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?

As a commissioner, the energy level of off-topic, single-issue commentary on the Facebook events page gave me some cause for concern (scroll down, you’ll find ’em). But, in the end, these tightly focused concerns highlighted broad issues that the commission had already identified.

I’ll try not to get too tedious with details and focus on the key take-aways. Later, I’ll call out a few individuals by name as they exemplified some key concepts that I, personally, would love to see move forward. And one that…wait, what did he say?

I Feel Your Pain

Each of these single-issue commenters attended, each of them spoke, and yours truly spoke individually with each one during the round table portion. Inside each of these stories lies a “pain point” brought on by a lack of awareness of factors that turned out to be critical to their situations.

To be sure, the “lack of awareness” was no fault of the commenter. In each case, the city made access to the relevant information either difficult or impossible — when the information was sought some years or even decades ago. This information consisted uniformly of rules, regulations  and laws that impacted residents but was opaque to them until they confronted it in a court of law.

To generalize the basic input, “How can a resident have a fighting chance if they don’t even know the rules of the game?” I think all RI Future participants can look at that basic question and reply, “A resident does not have a fighting chance.” The city has brought some of this information forward in the years since, but opacity remains an ongoing problem.

Fair enough. If the terms “openness” and “transparency” have any meaning in this context, they mean that a more-or-less capable resident or business owner can find, read and comprehend the rules and regulation that pertain to their situation. If this commission does anything at all, it should create a path to resolving this issue. Permanently and completely.

Some Basically Good Ideas

Another set of commenters sought to put forward ideas that could benefit a wide range of residents. Some simply indicated known examples from other jurisdiction like systems that alert riders to bus arrivals. (That, of course, lies with RIPTA at the state level, even though those vast majority of users would reside in Providence.) One, quite specific, asked for better guidance on exactly which kinds of urban farming spaces qualify for property tax relief. (That guidance may yet to be written.)

Others focused on more difficult issues like how departments generate and communicate policy choices. To me, this seemed particularly ripe in that it slices deeply into the critical space between privileged, internal discussion and public debate. It’s not an easy space to mediate, but an important one; to paraphrase one commenter, why bother going to a public hearing if the issue is already decided? Why, indeed?

How can we craft policy that meets conflicting needs sets? How do we balance the desire for confidential conference and public access? What happens if “everything” is public?

As all the commissioners repeated over and over, the public hearing would not provide answers; rather, we would try to generate a set of questions. Who will answer these questions and when? That, also, remains unknown.

Mini Bottom Line

Generating meaningful questions may seem weaker than providing solid answers, but if those answers are bad ones, what’s the point? While this one 2-hour meeting did not resolve every issue for every resident, at least it created a sense that people could be heard.

And it created a space where discussion could occur, where ideas could be put forward and not immediately die. My sense is that most participants left feeling better about their chances than when they arrived.

If this commission can pay that off, it’s all to the good. And, by gum, we’ll do our best.

Name-Dropping, For Good and For Ill

This can’t be an RI Future post if I don’t drop on a few players who showed and brought their whatnot. I mean, am I the Frymaster?

First up, Ms. Tara Pinski (and please forgive misspellings, as it’s late) chair of the PVD GOP – as she described ‘captain of a canoe’. While she led with an attempt at public humiliation – How many are registered Democrats? Who is compensated? – her suggestions were very good. In fact, one of them made me say, “Damn! Why didn’t I think of that?”

Sadly, her beefs about City Council minutes and voting are actually already available via the third party resource ClerkBase, of which she had never heard (see above, under unnecessary opacity).

How sad is that? And it’s no reflection on Ms. Pinski or the GOP. PVD, that’s our bad. (Votes are only captured in the minutes. Suboptimal as that may be, it is a public record and available for your parsing. Yes, it’s like picking crab, but by all means, pick that crab, populate that database and publish it for ALL of us to see, appreciate and criticize, er, discuss…)

Beyond that, she suggested streaming and/or captured audio and the ability to “Skype in” to City Council meetings. But the one that really caught me was a monthly “open mic” night with the City Council. That’s downright Uncaucus!

Next up, environmentalist Greg Gerritt, who’s on a bit of a tear linking economic development and environmental issues. He suggested that we try to capture and publish data on trash collection. If you pay taxes, you care about this issue and about this data. Trash is heavy, and we pay to drag it up to one of the highest points in the state. The less we trash, the less we pay. Plus, giant amounts of what we throw in the trash trash is actually worth good money. To review, you’re paying money to drag money up to the top of a hill and throw it away. Care to take a look at that?

Lastly, Mr. Anthony Gemma, candidate for CD…um which one? So he made some grandiose announcements and promptly split before anybody could ask him…”What?” While some of his statements are incontrovertible – lotsa places do lotsa stuff and we don’t have to reinvent the wheel –  he claimed to have developed a Providence citizens’ dashboard at a personal cost of over $100,000.

Yeah, $100k for a citizens’ dashboard that – if it actually exists – he could post that link in these here comments.  Here’s a question he dodged by splitting: exactly what data does your dashboard deliver, given that the city of Providence does not have one single scrap of data available via API?

The committee, created by an act of the City Council, is tasked with developing guidelines and systems to help people interact with city agencies, gain easier access to government information and, hopefully, deliver the efficiencies made possible by well-designed, web-enabled computer tools. You know, the Interwebs!

The trade term for this general area of work is “government 2.o”, meaning the application of the basic concepts of “web 2.0” to government services. In coming posts, I’ll write more about what that means in real terms, but for now, let’s just say that basic idea is to find ways to use the Internet to connect people with the City and the City with people.

Open Means Open

While it’s still early days, it seems likely that a good portion of our work will revolve around the open meetings laws. As an official committee, we are bound by those open meetings laws, so the very actions of the committee will be our first area of learning. What does it mean to comply with the letter of the law? What about the spirit of the law? What kind of tools exist now? How could those tools be improved?

In very short order, those questions will rocket out of the realm of the hypothetical and land squarely on Jump Street. And you, good readers, will enjoy a running commentary. I think you’ll find in these posts a more measured tone from your Frymaster – my “inside voice” so to say.

While many aspects of the City’s web-based services can improve, it’s important to appreciate the scale of operations for the City’s total information needs and the resources made available for the task. Given the deficits with which the City struggles, people should be realistic in what they expect. Having served on the Mayor’s Transition Committee to assess IT issues, I know first-hand the incredible challenge that this represents. Far too few have far too little to do far too much.

About the Benjamins

On this point, I want to reiterate that third item in the broad definition of goals: delivering efficiencies. Web 2.0 and government 2.0 have a third sibling, enterprise 2.0. This is the direction from which I approach the work. Enterprise 2.0 is a rapidly growing space for one very good reason – it saves money!