A reflection on Hackathons in 2011

While I am reflecting, I thought it a good time to consider hackathons. In 2011 the term "hackathon" became common and many cities all over the world opened datasets for developers to build applications around. Below are some lesson's learned to better position a hackathon to a government context:

Lesson learned #1: A hackathon is a means to an end, not the end.
Hackathons are often talked about as if the event itself were the goal, overlooking the actual content of the event. A hackathon is not a box on the "is my government being innovative" checklist and it is not a thing. But rather, a hackathon is a method or an approach, a way of developing solutions. If a hackathon is to be part of the government problem-solving toolkit then, like any other method, it should be documented and improved upon. Watch out for Matt Chwierut's thesis on the Summer of Smart hackathon series!

Lesson learned #2: Don't just make solutions, spend time identifying problems.
Government has to calculate its risk carefully, has to think long-term, and balance numerous social and economic metrics. As such, problems need to be clearly identified and scoped. I have seen few hackathons that clearly state the problem to be solved. The result is usually lots of solutions for niche end-user problems. While this is useful and has produced some great solutions, knowing where the highest impact could be made might help to align solutions with problems faced by many as opposed to a few.

More focus on problem definition would also better identify communities to solve the problem, thus creating richer solutions. For example, a hackathon to generate solutions for patient-centered healthcare might be of interest to medical providers, heathcare recipients, service designers, coders, and healthcare or ICT NGOs, as opposed to a hackathon with a bunch of disparate datasets, likely the attendees would primarily be software developers assuming a need and designing the service delivery in addition to coding the app.

Lesson learned #3: It doesn't end at the hackathon
As much as it doesn't begin with the hackathon, it also doesn't end there. A hackathon as a means, not an end, highlights that there needs to be a driver and a motivator. The driver is a good problem definition (see #2 above). The motivator, considers what are the incentives to ask smart and busy people to work together for free to solve a civic challenge? Altruism, public service, and a mission-driven ask can go far (consider the development of Linux being done by an unorganized unpaid workforce who challenged one of the largest corporations of the world), but how about being rewarded with access to an incubator, something like the Y Combinator or  Code for America's Accelerator to shape your 2-day concept into a working prototype, a product, a business? Or working with the City to deploy your prototype as a pilot? And if a civic hackathon could spin out start-ups, products, and entrepreneurs, in addition to creating some really great apps, then we have demonstrated a model, not only for problem solving, but also for economic growth!

As a quick mention, I think the Summer of Smart hackathons did a great job diversifying the community of problem solvers and the Code for America Iconathons did a tremendous job scoping the challenge around different topics.

2012 will be a very exciting time to shape the hackathon into a sustainable approach to civic problem solving. Here in SFgov, we are using these lessons learned to inform the design of a platform called ImproveSF that will launch in early 2012. By book-ending a hackathon with ImproveSF on one-side and an incubator on the other-side, then we have a better chance of aligning solutions to actual problems and making those solutions sustainable by generating new business!

2011 Two Birds with One Stone Innovation Award: Smog-eating buildings, community WIFI, parklets

I once lived in LA and being new to the city and to the West Coast, I was struck by two things:

1. The brownouts 
2. How attractive everyone was

Ding, a lightbulb went off. I thought, why not use the energy generated in the MANY gyms throughout LA to power the grid to prevent the brownouts? In essence, leverage one system for the benefit of another, making something larger than the sum of its parts. Since then, this concept has always been a central goal in my work (old: my mobile phone pollution monitor and new: SFGov) but also a factor, which I think to be important for efficient problem solving.

As such, I present my first ever "Two Birds with One Stone Innovation Award" for 2011! I am not awarding products or companies, but rather innovative concepts. The nominees are:

#1 Smog-eating buildings

Buildings coated with a material that "eats" harmful gas and chemical pollutants. The real secret of this amazing phenomenon is a form of titanium dioxide. This is not new and was first talked about in 2008 but the reason it's on my 2011 list is because Alcoa (a large aluminum manufacturing company) is coating tiles with it, enabling building-scale pilots! Imagine: all the buildings in a city that usually just sit there and consume energy could now give back and clean the air?! Titanium oxide doesn't stop at building tiles but could be used on sidewalks and roads. And then we have pollution-eating cities! And then...what if the reduction could be measured to enable buildings/cities to trade or offset other costs? Think carbon trading by quantifying sequestration except with smog. 

#2: Community WIFI

Even though infrastructure, especially wireless is usually outshined by its smartphone counterparts, I think a few ideas surfaced in 2011 that could create entirely new markets by creatively leveraging and converging existing infrastructures:

• WIFI Whitespaces: Imagine trying to blanket SF in WIFI? How many access points would be required? The answer: Alot. Why? Because WIFI uses 2.4GHz frequency, this band is fairly short range relative to say, the spectrum auctioned off to mobile phone operators. Now imagine that access points could make use of a higher band usually reserved for TV (long range). And tada, WIFI on Redbull! Thus, SF would need only "a few" as opposed to "alot" of access points. This has been talked about for a while, but recently the FCC has approved a trial deployed in North Carolina. And Ofcom (the UK communications regulator) promises whitespace networks by 2013. Microsoft is making routers, Google is interested, Bay area companies are leading the charge...how does SFgov get involved? 
• Wireless lightbulbs: So it turns out that the Visible portion of the Electromagnetic (EM) spectrum is huge AND that there are lots of lightbulbs in the world. So what if Visible light from a lightbulb could transmit data? Think: your remote control sends a single datastream using the infrared portion of the EM spectrum telling the TV what to do (volume down, channel up, etc). Now, enter Visible light and we have many datastreams in parallel and at high speeds! So many possibilities with transmitting data through LEDs: think about all the lights in a city and how they could become tunnels filled with real-time information about the city. How you could stand in a beam of light with your smartphone and "catch" the datastream. How the stop light could transmit data to your car telling you there is a traffic jam ahead...so many possibilities. Thank you Harold Haas for this amazing work!
• 802.11s: An opensource wireless protocol was adopted by IEEE in 2011 and driven by local SF company CozyBit. 11s would enable different proprietary devices to create a multihop mesh network. Imagine "the last mile" (or maybe more appropriately called "the last block") being connected through a bunch of personal devices working together to blanket a WIFI signal in the area of its perimeter!

#3: Parklets

San Francisco has been at the forefront of transforming under-utilized spaces into shared citizen places. These little parks that were formally parking spots have made us reconsider the "public" of public space and how a little effort can go a long way. This movement began in 2005 when the San Francisco-based art and design studio, Rebar, co-opted a metered parking space for use as a park. Now in 2011 the city installed a 2-block parklet on Powell street in Union Square through the Pavement to Parks program. With the support of the city, this subversive art installation has become a standard revitalization tool! For 2012, I think we can predict more parklets and some experimentation around other types of marginal spaces (ie. under freeways, potholes ;)  And if you haven't seen a parklet or would like to tour the many in SF see this article in the SF Chronicle

All the nominees are awesome and I am very enthusiastic about what they will enable in 2012. But for now, my 2011 Two Birds with One Stone Innovation Award goes to:

#2. Wireless and the built environment

Why? By converging digital and physical infrastructures we have a third space: a responsive and cognitive city. With so much speculation about the growth of cities and how we expand, perhaps growing horizontally and vertically is no longer the answer - maybe we expand through this third space. What if we don't make 'bigger cities' but we make 'smarter cities'? A smarter city would share, be aware of itself, adapt to change, be customizable to the diverse needs of its population, be community-centered, be open, transparent, invest in platforms not products to grow opportunities.

By leveraging our built environment to expand, extend, and make new wireless opportunities, whole new markets are carved that make way for new products, services, and expertise - thus jobs, in addition to the enabling access for sensor networks and communities. I look forward to considering the role of the City in making wireless access pervasive and what it could mean for making a smarter San Francisco in 2012.     

Hello SF (from the MCPC2011 Conference)

I attended the 2011 World Conference on Mass Customization, Personalization, and Co-Creation (MCPC 2011), where this year focused on “Bridging mass customization and open innovation”. The conference brought together industry, academia, and government to present business models, research, projects, and papers that explore, explain, and implement concepts of Open Innovation and Mass Customization.

You might be asking what is mass customization? What is open innovation? And why is this relevant to government and to the SF Department of Technology?



Mass customization is a business concept that explains a relationship between producers and consumers where customers co-create products and services with sellers. Industry examples are Caseable, Vastram, Zazzle, Gemvara, while a seminal work on the concept is:

• Pine, B. Joseph II, “Mass Customization - The New Frontier in Business Competition,” Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Mass., 1993.
• For more contemporary info, see Frank Pillar's blog, one of the conference organizers and foremost authorities on the topic.

Open Innovation is a concept that considers leveraging partners to co-create products and services, as opposed to closed innovation, where organizations work in isolation. This framework is used in R&D departments in Ford, HP, Daimler, Xerox to name a few, is utilized in government agencies such as NASA, USPTO, EU Commission, and in cities such as NYC, Vienna, Montreal, and of course San Francisco. The concept was developed by Henry Chesbrough (University of California, Berkeley director of the HAAS business school program in Open Innovation, his newest work is:

• Chesbrough, Henry, “Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era,” Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA, 2011.

Why is Open Innovation relevant to government in general and to the SF Department of Technology in particular?

Limited resources. Vibrant community.

Like most public non-profit agencies, the City of San Francisco is often constrained by resource availability, budgets, and red tape. Needing to validate the spending of tax payer money is tricky when investing in technology, primarily because of Gordon Moore and his painfully accurate law that predicts the exponential growth of technology - often times proving a solution obsolete soon after (sometimes even before) it is launched.

That said, we in SF have one of the strongest technology development communities in the world. Yes the world, that is not an exaggeration. And not only is this community technologically savvy, but it is also entrepreneurial and civic-minded. There is certainly no shortage of citizens willing to volunteer their expertise (think CodeForAmerica) and organizations with formalized policies for supporting those efforts (think Google 20%) along with organizations having their own support for social development projects (think Google.org).

So the big question: How do we connect demand (civic challenges and limited resources in government) to supply (vibrant community) to define and solve civic challenges?

This conference was of particular interest to me because I believe that Open Innovation can be a method of governance to solve civic challenges. That Open Innovation platforms can be built to customize government services to create better experiences between government and citizens (how we live and work in our city). And now during this time of economic crisis it is particularly important to consider investing in sustainable initiatives such as strengthening and empowering a community, rather than internally building a technology product that incurs high development and maintenance costs to prevent it from obsolescence right out of the gate.

Some highlights:

• Cars: Products or Services?
• Henry Chesbrough’s keynote speech. Products are yesterday...Services are now. A car is no longer only a product, but also, enables services by balancing its utilization differential through shared use and shared payment. Think Zipcar, City Carshare. New markets are formed around shifting one’s perception of the car from a product to a service enabler.
• This was echoed by a presentation by Daimler and its Car2Go project, where they are designing transport systems that rely on the car as a shared space. I thought this was great, a car company’s way of coming to terms with the fact that cars are just not as important to people as they used to be.
• Another approach in the automotive industry was presented by TJ Giuli from Ford Research and Advanced Engineering. Ford has opened their API to some Michigan U. students and other “trusted partners” such as Pandora and Stitcher to develop applications. This is a good first step BUT I think its important for Ford to open its API beyond “trusted partners” and push the potential for entrepreneurs to create new businesses otherwise this could be seen as Ford paying very little for alot of creativity and work.
• SF tore it up! We are leaders in this space and I am excited to build and strengthen our position.
• Did you know that Square was prototyped at TechShop?! Or ever heard of a company going from concept to $1,000,000 in 6 months? Most companies procurement departments require more lead time! TechShop again demonstrating that it is amazing and that Open Innovation works.
• Tim Moore from BART and Donovan Corliss from SFMTA were awesome during the Smart Transportation panel organized by Louise Guay! Attendees were impressed by the work being done. In fact, one attendee asked how did BART incentivize because it has more applications then the Whitehouse Open Innovation initiative?! Tim Moore’s answer: We were first :) and worked tirelessly to support the development community.
• What’s in it for me? This question was well considered by two presentations on the Open Innovation Strategy and Capabilities I panel:
• The Battistella/Nonino paper considered web app features that encouraged participation and the Aitamurto/Konkkola paper collected data from user responses where findings suggested that recognition and being a part of a community were important factors. Papers:
• “What drives Collective Innovation? Exploring the system of drivers for motivations in open innovation web-based platforms” by Cinzia Battistella and Fabio Nonino
• “Value in Co-Created Content Production in Magazine, Publishing: Case study of co-creation in three Scandinavian magazine brands” by Tanja Aitamurto, Saara Konkkola.
• Open Government: Hype or Revolution?
• The presentation by Dennis Hilgars and Michael Steinbusch “Open Government, Citizen Co-Creation and Gov 2.0: Hype or Revolution?” showed that the Open Innovation project space is rich and diverse. The primary finding of the study (grossly simplified) is that informal relationships produce positive results.

Final thought: I am happy to have begun my new position in the City and County of SF, Dept of Technology by going to the MCPC2011 conference because much of my focus will be on building an OpenGov program with Jay Nath. We already have initiatives that demand very thoughtful consideration with regard to sustainability, incentive models, and partnership networks - all topics discussed during the conference. I feel strongly that the OpenGov program we design will be a big contributor to Open Government research in general.

It is to my great enthusiasm that I end this post by saying welcome to the Shannon in SF blog! There are some GREAT projects in the pipeline...stay tuned!!

If you would like me to link to your paper/research, please send me the link.