Several people in the crowd took exception to the characterization and shouted back, “You people?” and “Who are you calling you people?” Padula’s response was to threaten shutting down the meeting altogether.

Once he did allow residents to take to the microphones, the first person to speak, Jessica Ann Anderson, accused the council of “Using my kids as pawns.” She also scolded the members sitting on the stage, telling them they set a poor example for the students, not accepting blame for anything themselves and instead pointing the finger at the teachers and the school committee. Someone near me made the comment, “What do you expect from a convicted felon?” Obviously referring to Mr. Padula’s prison record. Shortly thereafter a shouting match began between a member of the audience and the council members and Mrs. Anderson once again scolded the elected officials by asking them to remain civil because there were children watching.

No one could keep complete track of all the side conversations and comments being exchanged but shortly thereafter, Councilwoman Filomena Gustafson made an arguably obscene gesture to the audience that was caught on tape by several local television stations, including WJAR.

http://www2.turnto10.com/news/west-warwick/2012/jun/06/i-team-potential-settlement-school-budget-fight-ar-1062587/

Padula tried to justify the gesture by saying she was threatened by someone in the audience. However, the council was onstage, away from the crowd and there were several police officers on scene to prevent anything like that happening. The next day, Gustafson reportedly told Brian Crandall at Channel 10 news that the gesture only meant, “to hell with you.”

That, coupled with Town Solicitor Timothy Williamson’s question later that evening, “If the school committee hadn’t cut sports, how many of you would be here tonight?” seem to show a particular propensity for the council wanting to operate in the shadows without the harsh spotlights shining on what they may be doing.

In that vein, the council wanted to hold a joint meeting with the school committee prior to Tuesday night’s meeting but was rebuffed by the School Committee Chairman, Jim Williamson, stating that the earliest they could all meet would be on Wednesday. However, Mr. Padula corralled his council members and his allies on the school committee into meeting Monday, June 4 at the west Warwick Senior Center with no prior announcement and only posted an agenda seconds before the meeting. this meeting will more than likely result in complaints of violations of the open meetings law against both the council and the school committee.

So, with an obvious contempt for their constituents, an inability to compromise and the all too ready position to point fingers first before proactively approaching problems, the town of West Warwick faces not only a deficit in its finances but in character of the town’s leadership.

Here’s a heads up on the meeting from our publisher emeritus Matt Jerzyk, now a senior aid to Mayor Taveras:

Mayor Angel Taveras and the Providence City Council recently appointed a 15-member commission to study transparency and accountability in PVD city government. The Open Providence Commission for Transparency and Accountability will advise the Mayor and the Council on how to use technology to improve the openness and efficiency of city government.

Tonight, we ask YOU to join that conversation from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM at the RISD Chace Center, located at 20 North Main Street. 

At this public hearing, you’ll have the opportunity to network with neighbors, commissioners and other city stakeholders and to share your proposals to make Providence city government more transparent and more accountable to the public.     Your voice is critical to our work and we strongly encourage you to attend, participate, and share your ideas for a more open, transparent and accountable city government.     The event is free and open to the public.  Light refreshments will be provided.

For more information on the Open Providence Commission and to submit your online comments, follow this link:
http://www.providenceri.com/open-government