Good morning, Drouvelkan. Good morning. Do you have a good time last night? Yeah, yes, okay. Well, I guess the ones who had fantastic times, well, they might not be here yet. But yeah, that was a lot of fun. I'm glad to see that everyone is so fresh and awake. Well, I know that having eight hours of sleep, you know, it helps. Yeah, well, I just have a couple things that I need to mention today. Just some quick details. There. First one is that one of the sessions from yesterday got moved to today. We've updated the website. The printed schedule cannot be updated, as you can imagine. So if you want to see that session, make sure that you're there at the right time. The second detail, it's something that I've mentioned yesterday. And unfortunately, unfortunately, we've had some issues yesterday in the morning, so people could not post those session evaluations. It's very important to us that you do take the time. So if you want to post a session evaluation, go to the session detail page, and at the top of the page there's going to be a link that says provide feedback on the session. Just click it. It takes about 30 seconds. There's like five quick questions. It's like rating things from one five, one star to five star. You know, it doesn't take much time and it provides a lot of very, very valuable feedback. So please take the time to do that. Third point is the questions for the keynote. We are going to collect the questions via Twitter. So just post your questions on Twitter with the hashtag askankd, that's AnkaD, that's AnkaDromataisberg Twitter username, in case you're wondering what this means. So post your questions on Twitter. We will be collecting those. Make sure that you post your questions once. Posting a question 15 times does not help anyone and does not guarantee that your question will be actually asked. So we will pick the best questions and ask them at the end of the keynote. As you can imagine, organizing a DrupalCon, it takes a lot of different components and all of these are very important. We need to have a good location. We need to have the right people to organize the events. We need to have the attendees. We need to have the speakers. And also we need to have sponsors. Sponsors are a very important aspect of making such events possible. To introduce today's keynote, we are going to have Peter Guagenti from Acquia and please help me welcome Peter on stage. Good morning. A little bit of housekeeping before I get to do the short sponsor pitch. And it has to do with an unresolved question from yesterday's interview with Driess. And it has to do with Driess's hair. So for anyone who's looking to be like Driess, the product is called Garnier Fruittice Extra Strong Putty. Sounds like some sort of construction product, if you ask me. We will actually start making these available alongside Drupal T-shirts at all DrupalCon, from this point going forward. So you too can be like Driess. Another side note, I did borrow this from Driess and he said, you know, that's really important to me. I think I might have to hold your passport. So as Florian mentioned, I'm Peter Guagenti. I run the products team at Acquia. We've actually, this is our tenth DrupalCon that we're sponsoring. We're incredibly proud to be part of this community. We really appreciate the opportunity. We actually have a number of new products that we're showing here at DrupalCon. We would love for you to swing by the booth and give us a chance to show you what we've built and give us your feedback. I'll highlight a couple here. We have a new version of Acquia Search that we launched a couple of months ago. Some pretty significant changes. Search is built on solar. We updated the version of solar in order to improve performance, to add some new capabilities, but we also have done things like moved it into our own managed cloud environment instead of dedicated servers so we can actually serve Acquia Search from any Amazon data center around the world, which improves response time. We've also improved some usability, and we now have support for Search API. I know there are a number of folks who really care about that. We also have this great product we launched earlier this year called Insight. And what Insight does is it monitors over 100 different parameters on your site to proactively notify you if we see security, performance, or other issues with your site. I had someone in Denver ask me, they said, you know, so what are you really checking here? It sounds like all these things are things I can check myself. I said, okay, well, 100 parameters you're going to take a couple of days to figure that out. We check every time Cron runs. So, trying to automate the mundane for you. We also have a prototype of Drupal Commons 3.0. How many of you have used or seen Drupal Commons? So Drupal Commons is a social collaboration tool that we've built in Drupal. It powers things like dev.twitter.com or the World Economic Forum or others. We have a new version that's rolling out with improved usability. This is the functional prototype. We would love your feedback. So please swing by the booth and check it out. And last but not least, once again, how many of you have heard of Acquia Cloud or use Acquia Cloud? So we are officially unveiling a permanently free tier for Acquia dev cloud. So this is coming available in the next couple of weeks. Come to the booth, give us your information. We'll notify you as soon as you can. We can give you an access code. This will be free for life for developers like you. So you'll be able to go in, develop on Acquia Cloud, use all of our tools and all of our workflow when you're ready to go to production. Then you'll have to find the right size of equipment for what you're doing, but great, great service for you as a developer. So thank you. So enough of the sales pitch, right? So I'm pleased to introduce our keynote speaker today. I'm going to try to get Anka's name right. Anka Domscheitberk. Anka is an incredible individual. She's both an entrepreneur and an activist. She's been working tirelessly over the last ten years in order to really help break the glass ceiling and help more women end up in leadership positions in large organizations around the world. Incredible activity and one that was awarded with the Woman of the Year Award in 2010 by the State of Berlin. Anka is also the founder of Opengov.me, a company that's focused on consulting and best practices for open government. And she's going to be speaking today on how governments and citizens need technology to improve both transparency and accessibility in democracy. So let's give a warm welcome to Anka. Good morning, everybody. It's really a pleasure to be here and an honor to be invited to speak. I hope everybody is really awake after a beer evening in Munich. That's always a dangerous thing to talk at the morning after. I want to talk about something I consider really relevant for everybody, not only those sitting in this room but really everybody living on this planet. I want to talk about how digital democracy will change our lives. You will have to bear with a little introductory theory at the beginning, so I want to present what is open government just very briefly so you will not get bored during this introductory part and make sure we all are in the same frame of reference and know what we are talking about. And then I'd rather talk about the practical aspects from those two angles, how you can open up government, top down by government, open government strategies from governments themselves, or bottom up if they don't do that. And last but not least, I want to make sure you take home those bits which I consider most relevant. Little summary, so to say. So let's go into the one-on-one for open government. As was already said, open government has a lot to do with transparency. But what is meant with transparency? It means various things. It means, on the one hand, open data. I'm sure most people know what open data is. It's making all data in the hands of the public sector. Public, in-machine readable format, cost-free with an open license to be used for any use in raw format. So that is open data. Only two types of data are not to be published. And this is personal data and it's data which has special requirements in terms of security. But transparency is much more. It's not just open data. It has a lot to do with transparency on how our decisions taken in government. How our laws made, for example. It also has to do with what happens after that process. What actually is the outcome of a specific decision taken on politics? For example, investments for recovery. Did it actually lead to more jobs? Did it change something to be better? It's like no-brainer questions, but most governments don't really report with facts on these simple questions. So transparency is about that, too. The second pillar of open government is collaboration. It's using Web 2.0 tools for more interaction, for new types of collaboration, which outside government, we all are already now using nearly every day. So within government, that's still rather an exception. And we talk about collaboration. For example, on exchanging experiences, collecting knowledge, getting access to collaborative knowledge. Simple things like wikis, which are not used in government, nearly not. So we talk about new collaboration in one public authority, but we also talk about collaboration across boundaries of one public authority. And that can even cross federal levels. So municipalities can work together with state levels. State levels can work together with federal levels. That happens in some forms, but it does not happen in a very frequent, effective, and internet technology-supported way. Another type of collaboration goes even farther. It means collaborate on really content issues with people outside government. And that is the barrier which is hardest to break down, because governments usually like to stick with themselves and not really expect insights, innovation, good contributions from outside the government. And that is exactly the thing which is changing now when governments turn to citizens for other ideas. The third part of open government is participation. Very often, participation is translated to something like e-voting, where you ask citizens to decide whether they are in favor or against a certain political decision. That's a rather digital yes or no decision if you want. That, of course, is participation, but if you consider participation to be something like an iceberg, that's just as much. It's the tip of the iceberg. But the big part of it is rather asking the people to get input, to get input for decision-making, for consultory processes, discussing with people and really listening to what they have to say. And that is much, much more than just asking a yes or no decision and it can be done much more often than the first variation. Participation means also something else. It means mobilizing people to do something with using internet tools to reach a common goal. It can be a political goal. This can be things like bringing people to protect themselves better in healthcare issues or to break down social barriers in education, things like that. So desired goals on to make people do something for it and to use e-participation means for that. So that was all of the theory. You are done with it now. The whole open government took place in 2009 when rather the Anglo-American world, especially President, U.S. President Obama on his first day in office started with bigger open government initiatives and you can see two of the biggest ones, the most famous ones, open government platforms are actually built with Drupal, that is the White House.gov one and it's the national open data portal in the United Kingdom. This is when the first national open data portal popped up and in the left lower corner you see a platform from Australia where the government interacted in the way I described beforehand with citizens to ask them how they within government could do their job better. It was also in this time when websites popped up, for example in the United Kingdoms with names such as tell us a betterway.com which exactly brings across this change in mindset that outside government are people with great ideas for inside government. This openness was really new and social media were used to work together with the people to get ideas. Now we are some years farther. We have a global initiative where people work together. 55 countries are collaborating in these so-called open government partnerships all over the world. They have to commit themselves to specific things to join this open government partnership. Germany, by the way, is not a member yet. We try to lobby for it. So if you meet Angela Merkel, tell her we should do it too. What you have to do to become a member is you have to publish a national annual action plan and not just a blah, blah, blah kind of plan which we all know very often exists in public sector and politics especially, but these have to be plans with concrete measures, with commitments, with measurable commitments and the action plan as well as the status quo measurement at the end of the year has to be done with intensive involvement of the civil society. My personal suspicion is that that's why Germany is still not a member. It's still a little bit difficult to ask the people and involve them in big decision-making. It's all about sharing knowledge, experience and tools. So when these decision-makers from 55 and it's getting more and more countries meet every six months for bigger meetings to exchange what they've done and what worked well on their environments, they could be talking about a platform built on Drupal 2 and it's all about sharing. So how is it done top-down if it works well? This is a map showing open data portals all over the world right now and you can see at one glance it's no longer an Anglo-American idea. It has spread all over the world. On this bigger map you see just the open data portals in Europe so it's growing, you can read nearly every week or every couple of weeks news that there is another one coming. The big one, the most famous one, the one from the United Kingdom, just had a relaunch and it really changed in the last couple of years from being a portal providing data for experts which is and was a very great thing to have at that point in time that provided developers the opportunity to develop applications using this data, make sense out of it, visualise it, create services out of it and it's still there, this functionality within the portal but since then it's gone a really long way. It's now become a portal much more addressed to a broader kind of people. It became a transparency portal for citizens where you can find much other types of information which people are interested in and as I said before it's done with Drupal. So I'm not saying it's pitching here but I think it's for you interesting to know what are good examples using that technology. What is new for the UK portal and is also demonstrating the degree of openness and unthinkable in Germany still today is that the official national data portal is including data which actually comes from outside from an NGO from whoislobbying.com for example. That's what kind of lobby people, ministers are meeting every day and you can compare which minister meets more people from industry and which industry sends the most people to lobby appointments with ministers and things like that and we know all the latest after-acta how relevant that type of information is. So now you find that on the national open data portal too. But with one click you also find information on political goals and on specific commitments within goals. With these commitments the UK government wants people to give people the opportunity to measure their success and if you click on one of those goals you get a pop-up with much more information on exactly what is the status of each of the measures in terms to reach these goals. What you can also find on this and some people are really interested in it is in a kind of upgraded org chart. Many people really don't know what the heck are these people in government doing. They might still not know after reading this org chart but they have a little more insight at least so they can click on every one of those little tiny boxes and they can read the description of responsibilities the curious ones can find out how much pounds this or that person earns and that position and form an opinion on whether that's worth the tax money or not. But you can also find the email address and the direct telephone number of each of those people working there. In Germany that would be rather difficult today. So summarizing the UK Open Data Portion as a very good example what you see there is typical for recent Open Government platforms. They are really modular mashups. They combine information and data coming from various sources and they make use of a lot of interactive means to talk with citizens and with the government. And if that sounds familiar for Drupal people that is a good thing. Why is data important to have? Most people cannot make much sense of long lines of numbers. I'm one of them. I prefer it if numbers turn into pictures to start to speak for themselves. Most people find it easier to understand visualized data. And for those people to understand complex content and many political decisions have to do with complex content like how a tax money is spent. It's not an easy thing. Many people find it easier to understand that with this type of visualization like this one which where does my money go .org in the UK provides. So at this little slider on top you can adjust it to your annual salary and then you can find out how much tax are you paying in the year, in the day, and how much of your personal individual daily tax goes into defence compared to, for example, education or culture. And then it sounds a bit more relevant to your personally and it's easier for you to have an informed decision and take part in public discussions about these matters. Open data can also unleash innovation potential and bring new innovative services for just everybody else. This is just one I want to present. It's one I particularly like. It's from London as well. In London you can get rental bikes and you know that it's became painful and expensive to ride cars at the city centre so many people get really using these bikes but you only can get them from specific racks where they are locked and you have to bring them back to one of those racks. So it's an important question to know in the morning when the people from the outskirts take the bikes to ride into the city centre where actually is a bike I can take. So what you want to know is where it's a full rack because it means there's a bike in it. These little dots, the red ones, mean there's a bike at the rack. It's a full rack and the bigger the dots, the more racks are there with bikes in it. But then if people talk one of those bikes and when you do it in the morning, some hours later it's real-time information so that's just screenshots from some hours later, they all move to the city centre and then if you have bad luck all racks are already occupied and you sit there with your bike and don't know where to bring it the closest possible to your office probably. Then you can turn to this little application and find where is a free rack and get rid of the bike and go to work. And later in the evening it all repeats itself people bring back their bikes to the outskirts and then the racks are full there, some are still full and the most interesting parts of the city where the nightlife takes place. You can see that as well. So it's a very nice little application showing how it can be useful just for everyday life. In the European Union, EU Commission are nearly gross, even quantified the use of open data. There's a debate going on whether that number of 40 billion euro which she estimated and published for potential value creation just in the EU for opening up public sector information. So there's a debate about that but really I don't care whether it's 10 billion or 40 billion or 60 billion, it is a lot of value and it's not just monetary value, it's many other values as well. But the EU realized that this idea is good for Europe and that's why there exist European plans they have been decided upon. For example, to go live with the European Union Open Data Portal still in this year to give out specific rules on how open data should be done in European member states. But they also give away 100 million euro just for new projects and research to promote and realize open data in European member states. That started already last year but it's still going on this year and next year though there are opportunities. The rules which will most likely be amongst those defined rules for open data in Europe are that it has to be machine readable which makes all sense in the world, that it has to come at no extra cost for users with very few exceptions. That's a hard thing to swallow for the German government as well if it comes like that. And it has to be open for any use not just non-commercial and private, no for just any use. We see collaboration on open government even going one step farther now. There's a cooperation between the United States and the Indian government. They cooperate on an open source open data portal. It was due to be launched something like four months ago. It's still work in progress but it will definitely come. You can contribute to it. It's developed on GitHub and it will be used for the national open data portal in India but then it will be usable for just everybody, every state, country, whoever wants to use it to build a fast and effective open data portal they can just take it. And if you would like to know that, it includes Drupal too. But I said some governments don't move fast enough, some don't move at all. So what happens then? In a digital democracy, in our nowadays society, people take initiative. They just do it themselves. If they don't see happening then they expect from government to happen. So they start leaking documents which they miss and don't see. So they create transparency themselves if you want. They even create laws they miss. Sometimes I will show you one example. If they don't like some laws or drafts for laws, they get rid of them. Sometimes it works. They get rid of ministers or leaders that they don't like. They monitor political accountability and create publicity for when it goes wrong and how they see it. They fight corruption, bottom up if they don't see their governments doing it. And they get organized to do so and push open governments from bottom up. And they do so not only within one community or one national country, they do it across borders and when they see something somewhere else could be another continent, they just copy-pasted if that's possible and do the same in their country. For each of those little examples, you all know WikiLeaks. That's how it started after Kryptom, which is a little older. Leaking now became, regardless of what happens to WikiLeaks or not, leaking became an option for opening up government secrets bottom up. Secrets which people believe do not deserve to be secrets anymore because they have to do with corruption. They have to do with power abuse. They violate human rights and everybody should know that like in the collateral murder video, these things have to be made public. Things like environmental crimes, so-called secret public contracts. We had some of those in Germany which were made public and afterwards the government published the same contracts. So they had to follow the desire of the people. But even when citizens see that their money, it's our money, public budget is tax money, that's wasted. We should know about it and we should do something about it and these things now can happen in many ways. So we should know that around envelope got digital. We also want to know what our politicians are doing every day in the parliaments. You probably know OpenCongress.org which is a really great community page in the US where you can follow the money trail for politicians. You can see who voted what, what is discussed today in parliament. There's one little thing in Germany as well doing that. It's the parlameter and it comes from our second national TV station and they provide it on their online channels and yet you can see who voted what, the colours are political parties. Hopefully the next election you see an orange one as well for the pirate party. And then you can filter even by how did married parliamentarians decide versus non-married ones, those with kids, those without kids, Eastern and Western with lots of other income sources and those with no or less income sources. These are interesting information and you can here on this little tool relate them to the political decision making of those members in parliament. Sometimes when governments don't provide official open data and national open data portals people try to collect it themselves. That is something we saw in Germany where there is a quite vivid open data open government community going on with various NGOs one of them and working too who try to push the government with lots of direct interactions where we meet people from the Federal Ministry of Interior there are people who listen but processes in Germany are really slow they always want to do it perfect and sometimes perfection needs forever not such a good thing in the Internet Society where having a better version BETA version is sometimes better than having a perfect one years later. We wanted faster we didn't get it faster in Germany so the Open Knowledge Foundation in Germany created often a data.de which means open data.de basically and just got data where it was distributed somewhere on lots of other public authority portals and they put it together. It's supported by the Federal Ministry of Interior actually as much as the Federal Ministry supported the first national apps competition apps for Germany it was called but they didn't want to organize it themselves I don't know any other country such a national kind of apps for democracy competition has been done by NGOs it's usually done by the government itself and we wanted to have one in Germany but nobody did it so eventually we did it ourselves three NGOs worked closely together but the Federal Ministry of Interior joined so-called community public partnership with us and only with this partnership civil society working together with government on this one common goal having an apps for Germany competition that was really successful and we used the often a data.de platform to collect data for this challenge for this competition because clever us we not only had entry possibilities and prices for ideas and for applications we wanted more open data in Germany we wanted more public authorities giving away the data for just any use so there was a third category and that was data and we got the Federal Ministry of Interior to using their own letter heads and sending their letters with invitations to take part in that competition and free public authority data they sent these letters to many many public authority and that worked very well and we got the data from often a data.de we collected all the data we received during this competition which of course we made open after the competition as well but we also had the Open Knowledge Foundation collected data they got from other sources like with all apps competitions you could see many many really good and useful outcomes one of them you see was the hourly measurements from regulation for all over Germany and there was a little app developed to make this data visible in a really nice way my preferred example of what people can do and how they can succeed in doing open government themselves comes from the North from the state of Hamburg citizens in Hamburg for a longer time tried to push the Hamburg state government to open up to make a transparency law to tell their own public authorities to publish contracts to publish plans for infrastructural changes in the city things like that but it didn't happen so what they did they opened up a public wiki I don't know whether you have seen something like that before I haven't I have seen drafts of laws being published somewhere and people could come in that exists in some regions but I've never seen people, citizens themselves sitting down in a public and open wiki and really writing a law but that is what they did they wrote a law to ensure transparency in government it included things like all contracts with third parties which involve tax money being spent which is above a certain threshold of course lobby impact made visible all these things this was a collaboration driven by many initiatives and organizations even some political parties from the opposition took part the pirate party as well, the greens the chaos computer club was involved and others as well they collected signatures by citizens to get the opportunity to take part in there is a formal process within the state of Hamburg where citizens can end up deciding something so they collected enough signatures in a very short period of time 50,000 in wars to get the first stage of this referendum process and still at that stage was showed rather ignorance and was not really interested in supporting that they thought they can just sit and wait and it will go over this can sometimes work but sometimes it does not work anymore you can't sit out the people anymore if they really want something so the due process said that there will be a referendum if the state government does not create the law itself within the period of I think it was something like 3 or 4 months they didn't do it though there was a referendum schedule for end of this summer end of August could have been these days theoretically and then the community initiative with all these organizations taking part they really powered up they had a perfect plan in place how to spend all time from April to August with every week having something taking place of the state of Hamburg with publicity with public events talking to citizens, convincing citizens and there was so much support coming from really everybody else in the city that the government started to worry and that is the point where they started to negotiate with this initiative and they sat on one table and then in a period of very few weeks and very few changes to the draft of a law they thought it may be better to do the law themselves instead of having the people forcing them to do something which they openly opposed to it would be just a shame for them and that's what they did not even one year after the wiki was opened and started that law became a law written by the people the government forced to adopt it and the mayor of Hamburg went to the press and said he is so proud it was an anonymous decision we are the most transparent city and state in all Germany and I don't care whether he takes the credit as long as it makes the government becoming more public and as I said at the beginning people look to other places so what do the people in the state of Berlin do they look to Hamburg and they say and ask why don't we have such a thing we want to have a transparency law just like that in Hamburg and dear Berlin government if you don't do it we might do it like they did that in Hamburg and it just spreads like a disease like a really good one in that case well we had another case a very famous wiki in Germany the Germans all know it we had a federal minister called Gutenberg who just copy pasted his doctoral thesis many people took a lot of time to research and compare line by line his doctoral thesis with publicly available sources to find out what and where he copied from if you wonder what he copied in this little colored barcode you can see it if you have good eyes the white lines are the text parts he wrote himself not too many and it became very embarrassing because that was a process which he worked at the beginning it was more white and then it became less white and even less white and even more less white so the day came where it was just too shameful for him and he just had to leave he tried to get back into politics it didn't work because we the people did not want these things can work it makes sense to fight against something you don't want to have representing you and then we had of course the case of Akta the fight against Akta became more intensive when the first Akta draft which believe me was worse than what was discussed in the last months when that was leaked on WikiLeaks in 2008 not everybody might have heard about that at this time but the relevant communities initiative and NGOs working on the topic of fighting against censorship keeping the internet free as we wanted and as we know it they worked with this proposal with the ammunition to analyze what is there on the horizon and to use the time until it ended up in parliaments like the european parliaments to use this time to be perfectly prepared to just dump it and it was done in many ways therefore for example as the german freedom of information portal of course not coming from the government it's called ask the government and this was used for a freedom of information request it's very easy to do it with this platform it was used to ask who in the german government took part in the negotiation rounds of Akta in the last years and the answer was declined the response being this would endanger public safety I don't know whether you get the danger I didn't understand it and the people did not want to take this as an answer and publicly money was collected to get into a legal process to force this information to become transparent and public you all know things that happened besides that one the digital citizens used all sorts of viral means techniques to get the message across because they understood it's not enough if just the informed communities fight against it it's not enough we need the ordinary citizens and we need to educate those citizens in a way that they don't understand and that's probably not with all those complicated scriptures it's rather more again visual explaining in little videos and pictures what does that mean for us if that law comes through it means bypassing democratic process like one of those youtube videos said and then we have things like avas that global petition platform it's not working on national levels and that is the future the internet has no national borders and more and more citizens understand themselves as digital citizens living in a more global world they don't care about national borders and that's why they join also those global campaigns in sign because they consider an issue to be a global issue and they as a citizen have to do something in favor or against it and that was the case of actor 2 no actor 1 there were nearly 3 million signatures presented to the European parliament before it had to decide and debate on actor it went all over the news that is what you need to have at the end that everyday newspapers and media are reporting about it because not everybody sits on the internet every day many people still just reprinted paper they watch tv and you need to reach these channels to achieve real change but that happens at the start in the other media and that's what happened in this case and eventually the people we won and then we have that other example the sopa in the united states stop online piracy act it's once again the copyright excuse used to try to monitor people to censor the internet to steal us the freedom we so much enjoy and in the internet in the united states at the sopa opera platform somebody related the information and that shows you how important open data is they combine the information on how much money the members of congress get from specific industries and how have they said in public is their opinion on sopa and these columns you see the long one that was the I am pro sopa votes in congress and you see it's much longer than the opponent's list and on the price tags I call them on the heads of each one it's too small for you to see but on the platform sopa opera you could see I call it price tag because I mean you could see how much money they got from the industry and you could see a direct correlation embarrassing a shameful correlation between the voting they intend to do and the money they received from the benefiting industry but at least we could see it and that made us really get angry really angry I mean and that led on the 18th of January to the internet blackout day which I'm sure everybody of you has noticed more than 10 million petition signatures were sent millions of calls were made just from one tool from Wikipedia many people many websites turned black on that day including Wikipedia and other really big websites and I believe it's the combination of masses of people opposing something but also industry and brackets that also means money also industry fighting against it that made the members of congress magically change their mind within 24 hours money always tries to make laws which is a sad thing but the least thing we can expect is that we see how it takes place so that we can take action in time so for example in California there is in place the global warming act which prescribes that in California CO2 emissions have to go down to the 1990 levels by 2020 and guess what oil and gas companies don't like this law so what they do want is get rid of this law and they just try to achieve this by buying votes and here you see the money trail if that's not too easy to see I explain it to you the big lines are big money small lines are small money and the big lines all come from oil and gas companies they paid more than 10 million dollars to get a new proposal which would mean getting rid of the existing global warming act making this visible again makes people angry shows you the impact of money on our representatives ours the people's representatives what they are doing and their political work and we vote for them or we don't do it and then we have tools of fighting corruption corruption is a problem I would say in every single country in the world it is a problem in Germany it's a bigger problem probably in India where it's a really really big problem it's hindering development for the society and the government declares every single year how much they want to fight corruption but either they don't really want to do it or they are not really effective in doing so because it does not happen in the pace that people expect it to happen so what somebody just did they built a platform called I paid a bribe and people can upload information on when and where and why they had to pay a bribe and these are things like that a railway engineer who describes how he got a contract like always only by paying a bribe and then the public civil servant engineer came and told him let's save some of the concrete and make 50-50 on the savings which is as you know a very dangerous thing to do on constructions so that good guy didn't do it but he made it public on this platform and this platform collects all the data and you consult the data and visualize it and see what regions are more corrupt than others what types of offices are more corrupt than others but you could also see the contrary you could see which ones are least corrupt and you can learn from those and exposing these black sheep hopefully in the medium term leads to the reduction of these things to happening I believe that black sheep can only hide in the dark the more light you have on them the less of those black sheep you will see and finally open government globally is very often copied haste if you take a very good example from the civil society in the United Kingdom many people they produce many of those little tools which are very useful to get forward bottom up with open government one of them is what do they know.org it's a platform where you can where you can do freedom of information requests to your government in a very simple way you get a form, you can fill it in you can much easier identify which governmental authority is responsible for this information and sits on the data and you can formulate your request in a way that it's very hard to tell you no I don't give it to you because it's not my day today it makes it really hard because it already has all the paragraphs stipulating your right on getting that information within this pre-written request you only fill in some parts of it and that's bit like everything else what my society.org is doing is open source so that was too fast countries all over the world including the European Union itself copied that platform and you see even the fragdeinstadt.de platform I showed you in Germany that's all done on whatdotheyknow.org it's reused that's what we will see more often and mysociety.org has lots of these things to offer not only on transparency it's like the open data portal in UK it's moving from just providing information or helping to provide information it's moving into tools which allow for real transactions between citizens and governments where you can report problems in public transport for example or things like fix my street which you may know which now exists in many many countries and cities in the world where people can report problems with their municipal infrastructure and get them fixed now I want to make sure that you really remember the things I wanted to remember I know that you can't remember a 45 minutes talk that it's too much wanted after an evening full of beer maybe maybe even without beer I guess so what I consider the most relevant things which I try to be across in this keynote is my optimism my optimism that transparency is the future of government is the future in our democracy and that secrecy and corruption have much harder times because of that because transparency is contagious globally and if we see people having it somewhere we push our governments together where we are as well we can much easier than ever before join forces now in a digital way too we become really powerful we can force governments like never before we become so powerful we can no longer be ignored governments have to listen to us if we are loud enough which of course implies we have to do it not to sit and be bored and do nothing watch TV and read colourful I wouldn't call them newspapers do something fight for it it's for all of us governments will have to understand that open government is not if we want to do a question it's when does it take place questions and it's a question of do we as governments have mistaken it do we sit on the steering wheel do we have a part in it how is it shaped how do we do it or are we forced to do it and somebody else opens us the government up from bottom down which we may not like so much but if we understand we now meaning the government if we understand we have to do it we'd rather do it ourselves because it looks much better than open sources I would say but if they don't do it we do it for them and which is good for this community sitting here I believe open government in general has so much to do with openness with collaboration with sharing and so much to do with open source that should be really good for this community tech community because of all of that if a key enabler in this I'd rather call it revolution or others say it's rather an evolution I don't really care it's a very big change taking place and you can be part of it you should be proud of it that you can do that that you can enable and fasten this process because it not only means interesting business for you it means you taking part in making our society a better place and improving our democracy so that more people have a say and contribution to it this is what I want you to remember thanks so much and if you have questions now what you can hello everybody thank you for tweeting like crazy Paul Johnson and myself were sitting in the back basically getting all your feedback after a while we noticed that really certain issues are on your mind and certain issues are binding we figured out five questions that basically bring the whole thing together or maybe it's on the mind of the audience most privacy of course is an issue and regarding privacy privacy and correctness how do we know that open data is not enriched or misquoted or presented out of perspective we don't know it for sure but since it's raw data and it's public and it's transparent everybody can find out often sometimes opponents of open data say you can do everything with data you can always present it and visualize it in a way that supports your opinion that may be true but everybody else can do the same so after all you have a fight on truth a fight on data what do we have now now we have a story in the newspaper it says something is like it is but do we know whether it is like that we don't know the data we only see the message now we can look behind the message and look at the data itself and we can look at interpretations of multiple interpretations of one set of data there may be different ones but we can see the differences between it and can put it into perspective if we take that one step further then should it that's actually also a question should it be up to private companies to analyze this raw data and not the government itself that should be up to everybody else I mean open data means it's open it's there, it's in the world everybody governments, companies citizens, civil society everybody can use this data and play with it whatever they want and hopefully many do it coming from different angles and this way representing the diversity of our society and all political opinions we have and find there of course companies can come and use data for their own purposes but civil society can do the same and if that's a different goal we will see that in the interpretation governments can do it as well never should somebody say that's what we have today it's the old way of doing it never somebody should say here's a set of data and only you get to analyze it that's not how we wanted we wanted open and we wanted to be used for everybody else there's two or three of you guys asking the question are there any risks for government or society related to open raw data has it ever gone wrong or for that matter should certain not be open I don't remember a single case where it has been made wrong except if I count the cases where it has not been made open because that is making it wrong so as long as you publish data and respect two really important guidelines nothing can go wrong but these guidelines are important the first one is no personal data is involved it's no data on person so if we talk about healthcare data it does not mean Anker has this and that disease and this is how it developed and this is made public it does rather mean for example statistics on how can you treat cancer and how is the outcome between this hospital and this hospital so you can compare output but not related to individuals so if you look at data you do not want to publish the other set of data has to do with security but sometimes people say for some data it may be true that national security or individual security can be at risk if you publish a certain set of data what we see now secrecy being this big and openness being this small what we need is to put it the default is public having data public the exception is these two sets of data which we do not want to have public what we need is precise concrete guidelines where to draw the line what means national security it does not mean like the decline for the one freedom of information request to make names of governmental officials I mean it's their job negotiation rounds of acta this is not security relevant but there may be others other data which is of security relevance you know we need the help to draw this line for example from data protection officers they are the big helpers for the open data community although it sounds like the contrary it's not the data protection officers are friends of open data and they are experts on telling where is private individual personal data they know best where to draw the lines and we have to ask them for this because what we do want we want a transparent government but the transparent government does not mean a transparent citizen we don't want transparent people we don't want surveillance we don't want to be monitored and everything we do we don't want that and that's why we also have to look very with a lot of attention to this privacy issue that this line is really drawn and that government is not doing what they try to do every single day and nearly every single country to step across the line and to get more surveillance and more transparent people the government is there for us it's not the other way around that brings us to another point and you notice that many of these people here of course they're working with data they're building Drupal after all right the question that comes up then is should it be can open data be manipulated by government, by citizens by interest groups or what does government do I believe that openness creates trust at the moment where you publish things you put the basis for trust as long as you hide things you give room for interpretation room for suspicion and usually there's a reason for that secrecy enables bad things more secrecy you see more bad things happening more manipulation takes place as long as things not published so what we talk about is rather how to reduce manipulation also in governments by making more things public and when data is public I don't think the danger of manipulating on the side of the government is so big because so many people can look onto it it's like you try to um you try to do something stupid and open source code I mean so many people look onto it somebody will find out and they will make it public they will say hey look how can this data be true last year was this, how can it change a one year like that it doesn't make any sense explain why that is the case and if they can't explain it they get into trouble so with open data manipulation becomes much much less likely I think so brings me to the last question if government is to become a Drupal customer some of them are but most of them aren't yet what technical features what kind of functionality would be most important is there anything specific that Drupal would need to be able to do in order to become a perfect open data government tool I'm grateful for this question I had an e-mail conversation with somebody who is building Drupal platforms for the German federal government and I was asking that person what do you like of Drupal and what could they do better so that's basically what you want to know and he said it's really good that it's so modularized and that you can mix things how you want them to mix on the platform that it's front end not interfering with back ends and it works very nicely and you can adhere to many governmental standards for example accessibility and things like that so that seems to be pretty easy to Drupal but he said he sometimes seems one issue and that is that many modules seem to collect a lot of data of the people using it and that sometimes developers don't know how much data overall is collected but that is a problem for governmental platforms because they have extremely high levels at least in Germany levels of privacy requirements not to collect data from people which use a certain platform there seems to be too much data collected using Drupal products so if you could look into that problem maybe talk with governments where do you think it's too much and how could we change that that is probably a good idea I guess we'll take that one home actually that guy is here in the room if he wants to out himself where are you hidden wave the hand right back there somebody wants to talk to him he gave me that really interesting input all right wraps up my five questions Florian thank you very much and there's one thing you mentioned when we were setting things up on stage here you said that you would like to have one of those t-shirts and so we went up front and we got you a nice women's size t-shirt it was great to have you here thank you very much thank you thank you very much


Okay. We have a second concept for you to consider, and this is the renewal of the Centers of Excellence in LC research. And Jean McEwen is going to, she's a program director in genomics and society division, and she's going to present on behalf of Joy Boyer. Jean? Great. Thank you, Rudy. So a little bit of background on this year's program. We're now in the 13th year of the program's existence. We've issued our first set of grants back in fiscal year 2004. And the goals of the program have really been the same since the inception of the program. And they are, first, to create transdisciplinary research teams that can integrate behavioral, social science, legal and humanities research with genomic research efforts. Second goal is to facilitate the translation of research findings so that they can be used to inform health research and public policies, so a translational aim. And then the third goal is to really develop the next generation of LC researchers with emphasis on recruiting people from diverse backgrounds. In the initial years of the program, we used two mechanisms, the P-50 full center mechanism as well as the P-20 exploratory or planning grant mechanism. But when we last issued the RFA in 2015, for various technical and administrative reasons, we switched to a different mechanism, the RM-1, the research project with complex structure mechanism. And that's the same mechanism that we're proposing to use again this time around. So so far, since the program began, we funded a total of 11 full centers and eight of those P-20 exploratory centers in the years when we were funding those. Currently, we have six of these centers funded, listed here at UNC Chapel Hill, Yale Henderson PI, that center. We also have a center at Columbia University, a center at Johns Hopkins, one at the University of Oklahoma, University of Utah, which Jeff Botkin here is the PI of that center, and finally a center at Vanderbilt University. So six centers, and currently our budget for the program is about $6.1 million a year to fund these six centers, and that represents about 33% of the LC 5% set aside. So that's where we're at budgetarily. So to sort of clarify where the various centers are currently at in the funding cycle, UNC is now finishing its first, it's actual five-year renewal, so it will not be eligible to apply for this RFA. Columbia is now finishing its first funding cycle, so it will be eligible to reapply this time for one more four-year cycle of funding. And the other four centers, Hopkins, Oklahoma, Utah, and Vanderbilt, were all funded in 2016, so they all are fully funded for the next few years. A few words about the accomplishments of the centers that we've seen sort of play out over the life of the program. First I think it's fair to say that over the years the centers that we funded have done a very good job of establishing productive transdisciplinary research teams that have really involved the integration of a broad spectrum of both LC research and genomic research. A number of the investigators currently serve as PIs or co-investigators or consultants on various of the large-scale genomic studies, many of them funded through our division of genomic medicine, such as a number of the grants emerge in the CSER program and in insight of the newborn sequencing program. And it's also, I think, worth noting that by working within their institutions across disciplines, there's actually been a fair amount of institutional support from these home institutions for this kind of transdisciplinary research that really integrates this whole spectrum of disciplines. In terms of their translational successes over the years, the CSERs have provided a lot of resources, I think, to policymakers. They've written policy briefs and white papers that have really been used to inform the development of legislation at both the state and federal level. Investigators from the CSERs have provided a lot of expert testimony to Congress, to state legislatures, to groups like the President's Bioethics Commission and other federal advisory committees, and they've served on these committees as both members and in some cases as chairs. And in terms of their training mission, this is more than 100 graduate and postdoctoral students and junior faculty members have now, over the years, received training or mentoring through the CSERs. And about 25% of the trainees have been members of underrepresented minority groups, which is, I think, a pretty good record. A number of the CSERs actually have offered training at the undergraduate level, which in many cases has been a really successful way of bringing in minority trainees at the sort of the beginning of the pipeline. And a number of the graduate students and postdocs that have been trained through the CSERs have gone on to get tenure track positions, and a number have become PIs on their own grants. So I think, by and large, the program has been fairly successful in terms of accomplishing those three basic goals. So our plans for the reissuance, basically, the version that we're proposing this time is essentially identical to what we issued back in 2015 when we moved to that RM-1 mechanism. So specifically, once again, we'll require a focused and yet flexible research plan. We want people to propose either a single large project or a series of sort of highly integrated, more focused projects kind of all focused around a single theme. And we expect a good description of the education and career advancement activities that will be undertaken. And unlike in the initial years of the program, when we were really focused exclusively on postdoc training, now, under this mechanism, the training activities can really span the entire pipeline. So everything from graduate students to junior faculty and sort of everything in between. These grants, once again, will be for four years with the possibility of a four-year renewal for a total of eight years of funding. And just as with the last time we issued the RFA, the budgets will be limited to $650,000 per year. That's direct costs. The one thing we are proposing in this reissue is to provide a bit more clarification about the importance of the education and career advancement activities that we expect the centers to conduct. I think the last time the RFA was issued, there was some sort of lack of clarity in the language and there was a sense among, I think, some of the applicants and some of the feedback we got from reviewers that we were stepping away from that component of the centers, which was not the intention. So we've tried or we will be trying to really clarify this time that that remains an essential part of the expectations. And we will be encouraging people to, again, really keep the emphasis on training of minority or people from underrepresented minorities, encouraging them to leverage existing institutional programs and to take advantage of things like our diversity action plan and the other NIH diversity programs that exist, like the administrative supplements to promote diversity and the NRSA pre-doctoral diversity award to recruit and retain minority scholars. So to kind of briefly summarize our overall plan, we plan to open this to all applicants. We do anticipate that the one center whose funding will be ending next year may well apply, but the competition is wide open and we do anticipate receiving applications from a number of different institutions. And we hope to be able to make available around or up to $2 million in funding, which would allow us to fund up to two centers. The goal would be so that we could maintain about six centers in all while still keeping our budget to about 33% of our ELSI set aside. And I should mention that we're not planning to issue an exploratory solicitation as we did in those earlier years of the program. Our sense from our experience the last time we issued the announcement was that we're now at a point where there's really a pretty substantial number of institutions out there who are at a point where they can really have the capacity to compete successfully for a full center application so we don't really see the necessity anymore for an exploratory mechanism. So in terms of the proposed timeline, we think if Council approves the concept that we'll be ready for a July release date with applications due in November, they would be reviewed then in February or March of next year and then come back to Council a year from now with anticipation of a start date in August or September of 2018. So that's our general plan. If anyone has questions or comments, I'm happy to take them. Questions for Jeanita. So thanks for a very nice overview and summary of the CSER program. I'll just say that I would used to be part of one and I think it did really provide an important mechanism for increasing access to ELSI research issues among underrepresented minority groups. I had a postdoc who went on to become an assistant professor at Columbia University so I count her involvement in the CSER program as a really important component of her training. So a question for you is how is the decision made to only have two applications that would be funded in this next round of the program? It's sort of a practical matter. It's really a budgetary thing. As I said, we were actually advised by Council several years ago not to let the number of centers that are funded exceed about a third of our budget. And so if we were going to have to limit it to a proper maximum of six in order to keep to that limitation because otherwise, you know, we don't have enough funds for investigator initiated grants. Yeah. So as somebody who is sun downing on my center, I have found it to be an extraordinary opportunity to train new people, to bring together groups of people at an institution or several institutions to network across the country and the kinds of work that's done in the program that's done fostered by these centers has changed remarkably since 2003, is that when you first issued? 2004, I think, yeah. 2004 when those were first awarded. Think about that. It's 12 years. And think about what's happened with genomics. And the centers have really allowed people to be nimble, I think, in response to some of these technological sort of emerging issues in LC that track emerging different changes in genomics and big data. And I wonder, I wanted to follow up on Cheneyda's question because I'm just wondering why not, I think they're very functional. Why not fund three instead of two? Unless you think council said something that you can't work against. No. We can revisit absolutely. But it is always this question of how we balance the investigator initiated part of the portfolio with the centers or the program initiated part of the portfolio. And I do think, I mean, this is an area where we do want to encourage a lot of innovation. The science is changing so rapidly. And although the centers are designed, I think, to be very flexible and respond rapidly as things do develop, you also want the flexibility so that is a whole new technology comes down the pike that doesn't necessarily fit into the sort of the general subject matter of a particular center, that you've got the flexibility to maybe or maybe issue another RFA to focus directly on that issue, for example. So we're hesitant to tie up too much of our funds in a single program. But again, it's certainly something that can be revisited. It's just something to think about. And also, I don't know if before I came out, I apologize. I was a little late. Whether you just summarized what the themes are in the centers because they're wildly diverse in their approach and approaches. Yes. The kinds of things they're working on. Right. And I can go back to. And you did. Oh, well, I already know it, so you don't have to do it for me. Yeah. No, but they are. I mean, we have, for example, one of the centers is focused exclusively on issues relating to Native American, Alaska Native and American Indian sort of community attitudes towards genomics research in an incredibly important area, because it's an underserved population that we're really trying to reach out to. We have the Hopkins Center that's focused really on ELSI issues in genomics research related to infectious disease, prenatal testing is sort of Jeff's focus. I mean, so each of these centers is really has a very different and unique focus and yet broad enough that they're, you know, they're able to sort of take in new issues that arise within that area of focus. Two thumbs up. Yeah, Jean, thanks for the presentation. Just two quick things. I wonder if you can comment just briefly about Sears Central and that element of the network organization. And then secondly, I think one of the real assets of the network is the continued participation of centers or people who have centers who've rolled off their funding. And it would be just wonderful to be able to maintain the participation of those folks as much as possible. So we have any thoughts now about how the network might be able to motivate continued participation by those groups? Yeah, two very good questions. I'll answer the second one first. I think our goal and our plan is to try to keep the people who have been funded for these, you know, this initial over 10 years or almost 13 years now of the program because some of these have been extended to keep them involved because there's an incredible, you know, rich. I mean, these are really the pioneers in the program and we definitely want to have them involved and able to continue attending meetings or participating on calls. So that's definitely sort of part of the plan, exactly how that will be structured, you know, remains to be seen. And then you mentioned the Sears Central, which is kind of the name that we've given to the kind of informal coordinating center, which currently is being run out of UNC. And that's worked very well in terms of, you know, helping to coordinate, you know, monthly phone calls and most importantly to set up the periodic meetings, the face-to-face meetings that we have. They've also coordinated, you know, opportunities for trainees to travel, you know, from one center to another so that they can actually get some exposure to experts in working in other centers, you know, perhaps all the way across the country. So that's been another really effective way that we've used the coordinating center and we do plan to continue that in some form. Oh, I thought it said you weren't planning to continue it. In the brief, it says you're not planning. No, no, not in the, no, yes, let me correct myself, but we'll have a coordinating function. Yeah, that it won't, yeah. Well, I was just gonna say in contrast to Gail's comment, I think it is important to keep, I think the one-third ratio makes sense to me if you want to continue to get unsolicited applications and I think there will continue to be kind of new questions that come up as genetic testing gets implemented that you'd like to be able to have RO1s and other things about. Let me just point out that it might make sense if you want to revisit this issue to do it a year from now when you have the applications before you. The notion of funding three may be very compelling or it may just disappear depending on what's coming. Yeah, I mean, the other thing I should mention is that we are reaching out to other institutes to see if we can get funding from additional institutes and who knows, that may happen. I'm not holding my breath in this budget climate, but it could happen and obviously if it did, that would give us greater flexibility. Okay, I don't need to labor the discussion. Can I get a motion to approve the concept? And a second, all in favor? Any opposed, any abstentions? Thank you very much. Thank you, Jean. Thank you.