<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=windows-1252"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div role="main" data-theme="c" data-role="content" id="StoryHeaderMobile" class="MainPage ContentDefaultMobile ui-content ui-body-c">
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<h1 class="headline"></h1></div></div>For those who haven't yet seen this article in the East Bay Express about Open Oakland, Code for America, Sudo Room, and other related developments, see below and at <a href="http://m.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/cracking-oaklands-code/Content?gpt=1&oid=3426694">http://m.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/cracking-oaklands-code/Content?gpt=1&oid=3426694</a>.<div><br></div><div>Please tweet this, share it on your Facebook timeline, and/or forward it to relevant mailing lists - an easy & free way to help out while helping raise awareness.<br><blockquote type="cite"><div role="main" data-theme="c" data-role="content" id="StoryHeaderMobile" class="MainPage ContentDefaultMobile ui-content ui-body-c"><div class="storyHead"><h1 class="headline">Cracking Oakland's Code</h1>
<h2 class="subheadline">Can a group of hackers figure out new answers to the city's old problems?</h2>
<cite class="byline">by <a class="ui-link" href="http://m.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/ArticleArchives?author=3355911">Azeen Ghorayshi</a></cite>
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January 02, 2013
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<div class="magnumContainer no-foundation-imgeditor"><br></div><div class="magnumContainer no-foundation-imgeditor">Back in 2007, Michal Migurski noticed that the City of
Oakland's crime-mapping site, Crimewatch, was nearly impossible to
navigate — not to mention stuck in the late Nineties, design-wise. The
site contained useful information, but because of its clunky interface,
it wasn't really helpful. But for Migurski, who works at an online
design and mapping firm in San Francisco, it provided the perfect
challenge.</div></div><div role="main" id="StoryLayoutMobile" class="MainPage ContentDefaultMobile ui-content" data-role="content"><div id="storyBody" class="page1"><p>For weeks, Migurski worked late at night hacking the city's data,
trying to find a way to take the daily crime stats and create code that
would present the information in a new, user-friendly format. With the
help of his colleagues, he created Oakland Crimespotting, a website that
allows people to track crimes by date, neighborhood, and crime type,
all laid out on a relatively intuitive interactive map. The website
became an instant success: Neighborhood crime prevention councils, which
previously had to hunt down data from the Oakland Police Department,
now had better information with just a few clicks. Oakland Crimespotting
was, essentially, a timesaver for everyone involved. And, as the saying
goes, information is power.</p><p>Nine months after the site went online, however, the city blocked
Migurski from retrieving any more of its data. "They weren't too happy
about it," Migurski recalled. "They felt that we were misusing the
service and putting undue stress on their servers. I don't think that
was the case because at this point we'd been running the site for
months. It wasn't anything new." However, a few months later, the city
had a change of heart. Instead of just letting Migurski continue as
before, officials promised they'd start providing him with the
information on a daily basis. And in the five years since, the city has
never failed to deliver.
The city's initial misgivings weren't entirely surprising, Migurski
noted. "We were basically asking something of them that they'd never
considered giving out before," he said. But the city's shift in attitude
reflects a sea change in government that's taking place across the
country — not just in Oakland.</p><p>In 2009, so-called civic hackers like Migurski were given the
equivalent of a divine ordinance. That's when President Barack Obama
issued the Open Government Directive, a memorandum that called for
increased transparency in government by freeing up data for everyone to
use. Since then, more and more municipalities have been working with
civic-minded hackers to help cities make websites and apps that matter.
The idea is that data — whether on crime, budgets, liquor licenses, or
disease outbreaks — can be organized and presented in a way that's more
useful to the public. And giving people greater access to data not only
increases transparency, but it also makes people better informed. The
ultimate goal is to create a more engaged citizenry, which, in the
grandest Obama vocabulary of the movement, is "the essence of
democracy."</p><p>"It's a new definition of transparency," said Jen Pahlka, an Oakland
resident and founder of Code for America, an organization that brings
together cities and hackers to solve problems using technology through a
year-long fellowship program. "Transparency shouldn't just be about
holding your government accountable; it's about changing the
relationship between people and government."</p><p>And there's perhaps no better place for such a movement to take root
than in Oakland, where a combination of factors — a tech-savvy
workforce; an activist-oriented, DIY-minded populace; and a
cash-strapped government with few resources — make for a ripe
environment in which to create meaningful breakthroughs in civic
hacking. Thanks in large part to the city's new online engagement
director, Nicole Neditch, the city has been actively working with
hackers on various projects: In December, more than one hundred
librarians, students, small business owners, city staff, and coders
attended City Camp, an event at City Hall that aimed to get different
groups of people involved in finding creative technological solutions to
city problems. On January 3, three Code for America fellows will begin
an eleven-month project to build much-needed apps for the city. And
later this month, the city will roll out an "open data portal," freeing
up more than thirty datasets on crime, property, and public works
requests, which they hope will be put to good use by the city's intrepid
coders.</p><p>Certainly, these endeavors are admirable. But the goals they aim to
achieve — and whether they can actually achieve them — aren't so
clear-cut. Getting people to actually use the apps, sustaining the sites
after the hackers have left, and dealing with the city's
still-significant digital divide are only some of the challenges these
new measures face, and for that reason it's unclear whether they'll
actually lead to a more efficient, let alone a more democratic, Oakland.</p><p>Advocates of civic hacking note that the technology is simply a means
to an end, not the end in itself. Oakland Crimespotting, for example,
was successful because it allowed people to easily see the crime in
their neighborhoods, and gave them a platform for a more productive
conversation about crime. "It's not about the technology," Pahlka said.
"It's about the people and the conversation they are having."</p><p>Perhaps, but in a city fraught with complex problems, are apps really the answer to Oakland's woes?</p><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><hr align="center" noshade="noshade" width="20%"><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p>For many, the term "hacking" still mostly brings to mind negative
connotations. "It probably got misinterpreted as a negative term for
breaking security systems in the Seventies or Eighties," Migurski said.
But for a long time, the term simply meant "finding interesting, weird,
or elegant solutions to a problem."</p><p>The story of hacking begins with model trains. In 1946, a group of
MIT students started the Tech Model Railroad Club to fiddle with and
build an elaborate system of miniature trains. Half of the club was in
it for pure nostalgia: They painted the meticulous replicas and waxed
poetic about an aging pinnacle of high-speed transportation. The other
contingent, dubbed the "Signals and Power Subcommittee," oversaw the
massive wiring that powered the elaborate system of crisscrossing train
tracks.</p><p>Using stray equipment cobbled together from the campus phone system,
the S&P members strung together wires and dials that allowed for
complex manipulation of the miniature trains. In 1959, they wrote a
dictionary for their particular jargon, which became the foundation of
hacker culture. <i>Hack: 1) an article or project without a constructive
end; 2) work undertaken on bad self-advice; 3) an entropy booster; 4)
to produce, or attempt to produce, a hack.</i> By taking existing stuff,
tinkering with it, and figuring out how to give it a clever new
purpose, these students were producing what they called hacks.</p><p>And this spirit remains largely the same in today's generation of
self-identified, decidedly non-nefarious hackers. Such was evident on a
Friday evening in December, when a group of them gathered on the second
floor of an office building on 22nd Street and Broadway for the opening
party for Oakland's newest hackerspace, Sudo Room. The event included at
least some of the typical party indicators: people, bottles of whiskey
and cheap wine, and the glaring buzz of dubstep floating above the
awkward party chatter. But there were also scattered laptops, a giant
vat of an experimental kombucha brew, more than two hundred books on
topics as disparate as coding language and law, and equipment for radio
broadcasting. Sudo Room intends, like the Model Train Club before it, to
cater to all sorts of hacks.</p><p>Most people, however, were huddled around a contraption attached to a
door leading to the office from the elevator. Someone across the room
typed something onto his laptop and shot a thumbs up; a second later, a
round piece of bright orange plastic over the door's lock made a
whirring sound, a dial turned, and the lock popped open. The hackers
were enthralled. It wasn't just a party trick — it was the group's first
hack. Rather than distribute keys to all the members of the
hackerspace, the hackers wrote some simple code, used their 3-D printer
to make precisely modeled plastic discs, and strung them together with
roughly $5 worth of hardware to engineer a way to open their building's
door just by entering a password online.</p><p>"But the best thing is, we've created a solution that other people
now don't have to work to create," said Matt Senate, one of the founders
of the space who is also a member of Open Oakland, a motley crew of
around twenty civic hackers whose goal is to change Oakland with
technology. (Full disclosure, I've known Senate since college.) The code
and the 3-D models are all available for free online, so anyone with
basic coding know-how can set up a similar system.</p><p>That's one of the central tenets of hacking culture: copy everything
and share everything accordingly. (Sudo Room's door displays a giant
yin-yang with "CTRL-C" and "CTRL-V" written above and below it — the
keyboard commands for "copy and paste," a mantra equivalent to "live
free or die.") The idea is that only by operating in a completely open
environment where collaboration can occur can ideas be constantly
improved. The same premise defines the so-called "open source" movement,
which focuses on code that is freely available for everyone to take,
remix, and refine to their specific needs.</p><p>It's an idea rooted in efficiency: Why reinvent the wheel when you could spend that same time making a much more awesome wheel?</p><p>Cash-strapped public agencies could especially benefit from this
concept, but not surprisingly, they've been slow on the uptake. "Cities,
as much as you try to get them to copy each other, they're way too
adamant about not doing that," said Max Ogden, a former Code for America
fellow who spent most of 2011 creating apps for the City of Boston and
who now spends much of his time hacking in Oakland. "They act like
'copy' is a bad word, but it's what open source is based on."</p><p>Accordingly, one of Code for America's main goals has been to get
cities to become more comfortable with the idea of copying each other.
The same code used to make Code for America's "Adopt a Hydrant" site in
Boston, for example — which encouraged residents to take responsibility
for individual fire hydrants, which often get buried in snow — was used
to make an "Adopt a Siren" site in Honolulu, where there is currently a
problem with people stealing batteries from tsunami sirens. Earlier this
year, the City of Chicago bought a bunch of beer, recruited some civic
hackers, and launched "Adopt a Sidewalk" with a similar premise: to get
citizens to work together to shovel snow from pavement in their
neighborhoods.</p><p>Meanwhile, some cities are investing in tech innovation as a
permanent fixture of government. In 2010, Boston's City Hall created an
Office of New Urban Mechanics, and a few weeks ago Philadelphia followed
suit. The departments basically serve as low-cost research and
development: Bring together civic hackers, fiddle with existing code,
and test out new ways of solving old problems. "I think more cities are
realizing you don't have to be really up to date with technology to
innovate," said Code for America's Pahlka. "You can tackle these things
without upgrading all your systems and being a state-of-the-art city."</p><p>And yet, while other cities have chief innovation or technology
officers, in Oakland — where city staff has been slashed by 25 percent
over the last ten years due to budget cuts — an in-house R&D
department is just a pipe dream. In the meantime, these projects largely
rely on the efforts of online engagement director Nicole Neditch. "As
cities all over the country have had to downsize, by opening up data and
engaging citizens, it's a way of being able to do more with less," she
said. "Ideally we'd like to have a bunch of people dedicated to doing
those things, but right now we're just trying to get people across
departments to think about things in a new way in the first place."</p><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><hr align="center" noshade="noshade" width="20%"><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p>At Oakland's City Camp event in December, city employees abounded.
But Neditch stood out. A tall woman with girlish features who — when not
busily typing on her laptop — is usually smiling and shaking someone's
hand, Neditch is at least a decade younger than most of her peers at
City Hall. She's also one of the city's newest hires, tasked with
bringing Oakland out of the Dark Ages of the Internet and into the
21st-century world of online interaction. Along with City Councilwoman
Libby Schaaf and Communications Director Karen Boyd, Neditch was one of
the main backers of Oakland's partnership with Code for America. Schaaf
calls Neditch a "goddess" for her efforts at championing technology in
City Hall.</p><p>And she's just the right person to do it. Neditch is a programmer, a
former co-owner of the cherished Oakland institution Mama Buzz Cafe, and
helped launch Art Murmur. She is, in many ways, the very embodiment of
community-minded, DIY Oakland.</p><p>And she cares — a lot. On Tuesday nights, chances are you'll find her
cooped up in a small conference room in City Hall long after most city
employees have gone home. That's when members of Open Oakland meet to
work on projects as diverse as visualizing budget data and making an app
that allows citizens to adopt storm drains in their neighborhoods.</p><p>The group officially launched in August after co-captains Steve
Spiker and Eddie Tejeda realized that hackathons — day-long coding
events focused on quickly churning out apps — were too limited in scope.
"We realized doing a hack event once a year for the city just didn't
cut it," said Spiker. "It wasn't sufficient that we just did this one
thing and then let everything drop." It was also partially the result of
Code for America's new endeavor to complement its fellowship program,
encouraging civic hackers across the country to organize into regularly
meeting coding groups called "brigades." According to a Code for America
representative, Open Oakland is now one of the biggest — and most
active — brigades in the country.</p><p>Tejeda had just finished a Code for America fellowship in New Orleans
— which in 2010 had the most blight of any city in America — helping to
make a site that allowed people to search by address to find out the
status of blighted properties. Previously, people had to wade, by phone,
through a complex web of bureaucracy to find out the same information,
but now they can see the status of a blighted property with just one
click. "It's not just stats — it's specific places, specific people,
specific impacts," said Tejeda. "Now people can ask the real questions."
In other words, finding out the information shouldn't be the hard part.</p><p>It's this same mentality that's informed much of the work that Open
Oakland has strived to do. And, luckily, there's no shortage of hackers
dedicated to doing just that. "That's one of the reasons we knew Open
Oakland would work," said Spiker. "We knew there were a whole bunch of
people in Oakland with incredible skills that had good jobs in tech, but
they weren't the kind of jobs that were going to change the world in
any way." Or, as Neditch said, "It's really just the tech version of
Oakland's diverse community of people who like to participate. It's a
general DIY way of thinking."</p><p>It's certainly impressive that a group of twenty people with day jobs
devote outside time simply to help make their city's clunky technology
flow more smoothly. To outsiders, it may seem like a puzzling dedication
to working on incremental projects with no concrete end goal in sight.
But the question is: How long can it last?</p><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><hr align="center" noshade="noshade" width="20%"><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p>When Oakland's three Code for America fellows arrive in February,
they'll be embedded in city government for a full month. Working with
Neditch and others, it'll be their jobs to identify the city's
shortcomings and try to create technological tools that will have the
greatest impacts. When Oakland and eight other cities were chosen out of
the 29 that applied to have fellows for 2013, Neditch and Boyd
suggested some starting points: fixing the city's cumbersome contracting
processes (currently largely done on paper) and coming up with a better
process for public records requests. It remains to be seen whether
these are the projects the fellows will ultimately pursue, but, as
Tejeda said, "Building the tools is actually the easy part. The
difficult part is actually understanding what you need to build."</p><p>And in an effort to spur more civic hacking efforts beyond the Code
for America work, Neditch is working on creating an open data portal for
the City of Oakland — originally proposed by Councilwoman Schaaf in
April — to house more than thirty datasets held by the city. "For now
it's going to be sort of the low-hanging fruit of what's already
available online in some form," said Neditch. The portal, however, will
be a single repository for all the information, constantly updated and
able to be synced or downloaded for easy access.</p><p>Similarly, the city recently debuted Engage Oakland, a site meant to
serve as a community board for citizens to pose questions to city
officials, or comment on other people's ideas to improve the city. In
the future, Neditch envisions city staff taking an active role in
responding to and participating in the forums on the site. In the most
utopian sense, Engage Oakland would blur the divide between City Hall
and citizens so that all community members can be heard — not just those
who show up to city council meetings.</p><p>While all these measures have just been rolled out in the last year,
what's clear is that within City Hall, this movement is being viewed as a
sea change in how government operates. "I think it's a culture shift
among city employees that no longer see [open government] as
threatening, and are actually excited and hungry for it," said Schaaf.</p><p>What's less clear to see in the haze of fancy interactive websites
and apps, however, is the actual impact they will have. The language of
Code for America, the city, and the hackers is often unimaginably grand
in scale, with all roads inevitably ending at "a truer democracy."
Multiple people I spoke to invoked the desire to revert back to the
early days of collaborative government, with the Internet eventually
shepherding in a bygone era of town hall-like participation. The goals
are commendable, to be sure, but even the most useful website isn't
really that useful at all if no one uses it.</p><p>"It's something I struggle with every day," said Neditch. "There is
this jump to technology as the solution to increasing engagement, but
it's definitely not the only step we have to take."</p><p>Spiker echoed a similar sentiment. "A lot of the things we've seen
being done with open data so far are technology vanity projects," he
said. "But there have been a number of things that really have been
transformative, I think.</p><p>"Right now if you want to start a business in San Francisco, you can
find vacant properties, search by neighborhood, find characteristics of
nearby businesses, and check out crime and foreclosures in the area," he
continued. "You'd get a very comprehensive picture of all the things
you'd need to know to locate and invest in the city. In Oakland,
however, none of those things exist, except for being able to look at
Crimespotting."</p><p>And as far as getting people to plug in, Code for America is
beginning to emphasize that aspect more as well. In the next year, it'll
be pushing cities to do what's essentially basic marketing around the
sites. After all, people are more likely to use sites if they know they
exist.</p><p>But in Oakland, the challenges remain great. The digital divide
continues to be a persistent problem. Open Oakland, for example, is
mostly made up of young white males, representative of the mostly young
white tech sector that it's largely drawing from.</p><p>But the problem, said Dennis Rojas, director of East Bay Job
Developers and a board member for the Latino Connection PAC, is only
partially the skills gap; it's also about how the conversation is being
framed. "I think people hear things framed in terms of being about tech
and think, this is something that doesn't concern you. But this is
something that very much concerns you. It's not about hackers and
computers and technology; it's about your community, your issues, and
keeping your neighborhoods clean and safe."</p><p>While the City Camp event, which Rojas attended, was incredibly
successful at bringing together disparate communities, he emphasized
that those types of events can't just be happening downtown. "I'd like
to see something like this happen in East Oakland. One of the challenges
with communities of color is that they're very cynical of government,
and it's because they're not part of the conversation." Holding an event
like City Camp downtown — far away from many of the communities
excluded from the conversation, he said — just pushes them farther away.</p><p>And it's not lost on many hackers that, despite the city's many
efforts toward open government, Oakland has had some issues with
transparency. City Administrator Deanna Santana, who has been very
supportive of Oakland's open government initiative, has also come under
fire for her efforts to redact portions of a report that strongly
criticized OPD in light of its heavy-handed response to Occupy Oakland
(see "<a class="ui-link" href="http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/deanna-santana-tried-to-alter-damning-report/Content?oid=3341245">Deanna Santana Tried to Alter Damning Report</a>," 9/19/12).</p><p>The issue highlighted one of the specific challenges that Oakland
faces moving ahead with open government initiatives: trust. Almost every
civic hacker I spoke to mentioned mistrust of government as a major
hurdle in Oakland, but also one that their efforts are precisely
designed to combat.</p><p>"I think one of the biggest problems we've faced is that whenever
government operates in a closed fashion, it just asks for and results in
distrust and concern that government isn't doing what it's meant to be
doing and isn't willing to be questioned," said Open Oakland's Steve
Spiker. "But there is a love for this city that's very strong and very
rich, and it's got a history of social activism that's carried over in a
lot of ways to the tech community."</p><p>In the meantime, the biggest question may be whether these projects
can stay afloat. After all, Michal Migurski created Oakland
Crimespotting for free, and while he's not planning on shutting it down
anytime soon, that doesn't change the fact that its existence relies
entirely on him. He's made the site's code available for free online,
but if city employees don't pick up the slack, it would take another
civic hacker to keep it going.</p><p>"[The] short answer is that I don't think it's particularly
sustainable," said Migurski. "I've been looking at the history of public
transportation, which looks a lot like the current data movement.
Initially, it was all housing developers laying it out: They'd rip up
streets, put down tracks, and it was a really cowboy-ish kind of setup.</p><p>"My sense about the civic coding thing is that you still need people
who have the itch, interest, and energy to bring the data out in the
open and show there's a demand there, and then over time it will be a
thing that is expected of cities to provide for their citizens," he
continued. "This isn't a cool faddish new thing; it's a thing like
police, fire, and transit that citizens need. It's a responsibility that
governments have, especially with something like crime. You already run
the police, you already collect that data, so it makes sense that the
people who collect that data should also be responsible for sharing it
with the public." According to a representative from Code for America,
its fellows will spend the last few months of their program in Oakland
transitioning the maintenance of their sites and apps to the city.
Whether city staff will actually be able to sustain the projects is
another matter.</p><p>Given these issues, perhaps it's wise to have tempered expectations.
At City Camp in December, there was no final product, no shiny
semi-tangible app or repository that contained the fruits of eight hours
of theoretical problem-solving. But when the final closing remarks were
given and the last person left the stage, most people were lingering.
Attendees were clustered together, talking about things they'd discussed
during the breakout sessions of the day, or about their personal
projects. Many people exchanged email addresses to meet up at future
dates. The event was more than just the sum of its parts; it was simply
the beginning of a conversation.</p><p>The conversation about Oakland may be long, and it may be
complicated, but it's no more long and complicated than the discussions
happening in Detroit or New Orleans or Philadelphia. The conversations
are happening, but for now, the important ones are still happening
offline.</p><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><div class="no-foundation-imgeditor">
<img src="http://m.eastbayexpress.com/imager/b/story/3426694/1dda/feature-1.jpg" alt="As a Code for America fellow in 2011, Max Ogden created apps for the City of Boston. Now he's one of many hackers trying to help Oakland." height="107" width="160">
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<span class="credit">
Photo by Wes Sumner
</span>
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<span class="caption">
As a Code for America fellow in 2011, Max Ogden created
apps for the City of Boston. Now he's one of many hackers trying to help
Oakland.
</span>
</div>
<div class="no-foundation-imgeditor">
<img src="http://m.eastbayexpress.com/imager/b/story/3426694/2a56/feature-2.jpg" alt="Oakland Crimespotting allows people to easily see crime happening in their neighborhood." height="90" width="160">
<br>
<span class="caption">
Oakland Crimespotting allows people to easily see crime happening in their neighborhood.
</span>
</div>
<div class="no-foundation-imgeditor">
<img src="http://m.eastbayexpress.com/imager/b/story/3426694/9ffb/feature-3.jpg" alt="Nicole Neditch is trying to bring Oakland out of the Dark Ages of the Internet." height="240" width="160">
<br>
<span class="credit">
Photo by Wes Sumner
</span>
<br>
<span class="caption">
Nicole Neditch is trying to bring Oakland out of the Dark Ages of the Internet.
</span>
</div>
<div class="no-foundation-imgeditor">
<img src="http://m.eastbayexpress.com/imager/b/story/3426694/f099/feature-4.jpg" alt="Code for America founder Jen Pahlka believes transparency can change the relationship between people and government." height="160" width="160">
<br>
<span class="credit">
Photo by Wes Sumner
</span>
<br>
<span class="caption">
Code for America founder Jen Pahlka believes
transparency can change the relationship between people and government.
</span>
</div>
<div class="no-foundation-imgeditor">
<img src="http://m.eastbayexpress.com/imager/b/story/3426694/2cf9/feature-5.jpg" alt="Matt Senate is one of the founders of Sudo Room, a new hackerspace in downtown Oakland that caters to all kinds of hacks." height="107" width="160">
<br>
<span class="caption">
Matt Senate is one of the founders of Sudo Room, a new hackerspace in </span></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div role="main" id="StoryLayoutMobile" class="MainPage ContentDefaultMobile ui-content" data-role="content"><div id="storyBody" class="page1"><div></div>
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