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DEREK SLATER: I think we'll get started.
Thanks, everybody, for coming.
My name's Derek Slater, and I'm a Policy Manager on
Google's Public Policy team.
We're having this panel because we get asked often,
what should developers be thinking about in terms of
public policy and the legal environment around them?
Rather than having us just talk to you about what Google
thinks about, we wanted to introduce you to a few other
people who are both working in the space advocating on behalf
of developers and startups, as well as helping developers and
startups engage with government to improve
government and civic services.
So with that, I'm going to turn it over to the leader of
your panel, Mike McGeary, who is the Co-founder and Director
of Engine Advocacy, a group that advocates on behalf of
startups in Washington.
Mike.
MIKE MCGEARY: Thanks, Derek.
Hi, everybody.
Thanks for coming out.
I will make you one promise as we start this whole thing.
I know that I am keeping you from the party, so I will be
prompt and we will make this worth your time.
So with that, I'm Mike McGeary.
I'm the Co-founder, Chief Political Strategist for an
organization called Engine Advocacy.
We're actually based here in San Francisco, and what we do,
as Derek said, is connect the startup community in the
United States to government at the federal,
state, and local level.
And work to build more efficient grassroots tools, so
that you, as a developer, an engineer, or as a founding
entrepreneur of a company that's growing can have more
of a stake and a voice in a debate.
I want to make this a little bit interactive, since it's
the end of the day.
So if you'll indulge me.
Tell me, how many people out there have ever taken some
sort of political action other than voting?
Everything from holding a sign, to writing a letter to
your congressman, to going to a city council meeting?
OK, that's a surprising amount of you.
And that's very good.
For those of you here from the US, how many of you
did that for SOPA?
OK.
That's good.
That's a lot of you.
I'm excited.
One of the reasons I ask that, and why I think it's really
good to gauge that is for those that remember what it
was like to go through this SOPA debate here in the US, it
was really the beginning of, I think, the next stage in
engaging people like you who design and build products
every day in the political process.
Because as your companies have grown, and have taken root in
places beyond San Francisco, and beyond New York, and in
cities all across the country, it's become more important for
members of Congress, for people at the White House, for
your mayor, for the governor, for people in the legislature,
in the regulatory environment, whatever it is, to hear your
perspective.
Because you have a distinct and important economic impact
on what happens to the wider economy.
That's a lot of what we do with Engine.
We're going to talk a little bit more about economic
impacts, and then about specific issues and areas that
a lot of this panel that are all much more learned and
smart than me.
So I'm going to let them talk in a minute.
What we're all working on and how you can get involved in
that and help shape that debate.
But from an overarching perspective, SOPA really
changed a lot of things for us.
It was the first time a lot of people all across the internet
stood up and said, wait a minute.
This has a material impact on me and my business.
And that's why this is important.
The internet, as I like to say a lot, especially with my
friends from Google, the internet is the greatest and
most positive force for the democratization of ideas in
the history of the world.
And we need to protect a free and open internet, not least
because we need to be able to exchange those ideas.
But because so many of you are building products and
applications and businesses and
companies on that internet.
A lot of them right here in the United States.
And those have an impact on your community, on am economic
level, on a social level.
Going even deeper than that into civic innovation, which
you're going to hear about in a second.
And I think that it's important to inject your voice
in a debate when--
if you have a two-person company and you're working out
of that proverbial garage, I promise that not one of you
would tell me your third hire was a
government relations counsel.
It's probably another developer.
And that's what you're supposed to do.
So we're going to try to make this easier.
We're going to give you some tools to get more involved,
more deeply, talk about some of the issues that are
happening here in the US.
For those of you who are here from overseas, we'll talk
about global issues as well, and want to hear from you and
some things like that.
There are some groups that are forming all around the world
to do this that we're friendly with, that we're working with.
So we'd love to hear and talk more about that.
Want to make it an interactive session.
We'll all going to do a little introduction.
I'm going to ask some questions to the panel.
And then we'll do a little Q&A. There are two
microphones, and they've asked me to have you stand up and
form an orderly queue so that we can get those questions on
audio and video for perpetuity to be shared forever.
But anyway, so thanks all for being here.
That's my quick introduction.
I want to kind of go down the panel and introduce you to who
we've got here.
First, to my left, we're really privileged to have Jen
Pahlka with us who leads Code for America.
My favorite part of what she does is that it really allows
you guys, developers, building companies, building
organizations--
with the nine seconds of free time you have every week, you
can jump in and help make your city smarter.
Or you can take some time and really dive in and do that.
She's going to talk more about that.
But talking a little bit about civic innovation and what that
can mean and how that can be an important step in building
stronger communities.
But Jen, tell us about Code for America and what you're
working on.
JEN PAHLKA: It's a bad idea to put me first.
MIKE MCGEARY: I know.
JEN PAHLKA: You want to do that?
OK.
MIKE MCGEARY: Do you not want me to do that?
JEN PAHLKA: Well, I always like to pick it up after the--
MIKE MCGEARY: OK.
JEN PAHLKA: But I can do that.
Do you want me to do that?
MIKE MCGEARY: Sure.
JEN PAHLKA: OK.
It is on.
OK.
Thank you for that very sweet introduction.
So I think you're going--
the reason I didn't want to go first isn't that I'm shy.
Though, I'm less shy every day these days.
I think we do sort of pick up where others leave off, in the
sense that the first interface that you are offered as a
citizen is a political interface.
And the first thing you're asked to do is vote.
You need to vote.
And then after you sort of vote, and then things don't
necessarily turn out exactly the way you'd like them to,
then you find other ways to advocate.
And I think these guys are all going to talk about some very
important ways that you need to advocate beyond voting.
Where we come in is actually beyond that.
So we're talking here about policy.
And there are a lot of ways in which policies
get written and passed.
And they may be even the ones that you wanted.
And then somehow, it goes wrong yet again.
Anyone hear--
Terry Gross-- actually, it wasn't Terry Gross, but it was
Fresh Air last week, the guest host talking about Dodd-Frank.
Frank-Dodd?
So we passed this piece of legislation that is supposed
to address some of the ills from the financial meltdown.
And a lot of people worked really, really hard to get
this thing passed.
And I think there were a lot of things right about it, some
things wrong about it.
But basically, it was sort of doing the right thing.
And then, in the couple of years since it's been passed,
it has now gone from the political realm into the
bureaucratic realm, to be implemented in government.
Those people that we call bureaucrats, and we often use
that word with a bit of contempt.
And I don't think that is serving us well.
They have the very difficult job of
actually making that real.
And in the years since it was passed, most of the
protections that were in that bill have been essentially
unwound and, as I said, defanged.
So there is this critical gap, I think, between the
intentions of policies and the outcomes of policies.
The reason I'm starting with that is I'll give you a firm
example from Code for America's work.
We came into the city of Philadelphia last year and we
had a team working with the planners
there on the 2035 Plan.
This is the strategic plan that will guide development
within Philadelphia for several years to come.
And they need input.
They have a policy that says they're supposed to get input
from a lot of different citizens
about particular things.
Things like food deserts, whether rail
lines should be extended.
But the policy allows people to come in
and give that feedback.
Well, they have to come in person at
6:30 on Thursday nights.
So the people that come and give feedback to that plan are
not the people that they need answers from.
They're not the people who live in food deserts.
They're not the people taking those rail lines.
And so the Code for America fellows--
these are people who take a year off.
In fact, one of them was a Googler who took a year off
and came to work with Code for America.
They built a very simple text messaging platform.
They put posters up around the city in
very particular places.
So if they were in a food desert it said, please tell us
where you shop for groceries.
Text your answer to this phone number.
A lot of people don't, unfortunately, have internet
access in their homes in Philadelphia.
And they don't even have smartphones, but they do have
phones that can do SMS.
At the end of these rail lines they said, would you take this
rail line if it were extended?
You'd text the answer in and it would text you
back another answer.
Well, what if you had to switch to a
different bus or something?
So you could get all this feedback.
That's making what you're doing actually meet the
intentions of the policy.
And I mean, there's a lot more to say about Code for America,
and I think about different ways that
we can affect policy.
But I thought I'd just start with that as an example of how
it's really important not just to think about politics and
voting as your interface to government.
We're really talking about getting under the hood.
The bureaucracy is the operating system of our
government.
We need to get down there, too.
DEREK SLATER: That's great.
Bureaucracy is an operating system.
There's a concept.
But no, it's absolutely true.
And the work that you guys have done-- that's a great
slice of life-- has been great.
We're going to come back.
I've got a couple of good questions there, but I want to
introduce next Kevin Callahan, who is one of you, in ways
that the three of us are not.
I often say that I should be barred from ever touching code
on anything that we do publicly or privately,
frankly, in websites that we build in my office.
But Kevin is the Technical Co-founder of a business
called MapMyFitness.
And he's down in Austin, Texas.
So why is he here on a policy panel?
And Kevin, talk a little bit about your experience and why
it matters to you as an entrepreneur owning a growing
business, continuing to grow in Austin.
So not in Silicon Valley, not in New York.
Why it's important do you think for someone like you to
be involved in policy?
KEVIN CALLAHAN: Thank you, Mike.
So my name's Kevin.
I started my first website in 2005 because there was a joke
that I was too cheap to buy a GPS watch.
And since then, we've grown to about 100 people, 50 of which
are in Austin, Texas.
About 30 in Denver.
About 20 across the country.
And I had always thought that I was a small businessperson
without a real voice in terms of some of the policy that
affects me.
And so the reason I'm here is, is I met Mike about a year
ago, and I learned about this great organization called
Engine Advocacy.
And there were three reasons that this organization really
sort of compelled me, A, to be a member, but B, to sort of be
up here on stage talking to you about my
experiences with Engine.
First was need.
As a technical co-founder, as someone who was trying to grow
a business, we would eventually
run into some hurdles.
We kind of high-fived each other when we got our first
lawsuit and we were named next to Facebook
and Google and MapQuest.
Pretty soon, those high-fives turned to tears as the
lawsuits keep coming.
But it was almost a rite of passage.
You sort of get famous enough to get sued.
And now it's getting involved in pushing through
legislation, like the America Invents Act, which radically
changed the system.
There's still a lot of work to be done with the SHIELD Act,
which really puts the onus on the loser of a lawsuit paying
your legal fees.
We've sort of fixed some of these problems and it's
through Engine that I really learned how to interact and
get my voice heard more.
The second was confidence.
I don't think prior to meeting Mike and hearing his stories
about how he's worked with other startup founders, other
technology companies my size, that I would be able to sit
down at a table at dinner with Senator Cornyn, who's one of
our senators in Texas, with his legislative director.
Because they wanted to hear about my opinions about
legislation, which was a really amazing experience.
Mike was instrumental, or Engine Advocacy was
instrumental in bringing Senator Moran to the table at
South by, and sitting next to him and having him talk about
his Startup Act 3.0, which really tries to address some
of the broken things about our immigration system and our
visa system.
And then the third is education.
Like all of you, we get inundated with news.
And how many different websites can you go to kind of
really figure out the issues and figure out what matters?
And Engine Advocacy really boils down the issues to what
really matter to us as developers, us as business
leaders, us as entrepreneurs.
And so it's really those three issues that I'm gladly able to
come and sit up here in front of you guys and just tell you
how much I love what Mike and Engine is doing.
MIKE MCGEARY: He's not a plant, I promise you.
Though, as I often say when we're on panels together, I'm
just going to give you all the money in my pocket.
So thanks, Kevin.
You touched on a couple issues there that I think lead us
into you, Jeremy, in that patent is something with
America Invents, and now SHIELD and some other things
that I think a lot of people in this room have either run
afoul of a patent troll.
Or if you haven't yet, as Kevin says, maybe you haven't
graduated to the big boy level of getting sued yet.
So hey, good luck.
But we're trying to fix that, too.
And we're going to need a lot of developer voices on that.
The other one is immigration.
And there's a woman named Lesa Mitchell, who works for the
Kauffman Foundation, who is awesome.
And also says, if you asked an entrepreneur what their top
five policy area issues are-- and I'm relatively certain for
those of you from the US in this room, you probably would
agree with this.
If you asked for the top five answers on the board, the
first four would be immigration and the fifth one
would probably be patent.
But it's those first four is immigration.
All the way down to my left is someone who's actually doing
something about it.
Is more than talk is action, and comes from a place where
action means a lot more than words.
And that's New York City.
Jeremy Robbins is a policy advisor to Mayor Michael
Bloomberg of New York and runs the partnership for A New
American Economy.
I'm not going to read your whole bio.
I'll let you do that.
But he's also running something called the March for
Innovation, which is a great way to get involved on what's
happening with the immigration debate here in the United
States and try to get more entrepreneurial people that
are already here to be able to stay and start business and
work for technology companies.
So Jeremy, tell us a little bit about what you're doing in
March and things like that.
JEREMY ROBBINS: Thanks.
Thank you, Mike.
I'd be delighted to.
And so let me start where Mike started, which is by asking a
couple questions.
And I think the first one is, how many of you in this
audience, by a show of hands, were born out
of the United States?
Keep your hands up.
How many of you have at least one parent who was born
outside of the United States?
And now, how many of you work at a company where at least
one key employee was born outside the United States?
It's basically all of you.
And there are two good reasons to ask that.
First is because it makes it really, really obvious about
the economic importance of immigration.
You are the cutting-edge developers in the most
important innovation industry, or one of the most important
innovation industries in our economy.
And every single one of you depends on immigrants or are
an immigrant yourself.
And if you look at what those statistics are nationally, you
get 40% of our Fortune 500 companies were founded by an
immigrant or a child of an immigrant.
If you look at innovation, what's coming out of our top
universities, more than 3 out of every 4 patents from our
top 10 universities have at least one immigrant inventor
on the patent.
I mean, the numbers are staggering when you think
about immigration.
But the second reason I asked you to put up your hands is
because it means that almost all of you have had first-hand
experience with our immigration system, which I
assume also means you realize how broken it is.
That if you want to come to America, you want to start a
company and you want to hire American workers, there's no
visa for you.
But if you want to come here on a temporary
high-skilled visa--
well, it turns you're out of luck because the year's supply
of high-skilled visas was exhausted in
five days this year.
You're going to have to wait till next April.
Immigration reform is something that has been so
fundamentally important for our economy for decades, but
we haven't gotten.
And the reality is that politics moves in moments and
this is a moment.
Now, we have an immigration system that was started, by
and large, the way it exists today in 1965 when we were
watching black and white TVs.
And it makes absolutely no sense in a global economy.
But this is a moment for change.
This is a moment where there is a comprehensive immigration
bill right now in the Senate, a bill that has a very
legitimate chance of passage but has a very, very difficult
road to becoming law.
And I think there's a natural tendency for people to say,
well, what can I do?
That I'm just individual.
I don't know a senator.
I don't go to DC.
I don't understand how politics works.
I think DC is broken.
I don't think there's anything that my voice can do.
But that couldn't be further than the truth.
This bill is not going to pass unless people stand up.
And people can stand up because people
care what you think.
You can speak collectively.
And especially when you talk about social media and new
ways of communication, you have an outsize
voice in this debate.
So that's why we started the March for Innovation, which is
going to be the largest ever virtual march on DC.
And we've been very proud to partner with Engine Advocacy
since the very beginning.
This march is going to kick off next
Wednesday and Thursday.
There's going to be a huge two-day digital storm where
we're going to get leaders from politics, from
technology, from media, from entertainment, from sports, to
jump across every social media platform, from Google
Hangouts, to Twitter Town Halls, from Reddit AMAs.
Creating a storm everywhere you're going to look, driving
people to marchforinnovation.com, where
they can sign up to with one click, use Twitter and
Facebook to call on their senators for reform.
And we'll going to have a lot of star power to lead this,
but the only way this works is if we build an army.
Is if people stand up individually.
People tell their friends.
People tweet about it.
People get involved.
And it's going to be a great success.
It's going to be a great success in no small part
because of Engine Advocacy and because a lot of other groups
that have encouraged people to get involved.
That have encouraged people to know that you can actually
make a difference very easily.
And now that you all have nice Chromebooks, you can actually
do it right now.
Or you can do it from your mobile device.
You can go to marchforinnovation.com right
now and sign up.
And then there are tools to tell your friends, to queue up
your call for support, to get involved, to tell your story,
and to be active so that next week when we start this march,
we can have a huge difference.
And we will have a huge difference, but it all starts
with signing up.
And so what we need more of is we need more
people to get engaged.
We need more organizations, like Engine Advocacy, which
are absolutely on the cutting edge of both grassroots
organizing and of policy thinking.
And so I thank you, Mike.
And I thank you, Google, for having me here today, and for
this panel.
Because this is how change starts.
So thank you.
MIKE MCGEARY: This is really not a program length
commercial for Engine Advocacy.
I promise.
But thank you, Jeremy.
That's very nice.
I want to stay with you for a minute because I want to ask--
we're sitting here at I/O. These are the best developers
and engineers in the world.
So a virtual march.
OK.
What can people who are much more technically savvy than
you or I do to be particularly effective during this and
moving beyond into the wider immigration fight through all
of our platforms on this?
And how do you think that could translate into sort of
sustained movement to get people involved as well?
JEREMY ROBBINS: It's a great question.
And I think a lot of it, I'm the wrong person to talk to
because I think I should be learning more from you in the
sense that, if you look at why SOPA/PIPA was such a big
success and--
I know I saw a lot of hands in this audience that played a
big role in it.
It was a success because people got creative.
People got active.
And it wasn't just Wikipedia shutting down.
I think too often one of the problems of SOPA/PIPA is that
the lesson that seems to be learned, at least in the
media, is that Wikipedia shut down for a day, and therefore,
the bill stopped.
That's not what happened.
What happened is that people, like Michael McGeary and
people like you in the audience went crazy.
You looked at what your talents were.
Whether it was creating a Tumblr storm, or getting viral
videos, or whatever you were doing, it was figure out ways
to make it easier for people to engage, to tell their story
in different ways, and to get people involved.
And I think that, when we have the smartest developers in the
world, many of them sitting in this room.
It's about, what can you do of your own initiative?
How can you--
maybe it's something as simple as a Vine
video or animated GIF.
Maybe it's building a web tool.
Maybe it's mocking up a website or taking the widget
that you can download at marchforinnovation.com and
iterating on that.
But there are a lot of ways that we need smart people
coming up with creative and smart solutions.
And I think this is where it starts, is rooms like this.
MIKE MCGEARY: I think that's one of the things that we
really work to do, is create a platform where creative people
can go and do exactly that.
Because you and I, and the rest of us, we're not the
smart ones all the time.
We're trying to create the platform and get more people
involved to do exactly that.
I want to turn to Kevin for a minute.
I want you to talk a little bit more about your
experience, having dinner with John Cornyn's legislative
director, as a businessperson, who's a constituent as well.
And I want to use that as a frame to talk about some of
the issues that you see coming down the horizon that are
going to be specific to where you see as a business going
beyond immigration and things like that.
What would they have been most interested in?
Take us inside that conversation a little bit.
And what was it scary going in and scary coming out, or was
it productive?
KEVIN CALLAHAN: No.
So it was tremendously scary going in.
Here was this gentleman that flew in from DC.
We spent the day touring Dell and AMD and all these large
Fortune 50 companies, or Fortune 500
companies here in Austin.
But then he just wanted to unwind with a beer, talking to
someone who just sort of is trying to grow a company.
And to understand what issues were important to me.
And questions he was asking was, A, Startup Act.
How does that really sort of impact kind
of my role, my job?
And for me what it is, is I live in Austin.
I have a growing company.
We doubled our size over the past year.
I can't hire engineers.
If any of you want to move to Austin, Texas, we're actually
hiring Python engineers.
MIKE MCGEARY: The barbecue is really good.
KEVIN CALLAHAN: Yeah, the barbecue is really good.
MIKE MCGEARY: Hot in the summer.
KEVIN CALLAHAN: But yeah, so the Immigration Act speaks
volume-- to me, as a person, I actually grew up--
I lived in 12 different countries growing up.
My father was State Department.
I have friends all over the world that never had the
opportunity to come and work here because of our system.
So the JOBS Act or Startup Act was really important to me.
Another really important thing with me is--
or another topic we talked about was the Electronic
Communication Privacy Act.
It's this 25-year-old act that was put in place to deal with
electronic information.
And what that basically means now is the government can take
your emails, if they say, well, we've already assumed
you've read them, so then we can use them, and use them
against you without any sort of legal recourse.
So it's an outdated system.
But what that does to me, as a small business owner, who a
lot with location data, who deals a lot with health data--
not health data, but about you, because of the health and
fitness apps we build, that really sort of puts a burden
on us in terms of being able to comply should that ever
happen to us.
And so the idea is, well, let me start talking about it now.
Let me have the platform to talk to a senator's
legislative aide, so that if he ever gets in a position to
make a stance one way or another, I know my voice has
sort of been added to that conversation.
MIKE MCGEARY: And ECPA, Electronic Communications
Privacy Act, in a lot of ways-- we talked after SOPA,
the next one was CISPA.
And that was about cyber security.
In a lot of ways, ECPA actually has even more, as
it's written now before it's being amended, is more
detrimental consequences from a Fourth Amendment standpoint
in the United States, in terms of search and seizure of
online and private materials.
And so it's good to see that they're started to get wind of
that and starting to ask questions as well.
And hopefully, it's more than it's been
cast in some circles.
Which is, well, if we change this, you'll be able to share
what you watch on Netflix on Facebook.
Because that also stops you from doing that, oddly enough.
But there are some really interesting Fourth Amendment
implications there.
So it's good to hear they're working on that.
OK, Jen.
I know you didn't want me to come to you first, so I
definitely want to come back to you now and talk more about
the culture shift you're seeing in cities around the
country and some of the things that you've been able to do
there, first of all.
But in a two-part question, because you guys made a really
brilliant hire recently in hiring Catherine Bracy to do
Code for All.
If you guys don't follow @cbracy on Twitter, make sure
you're doing that.
I'll get her a bunch of followers right there.
She's running Code for All and helping with
international strategy.
I know we've got a lot of international
people in the room.
So if you could touch on that, but then also just generally
like, where you've seen your own advocacy take you, overall
and broadly?
And thinking about what Code for American can do from that
perspective.
JEN PAHLKA: OK.
So Catherine, if you're watching, we'll count that as
an announcement of Code for All.
MIKE MCGEARY: Sorry.
JEN PAHLKA: It's cool.
She was hoping someone would.
MIKE MCGEARY: OK.
JEN PAHLKA: Agree, she's brilliant.
You asked a couple questions in there.
One is about the culture.
And I think that whatever question you asked, it gives
me an opportunity to make a good point, which is that Code
for America is about--
we create apps.
We work with governments, local governments, on building
these apps.
The real outcome is that we're using lean startup techniques.
We're using user-centered design.
We're walking them through a process that's vastly
different from how technology is usually bought or built
within government.
And the process that they go through with us is actually
more important than the outcomes.
The outcomes have been successful and so it's been
fun to be able to talk about those.
But what we talk about less often, because it's sort of
the follow-up question is, what happens when somebody
who's a technology person in government goes through this
process and sees that it is possible to create an app in
three months, that if it'd gone through their procurement
process would have taken--
these are not random numbers.
This is really from one particular sample and we have
many like them.
A three-month app that we did that they said would have
taken at least 2 years and cost at least $2 million.
So that creates the political will for change.
And the real outcome here is the culture virus effect of
having someone go, oh my god, we can do this differently.
I'm going to go talk to a whole bunch of people, other
people who are on city government and get them
excited about a different way of doing things.
And to bring it back a little bit though, I think to the
sort of advocacy piece, I'm talking about the flip side of
what you guys are talking about here, which is that the
people in, especially federal government, they think they
know technology.
They talk to a lot of companies that do technology.
And there's increasingly some great people, great companies
that are serving the government.
But there is an entrenched group of companies there and
they're often not the kinds of companies that
you people are starting.
And so they don't know these issues.
And they're not getting the benefit of the innovative
approaches that we see in the startup community.
If the open question here is, what is it?
How can your startup influence policy?
This is the biggest ask we can make.
And I'm not asking for your year of your time as a fellow,
though we would love that too.
And we are recruiting for fellows for 2014.
And it's an amazing, amazing experience.
But the biggest ask, really because that's a one-year time
limited thing, is start a company that serves
government.
There are an enormous number of opportunities to do that.
Think about the way we regulate right now and
contrast it with how Matt Cutts regulates spam and
search quality results.
We take three years to change the law when--
by the time we change the regulation,
it's completely outdated.
We need algorithmic regulation.
There are companies that should be built around that.
I don't want to go on because this could take all day.
But there's a million great companies that need to be
built that can serve government.
And I know most of you think about it, like no way in hell.
I'm not going to go through that
two-year procurement process.
I want to make great product.
I don't want to work on paperwork.
But the thing you need to understand
is that that's changing.
It may be changing slowly and me may be in the
beginning of it.
But part of this culture change is the will to do
procurement differently, to open the government
contracting system up to a whole new set of vendors.
There's a great project that was just
released called Procurio.
Or I think it was originally called RFP-EZ, which allows
your average 30-person web shop to bid on a federal
website contract.
Clay Johnson released this video recently where he talked
about the fact that the president just announced
initiative to map the human brain.
And it's going to cost a hundred million dollars.
We routinely spend something like 150--
in this case, $188 million on one government website.
Do you think you guys could do a decent government website
for less than $188 million?
I think you probably could.
That's our money.
That's our taxpayer money.
And the benefit of it is if you get in there and you're
working in government, then our leaders in government
actually have an understanding of the issues that you're
dealing with, too.
So it all comes together.
And this was a very long ad, which I will wrap up for our
Code for America Accelerator, which is accepting
applications through the end of this month.
But there's a lot of different ways that you can do it.
That's one important one.
MIKE MCGEARY: Well, and the most interesting thing for me
with what Clay did with RFP-EZ, which is
now Procurio, is--
that was a government program.
He was a presidential innovation fellow.
He worked with Todd Park, the US Chief Technology Officer.
It was in the White House.
It was a very much, very structured program that's now
been spun out and has become it's own private entity.
That's starting to now bleed out and help people.
I've said this before I think, but government's really good
at spending $100 million or a billion
dollars of taxpayer money.
They're not really good at spending $25,000.
And that's where, especially in the kind of products that
you guys are all building, that's where a lot of the meat
can really happen, where the rubber can meet the road.
JEN PAHLKA: And by the way, two of the Code for America
teams this year, in addition to the other work they're
doing with their city partners, are
implementing Procurio.
So we tie between what happens at the local level and what
happens at the federal level.
MIKE MCGEARY: That's great.
That's encouraging to hear.
We've got a few minutes left.
So if there are questions, I'm going to encourage you to run
up to-- oh, there are questions.
This is fantastic.
So let's do that.
And then, we'll take a couple questions and have some
closing remarks.
But I'll start at the front microphone, the gentleman in
the green shirt.
AUDIENCE: So I have to-- is this on?
So I have to piggyback on that last conversation.
So from the opposite side of the spectrum, so I'm a
technology professional within the government, having the
problem of going through the acquisition challenges of both
the FAR and the DFARS and other types of legislation,
it's very, very difficult, even if you work with the open
source advocates across the community, to push out
capabilities so that you can get people to work on it.
You can't get the money out to be able to take multimillion
dollar programs and actually make them efficient with
smaller teams across the US or otherwise.
Do you know what's going on?
So I haven't heard of that particular initiative.
Are there other things to be looking into that there's
actually top cover of actually changing the implementation of
the DFARS and so forth?
JEN PAHLKA: Federal Acquisition
Regulation, is that FAR?
AUDIENCE: So that's the FAR.
And then there's other nuanced iterations of that.
JEN PAHLKA: So this, to me again, this is the awkward--
you guys can answer, too.
This is the operating code that is sort of bloated, that
we need to get at.
And we're not there yet.
I think where this movement is, is proving that it can
work in a couple of limited cases.
So Procurio really was built just for one use case just to
start, which was a sort of basic website.
It's got content.
It has a little bit of interactivity.
It's probably pulling some data from some database.
And anybody here could probably do this.
What I would suggest--
so it starts to create that conversation, which leads to
OK, these are laws and regulations
that need to be changed.
But I would recommend for you, in the situation that you're
at, to look at the Presidential Innovation
Fellows program.
That's the way that Todd Park, this federal CTO, and Steve
VanRoekel, the CIO, are trying to pull these sort of
over-complicated processes together and say, we're going
to create a little space here for innovation.
We're going to take this process and we're going to
say, we can do something with this in six months.
We're going to have something that works at the end of six
months, whether it kills us--
even if it kills us.
And then, from there you kind of build back into, OK, how
does this now become a sustainable thing that works
differently from the bloated process that went before?
Does that help?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
Again, it's one of those things where there's been a
lot of talk about this for a number years across the actual
government circles.
Whether it be through different
CIO shops, or otherwise.
And curious how it's progressing from the actual
community side outside of that.
JEN PAHLKA: There's no one--
I'll try to be brief.
There is no one effort that can fix everything.
I think, to your point before about a platform that has
emergent outcomes, the best thing that we know how to do--
and I wish we knew how to fix this--
is to tell the stories that create the political will for
change and create the environment and opportunity
for other people to stand up and say, this needs to change.
We're going to do this, too.
KEVIN CALLAHAN: Yeah.
And I'm a little bit of an outsider in terms of
government process and regulations, but I know with
Obama's executive order last week mandating that all
government data is accessible, machine readable, et cetera.
Depending on what your need, Code for America actually has
brigades in cities.
And so if it's something that's really important to you
and that you think you make a big difference, contact the
local brigade and see when their next hackathon is.
Because potentially, they could prototype something out,
if whatever you're doing has that type of data available
out in the wild.
AUDIENCE: OK.
MIKE MCGEARY: I want to go to the back microphone.
We just do have a few minutes, so we'll keep going.
Thanks for your question.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, thanks.
My name is Mike, and I work in political data in DC.
So I might be one of the bad people here.
But one of the common threads that you all were talking
about was it seems that there's a big failure of being
able to connect citizens to the people who can make
something actually happen, whether or not it was the
bureaucrats, or the people crafting legislation, or the
people who will end up voting on legislation in the end,
trying to persuade them.
My question is, how do we solve that?
MIKE MCGEARY: I want to just briefly say-- and I guess
somehow, even growing up a Red Sox fan, I turned into an
eternal optimist.
But I would say that more than this being a moment of
failure, it's a moment of opportunity.
That with the proliferation of tools on the internet and
platforms that have been built, there are numerous
different ways for you now to take action to make that
system better.
Whether it's being a presidential innovation fellow
at that level, or working with your Code for America brigade,
or taking action on a political issue, or working
with your local police department to help them
understand the data that they have that they don't
even know they have.
And how it can be cross-referenced with public
health data to help make your city stronger.
There are ways to do all of this on the ones and zeros
level, and to build applications off that in ways
they haven't before.
Procurio is a great way to think about it.
And that now you can build that and the city can purchase
it and use it.
Imagine that.
They just haven't been able to do that before.
So less a moment of failure, more a moment of opportunity.
I don't know if anybody else has thoughts there?
KEVIN CALLAHAN: Yeah.
On a local level, you can actually make more of an
impact than you think you can.
Because local level, you don't necessarily have to solve a
federal issue if something is local for you.
So just go to a city council meeting and just start seeing
who's talking about what.
And just get involved.
JEN PAHLKA: We use the word "conversation" a lot.
And I think it's important-- we're talking in some cases
about getting our elected leaders to listen to us and
our bureaucrats to listen to us.
And the other side of it is, are we listening to the data?
Are we listening?
Are we playing that back?
And I think your example of police data's a perfect one.
But there's a bunch of others.
That data is there.
When your local IT guy in your town actually puts that data
out there, it is your job to go listen to that data.
They are opening a conversation with you.
Show up.
Look at it.
Do something with it.
We talk about, at Code for America, that we're creating
interfaces to government that are simple, beautiful, and
easy to use.
That actually is your role to create those interfaces
because the average person goes and looks at that data
and goes, what the WTF?
I don't know this stuff is.
But that is the start of a conversation and we have to
meet those people halfway.
MIKE MCGEARY: I think we've got time for one more, and
then we'll all be here for a couple of minutes afterwards.
You can grab us individually.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I'm from Latin America.
I'm from Colombia, actually.
Well, our governments also have a couple of stupid, and
crazy regulations like SOPA and PIPA.
It's everywhere in Latin America, Colombia, Venezuela,
Mexico, Chile.
If they copy, and just they want to copy, even they are
not conscious about what they are doing.
Will you suggest to create like a union for Latin
American countries of people like you increasing the
consciousness of entrepreneurs, business
professionals, and general users on the internet from
this kind of movement from our governments that just want to
facilitate the [INAUDIBLE]
and censorship of our internet in Latin America?
MIKE MCGEARY: There are groups like that that are starting
all over the world every day.
We work particularly with groups like Coalition for a
Digital Economy in the UK.
We just did something with France Digitale in Western
Europe, this week as well.
And we work with groups in Europe, Latin America, all
around the world that are starting to get together.
They're in a little bit nascent stage.
And of course, with the individual political
situations in a lot of these countries, that changes the
focus and the ability to engage in a lot of ways.
But yeah, I would encourage you to do exactly that.
Find the startups founders that understand that there is
a direct impact, and that they have that impact on the
economic forces at play in government, on communities
themselves, and on government at the highest level with
being able to do things like make bureaucracies more
efficient and work for the people more.
And if you get those people together, and you're able to
galvanize them in a way that allows them to think about
these issues and then take action, that you really can
have an impact, no matter where you are.
Again, that's a little bit of the optimist in me, but there
are groups like that that are forming every day.
If there's not one in Colombia yet, I think you
ought to start it.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
MIKE MCGEARY: So two quick things.
We got to wrap it up there.
They're going to kick us out.
Thank you all for being here.
We'll stick around and answer questions individually.
And I am doing office hours tomorrow, if you really want
to talk to me for any reason.
I'm at Google Developers something.
Google Developers Group at 11 o'clock.
And I will answer any random questions you have, including
about Red Sox history and optimism.
But thank you all for being here.
I hope this was informative, and enjoy the rest of I/O.