Paul Baker

Hi, I’m Mike. I’m sitting here with Paul Baker, who helps run the Chicago Open Government. We’re sitting here in the Webitex office. You’re president or? CEO. CEO. And a designer, yeah. Okay, so can you tell me a little bit about what Open Government Chicago does? What is Open Government? Well, it’s been around since about April of 2009, and it originally was founded to promote the idea of opening up government data, especially city Chicago data, and using that data to create applications. So we’ve got designers and developers and people who are just civically interested in good government, that type of thing. And like much of open data, it started with political transparency. It goes all the way back to Montana laws in 1990. And the Watergate scandal in 1972. People have always wanted to know who’s buying the political, who’s paying money to political candidates to try to get what they want. And now it’s gone beyond, much, much beyond that. People using data to make cities more efficient, to, you know, if you do transit tracker, you can bus tracker, you can tell when your bus is coming, all this kind of stuff. So there’s just general data. Data day usages, and also insight into how the government is operating and spending our money. Yeah, there’s lots of areas. There’s government efficiency, there’s transparency. The city of Chicago now is harvesting Twitter feeds and putting it into a gigantic data warehouse, and then looking for mentions of things related to city services, 311, that type of thing. So there’s a tremendous number of places. Why would they do that? Why would they be gathering that data from Twitter? Well, because people tend to tweet. There was an instance recently where people were tweeting about an accident on the CTA red line, like 10 to 15 minutes before the CTA people even knew about it. Oh, really? Kind of like that, when that airplane went down in the river. Right, right. But you can also learn about which neighborhoods, are there neighborhoods that are tweeting and having complaints about services, but they’re not filing 311 calls? So you can figure out which parts of the city people maybe are suspicious that their calls are not going to be answered. So they’re not calling, you can do PR campaigns in those neighborhoods. It’s kind of like the people, when we might complain to our neighbor, but we don’t actually make a formal complaint. Right, right. And this we’re doing in a public forum, so the government can say, oh, okay. So that’s actually maybe one way where they’re listening, but it’s good. But what do you do at the open government meetings to expose that? We’ve done a wide variety of things. Up until Ramadan. When Emmanuel took office, the daily administration collected a tremendous amount of data, but they didn’t release any of it, basically. And when Emmanuel came in, he started releasing data, and they’ve had a pretty aggressive data release campaign. Lobbyist data, crime data, restaurant inspections, a whole bunch of stuff. So that, up until about March of last year, April of last year, when they started releasing. We were largely lobbying, not formally lobbying, but trying to convince the daily administration to release data. And we were talking among ourselves. We had a few conferences that we were part of. There was an informal group of people, including three or four of the people who founded the Open Government Chicago group. Right. Who have been working since about 2008 to try to get civic data from the city. And we finally got it. Well, we’d been asking for it for all these years. Now they gave it to us. We have to do something. Right. So some of our first activities was actually bringing guys like Chicago CTO John Tolva in, talking to people, started developing relationships with people in the city. Brett Goldstein, who was the chief data officer. So we have friendly working relationships. They can learn from us. We can learn from them. And that was very successful. It was one of the first applications that was done. There were a whole bunch of them. But one that created a splash was the Chicago Lobbyist data, chicagolobbyist.org. And we worked with the city. We didn’t get all the data we needed. We did the website at Google Hackathon. And then we listed on the website what other data we needed, how we needed it changed. And within three or four weeks, we met with the city, with Goldstein and his staff, and they actually provided the data we wanted. So we sponsored meetings with government people, with data activists, after Geist and Gas. They all started creating websites. They would come up and demo the websites they were doing. We helped. There have been a couple of hackathons that we’ve supported. There have been contests that we’ve supported. MCIC had a contest. What’s MCIC? It’s Metro Chicago Information Center. They’re not around anymore, unfortunately. But they sponsored some contests in connection with the city, that type of thing. So we’ve had a wide variety of speakers. We’ve had Code for America people. Okay. They’ve spoken a couple of times. A couple of – a month ago, we had a presentation on the new Open 311 system that allows you to access data from 311 and also electronically submit data. So theoretically, it’s not quite there yet. You should be able to take a picture of a pothole and make a comment, and it will be geocoded automatically. You can submit that electronically to the city. To the city. Then you can get a code back that you can track the progress of that, patching that hole or whatever. And I mean, so it sounds like a few – it hasn’t been just a passive group of learning. It’s been you’ve been creating stuff like – I want to just go back also to that Chicago lobbyist that was created through the Google Hackathon. Now, I remember when that was launched, that was a very, very interesting thing. You know, I know that was a very interesting and useful project. Has there been anything that you’ve worked on through the open government group? That’s been like, wow, I never would have – like, has there been any like maybe preconceptions you’ve had about the government data that you came in and started and then as you’re working through it through the group, had your eyes opened? Yeah, in terms of the nature of the data itself, the lobbying data is a good example. When we started, we got 14 disparate files of a couple years worth of data. Actually, I think it was just one year. One year’s worth of data. And you expect that there’s all these lobbyists from big companies, you know, it’s a three, three, three and a half billion dollar budget. They’re spending, you know, $5 million or $12 million to ride the horse, you know? Yeah. Well, when you actually start looking at the data, a lot of the quote lobbying is nonprofit groups that are delegate city agencies. They run homeless shelters, but they have to have a meeting with three committees and they want to change a building to expand it. They want to build a hospital. They want to house more homeless people, that type of thing. There certainly are the Walmarts and the big companies who hire the high-end lobbyists to influence public opinion and to get legislators to do what they want, but it’s much less than we expected. Oh, really? Yeah. That was one of the big surprises is a lot of the lobbying is for totally innocent things, a lot of building permits and that type of thing that are very routine. Okay. So if I wanted to build a hospital, I would hire some people to lobby for me. I’m not necessarily a tobacco manufacturer. Well, there actually is a trend. They’re there, yeah. Oh, okay. So that isn’t just a rumor. There is a lot of money spent on that. Walmart is, you know, Walmart had this big campaign to finally build a store in Chicago. And so they hired a bunch of lobbyists. They convinced the city. We have this data. We haven’t been able to add it to the Chicago lobbyists yet, but they also gave tremendous financial support to a sympathetic alderman so he could win the election. And they’re building a ward so that they can put their Walmart in that ward. So when we can tell the full story of some of these things, that would be real interesting. Yeah. Well, they say follow the money, and this is – Follow the money, right. And you did say before – well, how long has been Open Government’s been getting together and meeting? I know you said there were some guys – It was founded in April of 2009. Okay. And we met pretty frequently, once a month, once every couple of months until about – really until. Until right before the beginning of 2011. And then things kind of slowed down, partly because we were just waiting for data. Right. And you can only wait for data for so long. Yeah. And then when we started actually getting some data, we started having monthly meetings. In fact, we had them here in Webatex for a while. We could only house about 33 people. It got so big, we got up to 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 people. We had them in other venues. Now most of them are at the community trusts. Okay. Where Dan O’Neill is, who’s one of the founders of the – And, excuse me, it’s not a technology-specific. You’re more about the data and how we can manipulate it. You don’t really care about whether you’re using Python or .NET or whatever? Well, typically people use Python, Ruby on Rails, a few use .NET, PHP. But we’re generally in favor, certainly, of open data and using open data. We’re using non-proprietary programming tools and systems, but we don’t have any ironclad rules. And we also encourage people to post their code on GitHub and things like that so other people can use it. Right. Okay. So you meet about once a month. Mm-hmm. And it’s – you kind of got to watch the meetup site to see where you’re going to be. Right. It varies a little bit. We were very consistent for quite a while. We haven’t been real consistent about the day in the last few months. Okay. Well, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me. Okay. No problem.