Civic Tech – Of the people, by the people and for the people
Kaufmann, Stefan
Kloiber, Julia
What if governments invited citizens to help create new tools and services that fit their needs? What if citizens offered governments not only their voices but also their hands and help build tools that improve the communication and collaboration between citizens and public administration? Initiatives and city labs around the world demonstrate how such engagement translates into new forms of citizen participation through the use of new technology. What´s behind these new initiatives and city labs? What challenges do they face and what chances do they hold?
 Hello, everyone, and welcome to this session on Civic Tech. The topic is heavily inspired by the work Stefan and I do. Stefan Kaufmann, to my right, he's just finishing his studies in media informatics and has been very active as a civic hacker in his hometown, Ullm, in the south of Germany. And he's going to elaborate a bit more on his experience later in the session. I'm Julia Kloiber, I work at the Open Knowledge Foundation, that's an international NGO working on various topics and projects around openness. And I'm also currently working on a project that's closely related to the topic Civic Tech, which I'm also going to mention a bit later. But before we dive into some practical examples, it's important to quickly look at a definition of Civic Tech. So it's a pretty new field, there's no ultimate definition of it yet. There's not even a Wikipedia article about it yet. So let's take the term Civic Tech apart and look at the two words it consists of, civic, meaning relating to a citizen, a city, citizenship, or community affairs, and tech, fairly easy, the short form of technology. So Ergo, this is what a definition of Civic Tech could look like. Civic Tech are digital tools and technology that improve public processes and systems, promote engagement between community and governments, and promote the lives of individual citizens. So Civic Tech helps citizens to better interact with their government, partake in democracy, and promote an open and transparent governing body. That's slightly abstract, I have to admit. That's why we're leaving the abstract level now and going to take a look at some examples. We have two examples and later on some more. So the first one here. Yeah, this is Open 311. That's quite a hands-on tool that improves the communication between the city government or local government and the citizens. Imagine the public sidewalk waste bin in front of your house is overflowing and there's cracks in the pavements and lights, not working, the street light is not working. So whom are you going to call? In the United States, there's service hotlines like 311 and services like this here, this is Chicago's 311 service tracker. This allows you to find out whether somebody already called in those issues and whether they've been assigned to the relevant city authorities already and what's the status on them. You can even get status updates if this is a waste basket in front of your house. So you'd be notified by email whenever a change occurs on this task. You already have seen this over and over again, but still open spending driven by the community creates visualizations which allow a completely different look on public finances, making budgets more transparent and not only to citizens but often also to lawmakers which take this as the first real opportunity to see what they're actually deciding upon. So these are two examples of what is possible through an open government and a community working together. So those two examples already suggest civic tech can help to improve a couple of things like the following, for example, political participation by enabling citizens to connect with one another and with their elected representatives. Or looking at information provision via governmental websites, for example, we are able to access information 24-7 and that's something we already take for granted. And besides improving the way of communication between Gov's and citizens, technology can also increase the efficiency within government. So here are some terms and concepts you might already know about. In the last couple of years, governments have been opening up and started to leverage technology and I guess almost 100% of German cities nowadays have their own website if not even specific apps and services. But still when we compare online governmental services with commercial services, there's this gap. Of course it's not fair to compare city Gov's with startups but still I believe there's a lot of unused potential. And of course there are some challenges, specific challenges that city Gov's are focusing that hinder them from developing state-of-the-art technology tools and challenges that hinder them to be as innovative as they could be. Let's take a quick look at those challenges. The first one is a no-brainer. Cities are on a notoriously tight budget and there's just no way that a city can go ahead and let street falls and streets fall into disrepair or cut school budgets to get e-participation or government 2.0 along and get away with that. Also if a government offers a service like for example the 311 hotline, there's just no way that they can for example have the down times. A service that a government offers has to be available all the time and for everybody. So if your city offers a 311 services and requests get dropped, the citizens will complain and you have a problem. So this fail often and fail fast concept, this culture that's very, very common in the startup culture. That's another thing that a city official and the city government can do. So and finally, to be completely honest, governments are not very attractive choices for employment. If you've got a choice to go to a startup or to a Silicon Valley company where they create flying hovercraft cars and have a ball pit in their office and compare that to a career in public service where if you've got interesting procurement processes and stuff like that, most people would probably choose the ball pits over the government employment opportunity. So after the challenges, let's look at some approaches of how to maybe overcome those challenges and let's take a look at the first challenge. So cities are on tight budgets, right? If your streets are shabby, if you have to make budget cuts, you do not necessarily think about spending a lot of money on apps and digital services. And this is why it's very important to commemorate what Timoraili already in 2010 said, that government has to be a platform. He says, government is not like a vending machine. This idea that citizens put in taxes and that they get out services is not a really interesting model of how government is ought to relate to its citizens. Instead, when government manages to become a platform and enable that provides information and data that others can build upon and create a wide range of tools and services, it's much more efficient and government can focus on the real challenges. So what's really interesting about this is a year ago I was talking to someone from the eGovernment department in Cologne and they are doing great work there. And this lady told me a couple of years ago, we thought, okay, there's this website of the city of Cologne and when a citizen needs information, he should visit our website. So that we have like big numbers of users visiting our website. Why should we offer our data, our information via APIs to others? And then a couple of years later after that, they thought, well, it just doesn't make a difference where citizens or where people get the information from. The important thing is that they get right information. So this about opening up and about being a platform where others can take your information and build services and products around it. I don't expect city governments to build like 10,000 apps for each service. So there's this whole community and companies, startups around that reuse data. We see that with transport data a lot, for example. But let's look at the second approach. So there's little space for experience and failure is not an option. Of course, when people rely on your services, like they do with gas services, fail early and often approach, that's not something that works for you. So instead of this, what could be an approach or option here is to create a space for experience. A lab, for example, we know that from big companies that they have their creative spaces, their labs, where they try out stuff. Or it doesn't have to be like as sophisticated as a lab. You can really start by just getting in touch with innovative spaces, groups in your cities. There's, for example, the KS Computer Club. There are groups all around Germany. There's the Knowledge Foundation Network. There are Civic Hackers like Stefan. Just go out there and check what meetups are in your city and go and talk to people. And we're going to look at some labs in a couple of minutes. The third approach with the Civic Tech people and the fact that public administration might not be as sexy for them as working for a startup or IT company, I think it's a good start to fix the number two, number one and number two, becoming a platform and then meeting people outside government. That's the first step of solving this problem. I assume if you, as a city government, get more innovative, you attract more innovative people. And a very good practice for that is Helsinki. Helsinki is a prime example. In the last month, the city was awarded the European Commission's Prize for Innovation in Public Administration. And they are doing everything I just mentioned. They've been opening up a great amount of data. They are providing it in really good formats so that people, that it's easy to reuse. So third-party application developers take the data and turn it into consumer products. And a monthly meetup called Helsinki loves developers. You can see the sticker in the back. And their city officials and developers have a chance to meet and to exchange about problems, about stuff they're working on. So Helsinki is a really nice example. And we're going to share this slide deck later on. There's a link to a really good article about what apps actually get developed. Well, yeah. So when you open up cities, integrate government as a platform and allow for the inclusion of external knowledge, it comes down to collaboration between the government and the people. And that's not so much a new concept. If you think about the first voluntary fire departments back then, back in the days in the 1800s, when the idea of public fire service was people forming a bucket chain, there were people all over the place, enthusiasts, who thought about ways on how to improve this classic fire protection approach. So for example, with new technology, like new fangled hand pumps and later on steam engines, and overhauling the idea that fire protection was organized. So these ideas were adopted from one city to another. Ideas were exchanged and innovation took place. And if you take this idea and this historical example and adapt it to the challenges we just outlined, it's not so hard to see the parallels. Think about everyday citizens who do have the willingness and the means to make a difference and want to improve on the current existing ways and give them the opportunity to do so, forming some kind of voluntary tech create, applying new tools and rethinking processes. We've been doing that in Ulm. How many of you do even know where Ulm is? Okay, come there. We've got a very big church and we've got public transport and that's about it. This is one of the examples where it all started for us in Ulm. You might have seen those real-time transit displays at bus stops that help you find the time to get a donor before the train arrives or something. In Ulm, we've been having them for seven or eight years, but not at our university, which is a big public transit hub. So about four years ago, a couple of students figured you just need data, right? You don't need a 200,000 euros public display outside. You just need the data in some way of displaying it. So at the end, the transit authority provided real-time transit data. The university provided a monitor that was just hanging around anyway. And what was to become our working group, Investors in Knights work, and created what you're seeing right here and what's been serving the students, university students ever since. So this is just one example from Ulm and Stefan brought some more, but let's look at a very simplified graphic. So in an ideal world, it would kind of look like this, engage citizens and city governments, like instead of isolation from one another, they have to zone where they connect and interact. And the yellow space, the interaction, is the space where the magic happens. So city graphs provide data like in the Ulm example, and people build stuff like the students in Ulm. And city government promotes apps developed by the community, or even better, they implement and adapt apps. So let's look at some more best practices of collaboration between graphs and engaged community, like in New York, for example. Yeah, this is a basic but still cool example. When the city of New York wanted to upgrade or bring their NYC.gov official website into more user-friendly spaces, they invited New Yorkers to Hackday where they could prototype their ideal city website. And then they took those results, which stemmed from their experience interacting with the old website, and took it as inspiration to upgrade the NYC.gov website. This is another example I really like. Code for America borrowed from this classical file brigade, again, approach, when they created their own brigade program. So this is all over the United States. Brigades, teams of volunteers, dedicate their time and their expertise, especially, to advocate for open data and open government, and also making that happen by developing applications that make use of open data. So since solutions usually do not really just apply to one city, to just one city, through those brigades networks, the teams exchange information, what's been working in one city, and find out what's been done elsewhere, and whether they can re-adapt, re-deploy that for their own city, meeting the demands of their own citizens. This is just one example here. Originally, this was an app for Chicago where citizens could find out where they could get vaccinated for free, and how to get through those vaccination clinics by public transit. So when a flu outbreak occurred just a couple of months later in Boston, the Chicago flu shut up was just re-adapted, re-purposed, and re-deployed for the citizens of Boston. Within a day and a half, they had a public health emergency declared, and within 36 hours, that application had been re-distributed, re-deployed for Bostonians. This is another example called for Philadelphia, used a smartphone app that had been used in Atlanta already, which allowed riders to track and classify their daily routes, daily routes, and submit them anonymized form to the Regional Planning Council, which can then use this data to better plan and improve on bike infrastructure. So those were two examples, or like the Brigades, the Tech Brigades are outside governments, are community groups that meet on a regular basis, and they also connect to government. But there's this second really nice approach, a program, of Code for America as well. It's the Fellowship Program, and the Fellowship Program gets teams, like little startup teams. There's a designer, a product manager, a developer. They really get into City Hall, so they work within government for a year. They collaborate on new apps, they foster new approaches, and tackle problem solving within City Hall. And what's really interesting about this is when they arrive, the challenges are often not predefined, because if a challenge is predefined, you can also go through a procurement process. So the really nice thing about this concept of progress is that it's a very open progress. So the teams arrive, and what they do is they interview city officials, they interview citizens to figure out, okay, where are their problems or challenges that could be solved by us. And what you can see here in the back is the team of Philadelphia, ready to roll up their sleeves. And let's look at Boston now, so at the outcome of a fellowship year, in Boston in 2011, the Fellowship team created this platform. It's a platform for parents, and it helps parents to answer the important question of which school is right for my kid. And they asked around in the city, and they really found that education is a big issue. The process is very fair, the process of school selection, but it's also fairly complicated. So they made this database, this system that enables parents to quickly search for a good school. You have a couple of filters, and what's really interesting about this example is that it's actually implemented, that it's an ongoing process, and it's really used by citizens in Boston to find the right school for their kids. And it's also promoted by the city of Boston. They also had wallpaper campaigns, big posters up in the city to show people, okay, this is an example. And if you want to go to the website, there's always the links in the corner. Check it out. It's a really nice example. And what's cool about Boston is that the city has its own innovation incubator. As all of you know, the MIT is in Boston as well, so there's a lot of knowledge there. And via this Boston mayor's office of new urban mechanics, internal agencies connect with outside entrepreneurs, with academia, and they pilot projects that address the resident needs. So they're collaborating with the MIT, with industry, and they already introduced several interfaces and systems. For example, an app called StreetBump. Look it up. It's a really fun app. And what's critical about this process, there were two researchers from the Bergman Center who studied the new urban mechanics office. And they said what's crucial is that the innovators, the people who have to take charge, who have to take care about innovation, that they are very close to the mayor's office, that they are not in some department far away, but that they are like, things move faster if you have the mayor or another high-level politician as a driver of your process. They followed them on Twitter. It's amazing. They just rolled out their fellowships for 2014, and they are doing great work. It's two people who are co-chairs of the office. And okay. So now you might think, okay, all right, after those examples in the US, it only works in the US. But let me give you an example that proves this assumption wrong. This is what you can see behind this text. It's a visual from the laboratory of what I see in Mexico City. And it's a lab that just started, I think, six months ago. And it's also a mayor's initiative. So the mayor decided, okay, he wants this space for innovation for a creative city in his city. And he started to lab. And here's a quote what the mayor says about the lab and its function. So the lab for the city will facilitate interaction between citizens and government to rethink the city together, generating a bank of ideas and solutions to build a city that supports and stimulates the imagination, a creative city. So what he did was he invited, or he invited 19 people. The lab has 19 staff from various fields, like artists, planners, technologists. They all have different backgrounds. And they also have six tech fellows, like similar to the fellowships. They work closely together with city departments. And this lab does not only work on code projects or digital projects. They also work on every day, like they walk into the streets and ask people, okay, you are a pedestrian in this big city. How do you feel? How could government help you help to improve your daily life? So they are also showcasing that wide open data is important, by the work of the city, together with the city departments. And they are drafting policy for an open government agenda. So let me show you, okay, the pictures you can see here is the Codeco Paralaseo.program, the team in the background. And they had this massive hack, the F hack day, where the city opened up 15 data sets. And I think 500 something developers wanted to come to the hack day. They unfortunately only had space for 300, but it's amazing. They get a huge city. And a lot of people are interested in helping with their skills to improve things in their city. And the lab gives them the chance, yeah, the lab is kind of this interaction space. And just very quickly, two examples, the fellows in the city have been working on. The one is Info Mercado. They are releasing the apps in one month, and they're going to present it to the mayor. So Info Mercado crowdsources information about Mercados in Mexico City and helps the government to collect this information. Because in such a big city, it's sometimes difficult to keep track or this, a lot of data and information the government just doesn't have. And the second app, as you can see here, are the famous Mexico City caps. And as some of you might know, it's always a bit tricky as a tourist to figure out whether a cap is official or not. So they built this really lightweight app that quickly tells you whether a cap is official or, yeah, or if it's an illegal cap. So just two very small approaches that kind of introduced this idea of open data of civic tech to the different city departments because they work together very closely with the fellows. Well, so the examples, Mexico City, now back to Ulm. Back to Ulm. So this doesn't work only in the United States and Mexico, but also in Ulm. And let me tell you a bit about how we approach this and what you could maybe pick up and adopt for your city if you want to engage civic tech there, please do. The last two years, we held annual barcams. You see a picture of one of them here. We do not have 300 people because Ulm is marginally smaller than Mexico City. But we were able to connect interested citizens, researchers, and government officials. Also back then, the city did not have a dedicated open data government website yet. So after having established contact to the city officials and having them release datasets as open data, we published it on our website just as an intermediary fix as raw downloads and through an API, just not as a permanent solution that we're going to have up and running for all time, but just as an intermediary fix until the city had an official open data web portal, which they have by now. Another quick fix we did. This is similar to the Boston School project just with a slightly worse user interface. This is the official tool for checking free kindergarten spots is just a glorified list more or less. So if you do not know that to Retellenstraße is in Ermingen, which is down there in the bus stops only five times a day, you'd probably sign up your kid for that and then have trouble. So this map here was our first step at creating a more user-friendly overview. And we hope we will be able to reintegrate that into the official kindergarten website to make this a lasting improvement. That's not just a hack, but expands on the official service by the city. So what you can do is you can click on, okay, your kid is in this and that age group, and then it filters you, okay, where are spots for your kid available? So the red crosses show that there's no free, yeah, that you cannot, like, that they closed, like, that it's not open for your kid. And the green things you can click and it directs you to the contact form of the kindergarten. I figure it's the same everywhere in Germany that the waiting lists are overbooked for ages if you need a kindergarten spot. To the right is Bavaria, this is uncharted territory. We're working on that. So this map is an example for the ghost you can achieve rather quickly. This is not a, this hasn't been a large-scale project. It was prototyped during Open Data Day. And one more thing that I'd recommend for city governments everywhere, our administration contact persons are officially allowed to join us on our meetings, which are usually on the weekends or during weekday evenings, and they're allowed to do so while being on the clock. So this makes for a very fast exchange. We've been able to get information and feedback very fast and in person, allowing us to develop and publish much faster than if we had to email back and forth through web formulas or whatever. And of course, we never quite left public transit. When we showed officials what could be possible through this experimental map, the city's transit authority was willing to let us help them create a process that allowed them to publish their schedule as Open Data. So examples like this here, this is a live map more or less that shows you where the bus is running. Actually, we have more buses than that. But examples like this can often serve as door openers to the administration, allowing them to better grasp the implication of what is possible if they open up data and implement government as a platform. So the last couple of slides. So what do those examples show us? What they show us is that collaboration is key. If this key map just like is somewhere around the internet and no one knows about it, it doesn't help the citizens of the city. So it's important that the difference they call this collaborative that government and government officials or people that work in the public administration, that they talk about the issues, the problems they are focusing on, and that they share insights and give this information to civic hacker community, for example, who builds concepts and prototypes like the Keter map or the real time map. And what they do is they reuse data. So they make use of data the city provides. So it's also very important that cities open up and that they provide resources for civic hackers. And there's also startups and companies that's important in this process because there is this point when you develop an app, it's fun in the beginning. So the civic hackers, most of them are volunteers. It's fun in the beginning. But then if you really have to implement it into the city systems, it kind of gets work. So it's really important to also have startups and companies and people who get paid on board to implement and productize apps from the community. So yeah, I really believe that via this collaboration, better civic tools could be provided. Also when it comes to data, like sometimes when cities provide data, it's hard to use for developers because they do not have an API yet or it's not in the right format. So that's something you can easily solve by getting in touch and by talking to one another. And there's already a couple of cities in Germany where this is happening. In Ulm, for example, in Cologne, in Berlin, we are in touch with the city of Berlin and officials from there. So this collaboration and getting in touch and talking to each other is very important. And we really like this concept of communities, connecting tech communities all over Germany. So that's why the Open Knowledge Foundation started a program in February called Code for Germany where it's a network of civic developers, of techies, designers, people interested in open data. And it's not a virtual network at all. It's actually a network of right now 11 Open Knowledge labs all across Germany and two more are incubating. So I'm sure there's a lab in the city near you. They meet on a regular basis. They work on great apps. It's not always the biggest, the super high-scale projects, but very easy kind of small-scale, quick wins. And if you check the Code for Germany website, you can also see on what the different labs are working on. And you can contribute by a GitHub. Find a lab near you and join. And yeah, what more can I say? Let's roll up our sleeves and get going. Thank you very much.
 Hello, everyone, and welcome to this session on Civic Tech.  The topic is heavily inspired by the work Stefan and I do.  Stefan Kaufmann, to my right, he's just finishing his studies in media informatics  and has been very active as a civic hacker in his hometown, Ullm, in the south of Germany.  And he's going to elaborate a bit more on his experience later in the session.  I'm Julia Kloiber, I work at the Open Knowledge Foundation, that's an international NGO working  on various topics and projects around openness.  And I'm also currently working on a project that's closely related to the topic Civic  Tech, which I'm also going to mention a bit later.  But before we dive into some practical examples, it's important to quickly look at a definition  of Civic Tech.  So it's a pretty new field, there's no ultimate definition of it yet.  There's not even a Wikipedia article about it yet.  So let's take the term Civic Tech apart and look at the two words it consists of, civic,  meaning relating to a citizen, a city, citizenship, or community affairs, and tech, fairly easy,  the short form of technology.  So Ergo, this is what a definition of Civic Tech could look like.  Civic Tech are digital tools and technology that improve public processes and systems,  promote engagement between community and governments, and promote the lives of individual citizens.  So Civic Tech helps citizens to better interact with their government, partake in democracy,  and promote an open and transparent governing body.  That's slightly abstract, I have to admit.  That's why we're leaving the abstract level now and going to take a look at some examples.  We have two examples and later on some more.  So the first one here.  Yeah, this is Open 311.  That's quite a hands-on tool that improves the communication between the city government  or local government and the citizens.  Imagine the public sidewalk waste bin in front of your house is overflowing and there's cracks  in the pavements and lights, not working, the street light is not working.  So whom are you going to call?  In the United States, there's service hotlines like 311 and services like this here, this  is Chicago's 311 service tracker.  This allows you to find out whether somebody already called in those issues and whether  they've been assigned to the relevant city authorities already and what's the status  on them.  You can even get status updates if this is a waste basket in front of your house.  So you'd be notified by email whenever a change occurs on this task.  You already have seen this over and over again, but still open spending driven by the community  creates visualizations which allow a completely different look on public finances, making  budgets more transparent and not only to citizens but often also to lawmakers which  take this as the first real opportunity to see what they're actually deciding upon.  So these are two examples of what is possible through an open government and a community  working together.  So those two examples already suggest civic tech can help to improve a couple of things  like the following, for example, political participation by enabling citizens to connect  with one another and with their elected representatives.  Or looking at information provision via governmental websites, for example, we are able to access  information 24-7 and that's something we already take for granted.  And besides improving the way of communication between Gov's and citizens, technology can  also increase the efficiency within government.  So here are some terms and concepts you might already know about.  In the last couple of years, governments have been opening up and started to leverage technology  and I guess almost 100% of German cities nowadays have their own website if not even specific  apps and services.  But still when we compare online governmental services with commercial services, there's  this gap.  Of course it's not fair to compare city Gov's with startups but still I believe there's  a lot of unused potential.  And of course there are some challenges, specific challenges that city Gov's are focusing that  hinder them from developing state-of-the-art technology tools and challenges that hinder  them to be as innovative as they could be.  Let's take a quick look at those challenges.  The first one is a no-brainer.  Cities are on a notoriously tight budget and there's just no way that a city can go ahead  and let street falls and streets fall into disrepair or cut school budgets to get e-participation  or government 2.0 along and get away with that.  Also if a government offers a service like for example the 311 hotline, there's just  no way that they can for example have the down times.  A service that a government offers has to be available all the time and for everybody.  So if your city offers a 311 services and requests get dropped, the citizens will complain  and you have a problem.  So this fail often and fail fast concept, this culture that's very, very common in the startup  culture.  That's another thing that a city official and the city government can do.  So and finally, to be completely honest, governments are not very attractive choices for employment.  If you've got a choice to go to a startup or to a Silicon Valley company where they  create flying hovercraft cars and have a ball pit in their office and compare that to a  career in public service where if you've got interesting procurement processes and stuff  like that, most people would probably choose the ball pits over the government employment  opportunity.  So after the challenges, let's look at some approaches of how to maybe overcome those  challenges and let's take a look at the first challenge.  So cities are on tight budgets, right?  If your streets are shabby, if you have to make budget cuts, you do not necessarily think  about spending a lot of money on apps and digital services.  And this is why it's very important to commemorate what Timoraili already in 2010 said, that  government has to be a platform.  He says, government is not like a vending machine.  This idea that citizens put in taxes and that they get out services is not a really interesting  model of how government is ought to relate to its citizens.  Instead, when government manages to become a platform and enable that provides information  and data that others can build upon and create a wide range of tools and services, it's much  more efficient and government can focus on the real challenges.  So what's really interesting about this is a year ago I was talking to someone from the  eGovernment department in Cologne and they are doing great work there.  And this lady told me a couple of years ago, we thought, okay, there's this website of  the city of Cologne and when a citizen needs information, he should visit our website.  So that we have like big numbers of users visiting our website.  Why should we offer our data, our information via APIs to others?  And then a couple of years later after that, they thought, well, it just doesn't make a  difference where citizens or where people get the information from.  The important thing is that they get right information.  So this about opening up and about being a platform where others can take your information  and build services and products around it.  I don't expect city governments to build like 10,000 apps for each service.  So there's this whole community and companies, startups around that reuse data.  We see that with transport data a lot, for example.  But let's look at the second approach.  So there's little space for experience and failure is not an option.  Of course, when people rely on your services, like they do with gas services, fail early  and often approach, that's not something that works for you.  So instead of this, what could be an approach or option here is to create a space for experience.  A lab, for example, we know that from big companies that they have their creative spaces,  their labs, where they try out stuff.  Or it doesn't have to be like as sophisticated as a lab.  You can really start by just getting in touch with innovative spaces, groups in your cities.  There's, for example, the KS Computer Club.  There are groups all around Germany.  There's the Knowledge Foundation Network.  There are Civic Hackers like Stefan.  Just go out there and check what meetups are in your city and go and talk to people.  And we're going to look at some labs in a couple of minutes.  The third approach with the Civic Tech people and the fact that public administration might  not be as sexy for them as working for a startup or IT company, I think it's a good start to  fix the number two, number one and number two, becoming a platform and then meeting people  outside government.  That's the first step of solving this problem.  I assume if you, as a city government, get more innovative, you attract more innovative  people.  And a very good practice for that is Helsinki.  Helsinki is a prime example.  In the last month, the city was awarded the European Commission's Prize for Innovation  in Public Administration.  And they are doing everything I just mentioned.  They've been opening up a great amount of data.  They are providing it in really good formats so that people, that it's easy to reuse.  So third-party application developers take the data and turn it into consumer products.  And a monthly meetup called Helsinki loves developers.  You can see the sticker in the back.  And their city officials and developers have a chance to meet and to exchange about problems,  about stuff they're working on.  So Helsinki is a really nice example.  And we're going to share this slide deck later on.  There's a link to a really good article about what apps actually get developed.  Well, yeah.  So when you open up cities, integrate government as a platform and allow for the inclusion  of external knowledge, it comes down to collaboration between the government and the people.  And that's not so much a new concept.  If you think about the first voluntary fire departments back then, back in the days in  the 1800s, when the idea of public fire service was people forming a bucket chain, there were  people all over the place, enthusiasts, who thought about ways on how to improve this  classic fire protection approach.  So for example, with new technology, like new fangled hand pumps and later on steam engines,  and overhauling the idea that fire protection was organized.  So these ideas were adopted from one city to another.  Ideas were exchanged and innovation took place.  And if you take this idea and this historical example and adapt it to the challenges we  just outlined, it's not so hard to see the parallels.  Think about everyday citizens who do have the willingness and the means to make a difference  and want to improve on the current existing ways and give them the opportunity to do so,  forming some kind of voluntary tech create, applying new tools and rethinking processes.  We've been doing that in Ulm.  How many of you do even know where Ulm is?  Okay, come there.  We've got a very big church and we've got public transport and that's about it.  This is one of the examples where it all started for us in Ulm.  You might have seen those real-time transit displays at bus stops that help you find the  time to get a donor before the train arrives or something.  In Ulm, we've been having them for seven or eight years, but not at our university, which  is a big public transit hub.  So about four years ago, a couple of students figured you just need data, right?  You don't need a 200,000 euros public display outside.  You just need the data in some way of displaying it.  So at the end, the transit authority provided real-time transit data.  The university provided a monitor that was just hanging around anyway.  And what was to become our working group, Investors in Knights work, and created what  you're seeing right here and what's been serving the students, university students ever since.  So this is just one example from Ulm and Stefan brought some more, but let's look at a very  simplified graphic.  So in an ideal world, it would kind of look like this, engage citizens and city governments,  like instead of isolation from one another, they have to zone where they connect and interact.  And the yellow space, the interaction, is the space where the magic happens.  So city graphs provide data like in the Ulm example, and people build stuff like the students  in Ulm.  And city government promotes apps developed by the community, or even better, they implement  and adapt apps.  So let's look at some more best practices of collaboration between graphs and engaged  community, like in New York, for example.  Yeah, this is a basic but still cool example.  When the city of New York wanted to upgrade or bring their NYC.gov official website into  more user-friendly spaces, they invited New Yorkers to Hackday where they could prototype  their ideal city website.  And then they took those results, which stemmed from their experience interacting with the  old website, and took it as inspiration to upgrade the NYC.gov website.  This is another example I really like.  Code for America borrowed from this classical file brigade, again, approach, when they created  their own brigade program.  So this is all over the United States.  Brigades, teams of volunteers, dedicate their time and their expertise, especially, to advocate  for open data and open government, and also making that happen by developing applications  that make use of open data.  So since solutions usually do not really just apply to one city, to just one city, through  those brigades networks, the teams exchange information, what's been working in one city,  and find out what's been done elsewhere, and whether they can re-adapt, re-deploy that  for their own city, meeting the demands of their own citizens.  This is just one example here.  Originally, this was an app for Chicago where citizens could find out where they could get  vaccinated for free, and how to get through those vaccination clinics by public transit.  So when a flu outbreak occurred just a couple of months later in Boston, the Chicago flu  shut up was just re-adapted, re-purposed, and re-deployed for the citizens of Boston.  Within a day and a half, they had a public health emergency declared, and within 36 hours,  that application had been re-distributed, re-deployed for Bostonians.  This is another example called for Philadelphia, used a smartphone app that had been used in  Atlanta already, which allowed riders to track and classify their daily routes, daily routes,  and submit them anonymized form to the Regional Planning Council, which can then use this  data to better plan and improve on bike infrastructure.  So those were two examples, or like the Brigades, the Tech Brigades are outside governments,  are community groups that meet on a regular basis, and they also connect to government.  But there's this second really nice approach, a program, of Code for America as well.  It's the Fellowship Program, and the Fellowship Program gets teams, like little startup teams.  There's a designer, a product manager, a developer.  They really get into City Hall, so they work within government for a year.  They collaborate on new apps, they foster new approaches, and tackle problem solving  within City Hall.  And what's really interesting about this is when they arrive, the challenges are often  not predefined, because if a challenge is predefined, you can also go through a procurement  process.  So the really nice thing about this concept of progress is that it's a very open progress.  So the teams arrive, and what they do is they interview city officials, they interview citizens  to figure out, okay, where are their problems or challenges that could be solved by us.  And what you can see here in the back is the team of Philadelphia, ready to roll up their  sleeves.  And let's look at Boston now, so at the outcome of a fellowship year, in Boston in 2011, the  Fellowship team created this platform.  It's a platform for parents, and it helps parents to answer the important question of  which school is right for my kid.  And they asked around in the city, and they really found that education is a big issue.  The process is very fair, the process of school selection, but it's also fairly complicated.  So they made this database, this system that enables parents to quickly search for a good  school.  You have a couple of filters, and what's really interesting about this example is that it's  actually implemented, that it's an ongoing process, and it's really used by citizens  in Boston to find the right school for their kids.  And it's also promoted by the city of Boston.  They also had wallpaper campaigns, big posters up in the city to show people, okay, this  is an example.  And if you want to go to the website, there's always the links in the corner.  Check it out.  It's a really nice example.  And what's cool about Boston is that the city has its own innovation incubator.  As all of you know, the MIT is in Boston as well, so there's a lot of knowledge there.  And via this Boston mayor's office of new urban mechanics, internal agencies connect  with outside entrepreneurs, with academia, and they pilot projects that address the resident  needs.  So they're collaborating with the MIT, with industry, and they already introduced several  interfaces and systems.  For example, an app called StreetBump.  Look it up.  It's a really fun app.  And what's critical about this process, there were two researchers from the Bergman Center  who studied the new urban mechanics office.  And they said what's crucial is that the innovators, the people who have to take charge, who have  to take care about innovation, that they are very close to the mayor's office, that they  are not in some department far away, but that they are like, things move faster if you have  the mayor or another high-level politician as a driver of your process.  They followed them on Twitter.  It's amazing.  They just rolled out their fellowships for 2014, and they are doing great work.  It's two people who are co-chairs of the office.  And okay.  So now you might think, okay, all right, after those examples in the US, it only works in  the US.  But let me give you an example that proves this assumption wrong.  This is what you can see behind this text.  It's a visual from the laboratory of what I see in Mexico City.  And it's a lab that just started, I think, six months ago.  And it's also a mayor's initiative.  So the mayor decided, okay, he wants this space for innovation for a creative city in  his city.  And he started to lab.  And here's a quote what the mayor says about the lab and its function.  So the lab for the city will facilitate interaction between citizens and government to rethink  the city together, generating a bank of ideas and solutions to build a city that supports  and stimulates the imagination, a creative city.  So what he did was he invited, or he invited 19 people.  The lab has 19 staff from various fields, like artists, planners, technologists.  They all have different backgrounds.  And they also have six tech fellows, like similar to the fellowships.  They work closely together with city departments.  And this lab does not only work on code projects or digital projects.  They also work on every day, like they walk into the streets and ask people, okay, you  are a pedestrian in this big city.  How do you feel?  How could government help you help to improve your daily life?  So they are also showcasing that wide open data is important, by the work of the city,  together with the city departments.  And they are drafting policy for an open government agenda.  So let me show you, okay, the pictures you can see here is the Codeco Paralaseo.program,  the team in the background.  And they had this massive hack, the F hack day, where the city opened up 15 data sets.  And I think 500 something developers wanted to come to the hack day.  They unfortunately only had space for 300, but it's amazing.  They get a huge city.  And a lot of people are interested in helping with their skills to improve things in their  city.  And the lab gives them the chance, yeah, the lab is kind of this interaction space.  And just very quickly, two examples, the fellows in the city have been working on.  The one is Info Mercado.  They are releasing the apps in one month, and they're going to present it to the mayor.  So Info Mercado crowdsources information about Mercados in Mexico City and helps the government  to collect this information.  Because in such a big city, it's sometimes difficult to keep track or this, a lot of data  and information the government just doesn't have.  And the second app, as you can see here, are the famous Mexico City caps.  And as some of you might know, it's always a bit tricky as a tourist to figure out whether  a cap is official or not.  So they built this really lightweight app that quickly tells you whether a cap is official  or, yeah, or if it's an illegal cap.  So just two very small approaches that kind of introduced this idea of open data of civic  tech to the different city departments because they work together very closely with the fellows.  Well, so the examples, Mexico City, now back to Ulm.  Back to Ulm.  So this doesn't work only in the United States and Mexico, but also in Ulm.  And let me tell you a bit about how we approach this and what you could maybe pick up and  adopt for your city if you want to engage civic tech there, please do.  The last two years, we held annual barcams.  You see a picture of one of them here.  We do not have 300 people because Ulm is marginally smaller than Mexico City.  But we were able to connect interested citizens, researchers, and government officials.  Also back then, the city did not have a dedicated open data government website yet.  So after having established contact to the city officials and having them release datasets  as open data, we published it on our website just as an intermediary fix as raw downloads  and through an API, just not as a permanent solution that we're going to have up and running  for all time, but just as an intermediary fix until the city had an official open data  web portal, which they have by now.  Another quick fix we did.  This is similar to the Boston School project just with a slightly worse user interface.  This is the official tool for checking free kindergarten spots is just a glorified list  more or less.  So if you do not know that to Retellenstraße is in Ermingen, which is down there in the  bus stops only five times a day, you'd probably sign up your kid for that and then have trouble.  So this map here was our first step at creating a more user-friendly overview.  And we hope we will be able to reintegrate that into the official kindergarten website  to make this a lasting improvement.  That's not just a hack, but expands on the official service by the city.  So what you can do is you can click on, okay, your kid is in this and that age group, and  then it filters you, okay, where are spots for your kid available?  So the red crosses show that there's no free, yeah, that you cannot, like, that they closed,  like, that it's not open for your kid.  And the green things you can click and it directs you to the contact form of the kindergarten.  I figure it's the same everywhere in Germany that the waiting lists are overbooked for  ages if you need a kindergarten spot.  To the right is Bavaria, this is uncharted territory.  We're working on that.  So this map is an example for the ghost you can achieve rather quickly.  This is not a, this hasn't been a large-scale project.  It was prototyped during Open Data Day.  And one more thing that I'd recommend for city governments everywhere, our administration  contact persons are officially allowed to join us on our meetings, which are usually  on the weekends or during weekday evenings, and they're allowed to do so while being on  the clock.  So this makes for a very fast exchange.  We've been able to get information and feedback very fast and in person, allowing us to develop  and publish much faster than if we had to email back and forth through web formulas or whatever.  And of course, we never quite left public transit.  When we showed officials what could be possible through this experimental map, the city's transit  authority was willing to let us help them create a process that allowed them to publish  their schedule as Open Data.  So examples like this here, this is a live map more or less that shows you where the  bus is running.  Actually, we have more buses than that.  But examples like this can often serve as door openers to the administration, allowing  them to better grasp the implication of what is possible if they open up data and implement  government as a platform.  So the last couple of slides.  So what do those examples show us?  What they show us is that collaboration is key.  If this key map just like is somewhere around the internet and no one knows about it, it  doesn't help the citizens of the city.  So it's important that the difference they call this collaborative that government and  government officials or people that work in the public administration, that they talk  about the issues, the problems they are focusing on, and that they share insights and give  this information to civic hacker community, for example, who builds concepts and prototypes  like the Keter map or the real time map.  And what they do is they reuse data.  So they make use of data the city provides.  So it's also very important that cities open up and that they provide resources for civic  hackers.  And there's also startups and companies that's important in this process because there is  this point when you develop an app, it's fun in the beginning.  So the civic hackers, most of them are volunteers.  It's fun in the beginning.  But then if you really have to implement it into the city systems, it kind of gets work.  So it's really important to also have startups and companies and people who get paid on board  to implement and productize apps from the community.  So yeah, I really believe that via this collaboration, better civic tools could be provided.  Also when it comes to data, like sometimes when cities provide data, it's hard to use  for developers because they do not have an API yet or it's not in the right format.  So that's something you can easily solve by getting in touch and by talking to one another.  And there's already a couple of cities in Germany where this is happening.  In Ulm, for example, in Cologne, in Berlin, we are in touch with the city of Berlin and  officials from there.  So this collaboration and getting in touch and talking to each other is very important.  And we really like this concept of communities, connecting tech communities all over Germany.  So that's why the Open Knowledge Foundation started a program in February called Code  for Germany where it's a network of civic developers, of techies, designers, people  interested in open data.  And it's not a virtual network at all.  It's actually a network of right now 11 Open Knowledge labs all across Germany and two  more are incubating.  So I'm sure there's a lab in the city near you.  They meet on a regular basis.  They work on great apps.  It's not always the biggest, the super high-scale projects, but very easy kind of small-scale,  quick wins.  And if you check the Code for Germany website, you can also see on what the different labs  are working on.  And you can contribute by a GitHub.  Find a lab near you and join.  And yeah, what more can I say?  Let's roll up our sleeves and get going.  Thank you very much.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to this session on Civic Tech. The topic is heavily inspired by the work Stefan and I do. Stefan Kaufmann, to my right, he's just finishing his studies in media informatics and has been very active as a civic hacker in his hometown, Ullm, in the south of Germany. And he's going to elaborate a bit more on his experience later in the session. I'm Julia Kloiber, I work at the Open Knowledge Foundation, that's an international NGO working on various topics and projects around openness. And I'm also currently working on a project that's closely related to the topic Civic Tech, which I'm also going to mention a bit later. But before we dive into some practical examples, it's important to quickly look at a definition of Civic Tech. So it's a pretty new field, there's no ultimate definition of it yet. There's not even a Wikipedia article about it yet. So let's take the term Civic Tech apart and look at the two words it consists of, civic, meaning relating to a citizen, a city, citizenship, or community affairs, and tech, fairly easy, the short form of technology. So Ergo, this is what a definition of Civic Tech could look like. Civic Tech are digital tools and technology that improve public processes and systems, promote engagement between community and governments, and promote the lives of individual citizens. So Civic Tech helps citizens to better interact with their government, partake in democracy, and promote an open and transparent governing body. That's slightly abstract, I have to admit. That's why we're leaving the abstract level now and going to take a look at some examples. We have two examples and later on some more. So the first one here. Yeah, this is Open 311. That's quite a hands-on tool that improves the communication between the city government or local government and the citizens. Imagine the public sidewalk waste bin in front of your house is overflowing and there's cracks in the pavements and lights, not working, the street light is not working. So whom are you going to call? In the United States, there's service hotlines like 311 and services like this here, this is Chicago's 311 service tracker. This allows you to find out whether somebody already called in those issues and whether they've been assigned to the relevant city authorities already and what's the status on them. You can even get status updates if this is a waste basket in front of your house. So you'd be notified by email whenever a change occurs on this task. You already have seen this over and over again, but still open spending driven by the community creates visualizations which allow a completely different look on public finances, making budgets more transparent and not only to citizens but often also to lawmakers which take this as the first real opportunity to see what they're actually deciding upon. So these are two examples of what is possible through an open government and a community working together. So those two examples already suggest civic tech can help to improve a couple of things like the following, for example, political participation by enabling citizens to connect with one another and with their elected representatives. Or looking at information provision via governmental websites, for example, we are able to access information 24-7 and that's something we already take for granted. And besides improving the way of communication between Gov's and citizens, technology can also increase the efficiency within government. So here are some terms and concepts you might already know about. In the last couple of years, governments have been opening up and started to leverage technology and I guess almost 100% of German cities nowadays have their own website if not even specific apps and services. But still when we compare online governmental services with commercial services, there's this gap. Of course it's not fair to compare city Gov's with startups but still I believe there's a lot of unused potential. And of course there are some challenges, specific challenges that city Gov's are focusing that hinder them from developing state-of-the-art technology tools and challenges that hinder them to be as innovative as they could be. Let's take a quick look at those challenges. The first one is a no-brainer. Cities are on a notoriously tight budget and there's just no way that a city can go ahead and let street falls and streets fall into disrepair or cut school budgets to get e-participation or government 2.0 along and get away with that. Also if a government offers a service like for example the 311 hotline, there's just no way that they can for example have the down times. A service that a government offers has to be available all the time and for everybody. So if your city offers a 311 services and requests get dropped, the citizens will complain and you have a problem. So this fail often and fail fast concept, this culture that's very, very common in the startup culture. That's another thing that a city official and the city government can do. So and finally, to be completely honest, governments are not very attractive choices for employment. If you've got a choice to go to a startup or to a Silicon Valley company where they create flying hovercraft cars and have a ball pit in their office and compare that to a career in public service where if you've got interesting procurement processes and stuff like that, most people would probably choose the ball pits over the government employment opportunity. So after the challenges, let's look at some approaches of how to maybe overcome those challenges and let's take a look at the first challenge. So cities are on tight budgets, right? If your streets are shabby, if you have to make budget cuts, you do not necessarily think about spending a lot of money on apps and digital services. And this is why it's very important to commemorate what Timoraili already in 2010 said, that government has to be a platform. He says, government is not like a vending machine. This idea that citizens put in taxes and that they get out services is not a really interesting model of how government is ought to relate to its citizens. Instead, when government manages to become a platform and enable that provides information and data that others can build upon and create a wide range of tools and services, it's much more efficient and government can focus on the real challenges. So what's really interesting about this is a year ago I was talking to someone from the eGovernment department in Cologne and they are doing great work there. And this lady told me a couple of years ago, we thought, okay, there's this website of the city of Cologne and when a citizen needs information, he should visit our website. So that we have like big numbers of users visiting our website. Why should we offer our data, our information via APIs to others? And then a couple of years later after that, they thought, well, it just doesn't make a difference where citizens or where people get the information from. The important thing is that they get right information. So this about opening up and about being a platform where others can take your information and build services and products around it. I don't expect city governments to build like 10,000 apps for each service. So there's this whole community and companies, startups around that reuse data. We see that with transport data a lot, for example. But let's look at the second approach. So there's little space for experience and failure is not an option. Of course, when people rely on your services, like they do with gas services, fail early and often approach, that's not something that works for you. So instead of this, what could be an approach or option here is to create a space for experience. A lab, for example, we know that from big companies that they have their creative spaces, their labs, where they try out stuff. Or it doesn't have to be like as sophisticated as a lab. You can really start by just getting in touch with innovative spaces, groups in your cities. There's, for example, the KS Computer Club. There are groups all around Germany. There's the Knowledge Foundation Network. There are Civic Hackers like Stefan. Just go out there and check what meetups are in your city and go and talk to people. And we're going to look at some labs in a couple of minutes. The third approach with the Civic Tech people and the fact that public administration might not be as sexy for them as working for a startup or IT company, I think it's a good start to fix the number two, number one and number two, becoming a platform and then meeting people outside government. That's the first step of solving this problem. I assume if you, as a city government, get more innovative, you attract more innovative people. And a very good practice for that is Helsinki. Helsinki is a prime example. In the last month, the city was awarded the European Commission's Prize for Innovation in Public Administration. And they are doing everything I just mentioned. They've been opening up a great amount of data. They are providing it in really good formats so that people, that it's easy to reuse. So third-party application developers take the data and turn it into consumer products. And a monthly meetup called Helsinki loves developers. You can see the sticker in the back. And their city officials and developers have a chance to meet and to exchange about problems, about stuff they're working on. So Helsinki is a really nice example. And we're going to share this slide deck later on. There's a link to a really good article about what apps actually get developed. Well, yeah. So when you open up cities, integrate government as a platform and allow for the inclusion of external knowledge, it comes down to collaboration between the government and the people. And that's not so much a new concept. If you think about the first voluntary fire departments back then, back in the days in the 1800s, when the idea of public fire service was people forming a bucket chain, there were people all over the place, enthusiasts, who thought about ways on how to improve this classic fire protection approach. So for example, with new technology, like new fangled hand pumps and later on steam engines, and overhauling the idea that fire protection was organized. So these ideas were adopted from one city to another. Ideas were exchanged and innovation took place. And if you take this idea and this historical example and adapt it to the challenges we just outlined, it's not so hard to see the parallels. Think about everyday citizens who do have the willingness and the means to make a difference and want to improve on the current existing ways and give them the opportunity to do so, forming some kind of voluntary tech create, applying new tools and rethinking processes. We've been doing that in Ulm. How many of you do even know where Ulm is? Okay, come there. We've got a very big church and we've got public transport and that's about it. This is one of the examples where it all started for us in Ulm. You might have seen those real-time transit displays at bus stops that help you find the time to get a donor before the train arrives or something. In Ulm, we've been having them for seven or eight years, but not at our university, which is a big public transit hub. So about four years ago, a couple of students figured you just need data, right? You don't need a 200,000 euros public display outside. You just need the data in some way of displaying it. So at the end, the transit authority provided real-time transit data. The university provided a monitor that was just hanging around anyway. And what was to become our working group, Investors in Knights work, and created what you're seeing right here and what's been serving the students, university students ever since. So this is just one example from Ulm and Stefan brought some more, but let's look at a very simplified graphic. So in an ideal world, it would kind of look like this, engage citizens and city governments, like instead of isolation from one another, they have to zone where they connect and interact. And the yellow space, the interaction, is the space where the magic happens. So city graphs provide data like in the Ulm example, and people build stuff like the students in Ulm. And city government promotes apps developed by the community, or even better, they implement and adapt apps. So let's look at some more best practices of collaboration between graphs and engaged community, like in New York, for example. Yeah, this is a basic but still cool example. When the city of New York wanted to upgrade or bring their NYC.gov official website into more user-friendly spaces, they invited New Yorkers to Hackday where they could prototype their ideal city website. And then they took those results, which stemmed from their experience interacting with the old website, and took it as inspiration to upgrade the NYC.gov website. This is another example I really like. Code for America borrowed from this classical file brigade, again, approach, when they created their own brigade program. So this is all over the United States. Brigades, teams of volunteers, dedicate their time and their expertise, especially, to advocate for open data and open government, and also making that happen by developing applications that make use of open data. So since solutions usually do not really just apply to one city, to just one city, through those brigades networks, the teams exchange information, what's been working in one city, and find out what's been done elsewhere, and whether they can re-adapt, re-deploy that for their own city, meeting the demands of their own citizens. This is just one example here. Originally, this was an app for Chicago where citizens could find out where they could get vaccinated for free, and how to get through those vaccination clinics by public transit. So when a flu outbreak occurred just a couple of months later in Boston, the Chicago flu shut up was just re-adapted, re-purposed, and re-deployed for the citizens of Boston. Within a day and a half, they had a public health emergency declared, and within 36 hours, that application had been re-distributed, re-deployed for Bostonians. This is another example called for Philadelphia, used a smartphone app that had been used in Atlanta already, which allowed riders to track and classify their daily routes, daily routes, and submit them anonymized form to the Regional Planning Council, which can then use this data to better plan and improve on bike infrastructure. So those were two examples, or like the Brigades, the Tech Brigades are outside governments, are community groups that meet on a regular basis, and they also connect to government. But there's this second really nice approach, a program, of Code for America as well. It's the Fellowship Program, and the Fellowship Program gets teams, like little startup teams. There's a designer, a product manager, a developer. They really get into City Hall, so they work within government for a year. They collaborate on new apps, they foster new approaches, and tackle problem solving within City Hall. And what's really interesting about this is when they arrive, the challenges are often not predefined, because if a challenge is predefined, you can also go through a procurement process. So the really nice thing about this concept of progress is that it's a very open progress. So the teams arrive, and what they do is they interview city officials, they interview citizens to figure out, okay, where are their problems or challenges that could be solved by us. And what you can see here in the back is the team of Philadelphia, ready to roll up their sleeves. And let's look at Boston now, so at the outcome of a fellowship year, in Boston in 2011, the Fellowship team created this platform. It's a platform for parents, and it helps parents to answer the important question of which school is right for my kid. And they asked around in the city, and they really found that education is a big issue. The process is very fair, the process of school selection, but it's also fairly complicated. So they made this database, this system that enables parents to quickly search for a good school. You have a couple of filters, and what's really interesting about this example is that it's actually implemented, that it's an ongoing process, and it's really used by citizens in Boston to find the right school for their kids. And it's also promoted by the city of Boston. They also had wallpaper campaigns, big posters up in the city to show people, okay, this is an example. And if you want to go to the website, there's always the links in the corner. Check it out. It's a really nice example. And what's cool about Boston is that the city has its own innovation incubator. As all of you know, the MIT is in Boston as well, so there's a lot of knowledge there. And via this Boston mayor's office of new urban mechanics, internal agencies connect with outside entrepreneurs, with academia, and they pilot projects that address the resident needs. So they're collaborating with the MIT, with industry, and they already introduced several interfaces and systems. For example, an app called StreetBump. Look it up. It's a really fun app. And what's critical about this process, there were two researchers from the Bergman Center who studied the new urban mechanics office. And they said what's crucial is that the innovators, the people who have to take charge, who have to take care about innovation, that they are very close to the mayor's office, that they are not in some department far away, but that they are like, things move faster if you have the mayor or another high-level politician as a driver of your process. They followed them on Twitter. It's amazing. They just rolled out their fellowships for 2014, and they are doing great work. It's two people who are co-chairs of the office. And okay. So now you might think, okay, all right, after those examples in the US, it only works in the US. But let me give you an example that proves this assumption wrong. This is what you can see behind this text. It's a visual from the laboratory of what I see in Mexico City. And it's a lab that just started, I think, six months ago. And it's also a mayor's initiative. So the mayor decided, okay, he wants this space for innovation for a creative city in his city. And he started to lab. And here's a quote what the mayor says about the lab and its function. So the lab for the city will facilitate interaction between citizens and government to rethink the city together, generating a bank of ideas and solutions to build a city that supports and stimulates the imagination, a creative city. So what he did was he invited, or he invited 19 people. The lab has 19 staff from various fields, like artists, planners, technologists. They all have different backgrounds. And they also have six tech fellows, like similar to the fellowships. They work closely together with city departments. And this lab does not only work on code projects or digital projects. They also work on every day, like they walk into the streets and ask people, okay, you are a pedestrian in this big city. How do you feel? How could government help you help to improve your daily life? So they are also showcasing that wide open data is important, by the work of the city, together with the city departments. And they are drafting policy for an open government agenda. So let me show you, okay, the pictures you can see here is the Codeco Paralaseo.program, the team in the background. And they had this massive hack, the F hack day, where the city opened up 15 data sets. And I think 500 something developers wanted to come to the hack day. They unfortunately only had space for 300, but it's amazing. They get a huge city. And a lot of people are interested in helping with their skills to improve things in their city. And the lab gives them the chance, yeah, the lab is kind of this interaction space. And just very quickly, two examples, the fellows in the city have been working on. The one is Info Mercado. They are releasing the apps in one month, and they're going to present it to the mayor. So Info Mercado crowdsources information about Mercados in Mexico City and helps the government to collect this information. Because in such a big city, it's sometimes difficult to keep track or this, a lot of data and information the government just doesn't have. And the second app, as you can see here, are the famous Mexico City caps. And as some of you might know, it's always a bit tricky as a tourist to figure out whether a cap is official or not. So they built this really lightweight app that quickly tells you whether a cap is official or, yeah, or if it's an illegal cap. So just two very small approaches that kind of introduced this idea of open data of civic tech to the different city departments because they work together very closely with the fellows. Well, so the examples, Mexico City, now back to Ulm. Back to Ulm. So this doesn't work only in the United States and Mexico, but also in Ulm. And let me tell you a bit about how we approach this and what you could maybe pick up and adopt for your city if you want to engage civic tech there, please do. The last two years, we held annual barcams. You see a picture of one of them here. We do not have 300 people because Ulm is marginally smaller than Mexico City. But we were able to connect interested citizens, researchers, and government officials. Also back then, the city did not have a dedicated open data government website yet. So after having established contact to the city officials and having them release datasets as open data, we published it on our website just as an intermediary fix as raw downloads and through an API, just not as a permanent solution that we're going to have up and running for all time, but just as an intermediary fix until the city had an official open data web portal, which they have by now. Another quick fix we did. This is similar to the Boston School project just with a slightly worse user interface. This is the official tool for checking free kindergarten spots is just a glorified list more or less. So if you do not know that to Retellenstraße is in Ermingen, which is down there in the bus stops only five times a day, you'd probably sign up your kid for that and then have trouble. So this map here was our first step at creating a more user-friendly overview. And we hope we will be able to reintegrate that into the official kindergarten website to make this a lasting improvement. That's not just a hack, but expands on the official service by the city. So what you can do is you can click on, okay, your kid is in this and that age group, and then it filters you, okay, where are spots for your kid available? So the red crosses show that there's no free, yeah, that you cannot, like, that they closed, like, that it's not open for your kid. And the green things you can click and it directs you to the contact form of the kindergarten. I figure it's the same everywhere in Germany that the waiting lists are overbooked for ages if you need a kindergarten spot. To the right is Bavaria, this is uncharted territory. We're working on that. So this map is an example for the ghost you can achieve rather quickly. This is not a, this hasn't been a large-scale project. It was prototyped during Open Data Day. And one more thing that I'd recommend for city governments everywhere, our administration contact persons are officially allowed to join us on our meetings, which are usually on the weekends or during weekday evenings, and they're allowed to do so while being on the clock. So this makes for a very fast exchange. We've been able to get information and feedback very fast and in person, allowing us to develop and publish much faster than if we had to email back and forth through web formulas or whatever. And of course, we never quite left public transit. When we showed officials what could be possible through this experimental map, the city's transit authority was willing to let us help them create a process that allowed them to publish their schedule as Open Data. So examples like this here, this is a live map more or less that shows you where the bus is running. Actually, we have more buses than that. But examples like this can often serve as door openers to the administration, allowing them to better grasp the implication of what is possible if they open up data and implement government as a platform. So the last couple of slides. So what do those examples show us? What they show us is that collaboration is key. If this key map just like is somewhere around the internet and no one knows about it, it doesn't help the citizens of the city. So it's important that the difference they call this collaborative that government and government officials or people that work in the public administration, that they talk about the issues, the problems they are focusing on, and that they share insights and give this information to civic hacker community, for example, who builds concepts and prototypes like the Keter map or the real time map. And what they do is they reuse data. So they make use of data the city provides. So it's also very important that cities open up and that they provide resources for civic hackers. And there's also startups and companies that's important in this process because there is this point when you develop an app, it's fun in the beginning. So the civic hackers, most of them are volunteers. It's fun in the beginning. But then if you really have to implement it into the city systems, it kind of gets work. So it's really important to also have startups and companies and people who get paid on board to implement and productize apps from the community. So yeah, I really believe that via this collaboration, better civic tools could be provided. Also when it comes to data, like sometimes when cities provide data, it's hard to use for developers because they do not have an API yet or it's not in the right format. So that's something you can easily solve by getting in touch and by talking to one another. And there's already a couple of cities in Germany where this is happening. In Ulm, for example, in Cologne, in Berlin, we are in touch with the city of Berlin and officials from there. So this collaboration and getting in touch and talking to each other is very important. And we really like this concept of communities, connecting tech communities all over Germany. So that's why the Open Knowledge Foundation started a program in February called Code for Germany where it's a network of civic developers, of techies, designers, people interested in open data. And it's not a virtual network at all. It's actually a network of right now 11 Open Knowledge labs all across Germany and two more are incubating. So I'm sure there's a lab in the city near you. They meet on a regular basis. They work on great apps. It's not always the biggest, the super high-scale projects, but very easy kind of small-scale, quick wins. And if you check the Code for Germany website, you can also see on what the different labs are working on. And you can contribute by a GitHub. Find a lab near you and join. And yeah, what more can I say? Let's roll up our sleeves and get going. Thank you very much.
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