so it's actually a really good question I think sort of the smart city movement
came out of this sense that cities weren't doing a good job keeping up with
private industry right you have these tech companies that Amazon Google right
where stuff shows up at your doorstep an hour after you order it right right sure
and then in the in the Civic space you know it takes six months to get a permit
or something like that in some cases you know and so I think it was this
realization that we could do better and we could leverage some of the technology
that's already been developed for private companies that got the cloud
computing the platforms the connectivity right the speed of web access the apps
right everybody has a cell phone how do i access my government in the same way i
access Amazon or uber or whatever and I actually have to clarify that I've heard
the people who push back on that concept and they say if I hear one more time
that city government needs to work like Amazon in the you know they're gonna
shoot somebody or whatever well I think it really does not in the sense
that you need it to be like a business thing for sure I mean like I'm sure sure
right but in the sense that Amazon spends a lot of time thinking about
their customers right and goes to their customers brings their service or to the
customer right and whatever level that is and i think cities need to do that
too right so we have you know all these functions that cities provide from you
know paving your streets to permits whatever we need to think more about the
customers and do customer focused design and come to the customer with
those things so that's one piece of what drives the smart city I guess the need
for a smart city well so I'm asked you a question because i so often hear people
say we're doing the Smart City initiative and that means they're
dragging a fibre down the street or they're just trying to be more one my
favorites well it's an expensive infrastructure thingy that I feel like
this kind of almost arcane at this point I mean don't get me wrong everyone loves
fiber but I mean so where do you really see that going over the next three four
five years I mean are you talking smart City on decision making or you talking
smart City on just like being more connected so it's a little bit of both
so you know we started researching our smart city program here
a little over a year ago and it started from actually grant writing so when you
write grants you tell a cool story about the project right and you try to
describe what you're going to deliver for the community if this project gets
funded sometimes it's difficult to also tell us sort of the specifics about why
this project is needed sure let's say you're gonna put a bike
lane project in and and yeah you know you can design this awesome bike project
that's gonna do all these great things for the cyclists and it will but how do
you explain why you chose to put it on the street X instead of Street Y
right that's a question you know traffic counts and bicyclist
counts and all these other pieces of the puzzle to tell that story and so we
started looking at okay we want to be competitive on these grant applications
we need that data and that turned into how do we collect the data how do we
store it how do we analyze it which then turned into a smart city initiative
right so it's it's sort of a little of both you have you know aging
infrastructure that's difficult and expensive to maintain
and expensive to replace honestly right and have you know these financial
challenges coming out of the recession and things like that so people started
looking around saying maybe if I did some analytics maybe if I mapped this in
a certain way or if I built the right kind of database I could figure out how
to make my money go farther right deliver the services that you know going
back to the Amazon concept I can deliver that user centric service in a cheaper
way or maybe make those dollars go farther and still deliver all your
promises and it's interesting that you say that because you know I was just
listening to a podcast the other day and they were talking about Amazon was said
something to the extent they wanted to be the most customer centric company in
the world right and I feel like they've really done that by you know they're
very product oriented but it's amazing how that everything that they do is
designed on helping deliver XYZ as fast as possible to your door giving you that
really great customer experience I think we're really interesting seeing if
cities could figure out a way to start delivering delivering projects then sort
of the same way giving access to permits in a similar way
rather than you know having to come in and stand in line for an hour and then
and then it might and then it might be approved in six weeks
well so there's a number of really good solid reasons why some of those things
take a long time right either we have a permitting process because behind that
is a sort of general planning process where we've said we don't want certain
kinds of buildings in certain kinds of places and there's good
reasons there's health concerns right there's making sure the
transportation network is functional making sure we can deliver water right
so we have to sort of those are big expensive infrastructure projects and
you want to you've got a plan tham you know 10 20 30 years out to make that
work you then have to sort of manage where
people put certain pieces of you know where do you build houses as opposed to
what your warehouses right right and so in order to make sure that that process
that that well-planned process gets carried out over those 10 20 30 years
you have to sort of slow down the permitting process to a certain extent
to give engineers and and you know the City Council whatever time to review
those things and make sure that they fit in with the plans at the community is
established for itself so there's some good reasons for things to sort of slow down
or be careful with it sure but at the same time there's a lot of opportunity
to okay let's get this connected you should probably be able to apply for
your permit online right that'd be awesome right that's something that we're
working on well and I think it might be more gratifying to the end-user if
they A could submit it online and then they got notification updates on the
move around inside the building because there's probably a lot of stuff
happening on that permit over those six weeks but I stuff that they don't see it
so it's not a gratifying process and so if you could figure out how to make that
part connected that'd be a really interesting kind of smart piece of the smart city
yeah you're you're a hundred percent spot on I think you've hit the
nail on the head with that so it's really interesting for example city has
an app most cities have an app where you can't report you know roadkill potholes
right are leaks whatever right it's interesting though what happens on the
backend with that so a lot of times you'll submit a report right you'll take
your picture you'll submit your report and then you think nothing happened well
something did happen it's exactly what you're talking about right you went to a
staff member who went out took a look at it right then they're gonna come back
and we have to figure out the funding mechanism procurement in cities takes
time we don't want people just spending the public money willy-nilly right so
there's a whole process and it moves through the departments what we don't
always do a good job with this coming back to the to the resident and saying
hey you know we actually right right so we fixed the pothole but maybe they
didn't know that it got fixed right so we don't always get credit for all that
it's your complex process it's on the backend and that's another good reason
for well I think this is we're kind of comparing cities to Amazon is actually
a really good comparison there's how do you make that complex seem easy because
right think about the logistics and the supply chain management that Amazon has
running in the background I mean it was such a big deal that they built their
own server farms so that way they didn't have to outsource it and
developed an entirely new way of like cloud computing so so you should
trademark that you know make complex seem easy I think that's exactly right
somebody's probably beat you to it right but I think that's exactly what smart
city is all about right we're taking this complex process of civic
governance and how do you make that accessible and simple so that your
average person doesn't have to be a government expert in order to access the
services that are provided it's interesting you mentioned you know
wanting to come back to the idea of laying fiber
I think it's nuts right so there's a lot of things that cities are really good at
right which are good at planning and land use management and civic
organization these kinds of things we're not an ISP in most cases a few cities
aren't but it's kind of interesting you know so I won't name names I don't want to
call anybody out but there's one city in particular that as you go to smart city
conferences and things have stood out as they're sort of the leader in the fiber
space sure I actually got a chance at a conference to talk to the guy that's
running the project and he told me I don't know if we could be called a
leader so we don't have a funding plan we haven't rolled the fiber out yet and we're
not quite sure what we're gonna do with it yet this is the city that's on the
cutting edge of municipal fibers you know and it's like that sounds like the
trailing edge of yeah but then the real question to me is it seems like the way
that they would truly be smart is then to ease the permitting process for the
ISPs that are already running this make it easier for them to put fiber l copper
what I mean whatever in and that way it's being privately funded and it's not
coming off you know sure a tax dollar to lay a connection yeah there's a it's
interesting so on the on the small cell the wireless side that debates raging
right now the governor just vetoed a bill that would have said exactly that
you know wireless carriers you can come into a city and kind of do what you want
to a certain extent there were some limitations on it still but not as many
as cities sort of individually put it on the process sometimes you're good reason
sometimes not but that is a raging debate and you have lots of people on
both can the governor you know got caught in the
middle of this last one and ended up vetoing the bill and some cities are
celebrating some maybe not but um you know there's a there a trade off
between I think what private companies have their shareholders at the heart of
what their trying to do whereas city government has you know 70,000 residents
in the case of Redlands that are sort of on the line here right so I think we all
want there to be cell coverage you know Verizon AT&T whatever they want cell
coverage in the city and city government wants cell coverage in the city and
residents want cell coverage in the city but it's how do you do that in a way that doesn't you
know take advantage of public infrastructure that maybe has been put
in at citizen expense right or that doesn't overburden the companies with
you know pervading requirements that don't make sense it's it's it takes a
lot of time to figure that out which goes back to sometimes there are good
reasons that cities do things slowly sometimes it's a kind of an interesting
space to work in well and the park that's interesting it's like especially for
like here in Redlands you know most of the area most of downtown is already
fiber run so why would you spend you know write millions and millions and
millions of dollars to run it again yeah and you know sometimes there's
competition reasons like right you want to give you know low-income residents a
choice or something like that so there's some of those arguments I tend to think
that you know at least here you're right right the Fios is already out there
there's you know Comcast there's others that have already achieve that and I'm
happy to sort of work within that infrastructure at least for now because
we have so many priorities how do you pick and choose and if that's sort of
maybe partially handled and maybe it's not perfect with there's opportunities
for you know let's go figure out the sensor side or the database or something and
not try to get into that yet well and I think when it comes to that well not to
go down the fiber side too much but when you start talking about cell coverage
cell coverage is so inexpensive to deploy it's that's really become kind of
like your last mile piece for them for this effort to
replace fiber right and so if you look at a lot of developing countries they're
not running actual lines anymore they're running a cell tower and that's how
their citizens are getting low-cost internet delivered to everyone yeah well
or you got the Google Google balloons no right pressure and is it that you
know that's flying in Puerto Rico right so you know there's all kinds of options
like that in and it's it's interesting because you
know companies like Google Fiber are doing the last mile through RF or
something like that so part of what we do in the smart city space is we try to
look at these trends as they come down and we try to figure out where does it
make sense to for a city to invest and where does it maybe not make as much
said right when you have you know potential for 5g and we've got DSRC
radios for connected vehicles and you've got you know the fiber that the company
the private companies have already laid you know where does the city's fit into
that mix and you know I think it's an open question I wouldn't rush out to
spend money on it but I'm also not saying we're never gonna do it right
right well it seems like you'd be a lot more selective about it you know or
encourage the private sector to yeah you know in order to do this project over
here you need to help get this to the low-income areas right something where
that way you can kind of leverage the the power of the city as it were to help
make sure everyone's treated a little bit more equally there you're saying
that the city was having a problem collecting data right so were you what
methods are you using to collect data right now so that way you can make
data-driven decisions so in a lot of cases the data is collected but nothing
happens to it right and partly that's because we don't digitize it
okay so a work orders are a good example so in your typical work order situation
you have a request to fill a pot hole that comes in for a resident okay they're
gonna probably come in and make a request over the counter you're gonna
call customer service and then somebody actually comes in and reports that's how
that happens yeah sure sorry I'm just like one-stop private center here in
Redlands right where people come in and you know it's basically full services
customer service right okay yes so yeah people can call in you know use the
3-1-1 app whatever there's a number of different ways but somebody will take in
that request validate that there's actually a pothole out there that needs
to be filled but essentially to get that done you fill out a paper form and that
paper form gets handed to or work crew that's then gonna go out and fill a
pothole and then you know checks and boxes on the paper form to say we did
this bring it back in and it will get you know maybe get entered most likely
get stuck in a file drawer right that's sort of the traditional approach to how you
do this for the last hundred years well sure right so what we are building now
you know here in Reynolds you have the benefit of being next door to ESRI and
so you know we have a great working relationship with them
and they have a piece of technology where you have a mobile app that
connects to that 3-1-1 system and so people can report you know hey
there's a pothole take a picture of it that data actually gets filed in a
database somebody will still look at it and
validate it and it'll get sent out to a work crew but now it's going
either through email or straight into a work crews mobile app and they'll get
like a work list with locations on a map and they're going to go drive around
take care of them take pictures of the filled pothole and it gets pushed and
reverse back up to the customer and the entire thing happens digitally but where
it gets really cool is now you have a database and so you know one or two
potholes nobody cares but you feel a thousand potholes over a couple of years
or whatever it might be right and then you can map those and you can say you
know half the problems we fill happen on these three street segments maybe it's
time we go out and you know actually repave those street segments from scratch
right we're doing all this we're spending all this money filling potholes
we've paid for a street now with let's do the right thing right so when we talk
about making data-driven decisions that's what we're talking about but it
starts with you've got to pull in the data the right way you've got to have it
in a digital database that you can run analytics against and you know map it
and find those kinds of you know we didn't know we were spending a bunch of
money on the same segment of pipe because nobody had it in the database
right hmm so that's kind of in you know and you see that all over the place from
you know personnel management to the public infrastructure to you know how we
spend money in the finance department right it's all if you track it now you
can measure it and start figuring out how to do it better it's interesting
somebody's to tell me you inspect what you expect yeah or something along as
well they see if you don't measure it you can't fix it right yeah exactly
those things like a measured get change well that's very interesting I would
have ever thought about it quite from that perspective you know this street
happens to have 500 of the 1000 potholes right maybe we should just repave the
street right or you know let's figure out a way to redirect that heavy truck
traffic around it so that way that Street doesn't get destroyed or you know
so now you're thinking like a smart city guy right yeah and that's exactly what
we we spend our time and effort trying to figure out right is how do we and we
do things like that like going back to the you know the grant project example
sure you know one of the things I started doing when I came to the city
was writing grant projects around transportation bike lanes and sidewalk
okay yeah are you responsible for the Green Lanes maybe partly we can't know
depends do you like them or not okay depends if I'm riding my bike or not
good answer well we're trying to encourage you to do that right yeah yeah
it's not like I could stand or cut down on traffic to your public service
not sure but but I mean that's a good point right where do people actually
want to ride and that's exactly what we didn't necessarily know when we go into
these grant applications from a traditional perspective certain design a
really cool project that sort of on paper you know here's a bike lane here's
a bike lane probably makes sense to connect one but but where right there's
all those blocks in between and where new riders really want to be where they
headed were they coming from what times a day what kinds of traffic are they
facing all these different kinds of things and until you put all that into a
piece of software and start doing you know data-driven planning analysis
you're really you know yeah exactly
part of what stemmed that question is I'm picturing
those people on the side of the road that are sitting there with like a
little counter and they're just counting yes and then you know they're there for
three days counting traffic yeah and that's the data that we're driving these
decisions off of it and to me it seems like you'd be far better place to put a
simple camera there that can count cars and traffic and you know dogs crossing
the street and you know it'll get a hundred eighty degree view or 360
degree view of or from where that camera is right and now you can start
having like real true then maybe it only goes in for two weeks but given two
weeks of like actual data you probably have a very good understanding of you
know what's going where and if you could plug that that data into your database
it seems like then you can start making really good smart city decisions on yeah
Wow that streets extremely busy you should come work for us BJ no it's
making ideas up on the spot yeah and you know you're one of 300 startups that
have that exact same idea and that actually come and pitch to us all the
time hey we've got this new camera that does you know machine learning vision
whatever and we can solve these problems for you and I'm like yeah you know get in line
right there really are lots of them and lots of them with really cool technology
it's kind of funny though on the video side we've done that for a long time it
wasn't always sort of AI driven though it used to be that yeah you stand
on the side of the road and you know check stuff off and there's actually
formulas for okay does that count as a cyclist if they're walking their bike
right no like there really are like you talk to people that like experts on like
traffic planning and they're gonna tell you well you know were they wearing a
helmet you should probably be collecting that information did they try right did
they turn left right like there's more detail than just okay interesting three
right it's not just a roman numeral ticket boxes right so yeah stay on the side of
the road and do it then sort of upgraded that to well let's put a video camera
out there so now somebody doesn't have to stand in the Sun check boxes right now
we record it and then somebody sits in an office and watches the video and then
checks off the form right so we've moved them off the street that was
step one a little safer i guess yeah it's more comfortable right I mean now you
can sort of data warehouse it or whatever but yeah now absolutely we're
getting into all this AI machine vision stuff where the camera is actually doing
the counts itself no one ever looks at the film in fact it's probably not even
recorded the camera runs live some piece of software sits in the back end and
says I'm pretty sure that's a human and pretty sure that's a cyclist count Count
count right well chances are software's probably right 98 99 percent
plus of the time and as a result if it's if it's close enough you just cut down
on expense you know person expense okay well in the part the piece the other piece that
seems really fascinating to me is I keep I keep thinking about what what could
you do if you could plug all that data into like IBM Watson or some of the true
like AI platform well so what did you could use you know Watson to tell you
hey these streets should be repaved here's where you should cross connect
everything and now we're now we're just having part of what makes you the smart
city is thinking of the better questions to ask well in in so you're 100% on the
right track so let me let me take it one step even farther right so we have this
project where we're getting our streetlights connected right okay so now
there's companies telling us well we can do better than that you know there's
lots of people who can let you communicate with your streetlights
remotely but what if your streetlights also communicated with Watson which just
bought I think The Weather Channel or something like that
IBM owns it interesting yeah so now they're typing in local weather data and
they're saying okay it's cloudy right now let's
the street lights a little bit you know it's turn about by 10% to how people get
around right so there's all kinds of there's this sort of evolving
vision I think in the tech space that sort of slowly seeping into smart cities
that your technology really should anticipate you right so like it's one
thing to you know okay Google right and I want to you know check the weather or
get driving directions or something like that but what if I didn't ever have to
ask for it it was sort of there right ahead of when you needed it right
just-in-time information so interesting and so it seems like really your goals
to figure out how to help the city anticipate what people are wanting and
yeah so it's not so much telling people what they want like everybody still has
their autonomy and still make decisions right but we're sort of we want to be
sort of one step ahead of them so I be my ideal vision for like the
three-one-one reporting system would be you don't have to call in a pothole
because you're never going to see a pothole because by the time a pothole
started developing you know the city utility trucks are outfitted with you
know motion sensing equipment like the same stuff that's you know the
accelerometer on your smartphone right it could tell then it went over a bump
at that point and that gets logged and when that gets to a certain level
whatever it is we get out there and we fill the pothole and the citizens never
had to think about was there a puddle or was there a pothole and can I tell the
city about it and so we've we've sort of yes reporting is a cool concept but what
if you didn't have to report it cuz we were one step ahead of you so it's not
you know you haven't lost any decision about in capabilities but we've gotten
the infrastructure to the point where its not something you have to
worry about it's sort of faded into the background to a certain extent
honestly that's a fascinating idea because you have enough city vehicles
that are probably driving every single City street every single day
utility vehicles the private vehicles of you know city staff right leave all yeah
PD there's a hundred and one different option PD was probably hitting every
street in the city every day every two days there's no reason that and this is
this is technology that already exists right there's a little bit of a capital
outlay costume so trying to figure out you know what makes sense and for the
size of the city and the realities is probably and most of their cars are
already outfitted with enough technology to make 95% of this happen and so it
would just be creating the logic around the logic and the reporting of it so
that way I was immediately my mind was to some kind of like camera that just
kind of scanned the ground for imperfections but they have those too
you mean some creation of that or an accelerometer where it's
right you know and even if it just got logged as wow that was an abnormally
large hit well if you can figure out in the future hey well okay that there's
just a big a big dip there and this is but the city worker can then when they
go out review that okay that's there's a speed bump we're never gonna go back
there and check it again because it's map that in the GIS system yeah I mean
so at some point this sort of the lines between what's physical infrastructure
and what's a data question kind of blur together right it all becomes data or
it's all infrastructure or data is infrastructure you get into
philosophical questions but you're right if you had you wouldn't even need a big
data set about sort of the roughness of the street and you could probably suss
out what are potholes as opposed to what are sort of the normal imperfections of
the pavement and now you map them and then you get you know let's start
predicting them so we know what kinds of streets tend to have potholes based on
traffic volumes right whether Street conditions whatever well then they just
then you get right well then the next part is in that data starts really
helping you drive budgetary decisions and now you're planning far enough in
advance to know hey you know orange streets probably always going to be one
of the most beat up streets in the city right maybe we should make sure we stay
on top of that one so that we were not getting potholes but then we keep
working on all the ancillary streets just to bring them up to so one thing we
did one went here in Redlands we did the this pavement management project
everybody knows it isn't Paris but we've repaid large majority of the city
streets and part of what enabled us to do that is we took a look at what
condition all the streets are in mm-hmm right mapped all that and then ran some
calculations on when is that street segments gonna fail when is this one
gonna fail right and the ones that are about to fail like you you know you get
out there and fix them sort of proactively so that they don't drop down
a level and they're in there quality category right so we have something
called pavement condition index PCI right and it runs on a scale of zero to
100 which 100 is like a perfect brand on the streets the streets totally failed
its back to dirt probably right right so and I'm that traffic engineer but
that's the gist of it right and so what we actually did is we we hired a company
that did exactly what you were talking about they put cameras and other sensors
on it on a vehicle drove the city and gathered PCI data for every Street in
the city right this was in 2012 we got all that data in and then we put
that into the GIS system so you could map the
PCI of the entire city right and then we developed what we called
the payment management plan which said okay let's rank the priority of these
streets in terms of what makes the best sense for the community and against
costs so if you're in front of a school or you're a main street that drives
commerce for the city or whatever you know there's all these different
conditions right had community input all these things okay so now we have a sort
of a hierarchy of what the streets we think need to be done first and we know
which streets are failing and then what we can do is it's a lot cheaper to take
a street from let's say 85 to 95 than it is to take a street from you know 50 so
no I'm mixing this up but basically once the streets failed let's say it gets to
50 PCI it's basically failed you're gonna have to replace it so it doesn't
really matter if it falls you might have your grind it down you might
have to redo the entire bed you have to anyway once it reaches a certain point
you going to have to anyway but it's a lot easier to do you know the the
eighty-five ninety percent and keep them there it's cheaper to keep them there
than it is if they fall to 50 to bring them back right so you map
the whole city so what you're saying is maintenance is cheaper this that's
exactly that's exactly right and so the whole pothole conversation starts to
become okay we know where potholes are happening we also know how much it costs
to improve or repair certain portions of the street we know how much potholes
cost to fill so now it becomes an entirely data-driven process where we
say okay we know how to maximize our street dollars to get the best quality
of streets possible for these dollars interesting how may potholes do you think you guys
are filling in a year I'm just curious I don't know but i know the numbers gone
dramatically down I mean almost replaced two-thirds of city streets were
replaced or repaired right so they're all in good condition and there's a lot
cheaper to keep them that way than it is to sort of bring them up to that speed
so we made an investment in getting them all up and now we have a plan for
keeping them that way that's really interesting because it's that's again it
goes back to it's like by maintaining your car making sure your oils change
making sure tires are inflated your car's going to last a lot longer and
you're gonna have a lot less unforeseen issues you're gonna lot less you know
you know chances are your transmission is not gonna go out if you've hit all
your service you know service interval is that kind of thing and so that's
really neat seeing a city actually applying those same kind of principles
towards you know being proactive and well you know proactive in planning
versus like well I'm just gonna let it break and then we'll fix it eventually
but it's the perfect sort of the perfect analogy for what smart city means right
so you you gather a bunch of information and you don't have to guess and how to
spend money you can run the calculations and you can come up with okay there's
some input right so the council will tell us okay we prefer these kinds of
streets or these are where community members have the most interested in
let's use whatever it might be so they'll define sort of the the
parameters that you're working with but inside those parameters it becomes
purely a data-driven decision right interesting to run the calculations you
have this this matrix that the council of communities established you run the
data within that and you always know given these parameters how to maximize
the dollar to achieve that goal right and you can do that it doesn't have to
be streets right the same thing applies to you know sidewalks or bike lanes or
the IT infrastructure or the budgeting process any of it really becomes that
kind of a data problem so really I feel like what I'm hearing you say is that
this is much less about putting in like whiz-bang it's less about the app yeah
and it's and and it's less about the it's more about the overall
the citizen experience and also it's almost more about like the the business
intelligence that you gain out of collecting all that data yeah and so you
can now start having you start having the city manager who can make decisions
based off of a dashboard on the wall versus you know I yeah that feels right
right and so if you can actually make a decision based off of well that makes
sense that makes sense that makes sense now you're moving forward in a positive
manner it's it's so I think it's sort of half and half so that's that's a big
piece of sort of how we got into the smart city conversation but then what
you get out of that is yes you have this awesome infrastructure you know we've
got all these paved streets or whatever the case might be
you know same thing water pipes whatever right but the other side of that is you
you can now explain to the public why certain things we're done as opposed to
other ones so you'll have you will always in any city have people who come
and say why didn't my street get paved why isn't my water line repaired why don't I
have a sidewalk in front of my house and those are all really great questions
unfortunately no city has unlimited resources so there are always going to
be trade-offs like that but if you're using a data-driven approach that's been
vetted by the community that you get buy-in from the Council of
community executive staff that say yes we like this this matrix's approach and
then you apply that approach then when you get those kinds of questions from
the community it becomes a much more straightforward conversation it gives something
to point to yes yes we held hearings we got community input this process you
know we took our time to vet the process and now we're applying the process in
your streets going to get done in a year when you know the data says that it's
cost-effective to do your Street and we've found that you're still at an 85
we're gonna let you get to an 80 and we'll bring you up to 95 exactly and
people are like oh okay great whereas you know maybe before it was
okay well you know we didn't have the money to view your street because we're
sort of focusing on downtown why downtown well because right and
sort of philosophically justify your decisions and is much harder to do right
so it was so there's that that sort of conversational piece but there's also we
have this great open data portal and a lot of cities are doing this where you
know what if again anticipating the citizens what if we put that information
we make it publicly available right so we put that data on the website and
anybody can go and look anytime at the map and say oh I see they just did that
Street last year I get why they're not doing it this year right well so it
seems like having a really like clearly articulated easy to read and easy to
digest like explanation of what's on the map would be really really awesome and
then you can basically just start like heat mapping the map showing you know
here are the pipes that we're replacing here are the roads that we've replaced
here's you know and here's why we've made these decisions you know this pipe
made it from a hundred to you know 75 and it's leaking so you need to replace
it right away or that's exactly and I think that's where so we started this
conversation talking about sort of design oriented civics right this this
Amazon concept of how do we build to our users and so you've achieved that right
so you you've taken their input in terms of what they want you've used data to
figure out how to most effectively get that we're shown them what they've
gotten for their money that's that's design thinking on the city scale right
that's a smart city well I love the fact that there actually can be feedback on
it so that becomes a lot more I'm a lot more likely to report that there's
something wrong if I know that a something's gonna be done about it yet
and then somebody will let me know when something's
about it feedback breeds feedback well it gives you it gives you that closed
feedback loop so for us we do a lot
we do we do IT and so we have a lot of like closed-loop systems and so all of
our feedback has to go back and forth through the system so that way the
customers are alerted when we've worked on something you know we we keep people
have to be kept in the loop because if they're not the they just sit they're
wondering did I do something well in in it's gonna be the same thing so we
haven't quite and gotten quite gotten there I think at the smart city
conversation it's kind of funny almost before there was a smart city there was
a sort of smart city 2.0 but in my mind this far smart city 2.0 is really it's exactly
what you're talking about so when you work with your customers they really
wouldn't pay you very long I imagine if they said hey BJ
we have this problem we want you to fix and you fixed it but didn't tell them it was
fixed right or you fix it your way and they said well we'd really like if we could
change these settings you know configure this switches so yeah that's nice we
have this sort of policy we're gonna do it this way right they're gonna go find
somebody else is gonna do it the right way right do what they actually are
paying for right well you have the same thing at the city level so you know we
do these planning processes right but sometimes they're not as accessible as
we'd like them to be and it's gonna depend on the community right that you
might have you know working mothers you can't make it to council to to have the
discussion about the bike lane at 4:00 p.m. on a weekday right or people that
are working that can't make it to so and there's no way for you to serve in the
physical world reach all those people it's just not gonna happen right you have
seniors who have their hours and you know Millennials with their hours
whatever the case might be so what we're trying to do is let's take that process
and sort of extend it online so we can build this online community on Facebook
right or something like that where people can show up at City Hall or talk
to the permit center folks if they want to or they also have the option to give
you just as valid input through the app or through the web page sure and become
part of the process and so now what you get is you've sort of enabled that
equitable access so it doesn't matter what your station in life or your career
situation or whatever you can still have input on you know hey that apps going to
give you an alert that the city is planning on potentially you know putting
in bike lane or repaving your street or doing pipe and your surety or whatever
and you're like oh well I should care about that it's happening on my street
let me get on and you know thumbs up thumbs down leave a comment take
keep my driveway clear because they've got a doctor's appointment whatever and
we sure incorporating this sort of individualized Amazon style feedback
right individual city delivery of city services well it seems like we're really
interesting I mean you already have like YouTube live or Facebook live I mean you
can do a lot of that but then like what you said about hey could you make sure
to keep my driveway clear that morning because if you could figure out a way to
grab that information right and then like actually make sure that the people
that are doing the street work yeah we're aware of it hey you know one two
three four anyone street you know make sure to keep that address clear you know
in the morning so they can go to work well and so we already do things like that
but it's very it's like a labor-intensive very manual process
right so like it goes back to what you said about the work order right now that
somebody's holding out a piece of paper and it's showing up whereas you know if
in there you know the city truck they had an you know an iPad or you know
whatever the tablet of some sort that just said make sure to keep this street
cleared this you know here's how you do it you map it and everybody sees the
same map and you know there's no conflicts and yeah that's exactly it
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