Good afternoon. I'd like to call the meeting of the Board of Public Utilities for the city of Santa Rosa to order If we may have a roll call, please Board member right here Board member Grable Board member Bartholome here board member Batenfort Vice chair Anoni here and chair Galvin here let the record reflect that all board members are present with the exception of board members Batenfort and Grable Very good welcome again We're going to move to item two point by item two we have three proclamations To read out. I'm going to start with the first one because we have one attendee of the three So this is for Sean Murphy. Welcome, Mr. Murphy So the proclamation reads whereas Sean Murphy has been a devoted employee of the city of Santa Rosa Water Department for more than 27 years and Whereas Mr. Murphy began his affiliation with the water department as a temporary maintenance worker in reclamation and then as a wastewater Operator intern while he completed his wastewater operator coursework at the Santa Rosa JC and Cal State Sacramento and Whereas Mr. Murphy officially started his permanent career with the city on July 31 1996 as a wastewater operator number two in the water department and Whereas Mr. Murphy gained a large background of institutional knowledge of the operation of the Laguna treatment plant during his extensive service And whereas Mr. Murphy was willing to share his institutional knowledge and operational know-how With his co-workers in other operational areas at the Laguna treatment plant and Whereas Mr. Murphy was an ambassador for the plant leading tours to educate and the public on the complex wastewater treatment process and whereas Mr. Murphy was known for his candor and Selflessness when challenging operational conditions at the plant required a team effort and Whereas Mr. Murphy had a dry sense of humor and an enjoyable tendency to share his opinion in order to imbue levity in the work day and Whereas Mr. Murphy retired on December 29 2023 and is enjoying a well-deserved retirement Now therefore be it resolved that the Board of Public Utilities of the City of Santa Rosa does hereby express our sincere and heartfelt Appreciation to Sean Murphy for his 27 years of distinguished service to the Laguna treatment plant the water department and the community of Santa Rosa and I happily signed this earlier. I will open it up at this point If there's any board member or staff comments that wish to be made Before giving mr. Murphy an opportunity to speak sure vice chair, Noni The one thing I say I missed the fact that I didn't get a tour of the plant from you because when Mike Prince made me run through the Plant I was so focused. I mean I was thinking they should get a nicer guided. No But thank you Anyway, thanks for all your service and enjoy your retirement Director Burke Thank You chair Galvin and members of the board. I just wanted to tell Sean. Thank you so much for your service I know we didn't get to work together very closely, but I always enjoyed When you attended quarterlies and had great questions for me and also just randomly chatting quickly on certain things So it was always a pleasure to see you in the control room and we are going to miss your very Great institutional knowledge out at the treatment plant.  Murphy. Would you like to say a few words? Not obligated it's up to you Of course Very good. If you would come down. We'd like to give you the proclamation and have a picture taken With the board Okay, we have two more proclamations Neither of the people involved could attend today that the first one is for outgoing board member Mark Walsh. I'll read that proclamation into the record Whereas Mark Walsh was appointed to the board of public utilities by city council member Eddie Alvarez in February 2021 and whereas during Mark's three years of service with the board of public utilities he has provided outstanding leadership and guidance to the Santa Rosa water department and Whereas mr. Walsh has served on many subcommittees of the board Including budget review subcommittee water conservation subcommittee and contract review subcommittee and Whereas mr. Walsh provided a perspective of cost efficient effective and ecologically prudent delivery of water sewer and storm water utilities with the guidance he provided and decisions he made as a board member and Whereas mr. Walsh brought his financial expertise to the board of public utilities Providing in-depth review and understanding of the water department's annual operation maintenance and capital budgets as well as water and sewer rates and Whereas mr. Walsh was appreciative and supportive of Santa Rosa water staff acknowledging from the dais the hard work of the team and those presenting to the board and Whereas mr. Walsh recognized the board's responsibility to make tough decisions regarding funding infrastructure maintenance Repair and replacement and made these decisions thoroughly and thoughtfully to ensure Santa Rosa water Can continue to provide safe and reliable water delivery storm water management and wastewater collection treatment and reuse to its ratepayers Now therefore be it resolved that the board of public utilities of the city of Santa Rosa Does hereby recognize command and express its sincere appreciation To mark walsh for his three years of dedicated service to the community of Santa Rosa, and I signed that again earlier today We'll have public comment shortly The final proclamation is for Denise Cordova who again could not be here Whereas Denise Cordova has been a devoted employee of the city of Santa Rosa for more than 20 years and Whereas miss Cordova started with the city of Santa Rosa as a senior administrative assistant in the recreation and parks department where she provided support to the mayor's gang prevention task force policy team and the measure O grant agencies and Whereas miss Cordova transferred to the Laguna treatment plant in the water department on July 6 2010 and whereas miss Cordova provided more than 20 years of excellent administrative support to multiple work groups and customer service to the public and Whereas miss Cordova was always willing to take on new tasks to help the team achieve their goals and Whereas miss Cordova always had a smile on her face and a positive attitude and Whereas miss Cordova truly cared about her position and team providing cross training to fellow employees and training her replacement prior to retiring and Whereas miss Cordova shared her talent of sewing and knitting and shared her passion for traveling with her co-workers and Whereas miss Cordova retired on November 15 2023 and is enjoying her time traveling with family Now therefore be it resolved that the Board of Public Utilities of the city of Santa Rosa Does hereby recognize commend and express our sincere and heartfelt appreciation To Denise Cordova for 20 years of outstanding service to the community of Santa Rosa and to the city of Santa Rosa And that proclamation again was signed earlier today. So congratulations to her At this time we'll open it up for public comment. Mr. DeWitt Yes, sir. My name is Dwayne DeWitt. I'm from Roseland, which is in district one and I wanted to say I'm sorry that mr. Walsh isn't here so he could hear my comments I only met him because he got appointed to this body And I found him to be a very helpful person in terms of talking with the community about Issues that we face in district one Many of you may not know but for over 45 years District one has been facing pollution that came from stormwater pollution that Went through the sanitary sewage system under Sebastopol Road, which had a leak and then Contaminated the underground aquifer throughout Southern and Western Roseland going from West Avenue and McMinn Avenue out to the Southwest and there was actually a state Superfund site called McMinn Avenue State Superfund site in 1984 40 years ago and so Mark was willing to listen to these Historical situations and talk with us about the possibility of how we could resolve What's been a lingering problem for well owners? The city's approach was to get people off of their wells and put them on city water about 30 years ago I guess long story short though on all of this is that mr. Walsh was a good and Considerate conscientious public servant helping us at times when others didn't have An interest even and how we're gonna try to deal with our area out there And we still face a number of brownfields Pollution type situations and we were looking for lead agencies to help us and mr. Walsh while he was here was at least considering the idea of having mr. Alvarez be helpful on that all the best to you in the new year folks and I'll be hanging around for more comments I know the attorney will be carefully watching making sure I'm on topic Thank You mr. DeWitt we look forward to council member Alvarez appointing mr. Walsh's Replacement so that we have a full board so thank you for your comments Item number three any statements of abstention by board members All right seeing none we have no study session Item 5.1 are the minutes So we will open it up for public comments on the minutes, which is item 5.1 If you wish to make a comment, please move to the podium Seeing no one the minutes will be approved and entered We'll now move to item 6.1 our staff briefing director Burke Thank You chair Galvin and members of the board our staff briefing is our water and recycle water supply update and making the presentations The presentation will be Sean McNeill our deputy director of environmental services and Mike Prince our deputy director of regional water reuse operations Welcome gentlemen Good afternoon chair Galvin members of the board. I'm Sean McNeill filling in for Claire Nordley Today, I'm the deputy director of environmental services so Starting off with storage on Lake Pillsbury Storage in Lake Pillsbury is increased to more than 60,000 acre feet as of this week Which is about 200% of their target storage for this time of year if you'll recall PG&E sought relief in the summer and fall from their FERC mandated releases into the upper Russian River and We're maintaining releases at about a minimum of 25 Cubic feet per second or lower And the FERC has issued a variance They were operating under expired on December 19th when the storage in Lake Pillsbury exceeded the 36,000 acre foot mark And operations have reverted to their normal FERC Mandated flow under their annual licenses currently being issued for the project Uh, this is Lake Mendocino With the black bars. It's hard to tell on this screen here, but the black bar is Just starting on the left hand side of the curve of the water year And the purple bar is last year's so Lake Mendocino is about 73,300 acre feet right now and is gaining This week the storage exceeded the water supply storage pool, but is not into the Forecast informed reservoir operations management zone yet Storage is not where it was last year But it is still a very healthy in comparison to prior drought years With above normal carryover in storage from last year The army corps has been making some minor adjustments to increase the outflow from Lake Mendocino In anticipation of the additional storms this weekend, but no high flow releases have been Released yet Now moving on to Lake Sonoma storage Uh current storage level is above 245,000 acre feet which is Above the storage pool and encroaching into the flood storage space of the reservoir And we're continuing to see healthy storage with last season carryover as of today By Sonoma water's estimate. We'll still have about three to four years of water supply for its contractors Which is really good news Lake Mendocino and Sonoma Have now encroached into the flood storage pool And this is allowed because of the forecast informed reservation reservoir operations Also known as fero, uh, Lake Mendocino the water year from 2021 to 2026 Is major deviation in control manual to store additional 11,600 And 50 acre feet above the curve. So that's been A great effort that Sonoma water has participated in to ensure that we have that forecasting to Store that additional water And then in december of 2023 the temporary Urgency change petition was granted for determining the minimum in stream flow requirements in the water year Hydrologic index will be based on storage in Lake Mendocino as of january 1st And since that time the water year is considered dry because the reservoir was under 68,400 acre feet at the time And it will be reassessed monthly So reminder that uh now that The storage has exceeded the water supply pool Operational decisions for releases are now passed over from Sonoma water To the u.s. Army Corps of Engineers to manage the flood control needs of the russian river And this uh speaks to the negotiated major and minor deviations that were developed by Sonoma water With the u.s. Army Corps of Engineers for additional storage that is above and beyond the available water supply storage in both reservoirs Utilizing the forecast informed reservoir operations allows for changes to the reservoir operations manual for storage And switching over from water supply To a different kind of water supply We've received and have completed the u.s. Bureau of Reclamation's Small-scale water efficiency grant. Um, this was a commercial cash for grass rebate expansion plus tree installation The project resulted in Over 50,000 square feet of grass being removed and 23 million gallons of water savings We received 75 000 dollars in grant funds match rebates And miraculously After making a few phone calls We were able to uh to some large landscape owners. We already knew of we were able to Have these funds dedicated within a couple hours And so, uh Overall, there are 10 different projects that went through This program and we increased the rebate from a dollar 50 to three dollars per square foot Up to a maximum of 10,000 square feet each So it was a great, um project And I will hand it over to Mr. Prince Good afternoon chair galvin members of the board mike prince deputy director of regional water reuse operations Here for recycled water supply update This is a chart that I think you've seen versions of many times I want to draw your attention to the red curve that just goes a little past January, um The central gray line is sort of the average trend. Um, when you look at numerous years Combined or averaged and right now you can see the red trend is trending pretty darn close to the average I would say things are pretty normal In contrast, you can see last year is the dark black line We had been receiving quite a bit of rainfall by this time the year and our storage levels were good Moving up very rapidly Which triggered a series of discharges throughout last year, which is evidenced by the the sawtooth pattern you can see Particularly between march and april But all told things are really quite normal They're not very exciting yet, although we are looking at getting quite a bit of rain coming up very soon next slide This is a trend that shows our recycle water production All the gray squiggly lines in the background represent individual years The purple trend throughout all of those just represents an average last year was A lot more interesting I guess you could say overall relative to this year There was a big dip in flow That had been trending very high in january and in march Although this year as you can see by the black partial line on the left side Just up through december we're we're tracking similar to last year And I I expect to see things move up a little bit Especially over the next few days and weeks But generally things are are relatively normal right now, although below the average from 1986 to 2022 So shan and I are available for questions if you have any Thank you questions from the board All right hearing none. We'll now move it open For public comment on item 6.1 If you wish to make a comment, please move to the podium and wait for the timer to appear on your screen Mr. Duit Do I have to wait for the timer or just talk? All right. Hello. My name is dwayne duit. I'm from roseland About 30 years ago. I was uh informed that a project called left field farms Was going to begin working with the city of santa rosa on using recycled water I thought that's a really good thing and I have followed for these last 30 years the use of the kelly farm and the brown farm and I'm really excited about recycled water being used as helpfully as possible And I was hoping that there'd be a way to actually get income From the use of recycled water more so than you get now if you get any I'm uncertain if there is any income that comes from These different projects. It's not necessarily easy to find any information about that but Water is an asset It's a commodity No matter if it's been used once twice or five times or if it has any trace pollutants So i'm hoping that you folks will find ways to Look for more money in the revenue stream from the use of recycled water Because we'll be having more water the next couple of years. Now's the time to get some positives from it. Thank you Thank you, mr. Duit They'll take care of our staff briefing. We have no consent items. We have no report items We'll move to item nine, which is public comments on non-agenda matters We'll take those at this point if you wish to make a comment Please move to the podium and wait for the timer to appear and state your name for the record Mr. Duit Hello, my name is duane duit. I'm from roseland And what I wanted to speak about is something I mentioned earlier that I don't know if you folks are Tuned into it, but it's something that's very important to the people who still use wells in the roseland area Now annexed into the city of santa rosa the leaking underground storage tanks from petroleum gas stations That co-mingled with pollution from dry cleaners trichloroethylene Tce and other chemicals And then it was spread into the underground aquifer because of a leak in the sanitary sewer system Under sabastopol road it spread out to the southwest and That leak has never been plugged in a sense and the problem has never really been resolved The approach was well, we'll put those people who got polluted wells on to city water And then They could make that decision if they'll use their water under that well in a different way All of you know about the groundwater sustainability program that the state has now put into effect Anybody that has a well has to pay $30 a year for having a well Even if you're not using it and you want to keep it alive So that might seem like a small amount of money to you, but it's the principle that counts to the people who had wells drilled on their property Paid the money to have functioning wells and then we're told down the road Well because of a governmental situation, we're not going to let you use that well It really Bothered a lot of people in roseland and it disrupted the lives of a number of people Especially when the city of santa rosa working with the county declared what was called a red zone Around a certain area of properties that were contaminated Sunset avenue Hughes avenue going to the north up to sabastopol road That essentially was a form of redlining which caused those people's properties to lose value And you might not have heard about it much, but others who were living there did hear about it And when you get that red zone, it's still in maps you can find if you do some research And you'll see that that red zone then there was a yellow zone and it went further out to the southwest area where the roseland unified school district built roseland creek elementary school And and basically they pump They use a well also And no one ever really dug deeply into did that pollution go all the way out to there And so those school children are drinking water coming up from that aquifer And we're concerned that someone needs to see if there was pollution When the leak was first noticed over 40 years ago, I guess roseland school had testing done And they took themselves off of the well and got on city water So please look into this. It's something that is in your preview Thank you, mr. Dewitt I believe that'll take care now of public comments. We have no referrals. We have no written communication Do we have any subcommittee reports? Thank you. You too Any board member reports? All right, we'll move to the director's report Thank you chair galvin and members of the board. We have I have a couple items to share with you today First I was a request from the city clerk's office just to remind Those in the public that might be listening that we do have a vacancy on the board of public utilities It is a vacancy that is appointed by councilmember alvarez The purpose of the board the board of public utilities is to provide general policy direction over the management and operation of the city's Utilities the board reviews and approves policies and procedures for the department Establishes and recommends the approval of rates fees and the annual operating and maintenance budgets Ours utility and capital improvement projects Contracts for maintenance services supplies and professional services and negotiates property acquisitions Rents and leases for water department property So if anyone is interested in joining the board You can go to srcity.org Slash bpu and on that page There is a link where you can apply online for a board or commission So again if there's any interest, uh, there's a vacancy on the bpu Second I wanted to let the board know that the laguna environmental laboratory Has met the new california environmental laboratory accrediting program requirements This is a really big deal. So a big huge congratulations to the laboratory team These new requirements are collectively known as the nilac Institute standards or t and i for short And they were introduced in october of 2020 And required all certified environmental labs in california to be compliant by january 1st of this year And so we uh got it in in december of last year, which was great news This is a major achievement for our lab and I just personally want to thank all of them for all of their work Um that the staff has done to allow us to meet this deadline. So great job by the team And then last I wanted to let the board know That um as you are aware kimberley, uh harryman, uh retired, uh last or the start of this year And as we are going through the recruitment process, um We had an opportunity to uh have an acting assignment And so I wanted to let you know that um nick harvey who's in the audience Has been appointed as the acting deputy director of administration for the water department Um, he's worked for the city since august of 2014 And he started in finance and then came over to water in 2016 He's been presenting in front of you a lot this last um calendar year in 2023 And so uh congratulations to nick you'll be seeing more of him in his acting role And that's my report and I'm happy to answer any questions the board may have Thank you and congratulations mr harvey any board member questions for the director If not, we'll open it up for public comment on item number 14 If you'd like to make a comment, please move to the podium And wait for the timer to appear on the screen. You may begin by stating your name for the record Seeing no one rise that'll take care of the director's report. We'll now move to item 15.1 Which is conference with legal counsel. I'll ask uh assistant city attorney bigger staff to announce the item, please Thank you chair galvin, uh item 15.1 conference with legal counsel Anticipated litigation initiation of litigation pursuant to paragraph two of subdivision d of government code section 549 5 6.9 one case Potential litigation by meadowgreen number two homeowners association Related to creek bank erosion on the association's parcel adjacent to 65 12 meadowgreen place Thank you. We'll now adjourn to the mayor's conference room for the study or for the um closed session And then we will come back downstairs Please take public comment chair galvin. We'll then come back downstairs afterwards and report out But before we go upstairs, we'll take public comment on item 15.1 Thanks. I knew it. I knew you realized I was waiting around for one last chance Hi, my name is duane duit. I'm very interested in creek bank erosion And curious as to how a homeowners association is coming to the city about some sort of a dispute It makes one wonder is city property next to this creek? Or are you folks responsible for creeks that run through the city even if it's not your property? Thank you kindly Assistant city attorney bigger staff. Do you want to uh respond? Yes, uh, thank you, mr. Duit. Um, the the city is uh responsible for property that it it holds uh an interest in Okay, so it's not just every creek. Thank you kindly sir. That's correct Thank you. We'll now adjourn to the mayor's conference room and we'll come back afterwards and re-adjourn down here. Thank you Okay, I think we're all back. We'll re-adjourn the meeting of the board of public utilities Um, if we may have a roll call, please madam secretary Board member right here Board member grable Board member barthelot here board member baden for it Um vice chair anoni here and chair galvin here All right, let the record reflect that all board members are present with the exception of board members baden for it and grable Thank you. I'll ask our assistant city attorney bigger staff to report out on our closed session Thank you chair galvin for item 15.1 the board gave direction to legal counsel Very good. We'll now take public comments on item 17. If you wish to make a comment, please move to the podium Seeing no one and that'll take care of item 17. Thank you everyone That concludes the agenda for today's meeting So we'll adjourn in honor of our former board member walsh And our two retired employees who we presented proclamations to So we are adjourned. Thanks


Hello, my name is Pablo Sanastúme, I'm responsible for the Postal Security Project at the Postal Union of the Americas being in Portugal. Postal operators provide a key public service that connects families and friends, facilitates trade all over the world, and service key allies for governments in the times of need. However, due to its reach and infrastructure, many times postal operators are used for illicit purposes, such as drug trafficking and contraband. That is why it is so important for postal operators to invest in security measures to protect themselves, their assets, their employees and clients. Security has a traditional disadvantage of being viewed primarily as a cost rather than a source of business value to an organization. At the Postal Union of the Americas being in Portugal, we like to invest in security, and we do this in different ways. For example, we have a team of regional experts that can provide assessment and solutions to designator operators. We also provide financial assistance for those who want to implement new measures and technologies, and we work closely with the Universal Postal Union to assure that many designator operators comply with the security standards and reach a level of security certification. I encourage all postal operators to seek and obtain a security certification. This can be done through the adherence of the UPUs S58 and S59 security standards. This will provide a strong base to protect all clients, staff and infrastructure. Secure the supply chain and minimize all external and internal risks. Thank you very much.


All right, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. My name is Chris Bavitz. I'm one of the faculty co-directors of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. And I'm really pleased to welcome you to a very special edition of our usual Tuesday afternoon lunch speaker series. We always start these events by reminding people that we are being live streamed and recorded. So if you stand up and ask a question later, as I hope you will, just bear that in mind. It's a very special edition of the Luncheon series today for two reasons. The first is that it's Hub Week, which is a terrific event in its second year around Boston. And the Berkman Klein Center has again plugged our programming into this broader arc of events going on around the city. So I encourage you to take a look through the end of the week. Lots going on in the general area of technology and innovation. And we'll be adding their hashtag to our usual hashtag of BKC Harvard. So if you're tweeting or using social media, feel free to use hashtag BKC Harvard or hashtag Hub Week. And second, our speaker today makes this a very special occasion. Susan Crawford, also one of our faculty co-directors at the Berkman Klein Center, and also a clinical professor here at Harvard Law School. She's co-director of the Responsive Communities Initiative at the Center. I've had the pleasure of working closely with her the last couple of years in the Law School Cyber Law Clinic, which is also based at the center. Susan is the author of Captain Audience, the telecom industry and monopoly power in the new gilded age. She's co-author of the Responsive City Engaging Communities through Data Smart Governance. And she's a contributor to Condé Nast's back channel. Susan served as special assistant to the president for science, technology, and innovation policy in 2009, and was a member of the board of directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers from 2005 to 2008.  And it was one of Politico's 50 thinkers, doers, and visionaries transforming politics in 2015. She was a partner at Wilmer Cutler and Pickering, now Wilmer Hale, before becoming a law professor. And Susan's here today to talk about the Responsive Communities Initiative, which is, I think, doing the most exciting work out there around civic tech and innovation. So without further ado, I'll turn it over to Susan. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. So Jeepers, today is a special, special day. For one thing, my mom is here, Dorothy Crawford in the front row. And, yay! Woo! For another, it's a profoundly joyous and celebratory day for the Berkman Klein Center. Because Mike Klein and Joan Fabry are here. And I started off as a baby lawyer working for Mike. And Mike has a joyous way, a joyous way of drawing people to him and empowering them. And making them want to do things that are beyond what they are probably capable of doing. I personally experienced this. And his great gift to the Berkman Klein Center and our ability to grow and change and evolve is a matter of enormous celebration. One way to draw people towards you, as Mike often does, is to tell a story.  And so I have a story to tell today, because I'm trying to draw all of you into what I'm up to here at the Berkman Klein Center, the Responsive Communities Initiative. And the story I'm going to tell is not an ordinary story. It is a story of a trajectory of sorts. It's actually my story, my career story. I'm from Santa Monica, California. And the very first website I ever went to, right about the time I was meeting Mike and Joan in the early 90s, was called The Spot. It's a Santa Monica beach house. And the idea is, look at this alluring text. Immerse yourself in the sun, sand, and secret journals of five 20-somethings living under one roof. I was really drawn to that. And I distinctly remember clicking. And it was as if it was like the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe. All the clothes went away.  And there's a magical world beyond. This ability to communicate, to connect with people at a distance was so fascinating to me. And our firm, Mike's firm, was one of the very first to have laptops on the desks and a connection to the internet. So I really fell in love with the idea of the internet. I was a junior Birdman lawyer. What was I going to do? I became quite interested in the idea of connecting people at a distance and helping them achieve their best selves. That the internet was a truly empowering medium, unlike anything we'd ever seen before. I was drawn to early internet startup companies. They were all around the Washington area at the time. And I became very interested in this idea of governance. Our firm actually began the internet corporation for assigned names and numbers, weaving the contracts that caused it to exist. And I began what I now understand to be a gradual devolution of my career, starting off at the federal level. I was lucky enough to serve in government at the beginning of Mr. Obama's time in office, now regrettably coming to an end, and learned enormous amounts about what it's like to serve in government and understand technology at the same time. And it was a tricky experience. What I learned was that there are lots of heroes behind the walls of City Hall, people trying against impossible odds to get things done to serve others. I also learned that working among agencies in any government world is almost impossible. Really, you have to have gallows humor just to get through it, constant meetings, constant attempts to just push the stone a little bit farther up. This is a memory for me. I went into the office of a senior administration official and said to him, we could shift funding from landline phones, copper line phones, into support for high speed internet access for people who can't afford that access. We could make sure they have it. And he looked back at me and he said, but wait a minute. Phones are two-way. Right. Let that sink in for a moment. He couldn't imagine that you could substitute a way of using a phone by using the internet for what they had been using that copper phone line for. So there was a certain amount of digital illiteracy that was striking to me at the highest levels of government. Also, very difficult to use any form of social media, software, anything inside the government. There was a joke that if they could have had their way the Department of Justice would have just locked us all up in the basement surrounded by steel because communicating was dangerous. They were not very enthusiastic about it. So that wasn't happening. And the unit of interest, the way things were getting done in government, was always the meeting. We went to meetings. And gradually, step by step, something might happen. One of the Cambridge City Council people is here, and I'm smiling at her because I know that that must be what it's like locally as well. Coming out of that government experience, I became quite concerned about the concentration in the high speed internet access marketplace and also concerned that there wasn't enough information going into government about the nature of that marketplace. And I decided to interview people about it and wrote a book called, Captive Audience, which made me a little bit of a black sheep on Capitol Hill. Apparently I've been blackballed. If a cable executive is gonna be testifying on the hill, they've made it clear they don't want me on the same panel. And I'm just gonna say, that's great. You know, I've achieved my ends, I guess. But that book catapulted me into a deep awareness of the state of high speed internet access in America. And every interview had to be done off the record because there was so much fear of Comcast in the world. That led me afterwards to think about the role of government in a time of enormous technological change and potential market concentration. As people were losing confidence in that government. This whole evolution was entirely unplanned but I started noticing more about loss of confidence in giant institutions. Why was it that the government was seemingly incapable of doing anything about high speed internet access in America? Why was it that our confidence in institutions was draining out and people were stopping voting? We've got such low voter turnout in America. What's that coming from? How could that be? Because here's the problem. Americans say we don't trust government. And in fact, most Americans think they could do whatever government says it's gonna do better. And that each government official is actually lining his or her pocket that that's really what's going on. That's what survey results are telling us. At the same time, even though almost nobody says they trust government, we rely on government. Look at this, these huge numbers. Government's gonna keep us safe from terror. They're gonna help us respond to natural disasters, maintain infrastructure, provide a safety net for people over 65, ensure healthcare. This is the central conundrum. How can it be? How can it be that we rely on these institutions to do these great things without trusting them? And what's the role of technology in all of this? I said to myself. And having spent all that time at the federal level where everything is an immovable object and people keep saying no, I got extremely interested in cities. Here's our issue. We all think that everything's gonna be delivered immediately. 80% of everything's gonna come to us by drone in the next few years. At the same time, government is not that good at moving quickly and risks becoming an anachronism just as we need it more than ever. Central issue is that although the public is fractured, there are so many shards of Americans not talking to each other. We don't have giant institutions drawing us together anymore. We still have public needs. We have needs for safety, good health, education, a flourishing life for every American. We still have public values. But Walter Cronkite is not sitting at the kitchen table as he was when I was a child. He was there every night, as I recall, right? Yeah. So expectations are high. We still have public values, but government is not speedy enough to do it. And everybody's moving into cities. So here's my pivot to cities. Federal government, God bless them, they're terrific. But cities are where the action is these days. Most people are going to be living in cities. America, 80% of people live in cities. Did you know that about 46% of our land mass is unpopulated? We just have deer and buffalo. But we're basically living in cities. That led me to working on the Responsive City, my second book, which is attempts to be a gripping, engaging tale of local heroes against impossible odds, struggling to solve problems using technology.  That it is, here you go, simplistic, mechanistic, a historical lack of context, reductive and tautological. The entire idea of just instrumenting cities using data and somehow magically things get better for us seems to me impossible and largely driven by the urban intelligence industrial complex. IBM, Cisco, GE, Siemens, these companies who have talked to government institutions and said just let us put sensors everywhere and we will manage your city for you, all will be well. For me there's a deep tension here between our need for public values to be supported and the need of these companies, frankly, to use the city as a basis for instrumentation as a kind of a control mechanism. So instrumenting the city is a very popular buzz phrase these days, let's gather all the data, understand what's going on and somehow just nudge the city into better behavior, serving people better. I think there's a better way to think about this and what I'm trying to draw you towards is the responsive communities initiative approach because cities after all are for people. The whole idea is that we want to be together, we want to be in interesting places, we want to feel respected and dignified, stimulated, congenial, cosmopolitan, that's what a city is, not a sense of sensors, a set of sensors sort of pushing us through life. So here's where I want you to agree with me, this is the basis for what I'm pushing towards. These are these very widely shared principles that are animating the responsive communities initiative. Everyone has to agree that in this life, the only life we know of, it is our job to create conditions that help humans lead flourishing lives, that let them live out their life's project. This is not partisan, this is something we share, a deep core belief. We also have to believe, because look at all those things we think government's supposed to do, that government's supposed to be effective and should exist, the government's not gonna vanish from the face of the earth, we need them and we need them to be doing a better job. All right, you're with me, right? Can't contest this, it would be unreasonable to contest these principles. And the third one is that we know, from everything we know about human beings, that our deepest satisfaction comes from acting in a way that is compatible with other people's well-being, that our well-being and other people's well-being is inextricably tied together. We have to have an ethical concern for others. We do not live separately, incontestable. So with these three driving principles with which no one could disagree, or that they did disagree, they'd be completely unreasonable. CSA is unreasonable, unreasonable. Just, you have to be with me. It's time to do a little balancing in the role of data, technology and cities. We don't wanna value efficiency over compassion. We don't wanna give up on either efficiency or compassion. They're both central to the life of cities. We need to use this data to enhance the visibility of what the government's doing. So we see our relationship with it, its relationship with us. It is no longer just this very narrow, impoverished relationship. You pay taxes, I deliver you services. That's such a narrow strand that can easily be overtaken by authoritarianism or just neglected entirely. The civic mesh is possible, it takes data and can be created. That's the dream. That's my dream anyway. And the result of all that is that if we see government doing little things well, we see the bridge was built with funds that was supposed to be spent on that. We see that the place is safe. We understand that the park was actually planned by our neighborhood. We see that there was involvement at every level of a community in how something got built. Then when government needs to do those big things like rebuild LaGuardia Airport or somehow fix all the potholes in Boston or find a way to make the transit system work better in this region, it will have the support of the public when it needs to take those giant steps. Small things lead to big things. And so here's some of those big things, roads, firemen, policemen, schools, neutral street lights and post office. Now wait, one of those things doesn't go with the others. What are neutral street lights going in there? Well, this ties to another theme of the Responsive Communities Initiative, which is that part of a truly responsive community is having a robust, resilient, terrific communications infrastructure which includes those street lights. So my third book is gonna be called Fiber, just Fiber. If Cass Sunstein can make nudge work, I can make fiber work as a title, right? One word. And that is not alone what the cover's gonna look like, but something like that. And this is a big, big moment for US cities. We're going through a phase change, or should be right now. Between 1920 and 2010, cities really hollowed out across the country. People moved out. They became decaying, somewhat threatening, dark places. Starting in 2011, people moving back into cities, I tell you, they're chic. They're very, very central these days. And we're in this fourth era of change in cities. The first one was wrought by the steam engine. The second by just having electrical grid in public transportation around the turn of the last century. Cars clearly changed cities enormously. And now we're in this fourth change, which is combining fiber optic infrastructure in the ground with advanced wireless communications infrastructure that connects to that fiber, makes possible a whole new set of human relationships and city functions that could be made visible. Now, fiber, you're saying, what's that? Why is she talking about that? And even two days ago, I got a question on the street. Fiber? We have a jacket, thanks to our team that says team fiber. I got a little pleasure with that. So here's the problem for America. We're stuck. And I'll spell this out in a few steps. There are only three wires you need to know about copper cable and fiber. Copper, it's like a fairy tale. Copper is the lowest capacity, oldest. And a good deal of the country, especially in those low density areas, about 5% of it is stuck with the copper form of internet access, which is called DSL or digital subscriber line. Low density areas, there's more of the middle wire, which is cable, which is a good value proposition in those areas. Most of the country is mostly DSL, for the 30% of it, so about 70% of the country has 30% telco DSL lines and the rest is cable. In the high density areas, like here in Boston, cable dominates. So in most cities in America, your only choice for high speed internet access is this middle wire, the cable wire. Now we love cable. They reach all over America, but they are unregulated essentially as providers of high speed internet access. It's quite expensive. And there's only a very small amount of fiber optic in cities in America, about 14% of the entire country has a connection to fiber. Why do I care so much about fiber? Because its capacity, as far as we can tell, is virtually unlimited. Through this narrow glass strand, you can push enormous amounts of data that is carried on lasers. And every time you need to update the amount of data going through the fiber, all you have to do is switch out the electronics at the ends of the wires. You don't have to dig up the streets and replace the glass. It is future proof, as far as we know, 40 or 50 years. It's going to be the way the rest of the world is going to be transporting data. But the United States is sort of in the middle of the pack of the developed nations when it comes to the percentage of fiber connections in our streets. So although this phase change should be happening in American cities, we're really stuck on this plateau of cable wires that are controlled by very few players and are quite expensive and far lower capacity than what we're going to need. So the big picture is for most Americans, you have just one choice for your high speed internet access connection. It's mostly cable. And I've been working on this for several years and talking about it. It ties deeply to the future of cities. We have no national path to upgrade to any fiber connection for everybody in America. And we love mobile wireless, but you need to have a wire reaching very deep into neighborhoods in order to make that mobile wireless possible. Now, here's where those neutral street lights, the great things that American cities need to do come in. Just imagine that under all of our streets were fiber connections that were, it's called dark fiber, they're passive. It's just the glass. They're available to any private actor to provide retail level connectivity, so that makes it very cheap and very competitive. They would then connect to street lights which are controlled by cities, by and large, which were in turn, could be in turn made into neutral interfaces, places where any wireless connector, any wireless company could provide services. Result, ubiquitous connectivity, we'd never think about it. We don't think about electricity anymore. We hardly think about water. This is the way data capacity should be too. And cities need to control their street lights so that we don't end up with one company providing all of this data to each city in America. Left to their own devices, this is not evil. It's just the way private companies work. Verizon or somebody else will show up and control that street light and make sure that it's the only provider of very high-capacity data services. So we need to watch for that. So we need the dark passive fiber connected to these street lights and to make that fiber available at low prices and have neutral street lights so no single vendor can control that wireless data. That's the picture, that's where we should be going. Instead, we've got about 60% of households in several cities in America with no wire at all to their homes. We have a long way to go to get to this moment. Our initiative hopes to instill bravery in the hearts of mayors so they will take on this problem. Here's a little sketch of the brave mayors building fiber networks across the country. More than 450 of mayors are doing this. We want to encourage that to keep happening, make sure that this connectivity is essentially unlimited. I'm hoping Cambridge will do the same thing someday because here's the new model of the internet. Open fiber everywhere. There will be sensors. They should be subject to policy and contextual awareness and not a historical and aware of how their effects of the data collecting up by them, the effects of that data on people's lives. Open data is certainly part of this so that we understand what the city knows about us and can comment and engage. Algorithms are gonna chew through that data. This is the future. This is the way everything's gonna work. But the city needs to maintain its position as the provider of those public values. Ensuring that everybody gets to lead a flourishing life, ensuring that government works effectively and efficiently and ensuring that we take care of each other, that nobody gets left behind. That's part of the policy picture. Lots of marvelous things will happen. This is the kind of IBM Siemens view. We'll be measuring our water quality, looking for pollution, ensuring that we're using energy effectively, understanding congestion, rerouting traffic on the fly, understanding the sort of the pulse, the fit bit of the city is all possible with these advanced wireless and fiber connected networks. But subject to policy and subject to thoughtfulness on the part of human beings, that's my addendum. So this is the Responsive Communities Initiative. Little textual description of it here. What we're up to is pulling together these strands. The policy needs of cities, needs for fiber, needs for neutral street lights, needs for very thoughtful data governance and stewardship, a real head for social justice, plus the energy of Harvard students. And there's nothing like that in the world, I'll tell you. You know who's really smart on this, really smart on this is Dumbledore, who says that older people who underestimate the young are both foolish and forgetful. So that's absolutely true and we keep finding that. So that's the Responsive Communities Initiative. It's a project of the Berkman Klein Center funded by the Ford Foundation and housed here at Harvard Law School. Here's what we do. We're working again on infrastructure, on fiber, advising mayors, writing white papers, doing whatever we can to push this subject forward. On the far right, talking about data governance and stewardship, thoughtful approaches to the collection, chewing through and use of data by cities. And in the middle, most importantly, fostering collaboration among students, between students and policymakers, and among all the units of Harvard that are also interested in cities. I have lots of friends across the university working on this and in MIT. Our particular lens is the social justice lens here. Who we are, very important. I need to introduce you to Wade Warner, who is the co-director of the Responsive Communities Initiative. He should raise his hand and stand up. There he is, stand up. There's Wade. Hello, he's a retired partner of Davis Polk, with 35 more years experience in infrastructure financing and a wise head working with me on many levels of the initiative. Also the terrific Mariah Smith, where she, Mariah, stand up right there, who is an expert in economics, a recent graduate of Harvard College, and we hope that she will go to law school someday. A team of Berkman Klein fellows are working with us on this and a squad of students from across the university. There's enormous interest in this entire initiative to pull these things together. Our plan is to have a cross, or doing it now, have a cross university think tank, effectively, writing the white papers, coming up with policy suggestions, drafting legislation, advising mayors. There's also a course I offer called City Use of Technology, which brings together everything in a big survey. I'm also helping students work with the city of Boston and others as lawyers, helping them shape policies for privacy and use of sensors and getting fiber in the streets. The goal here is to train and empower students to get people into the field who will be those wise civil servants who won't need to ask whether the internet is two-way. And a real emphasis on cities controlling their destinies, cities remaining at the heart of the equation, not being overrun by the vendors who have every practical plan to instrument the city, but may not be thinking long-term. Digital justice is a key phrase for us, that everybody needs to be on the boat, everybody needs to be leading a flourishing life in cities, and data stewardship. Cities have a great temptation to simply monetize their data, think of it from their perspective, right? They have scarce resources and they would love to use their affordances as a way to just keep plodding along in the world, but that, I don't think, is stewardship of data. There are better policy ways to think about this, but the city is much more fiduciary than anything else. And our key differentiator, our key differentiator is that we are not part of the urban intelligence industrial complex. The Dan Hill thing. Because there are good reasons to work very, very closely with vendors. You learn a lot from them. But in this program, what we're trying to do is have a countervailing argument that there are great reasons to partner with companies, but not to let them dictate policy for the city or for the future of the country. So that's our value add here. And it's a very Harvard Law School value add, I think. So here, again, remember, this is our job. Our job is to help other human beings as lawyers, as policy makers. Of course we need government. It has to be effective, and in this current era, the only way to do that is to know how to wield data intelligently. And we have to help others. We can't just be in this for ourselves. And the city is really a demonstration of that. Why do people choose to live cheek by jowl? Because it's interesting. Because we like being with other human beings. We can't exist without them. So it's unreasonable to object to any of that. So you have to be with me. You have to think that this is a good idea. And that's it. That's my new initiative. And I hope you will join me. Thank you very much. Thank you. Very kind. OK. So we tried to leave a ton of time for anybody to ask questions. Anything. What do you think? What should we do? And what do you want to do? Yes. What's your name? I'm Paola Villarreal. Ah. I'm a fellow at the Brumundstein Center. And I have a few questions. But what is the involvement of the communities affected by this feature that you're proposing? What is the involvement of the community affected? Good question. And it's one that cities really grapple with all the time. How do we engage with the public? Well, we just started. What should we do? I toss it back to you. Well, I think you're focusing a lot on public-private partnerships. And I think that confirms that, indeed, the government is an anachronism. And the public is not so public anymore. What about if we think about a public community partnership? I think that will be a very nice way to involve everybody. Yeah, that's fascinating. And something that the Berkman Klein Center could really do. In opening up the Tuesdays to the community, that's a big step. This initiative should be doing that, too. I'm looking at my colleagues. We're just thinking about how to do that. So great suggestion. I entirely agree. And particularly here in Cambridge, which is actually a very diverse community with all kinds of inequality and other issues affecting it happens to be prosperous. Salaries are pretty high. But there are lots of issues, affordable housing, access to justice, access to social services. And I can imagine that this initiative could have a much wider aperture to the community. In fact, Jen, can I call on you? Is that all right? There's a mic here. Yeah, this is city council person, Jen Devereaux. Hi. Well, I'm thrilled to be here. I had met Susan socially once. And when I caught sight of this, I really wanted to come. I'm sitting next to Saul Tannenbaum, who's been a member of the city's broadband task force, which has worked for the last two years to try to grapple with some of these issues. And I think we're going to go to the next step of doing a feasibility study to look at what municipal broadband would look like in Cambridge and how we would do that according to your guidelines. So this is all great information. And I understand you're going to come and talk to us. We do want to hear from you. You can email us. You can come to hearings. We have an open data portal on our website. So we're really trying to put these things into practice. But Susan is absolutely right that it's really hard to move the needle when you're working in municipal or any form of government. And counselors turn over every two years. And these are very, very long term projects and very big investments. So it's really hard to keep the momentum going and build the institutional knowledge. So I'm here to learn. And I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, Jen. I appreciate that. There's the hand back here. The lovely Dan Jones is running with a mic. My name is Rachel Kalmar. I'm also a fellow at the Berkeley Inquiry Center. Can you hear now? Yeah. I was curious to hear a little bit more about how you're thinking about data stewardship. Who gets access to that data? How much of it is open for the public? And how do you think about, say, potential adverse consequences of having potentially very personal information available? This is a burning subject right now. So I recently convened a bunch of city data officers to talk about the use of privacy in open data. We've got two countervailing things going on. There's a big push for cities, including Cambridge, to open up their data, the data they have, and make it available so that potentially citizens could engage with the city more effectively or new businesses could start. Or even the second floor of City Hall could see what the third floor was doing. It can help interagency collaboration. At the same time, we know that any database that has had anything to do with a human being cannot be de-identified completely. There's always a risk that data that's released could be tied together with another database to identify exactly what taxi you took when and where you went. So the city data officers are working with public engagement to come, I'm deeply hopeful, on a set of at least processes to reduce that risk, to try to understand how data could be sufficiently de-identified. It sounds like jargon. Sufficiently take out personally identifying details so that it's still useful to people who want to build great things on top of it, but it doesn't pose too great a risk of identification of individuals. We are just at the beginning of this enormous policy area. So this is just the right time for Harvard lawyers and GSD students and policy students to be helping cities think through the reduction of that risk. One striking part of this city data officer meeting was that I had the city data officers meet data scientists. These two groups have never talked to each other. It's very rare for any town to have its own data scientists who could say, you know, you can't actually anonymize data. It cannot be done. So the university should be serving that function constantly, lowering its walls, having government, the people, how we do that, we have to figure that out. And academia and others work together on policies that will help everybody achieve their ends. We want to release data. We don't want to hold onto it. At the same time, we want to protect people from due intrusion. Here's the odd thing. 80% of data about someone on a city streets is actually held by a company. You gladly give all of that to Uber and Google and how about that Yahoo breach? Oh my God, unbelievable. So companies have it all and we don't seem to be too worried about that. What is it that makes it so itchy to have a government actor have that job when in fact we trust them? We want them to take care of so much of our lives. So there's tension. There's tension, there are problems and boy do we need good policy work on this. And I can tell you, I keep thinking, oh someone else must be working on this. There's got to be somebody doing this. And there isn't. That's why there's such optimism and hope and interest in this area that there's a vacuum. There really isn't a sort of social justice ear in this entire conversation at the moment. So thanks for the question and we're working on it and I have no answers yet. Except hopefulness. Here's to me. My name is Constanza. I graduated from Harvard College this past May and now I do near science research for a Harvard lab as well, I stayed. So I'm having a little trouble trying to imagine how you can bring this model of responsive communities to different kinds of cities. So I can see it working out very well in a developed city where things are working already very well. There's a system of data management in place where there's political commitment to working on the data and there's that commitment to bring social change. But how would you imagine this kind of model in like, well I'm from Chile so I'm bringing the perspective of like less developed countries where there are cities where there's still so much more to do where there's some data but there's no trust in government. There's not really a lot of political initiative to bring that forward to like use the data. So how do you see that your model playing out in that kind of a city where there's still like a lot of work to do in terms of corruption, in terms of even bringing people together in terms of engaging the community? Well you may think you're sitting at the Harvard Law School, this is actually the Harvard Leadership School. That's what's going on here. Training people, this is my belief anyway, to be infused in cities throughout the world that have this as just part of who they are, this sort of sense of public stewardship, deep ethical concern for uses of data and you do your best to bring in a younger generation in particular that really understands this because they've been living online into government, help them into those jobs and change culture. This is culture eats technology for breakfast every day, you know that's the whole thing. That's definitely true inside government. Even one leader who understands these issues and can balance them in his or her mind and can persuade others can change the way this is looked at. But without the rule of law it is hard to make progress but that's also what we're doing, is encouraging the strength of the rule of law in countries around the world. This is a truly global law school. Take a look at the LLN program, it's stunning. And so this is my little campfire here I want you to gather around but I imagine that there, this could be a franchised model, no reason has to live just here. Could be at any school in the country in the world that has this combination of student energy, interest in data, interest in networks, of seeing all this as part of policy and social justice. You just need a few people who want to be leaders and want to push this along and you can franchise this. I don't want to own this, I think this is a good idea anywhere and this is a good use of the university's walls. You start to wonder, what are universities for anyway? You know, because like all other institutions people are losing faith in universities and they still have great buildings, right? So they could be used as convening places, places to bring in separate strands. So again, all my answers are unsatisfying because this is just a process. But having a different admixture of people inside the walls supporting the rule of law and having universities all over the place supporting this larger view of the use of data and pushing it along is the only way to get this done I think. You guys, you've got something to say. Last good question though, really? No, I was just, no. You're okay, no. All right, that was a no. All right, in the back, Dan, there's a couple of hands here. I'm Roger Wilson, when anybody tells me it's unreasonable to disagree, I've got to immediately disagree. All right, great, okay. So I don't really disagree but would you, would you agree to say government should exist and should be effective and should be limited? Well, by their very nature, they're limited because they're not everything, right? But you should be limited more, I would say more than by their nature but should be consciously limited so as to avoid despotism and so forth. Absolutely, I'm with you and that's where the rule of law and this ethical concern also comes in. And then the other thing, well-being compatible with concerns, et cetera, would you also agree that it's, well-being is very compatible with self-interest? You know what's interesting is that we keep finding out from monkeys and all kinds of studies that our altruism is actually pretty deeply in bread, that it's a big part of who we only survive because we're able to relate to others. So yes, there's self-interest but it can often be overridden or at least tempered by concern for others. So those monkeys, they keep telling us things. Yeah, okay. I am Tim Davis, an affiliate at the Berkman Center and also work on a project around open contracting. So I was really struck by your conversation about the kind of public-private partnerships that cities are using to get this technology in and I'm just interested in how you're exploring that question of giving cities the skills, experience to develop good contracts and open up those contracts right from the early planning stage because so often, citizens only discover about the contracting once it's signed and don't get a chance to engage. Engagement and contracts, that's really something, imagine that. Well, here's what I, our job is to train everybody so they can second guess that person who starts spouting jargon at them from the company. At least ask good questions and understand what they're about to commit to and have people to call if they're worried about over-giving to the company. That's all, this is about literacy and strength and a little bit of a group boycott, like helping the cities talk to each other so that they know what deals others are getting and understand what they may be able to negotiate for. So it's, the problem is we don't have, is this capacity building? In the foundation world, they would say it this way. It's a way of making sure that everybody has an ability to second guess or at least question. So Dan, right in the back there, yeah, thank you. Yes, Judith Perrole. I think you've made a false dichotomy between self-interest, self-interest and well-being of others because we're extremely interconnected in our ability to survive and so taking care of one another is the way we act out a lot of our self-interest certainly in security and food production and other things. Thank you for that point that they're absolutely inextricably intertwined and we really do see that in cities. Here in the front, here, yeah, Alan's got it. Thanks. Thank you. Two small questions. The first, I was, I think it was Latvia on your list so that had a lot of connectivity. A lot of fiber, yeah. Bottom, so maybe an explanation of how that happened and is it expensive and the second question, more importantly, is from the research you've done, what's the closest example from the country's worldwide to what you're proposing? You know, it's interesting, I'm mostly seeing examples going the other direction. For example, China is building a lot of smart cities from the ground up, fully instrumented, absolutely understood, not particularly thinking about social justice and data stewardship, right? Necessarily, absolutely thinking about economic growth but all the privacy concerns or concerns about autonomy that might animate us or Americans not necessarily present there. So actually, a lot of this is borne out of concern on my part or our part, this is all our campfire, that we're missing an opportunity to inject a policy year into what's happening because we're starving government of resources often so they don't have the capacity to second-guess, to understand, to make a more nuanced judgment about what's going on. I've made a couple of trips to Stockholm and there I have seen the city taking very seriously its duties as a steward, as a fiduciary for its citizens and actually they have a lot of concern even about sharing data between the police department and others, you know, really worried about that and taking very gradual steps towards a fully instrumented city and being quite deliberate about it and they have made that fiber upgrade, they did that a long time ago so they're ready to be this kind of city but their managers are coming here to talk to us about policy decisions that might be made that will keep in mind all the data stewardship and social justice issues we're talking about. So. Can we go ahead and deal with that first? Sensors on, yeah. Well because the problem is you'll start pilots with companies that didn't just explode and the public knows very little about it and the question is whether you're adequately taking everybody's interest into account and then there may be a blowback from the press and the public when, if there is a press, question mark, and the public when they find out about it. So people, it is surprising, again I keep being surprised by this, surely somebody else is thinking about this but they're all talking to each other like Andrew will call Bill, who will call Harold, who will call Susie, what are you doing? What are you doing? They're just trying to figure out from each other what things they should be taking into account as they take these steps. So this is a very primitive field, surprisingly primitive given that we know 50 billion devices are gonna be connected to the internet of things by 2020. So this tsunami is clearly coming and cities are being overrun by requests to attach sensors to all their street furniture but the policy implications of that are difficult and the opportunities to monetize seem great. So they're really tugged right now. It's a fascinating time. John, do you have any questions or comments? Wonderful. Oh, okay, it's wonderful, thank you, that's very kind. I was hoping you were gonna bubble up and say no, forget it. Anybody else? Oh, here in the front row, anybody got a mic? My name is Theodora Skettis and I just graduated from the Kennedy School. So I was wondering, you mentioned initially that there are record high levels of dissatisfaction with government. So do you think that there needs to, well, do you view this process as a mechanism for raising levels of satisfaction or do you think that there needs to be some intermediary step like a cultural shift before people become comfortable enough with the government to permit data sharing at this level? Well, I think there are incremental steps that have to be taken and are being taken. Things like being able to rate your experience with a government service. Like a tiny thing, we expect that in the commercial world. We never do it in relationship to government but the government of the District of Columbia launched this, a Yelp for government services. And immediately people say, oh, that's a great idea. Why didn't we do that before? Or being able to thank the guy that just fixed the pothole, that's new. We do that in the commercial world all the time. We have some visibility into that process and actually have a communication. Governments are starting to do that. Seattle's doing that. Boston wants to make it possible to do that. So these little steps that we take as completely commonplace in the commercial world can start being taken by government just to make itself a little bit more visible. So I don't think it's binary. I don't think you have to change the whole culture which is gonna be really hard but you can just make things a little bit more visible people start noticing and then that's the civic mesh. That's when you understand that it's not just you and just you alone in a city that doesn't care about you but that you can be compassionate. In fact, the mayor of Louisville, Greg Fisher, announced that Louisville is the most compassionate city that that's what they're gonna be. He'd gone to visit the Dalai Lama or you know, whatever and it becomes compassionate but using data, why couldn't we use data to be visibly more compassionate? Here's the cool thing about all this fiber stuff. This can also be spooky but eye contact becomes possible over these very high capacity networks. We've never experienced that before at a distance. So that makes possible empathy, compassion between professors and doctors and the rest of us but maybe even for the city council person you can really talk to and be fully understood. Now she's yeah, whoops, she's worried about that but yeah, there are great possibilities here. So I see Saul's in the front row. Hi, Saul Tenenbaum. You're absolutely right that this is a sort of an untouched field and I'm wondering why and let me be a little more specific than that. My early undergraduate education was in urban studies and planning and even in the 70s it was data oriented. That's why I went into it. It was the best place to use computers for something and you can see its legacy in SimCity of all things. I mean that's deeply a part of a certain urban planning tradition. My question is and I don't know that you even have an answer is what happened and why did that discipline fade away? So you have to come back decades later and reinvent something. Well that's an interesting question. I mean people have been worried about ethics and data and stewardship since the beginning. I'm not inventing anything new here. I think the only, this new combination that I'm seeing is this big face change to unlimited connectivity which is something we do want. You want to have data everywhere and that makes possible an instrumented city spewing out data all over the place but from my view that face change, it's really a face change. It's a difference in kind not just in degree and nobody's focusing on that I think. It's this moment in time that is a bit new. We are just getting used to the idea of an autonomous vehicle driving itself. That requires a boatload of data to work and a lot of connectivity and just yesterday Uber announced that they're considering drones, taxis in the air, flying taxis that are self-driven. What could go wrong? What could possibly go wrong? So it's all pretty new and it's sort of marching along right now and we've got deep security concerns where we sort of think it's cool. People love Uber. You've accepted Uber. They have a tremendous amount of data about everything and they could become a big monopoly in every American city or cities around the world but we haven't really put together the idea that a lot of data and a lot of ethical concerns and this is what feels new to me and I think scale really matters in this setting and it matters at both edges. It matters because we can be more fully human, more fully connected in a way that has been impossible until now which is great, it could be great and it matters in the other direction in that we can be more fully instrumented and control or feel controlled on the other end of the spectrum which is a little scary. So you put together 5G wireless communications, autonomous vehicles, mixed reality like augmented reality and virtual reality and computer vision, right? All the body cameras could just be data and all the cameras and streets are just data and you mix all that together and it's a very different world and so the human, what's the human role in all that? The human is sitting in the autonomous flying taxi looking out the window at mixed reality which is a multi-layered digital presentation. Does that sound good, Jim? See, but it could be, it could be very engaging. We love, we never ask for less information about things well maybe you do. I think it's great to have information we need to learn how to cope with it, process it, put it in our journey somehow but the role of the human heart I think is not gone it's just we've gotta get it in there, insert these human values every once in a while and law students are great at that and so are Kennedy School students and Urban Planning School students and boy, you know who's the coolest? The undergrads, they are great. So the lab intentionally involves a whole squad of undergrads because the IOP is such a wonderful institution and I wanna do that kind of thing for this set of issues and thanks to Mariah, we've been able to do it. Boy, it's not easy to cross-register in this university but we made it happen, we cluged it together. Anything else? So you're all gonna join in. Rob, research director of the Berkman Klein Center. Hi, Rob Farris, research director at the Berkman Klein Center. So thank you for the inspiring talk as we're all custom too, as you know I'm a huge fan of this work and the fabulous team that you've convened. I'm still suffering a bit from a hangover from the debate last night and one of the narratives that's been shared widely is the growing disparity between urban rural areas and disparate economic futures. How much of the approach in the future that you envision is density dependent? Well, here's the good news. I don't think it is density dependent because there are all these places in Sweden with little tiny hamlets that have this kind of network presence in them. It was done with a little bit of state support but a lot of just good planning. Great policy can ensure that rural areas have the same sorts of experiences as are possible in urban areas. Not maybe not the flying taxis but the ability to see different layers of data to have the farm be visible to you in a way that it hasn't been in the past. The ability to keep your young people at home so you hang on to your rural character. They don't have to leave because the networks are so terrible. I actually have a lot of hope for rural areas and this phase change. It probably does require some level of loan guarantee, that kind of thing for the networks to be built. Here's a good thing. Mrs. Clinton's policy platform has an infrastructure bank in it, proposal for that, that would include fiber. So the state puts its good name behind a loan, lowering the cost of capital to a rural hamlet or a community needing to build that network. Wireless travels great in rural areas as long as they're not hilly. So we get this great connectivity and an ability to hang onto your rural character and real advances in agriculture and other businesses that depend on being in that rural area. I know I'm too optimistic but, and I do focus on cities because so many people live there but I think the future is pretty good for rural communities as well. Given this infrastructure bank idea could happen. Anybody else? Others on the right? The question is if I, I'm one of these optimistic people who's looking forward to these cities, but never in human history has, if this is successful, then the concentration of that data among different agencies, collaboration, et cetera, what happens or what's your thinking on the effective security of that? Because will frontiers disappear? Will they be feuding neighbors, et cetera? The usual security question but in this visionary world. Can I call on some cybersecurity experts to answer that question? What happens to security? What do you think? Can I call on you? What happens to security and the phase change? God, I'm John DeLong, a fellow here at the Berkman Klein Center. So I, you know, hard to, hard to predict the future a little cloudy. I think a lot's going to come back to these new techniques and data anonymization. You know, I think it is that most of the studies today show it's very difficult to do. But there are some new techniques coming out there. There are some new concepts for ways to use data and ways we probably haven't imagined as just the whole database or just part of the database. So I mean, I think it's one way to look at it. Obviously, there's a lot of other kind of more practical security points of view. You know, hard to tell, but certainly good problems, I would say. Great problem set. And so your question is also, does this just become one large mound of data as boundaries disappear and everything could potentially be knowable by someone else? And what does that mean for the future of mankind? Possibly, if access are increased. Right. That's already happening in a sense with the advent of the internet. We have far fewer barriers in terms of access to data about others than we ever had before. There's something pretty liquid and unceasing about what's about to happen, which does feel different, but I don't know what that means for us.  I don't think that's gonna happen. I do think we'll retain allegiance and protection. Government can only operate on so much land mass before it just blows up and doesn't work anymore. Look at the Roman Empire or when they try to be too big, it's not gonna work. So the subsidiarity, the need to have smaller components that are governed and understood is always gonna remain. That's why I've seized on cities as a tractable geographic line for this kind of treatment. Other people say, no, we have to be looking at regions these days. Boston is not a city, it's a region.  So there is no answer. There will be tsunamis of data, they will be accessible in some way. We'll try to limit the risk of harm to people stemming from that access while raising the benefits. We'll just muddle along, we're humans. We'll muddle. But we have to do our best to at least learn from each other. And that's one of my goals with this initiative. So thank you all. That was fairly enjoyable for me. I really appreciate it. Thank you.