Since 2009, under the city’s open data ordinance (Ordinance 293-10), city agencies have made 524 data sets open to the public at DataSF and over 100 apps have been created with the city’s data. From public health scores that accompany Yelp reviews to crime incident maps, civic data is powering some of our most useful applications.

This month, during a hearing of San Francisco’s Audit and Oversight Committee, Chief Innovation Officer Jay Nath presented new amendments to the city’s open data policy.

The new amendments to the open data ordinance are as follows:

1. The Mayor will appoint a Chief Data Officer who will work with Agencies to share more data with the public and internally

2. Each Agency will appoint an Open Data Coordinator who will coordinate with the Chief Data Officer and develop an open data plan that inventories all data assets

3. The City will establish rules to ensure that the City maintains ownership of the data (vs the vendor)

4. The City will establish rules to ensure that future software purchases allow for the ability to share data with the public

During the hearing, citizens and business leaders from local tech companies like Appallicious, and Splunk spoke to share their support for open data and how open data standards have helped to grow their businesses.

These improvements to the open data policies will bring on even greater innovation as San Francisco discovers new ways to use data to be more efficient and agile.

The open data amendments were passed on April 16 and will go into effect May 2013.

For more background on the Mayor’s Budget you can visit the Mayor’s Budget Website and the City’s new spending transparency portal.

Questions about the City’s budget priorities and/or ideas for innovative cost-saving  can be sent via email to mayoredwinlee@sfgov.org and/or twitter to @MayorEdLee with hashtag #SFBudget

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Related Articles:

Supervisor Farrell – Inside San Francisco’s Budget, Part 1 or 3

Special Thank You to Our Engagement Partners:

Inspired by the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows Program, the Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation and City Hall Fellows (CHF) are launching the Mayor’s Innovation Fellowship Program.

Innovation Fellows come from a variety of backgrounds but share several common characteristics:

• Experience working across sectors, with multiple stakeholders
• Passion and propensity for innovation
• Impeccable communication and presentation skills
• Unshakable belief in the power of technology

The Office of Civic Innovation will host three Mayor’s Innovation Fellows for twelve-month terms beginning approximately August 1, 2013. Fellows will be matched based on their interests and skills with one of impact areas: Open Data, Civic Engagement, Economic Development, and/or Technology Policy.

The Fellows will work as entrepreneurs, innovators, and leaders to the greater City family and innovation community. The Fellows will share their expertise and knowledge with other City staff and will participate in an extensive professional development program.

HOW IT WORKS

Mayor’s Innovation Fellows will work 4.5 days per week on their projects, with the remaining half-day dedicated to working and learning alongside their City Hall Fellows peers in CHF’s innovative Civic Leadership Development Program (CLDP) to gain a greater grasp of the challenges and issues facing government. This exposure will provide the Fellows with a greater understanding of how technological solutions can enhance government’s ability to serve the community. As part of the CLDP, all Fellows are expected to participate in 3-4 day visits to Sacramento and Washington, D.C. during the Spring to learn about the state and federal impacts on local government.

 QUALIFICATIONS

The program is designed primarily for young professionals with 5-8 years of private-sector experience in technology and innovation fields.

Applicants from all majors and academic disciplines will be considered and are encouraged to apply. Fellows are expected to possess the following characteristics: (i) academic achievement, (ii) written and oral communication skills, (iii) leadership potential and ability, (iv) dedication to public service; and (v) an entrepreneurial spirit appropriate for participating in this unique program. Preference is given to applicants who can demonstrate a strong connection to innovation and technology in the public sector as well as to the City & County of San Francisco.

COMPENSATION: Fellows will be paid a fixed, bi-weekly salary of approximately $2,400 ($62,000/year) plus standard health benefits and vacation days for a period of one year.

DEADLINE: Application will close on Thursday, May 30th, 2013

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Read our First Year in Retrospect below or download here

Here @CleantechGroup, we are delighted to partner with @Facebook, @SFMOCI, and the City and County of San Francisco on “Cleantech Goes Social”, a $25,000 contest to find the next great idea to promote cleantech adoption and minimize environmental impact.  The Office of Civic Innovation has a wealth of open data sets on everything from the city’s vehicle fleet and San Francisco International Airport customer survey results to building footprints, bike networks, and an inventory of open space. You can find direct links to data and San Francisco’s Data App Showcase on the contest’s Resources page.

Entrants still have a full weekend to prepare and submit pitches to socialcontest@cleantech.com.  Submit your concept by 5pm PST Monday, March 4^th to be considered for a chance to win prize money, personalized guidance from Cleantech Group and Facebook, and the opportunity to present your idea to investors and companies at Cleantech Forum San Francisco.  

Bill Weihl, Facebook’s Sustainability Guru, will announce the winner at the event, where speakers from companies like Autodesk, GE, Google, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and William McDonough + Partners will add perspectives on the nexus between sustainability and innovation.

Enter now.  The whitespace just got a little bigger.

Aspiring small business owners have to navigate across as many as 10 different city departments, – not to mention state and federal agencies – making multiple phone calls and visits to City Hall, filling out dozens of forms, and often receiving conflicting or confusing information.

That process just got a lot easier.

Mayor Lee recently announced the launch of the City’s new online tool to quickly help businesses navigate permitting and licensing requirements. License 123 is an easy-to-use tool that provides entrepreneurs and small business owners with a collection of the permits and licenses required to open a variety of businesses in San Francisco.

Here’s how the new tool works:

You begin by selecting the industry and specific type of business you would like to operate. Based on the selections, you are able to see all permits, licenses and associated costs.  Then, you are able to download the forms and are referred to the appropriate City department to submit the applications. All pages are translatable into Spanish or Traditional Chinese.

Users can easily select their industry from a prepared list

License123 was created out of a partnership between the Office of Small Business, Office of Economic and Workforce Development, and the Department of Technology. San Francisco is one of the first city governments to partner with Docstoc, the company behind the technology, to bring their solutions to citizens free of charge.

Formerly, the Office of Small Businesses fielded hundreds of phone calls a day from inquiring business owners about permits. The switch to an online one-stop shop will save staff time, increase accuracy, and create a much more user-friendly interface for aspiring business owners.

The launch of the License123 is a continuation of Mayor Lee’s concentrated effort to make it easier to start, stay, and grow businesses in San Francisco and to use technology to improve access to information and government services.

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To keep up to date on all SFMOCI projects follow us on Twitter

Many San Franciscans are familiar with restaurant safety scores – the green cards posted in restaurants that publicly display their inspection scores on a scale of 1-100. In 2005, San Francisco’s Health Department implemented a food safety ordinance that required the collection and publication of these scores. While Restaurants are not required to post their scores, many do voluntarily and all scores are publicly available online.

Now, restaurant inspection scores will be going digital, becoming more visible than ever before.

Today, Mayor Lee announced an exciting partnership with Yelp to integrate inspection scores into the Yelp profiles of San Francisco restaurants. In a couple of weeks, San Francisco Department of Public Health’s entire database of restaurant scores will be accessible on Yelp.

Public availability of restaurant health scores has increased consumer confidence and led to improvements in health and safety practices of many restaurants around the country. In fact, hundreds of cities around the country already collect and publish this data.

Working locally and nationally, Yelp, San Francisco, NYC and Philly have worked together to create a national open data standard. We are now partnering with Code For America and Yelp on a campaign to enroll more cities to join the effort.

Please ask your Mayor to join the effort at http://foodinspectiondata.us/.

“This is another significant step in the Open Data movement,” said Mayor Lee. “By making often hard-to-find government information more widely available, we can make government more transparent and improve public health outcomes with the power of technology.”

Yelp’s engineering team, SF, NYC, and Philly technical staff designed the Local Inspector Value-entry Specification (LIVES), which enables local municipalities to accurately upload restaurant health inspection scores to Yelp’s database. “Increasing the transparency and accessibility of important public information is another example of how San Francisco is leading the charge in bettering citizens lives by fostering innovation,” said Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO and Co-founder of Yelp.

“Open standards are critical for driving innovation. You can see that in the work that Google and Portland did with GTFS and the 400+ cities that have adopted that standard. We see the same potential here and ask that cities join us in making this important dataset more accessible,” said Jay Nath, Chief Innovation Officer for SF.

The new partnership is exemplary of how open data and public-private partnerships can improve the citizen experience and promote transparency.

Some of these startups and products arrive organically, others are the result of governments engaging citizens through hackathons, online platforms, and app competitions. These civic competitions have become so popular that there is now a book for anyone interested in creating one. 2012 saw hackathons around transit, social good, and sustainability, among many others topics. These hackathons empower citizens to use their talents and creativity to create solutions to civic challenges.

Once the hackathon is over, these solutions need help to become products or companies. A large part of this is funding. sf.citi awarded Smart Muni, an app developed by everyday bus riders at GAFFTA’s Summer of Smart, a $100,000 grant to conduct a pilot with the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority. 2012 also saw an expansion in civic crowdfunding. Platforms like neighbor.ly, ioby, and citizenvestor allow citizens to help fund civic projects. More and more citizen-created solutions are turning into products and sustainable companies with the help of organizations like Code for America. In January 2012, the City of San Francisco partnered with Code for America to create a civic accelerator to house, mentor, and fund startups focused on using technology to improve government efficiency.

The sharing economy, particularly in San Francisco, skyrocketed in 2012 with the popularity of companies like airbnb and Getaround. You can now share rides, bikes, or anything. Mayor Lee convened the first-ever Sharing Economy Working Group in March of 2012 to take a comprehensive look at the economic benefits and emerging policy issues around the sharing economy.

As the sharing economy spread across the country, Open Data and government innovation did the same. Philadelphia opened an office of the New Urban Mechanics, following in Boston’s footsteps. Austin, Texas recently approved the funds for an Innovation Office. Local governments are prioritizing Open Data as well, and making it more user-friendly. With new proposed Open Data legislation, San Francisco announced the creation of a Chief Data Officer position for the City, as well as departmental data coordinators. More and more companies are utilizing Open Data to build their products. Local company Appallicious built the SF Rec Park app using Open Data. 100Plus uses open datasets as part of its app that encourages people to live a healthy lifestyle.

As civic innovation continues to grow in 2013, there is still plenty of room for turning citizen-created solutions into products, jobs, and companies. Look for more solutions to pop up in this space, and for the civic innovation ecosystem to continue to get stronger and continue to grow nationally.

Now let’s hear from some of the City Hall and Office of Civic Innovation team as they tell us their favorite civic innovation of 2012 and what they are looking forward to in 2013!

Jason Euren, Research Fellow, Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation

2012: Revised Open Data Legislation

In 2009, San Francisco made headlines when it became one of the first cities to pioneer an open data initiative to bring City-maintained datasets to the public in a single web portal we call DataSF.  This year, we continued these great strides by expanding our existing open data ordinance to include the role of a Chief Data Officer as well as a streamlined process for City departments to more easily release new datasets.  This fall, we were also excited to expand the purview of the City’s open data initiative to include partnerships with private data and analytics companies.  In October, MotionLoft became the first private-sector company to donate data to the City’s open data portal.

2013: Continued growth of Open Data

In 2013, I look forward to bringing on our first Chief Data Officer and to continue growing our partnerships with private- and public-sector data organizations so that DataSF can become the one-stop-shop for all San Francisco open data resources.

 Alex Gudich, Innovation Officer, Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation

2012: Chief Innovation Officer

My favorite moment goes back to the early 2012: Mayor Ed Lee Appoints Jay Nath as San Francisco’s First Chief Innovation Officer!

2013: Living Innovation Zones

I am very excited about the launch of Living Innovation Zones – a test bed for the demonstration of new and emerging technologies in the public realm.

Hunter Franks, Community Manager, Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation

2012: October as Innovation Month

Mayor Lee declared October 2012 Innovation Month in San Francisco. The city celebrated the ideas, events, and people that make San Francisco the Innovation Capital of the World – all with the aim of strengthening the innovation ecosystem. Among the plethora of cool events, innovative companies like Twitter and Google opened their doors to the public during OpenCo. Can’t wait til next October!

2013: Innovation creating jobs

I’m looking forward to seeing more and more innovations that come from citizen competitions prosper into products, companies, and jobs!

Erick Orantes, City Hall Fellow, Office of Economic Workforce and Development

2012: ImproveSF

Exemplifying democracy at its finest, ImproveSF has busted through as the most efficient and interactive way citizens can help out their community and have their voices heard at the same time. This website has already gathered thousands of commentators, community leaders, and ordinary citizens who may have never engaged with the City and contributed their efforts to improve San Francisco. As the Innovation Capital of the World, ImproveSF is the finest example of the intersection between technology and community, as users find many ways to stay involved with the website’s development, whether it is gathering points for the most helpful ideas they contribute, or knowing that their voices are actually being heard by their peers and city officials alike. Because of ImproveSF, civic innovation in 2012 will be remembered as a network of San Franciscans coming together through technology.

2013: License123

In 2013, the one-stop portal for the business community of San Francisco has the greatest potential for laying out the foundations for permit systems in all major cities. This promising project has the most collaborative and innovative ideas  because of the cooperation needed from other city departments and business community alike. Because of this, the benefits of even building this website already have been demonstrated through their citywide partnership, forecasting a new relationship between departments and businesses. The highest demand to consolidate these processes has come from the small business community, who can have the option to receive/submit all needed applications through one online portal while focusing their limited resources to opening and operating in San Francisco. In 2013, The one stop portal will epitomize civic innovation and exemplify how technology can be the best solution to problems cities face in the 21st century.

What was your highlight of civic innovation in 2012? What are you looking forward to in 2013? Let us know: @SFMOCI

It’s something we hear a lot at swissnex San Francisco: “We’ve been to your events, and we keep coming back. But we’re still not quite sure—what exactly is swissnex?”

The short answer is that we connect the dots between North America and Switzerland, with the goal of bringing out the best that each has to offer to everyone’s benefit. “We’re like doctors,” said Executive Director Christian Simm at a recent monthly discussion that we co-host with a group called ScienceOnline Bay Area. “We feel the pulse of Silicon Valley and Switzerland, and we do transfusions of ideas between the two places.”

History

Like many countries, Switzerland deploys science and technology counselors around the world, usually to centers of science policy—places like Washington, D.C., and Tokyo. In the late 1990s, Simm took just such a position—only this time, the base wasn’t a policy center.

The San Francisco Bay Area had grown into a world hub of innovation, and Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Education and Research saw the need for a science diplomat outside of the traditional policy arena. On top of advocating for Swiss science and technology abroad, Simm found that Swiss companies, universities, scientists, and artists all wanted to be plugged into this vibrant region. And their counterparts in the Bay Area were just as keen to connect with Switzerland.

Simm began to envision a new kind of science diplomacy, one that would bring together exciting ideas and players from all disciplines and encourage and nurture the collaboration and innovation that materialized, to benefit not just the Swiss, but everyone involved. His vision became a reality in 2003 when swissnex San Francisco officially opened as an annex of the Swiss consulate. Now there are outposts in four other cities around the world: Bangalore, Boston, Shanghai, and Singapore.

Our broad mission is reflected in the diversity of our team. As a self-described “recovering physicist,” Simm calls his team members “free electrons.” In physics, free electrons have broken away of their staid and predictable atomic orbits, and can react to the forces acting upon them. In a sense, that’s what happens at swissnex San Francisco, where our people come from backgrounds as disparate as hospitality and physics, pediatric oncology and music journalism: We figure out which trends are the most magnetic, which ideas are the most electric, and we make connections.

Startup and Innovation Services

“Silicon Valley really is the place where entrepreneurs are bred on a daily basis,” says Gioia Deucher, Head of Startup Services. “For companies coming from Switzerland, this is really the perfect plug for them to reach a global market.”

Swiss startups compete to gain access to our CTI Start-up U.S. Market Entry Camp for three months. In addition to a desk in our downtown-San Francisco office, they get a stipend, targeted introductions with potential investors and collaborators, and workshops to help them grow their companies. Past residents have included companies that are trying to perfect existing technology, such as Jilion, developers of what they hope will be the Web’s most reliable HTML5 video player. Campers also come up with entirely new solutions, like Dacuda, creators of the world’s first scanning mouse.

Interdisciplinary Events

Designed to be both timely and substantive, swissnex events feature experts from Switzerland and around the globe. For example, a Swiss team blending art and science installed a virtual forest in our event space. As part of the Bay Area Science Festival, we brought together criminologists and fingerprint experts from the San Francisco Police Department to find out if fingerprints really tell the truth. And we partnered with UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and CERN to host an interactive evening centered on the Higgs Boson.

The San Francisco Police Department was out in force for an event examining the science and folklore of fingerprints.

Science writer Paul Preuss of Lawrence Berkeley wrote to the swissnex team afterward: “My sincere thanks and appreciation for the hospitality, creativity, and wonderful spirit you brought to this event.” He added, “swissnex San Francisco once more upheld its reputation for intellectual excitement and sophistication.”

These occasions are really about creating the space for interactions to occur, in the hopes that “free electrons,” whether from our team or the community, will make fortuitous connections.

Higher Education

It’s no secret that colleges and universities can be some of the best places to nurture innovation. Through mandates with institutions of higher education from all over Switzerland, swissnex San Francisco helps schools leverage the power of social media, and our communications staff gets the word out about the amazing science happening at topflight Swiss schools like EPFL and ETH Zürich.

swissnex held a social media study tour for Swiss institutions of higher education, which included a stop at the Twitter campus.

Our University Affairs team organizes alumni events to help Swiss alumni connect with their alma maters, and we periodically host representatives from Swiss higher education, who join us for up to a year as members of the swissnex team, helping further their home institutions’ internationalization goals and cross-pollinating with their counterparts at Bay Area schools.

Examining the nextrends

Just as the focus of business and art and science and technology all change at rates faster than anywhere else in the world here in Silicon Valley, so our activities morph to keep pace. But that doesn’t mean we just determine which way the wind is blowing and hop on for the ride. We identify the first breezes of change to better inform our audiences here and in Switzerland.

swissnex San Francisco’s trend-scouting site nextrends debuted in June 2012.

That’s why we started a trend-scouting website called nextrends, where members of our team, who are acutely in tune with the pulse of the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, leverage what they know to capture the essence of the region. In many ways, nextrends is a microcosm of what swissnex is—a repository of ideas and expertise, providing the latest analysis of trends and ideas that don’t always make the leap across the continent and ocean between here and Switzerland. Every two weeks, our subscribers receive reports on subjects like online education, the sharing economy, and local food entrepreneurship, to name just a few.

Hand-in-hand with its neutral position on the world stage, Switzerland has long been a country committed to unbiased exchange between groups­—groups that on the surface seem to have little in common. Yet, innovation and solutions to problems often spring from this melding of ideas. It’s that spirit we strive to channel at swissnex, as we continue to connect the dots.

To stay attuned to the latest happenings at swissnex, subscribe to our event alerts.

John Cannon is a science writer and a communications specialist with swissnex San Francisco.