Travis County Commissioners Court
January 19, 2010,
Item 25
>> Commissioner Eckhardt recommended that you stay for this next report.
that is number 25.
sev presentation from representatives from the city of manor on the labs public input and recommendation system.
>> good morning.
>> good morning.
>> right over there.
we might want tech to come in and help with this.
we might need to unplug and replug.
>> judge, this particular item, Commissioner Eckhardt brought this to my attention.
basically going to be a brief presentation.
may be a tool that man manor is using that appears to have some efficiency and effectiveness.
i'm not going to steal their thunder but after talking with justin, he kind of convinced me in the conversation that it was something worthwhile of venturing into.
of course bringing it before the Commissioners court to allow everyone else to see the detailed information of the conversation that we had on the telephone.
so this is the outlet I guess from that particular conversation that he and I had.
really appreciate the presence of them being able to make the down here today.
thank you.
>> which one of you is the 23-year-old techy?
>> me.
>> thank you.
>> you can't tell by looking?
i'll lead off.
i'm phil tait, city manager of manor, and our assistant city manager and responsible for putting our technology programs together.
i think Commissioner Eckhardt saw in in the newspaper and ironically the lady that wrote the article is over here to the left.
she didn't plan, didn't know we were coming.
dustin has put several technology projects together for us and has really gotten some really benefit for the city of manor.
he is going to go through the program for you.
i will turn it over to him.
>> thank you, phil.
thank you for the opportunity to present to you and show you some of the technology we are doing in manor.
it kind of all began with the relationship that we had with a researcher at stanford university.
stanford reached out about six months ago.
posed a question to us to come up with some solution to make a difference within government.
and so, we started doing a lot of research and looked at how can we engauge our citizens.
>> if you will use that microphone.
>> hold a second.
>> let's switch out mikes.
there you go.
>> check that one out.
>> better?
>> much.
>> much better.
>> manor labs was born out of that.
and it is open innovation platform that allows anyone in the world to participate in the city's research and development.
what I mean about I that, anyone can suggest ideas for manor, and the ideas are voted on.
i'll go over how the process works in a little bit.
but it builds solutions outs of that.
so the platform has been live six October 27.
we have had five implemented solutions.
so to kind of show you where we came from.
this is the best picture that I could find an unline to describe manor's technology about five years ago.
it's not only, we have had an awesome team of people in manor and council behind this technology.
we have gone through remarkable transformation.
so three years later, these are some of the people that we have worked with, some of our partners.
we have 17 strategic partners all over the world, several of which are multibillion dollar companies.
just about all our technology has been no expense to the citizen base and we're actually making a profit off our technology now.
the purpose of the platform is to build participation and to ultimately build engagement.
in order to build engagement, you have to repardon people for participating.
this platform has the me truck built in.
that is what it looks like.
it's run off of on spigot engine a company in california that we partners with to driver this open innovation platform.
traditionally used for foretune 500 employees.
it's a good form of innovation but for government it's important to harness the power of the citizens.
it's important to give a software platform to use to submit ideas and participate in the political process.
to submit an idea, screen shot is a little bad there.
a narrative box they can go in and type summary of their idea, whatever it is.
employees use it, citizens use it, and lots of great ideas have come from it.
this idea is one submitted by an officer to basically send out sms reminders whenever someone was about to get a warrant issued for arrest.
we collect their telephone number now on their ticket.
to use it to send out reminders.
a company in tokyo picked up on this and wanted to develop a solution for manor for free.
very power folful platform powering a lot of ideas.
the neat thing is it kind of brings a game element.
citizens can vote on ideas, promote ideas they like.
they can demote ideas they don't like.
what this allows us to see at a top level is the most popular ideas, where is our need at.
where do our citizens feel like we need to address issues at.
so this is a very powerful metric that allows us to see that.
it also allows them to recruit people to be a part of their idea.
it allows them to share that idea on line.
they can invest in ideas.
there's a vir chal idea market so they can insesinvest virtual currency in the ideas so we can see where is this going.
this is powerful.
a lot of people think it's a kiddy element having the dame metric but in order to make a sustainable platform you have to encourage people to come back and participate.
the only way to do that, they have to get a tangible benefit.
so the benefit they get is ino bucks.
when they sit an idea they get 5 000.
if the idea is implemented they get 3,000.
>> hold on.
repeat the numbers again.
what do you call them?
>> I in, horks bucks.
a term we developed.
basically a virtual currency.
they get rewarded for everything.
if they vote, 150 bucks.
the they blog, I think a thousand in horks bucks.
they can take the bucks and trade them in for real products donated by mer chance.
they can trade it in for mayor for a day, some of the things the city can do, we can't offer a lot since we are a government agency but we can let them have their own week declared in their honor.
we provide them a tangible benefit to participate in the process.
that is how we harness ideas outside of manor.
people can say, hey, I submitted an idea, watch it go through the process, and when the idea is implemented it is featured in the paper.
we run the leader board on the neck slide in our paper.
it shows what the type ideas are who the top users are.
it's good way to encourage people to be motivated to participate in the platform.
what is one month of innovation?
a month after our program was launched, that is the ideas that we had in there.
the first, if I can get my mouse over there.
the first level of the idea funnel is the incubation.
when an idea is split the it falls immediately into that level.
at that level citizens and other people over the world can vote on these ideas.
if it gets enough votes, enough page views, enough buzz behind each idea it will automatically drop to the next category called validation.
at the validation level that is where a department head will physically get the idea and review the idea and go, okay, is this implementable?
how sustainable is this idea?
how much is this idea going to cost the city.
does it address the problem.
they get to aand if they approve it drops down to emergent phase.
we get with all the department heads and evaluate the ideas and say is had something we can pie --pilot, how will we pay for this, is this a potential partnership.
out of the committee we will choose whether to implement or do pilot or abort.
if we implement we reward the citizen, provide a link to information where they can sign up for the new service or whatever it is.
if we abort the idea we have to give the citizen a reason why.
so we have to say it's out of just disk, something related to the police department, we give feedback.
completely transparent.
everyone can see this is why manor cannot implement the idea.
we go back to the drawing board and the process starts over again.
we can measure all of our impact.
it has very powerful back end.
we can measure, okay, obviously there's a large need in economic development in manor, probably one of the highest sectors of ideas we have submitted.
right now about 50 in the queue in the processing stages.
one of the greatest benefits of the platform is that it's user driven.
so it doesn't create extra work for us.
we look at the ideas after they are voted on and after we get the best ideas that the citizens feel are in the greatest demand.
one of the other of this is the collaboration element.
all of our research and development we do is posted on line.
all of the white papers, the technology we develop.
a lot of open source development now and we hope to work with the city and county of san francisco to do more open source technology department.
all of that is posted on line for other cities to use for free.
anyone can access at manor labs.organize.
.org.
that is what we want to help other agencies do.
we're all working on other problems on different .
we all have budget constraints, we face similar issues with information technology in other departments, economic development.
this platform allows us to collaborate with other agencies and learn from one another some of the future of open innovation manor is working on launching a national open innovation platform and we have about ten cities, three state agencies, and one feds--federal government agency signed up to participate.
completely free to the end participant and funded by the federal government.
we're still working on.
but coming out of Travis County which is our goal.
with that I'm open to any questions about the platform.
kind of a quick run through.
normally a 40-minute presentation.
wanted to give you a top level view of manor labs of you're -- you're free to go to manor labs.org.
>> give the website again.
i know it's important.
sometimes we push the time.
i didn't know.
you have a lot to say but can you squeeze it into this amount of time.
i think you have done a great job on that.
however, for those listening, give that particular website address.
>> manor labs dot org.
and you can get it off the city's website.
>> okay.
a question I failed to ask when we talked on the telephone earlier.
again, Commissioner Eckhardt, I'd like to thank you for bringing this to my attention.
the question that I had posted to you because I was concerned about those folks that may not have an opportunity to participate but have some grade ideas.
and the question was how do they but not have the technical or computers to deal with the idea they like to transmit to you.
how is that handled as far as capturing those kind of ideas that you maybe can incorporate into the measurement of the outcome?
how will that be handled?
>> they can call city hall.
and they can write their idea down and mail it to us.
a staff member will actually input their idea into the syste.
>> okay.
so on the website, on your web page, the website, it actually suggests that for other folks that may know someone that has ideas and doesn't have a computer, or they can just call city hall?
typically they will call city hall.
>> just call city hall.
>> yes.
>> call city hall.
we're working on a mobile lab where they can do it from the cell phone.
>> really, from the cell phone?
>> that's right.
>> hmm.
>> we're trying to bring the government to the citizen, in whatever platform they can access it in.
>> okay.
anyway--
>> of course you are working on the mobile.
>> that's right, of course.
>> that was the only other question.
i had a lot of questions but you answered a lot of them before the presentation.
basically I know the court, y'all haven't been exposed to it as probably Commissioner Eckhardt and I have.
since they are open to how we want to handle it, judge.
>> any questions for mr.
hasler?
>> I have a couple.
>> okay.
>> we had talked about this a little bit, the ability to filter participation.
and you had said originally this type of of platform was utilized for totally closed participation inside corporations.
>> you had you.
>> do you foresee or has manor experimented at all with the ability for curtailing participation to manor residents or Travis County residents?
>> it can be is the up to do that.
we opened et up to try to get government agencies, their feet wet, so to speak, with open innovation and how it works.
we want everyone to kind of be able to log into the platform, participate, and we have actually had a lot of ideas come out of overseas cities like from the u.k.
so it helps us kind of learn from them.
but yeah, it can be tailored to be citizen only driven.
yep.
>> okay.
you had mentioned that manor is now profiting from the ten developments?
>> we are starting to sev grants.
we partnered with a few venture funds and labs in silicon valley investing in manor and our r and d so to speak.
out of that we hope to make better products for government agencies, to have their products tailored.
manor is kind of a tinkering agency.
we light to not reinvent the wheel but come up with new uses.
we're starting to get a lot of those.
we have a lot of inquiries and agencies interested in participated and using some of our technology.
like our website, I worked with a guy out of calds, an organization called gov fresh, built on word press, completely open source.
at the bottom of website you can download the source files and anyone can use those files to make a free website.
so we're trying to make things easier for agencies across the country.
>> word press.
interesting.
you had mention the previously the license agreement that manor has with spigot was written with the intention of additional governmental entities utilizing the platform.
did I understand that correctly?
>> in manor's license agreement?
well, we have created a few.
we are, would go with the trento italy on some technology partnering with them and created the european union funded program over there, open innovation platform also with our spigot license agreement.
we can do that.
if Travis County wanted to beta test under manor labs, we can definitely accommodate and have a platform up and running in probably 48 hours.
>> yeah.
>> thanks.
>> mr.
>> thank you, junk.
i did have have some concerns with the privacy matters.
i know we had it on the tex dot agenda, removing it from their agenda.
there were some privacy concerns concerns Commissioner Davis had.
and also we have seen in future, in past events here, transportation issues.
we had to take on traffic, which was basically a coalition of developers.
i wonders with the lab work you have done in the past, we're pressured so much and citizens are pressured so much by public private partnerships and comprehensive development agreements and things of this nature, that if you could be able to determine if an organization like take on traffic or any lobby group were using your website, if there's any way that you could ever ever track and trace a software that could identify these groups versus actual citizens that are actually--
>> we have some pretty powerful agent --algorithms built in.
if a company joins and tries to sell the product they are immediately booted from the platform.
it violates the terms of use.
we don't allow any type of company with a vested independent in making a profit to participate.
they can look at the ideas from a top level which is what the company in tokyo did.
they are not actually a member.
they looked at the idea and said we're interested in helping you develop this idea at no cost to the citizens of manor and ultimately would help a the lo of other agencies without a similar problem.
>> as a sole source of funding?
>> national ininnovation platform.
we have a partnership with spigot and that is how the platform is running.
>> privately run?
>> software as a service hosts by spigot.
>> yeah, one of my concerns.
thanks a lot.
>> thank you.
how many departments does manor have?
>> five.
>> five, yes.
>> and--
>> 35 employees.
>> 35.
>> our i.t.
budget is $107,000.
>> okay.
any other questions or comments?
>> one more question that I had asked before.
how much time does staff spend monitoring manor labs?
>> not a lot.
now, when we first launched the platform was self moderated which means I approved each idea to keep the ideas targeted and keep it used for new ideas for the government and not a political soap box.
so probably the first month it took a few extra hours a week for me to self moderate the platform.
at this point it's completely user driven and the ideas only come once they have been veted and voted on by the citizen base.
so it hasn't created a lot of new work for us.
we do have one extra committee meeting, innovation committee, we tailor with department head meeting.
and the department heads enjoy the meeting and they get a chance to look at new perspectives and ideas and how we can turn them into real solutions.
>> I would like to further investigate a little more this, hearing some of the responses we have heard today.
i think it's something that I think we can look at in the future.
i guess as far as cost is concerned, what would it actually cost if the county is interested in looking into a situations like that, what would the actual cost be.
what will be the legal parameters that may circle, interface in something of this nature.
what would the department of its have to do in their role.
it's a lot of loose ends that I need to uncover and unveil.
but I would like to further look and discussing this and see if there may be a use for Travis County.
so I would like to meet with phil.
phil, was this young man with you last time I was out there at city council meeting?
>> yes, he was secretary at that stage in the game.
>> he was there then?
>> yes.
>> y'all didn't introduce him.
why didn't you ent dues him to me then?
anyway, I'd like to further investigate this, judge, and see--
>> absolutely.
we can make you all a test site so that your its can go into the back end and see how it works.
it's software as service so you don't have to tax county servers to use it.
you can put it on county servers but for the time being if you want to test it and see in an internal perspective how it works, we'll be happy to set that up for y'all.
>> okay, Commissioner Eckhardt, if you would like to be a part of that, I would appreciate it.
>> I would very much like to.
i understand mr.
heisler you are an oregon native and mr.
tait has stolen you from across the pond.
>> gets shot at every time he drives through town.
>> I live on the outskirts.
>> thank you very much for coming.
>> sure.
>> appreciate the presentation.
>> if you have questions, feel free to send an e-mail.
>> I'll be in touch.
thank you, phil and dustin.
appreciate.
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Last Modified:
Tuesday, January 19, 2010 4:03 PM
