the opportunity for civic startups (long - web 2.0 expo)

civiccommons.org | openplans.org | @nickgrossman

The Opportunity for Civic StartupsWeb 2.0 Expo 2011 - Nick Grossman | @nickgrossman

THE LAST BIG UNDISRUPTED MARKET:

Saturday, October 29, 11

Today we’re going to talk about how your startups can save the world!

me, me, me

First, a bit about me: I work with several organizations working in the civic technology space: http://openplans.org, http://civiccommons.org, http://codeforamerica.org, and http://civic.mit.edu

Are you working on what you’d call a “civic startup”?Is it disruptive?What is it?

1.Civic

2.Disruption

1.Civic

2.Disruption

3.Trends

1.Civic

2.Disruption

3.Trends

4.Opportunities

What we mean by Civic

civiccommons.org | openplans.org | @nickgrossmanSaturday, October 29, 11

of or relating to a citizen, a city, citizenship, or community affairs

This is pretty broadSaturday, October 29, 11

But it’s kind of like porn -- you know it when you see it

There are a bunch of startups that are clearly “civic” in nature -- addressing the connection between citizens and government.

But there are also a lot of companies and products that produce civic value without being explicitly civic in nature.

The line between what’s “civic” and what’s “social” is pretty blurry. Is Foursquare a civic product? In some ways, it is -- it does build a stronger connection between me and the front lines of my city: merchants.

Twitter is one of the best examples of web-based communication tools being used for civic purposes.

So, the stage is set for civic startups -- the “hard” boundaries (political, geographical) and “soft” ones (cultural) are getting blurrier by the moment.

Ethan Zuckerman from the Center for Civic Media at MIT describes “civic media” as the intersection of participatory media and civic life, which feels appropriately broad while still providing focus.

civicmedia

participatorymedia

civicmedia

participatorymedia civic lifecivic

— Ethan ZuckermanDirector, MIT Center for Civic Media

What we mean by Disruption

(obligatory hackjob on disruptive technologies)

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology

Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen popularized the term “disruptive” in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma. In a nutshell, a disruptive technology is one that transforms a market, often beginning by serving the low-end, or by serving a previously unserved segment, then moving up-market and unseating incumbents. Disruptive technologies are often dismissed as “toys” at the outset.

Software is eating the world— Marc Andreessen

WSJ, 8/20/2011

Great article by Netscape founder Marc Andreesen in the WSJ, pointing out that software and the internet are technologies that are disrupting nearly every industry, transforming business models, collapsing incumbents, and providing big opportunities for startups.

craigslist | classifiedsapple | music, phones, cameras

amazon | books, retaillinkedin | recruiting

airbnb | hotelsgoogle | direct marketing

netflix | videosskype | phonestwitter | news

Pick an industry, and you’ll find an internet or software company that’s transforming it right now.

Andreesen notes that we now have the tools to transform nearly any industry -- he points to healthcare and education as prime targets.

craigslist | classifiedsapple | music, phones, cameras

amazon | books, retaillinkedin | recruiting

airbnb | hotelsgoogle | direct marketing

netflix | videosskype | phonestwitter | news

The tools now exist to transform any institution

Pick an industry, and you’ll find an internet or software company that’s transforming it right now.

Andreesen notes that we now have the tools to transform nearly any industry -- he points to healthcare and education as prime targets.

employees: 32

With a staff of only 32, Craiglist has radically disrupted the newspaper / classified ads industry.

airbnb

AirBnB turns empty apartments into short-term rentals, disrupting the hotel industry.

What is ripe for disruption in the civic space?

Pick your “civic” issue, and there is likely a technology or company attempting to transform it. What’s missing? What do you think is next?

Politics - national, localCommunity

TransportationBorrowing sugarClearing graffiti

Protests[…]

Pick your “civic” issue, and there is likely a technology or company attempting to transform it. What’s missing? What do you think is next?

4 trends that are setting the stage for civic startups

So, we’ll talk about 4 trends that are making it more possible than ever for civic startups to get going. Then, we’ll talk about 4 models for approaching the citizen / government technology space specifically.

Spending more and getting less

source: Code for America

Governments spend crazy sums of money on IT. This is 17x the size of the video game market.

And much of that money is poorly spent.

‘Bloomberg has called the project a “disaster”… [its] cost has

exceeded $600 million, nearly ten times over budget’

And much of that money is poorly spent.

‘has soared in cost from $260mm to as much as $1.9bn’

Clearly, this is not sustainable, as governments are, at the same time, scrambling to save dollars. So, something has to change.

Changing of the guard

At the same time, there are big demographic changes in progress.

graphic: Code for America

Over the next 4 years, local governments will lose a majority of their employees due to attrition.

CHICAGOJohn Tolva

BOSTONNigel Jacobs

SAN FRANCISCOJay Nath

WHITE HOUSEVivek Kundra

NEW YORKRachel Sterne

CODE for AMERICAJen Pahlka

+ many more

At the same time, a new generation of tech-enabled leaders are coming up.

The rise of the Civic Hacker

There is a growing group of “civic hackers” who represent the “just do it” attitude of the internet. They don’t play by the old rules of advocacy and politics, they just make shit.

In Chicago, a guy named Harper Reed reverse-engineered Chicago’s bus tracker website, and built a public API so that developers could use the data in their applications.

Along with Dan O’Neill, they hooked this data, along with real-time service alerts, into an unofficial Twitter bot. Harper is now the CTO of the Obama Campaign!

In 2005, Adrian Holovaty started taking crime reports from the City of Chicago and mapping them. In the process of doing this, he hacked google maps so that the reports showed up on a map -- this was before the official google maps API existed, and was part of what lead google to create an official maps API.

Chicago Crime grew up and was folded into Everyblock.com, which won a Knight News Challenge grant in 2007.

Dan O’Neill of Everyblock pioneered the field of open civic data, working with civic institutions across the country to connect streaming data into Everyblock.

Everyblock was acquired by MSNBC in 2009.

Exit Strategy NYC tells you where to stand on the NYC Subway, in order to be closest to your exit or transfer. This dataset has lived in the minds of New Yorkers for decades, and is now available to tourists too! This small app has turned out to be very profitable.

osm haiti

This video shows the worldwide civic hacker community’s response to the Haiti earthquake in 2010. People used Ushahidi, Twitter and OpenStreetMap to build an up-to-date map that assisted on-the-ground relief efforts.

save a life

In San Ramon, CA, the fire department created an app that lets citizens with CPR training elect to receive alerts of nearby cardiac emergencies.

cfa fellows

Now, new programs like Code for America are working to bring this “civic hacker” ethic directly into the government software development process.

And of course, cities and governments around the world are working to capitalize on this interest, through app contests and other structured developer engagement programs.

Government as a Platform

— Tim O’Reilly

The 4th major trend paving the way for civic startups is the notion of “government as a platform” (platform in the tech platform sense).

People tend to think of government as a vending machine - put in your tax dollars and receive direct services back. If you don’t like the taste of the candy bar, shake the machine.

Governments are starting to think

less like app developers

and more like platform providers

But now, a new model is emerging, where governments are thinking about being a platform for further development -- the same way that Apple turned the iPhone into a platform for building apps.

This is all about data -- civic apps need data, and step one in building a platform is providing direct data access. Washington DC was one of the first big cities to really embrace this notion.

source: Wired Magazine

Once you have access to this data, you can start to do really interesting things with it -- and can learn how the city is working (or not working). This is a visualization of NYC 311 data.

Real-time Server

Mobile, web & other apps

Closed Model Platform Model

Platform thinking often mean re-architecting IT infrastructure. In this project, MTA (New York City Transit) is building its real-time bus data system as a platform -- opening up the data, and providing it to developers via an Application Programming Interface (API). This stand in contrast to the ‘closed’ model, where a single end-to-end solution stores, processes and serves all of the data.

We can visualize government as a platform like this. We’ll walk through this in the next section, identifying opportunities for civic startups along the way.

direct vendors

platform apps

direct vendors

platform apps

outside apps

4 Models for Civic Startups

So, what does that mean for startups? Here is one frame -- there are a handful of ways that startups can engage with the civic space, and with government in particular. I’ll break it down into four models:

Be the platform builder

vendors

platform apps

outside apps

Governments and their direct contractors / vendors build the internal IT systems that power everything else.

+ lots, lots more

This tends to be the domain of big, established companies, who have built up relationships and can weather the long sales cycles and difficult contracting environment that direct government work entails.

BUT there are a few notable exceptions -- smaller companies who have made it as government contractors. One example is Phase 2 Technologies, who has done lots of Drupal work at the federal level.

Another is the CKAN platform -- an open source project for managing data catalogs. Produced my the Open Knowledge Foundation in the UI, CKAN powers a large number of open data sites, including data.gov.uk.

Socrata is another startup with a successful business powering government data. Socrata offers a SaaS product that powers data.gov in the US and many state- and city-level data portals.

transpo

OpenPlans works with the largest transit agencies in the US supporting open source software that powers real-time vehicle locations and multi-modal trip routing.

To support this ecosystem of government vendors, Civic Commons is in the process of building a “marketplace” that networks governments with each other and with vendors. Coming soon.

At the same time, government entities are making direct efforts to support doing business with smaller companies. This is a goal of the US CIO’s 25 point plan, and is the focus of NYC’s forthcoming SPARK program.

Disruptive Opportunities

Open Source

Open SourceCloud / SaaS / IaaS

Design

Challenges

Design

Challenges

Procurement

Design

Challenges

ProcurementLong sales cycles

Design

Challenges

ProcurementLong sales cycles

Product vs. services

Build on the Platform

vendors

platform apps

outside apps

The next opportunity is to build *on* the government platform, but not necessarily as a direct vendor. This eliminates many of the procurement hurdles for small businesses, while still providing an opportunity to serve citizens and governments.

Within the “building on the platform” space, there is ample opportunity to make a difference using design and analytics. The Open311 Dashboard, produced by Code for America, works with any Open311-compliant city to visualize activity in the 311 (issue reporting, service request, and information inquiry) system.

BetterMetroNorth.com provides a nicer user interface to Metro North (NYC Commuter Railroad) train service.

apps for america

Lots of nonprofits and governments have sponsored app contests, like Apps for America from the Sunlight foundation. In many cases, these have been the catalyst for new startups.

Out of Apps for America 2 came the GovPulse project, which created a better user interface for the Federal Register. Noticing this, the OFR ultimately worked with GovPulse to develop Federal Register 2.0.

The idea for the re-design originated from Sunlight Labs’ Apps for America 2 contest. Developers Andrew

Carpenter, Bob Burbach and Dave Augustine from WestEd Interactive built GovPulse.us, “The Federal Register at your fingertips” and won second place. They caught the attention of OFR, who contacted

them to help with the official re-design.

Out of Apps for America 2 came the GovPulse project, which created a better user interface for the Federal Register. Noticing this, the OFR ultimately worked with GovPulse to develop Federal Register 2.0.

NYC’s app contest is called NYC BigApps

mycityway

MyCityWay

A 2010 winner, MyCityWay, went on to secure a large venture round.

Building “on the platform” frees you from many of the challenges of contracting directly with governments. However, it does introduce “platform risk” -- i.e., you become dependent (to varying degrees, depending) on the good will / reliability of the platform provider. Since the “government platform” is nascent and distributed, this does introduce some risk.

Design

DesignSimplicity

DesignSimplicityAnalytics

Challenges

ChallengesPlatform risk

Play outside the lines

A third option is to work entirely outside of government. As we’ve discussed, the nature of “civic” is certainly not limited to government, and the lines are blurring by the day.

vendors

platform apps

outside apps

There are many many examples of civic startups that exist outside the official purview of government, but still operate in near proximity.

blockboard

Blockboard is a neighborhood networking app out of SF.

commonplace

OurCommonPlace is a startup out of Harvard, piloting in Falls Church, VA.

localocracy

Localocracy allows registered voters to debate local issues. They were acquired by AOL in September 2011.

Agility

AgilityDesign

User-centered approach

AgilityDesign

Challenges

AgilityDesign

ChallengesFinding a business model

The Enterprise End-Run— Me!

bit.ly/enterprise-end-run

The last model we’ll cover today is a variant of #3 (playing outside the lines) -- in the Enterprise End Run, companies leverage an enterprise contract (i.e., with government) by first engaging end-users.

vendors

platform apps

outside apps

So you start way outside, then go in the back door.

vendors

platform apps

outside apps

So you start way outside, then go in the back door.

One startup that is doing this is Socrative (http://socrative.com). Socrative offers a mobile tool that any teacher can use in his/her classroom -- if & when it takes off, the teachers become the inside salesforce driving for broader adoption and sales.

SeeClickFix is another app that takes this approach -- citizens use the service on their own, and when there is critical mass, governments are incentivized to buy a premium package.

The Enterprise End-Run

One tension with the Enterprise End-Run is which audience to focus on: are you an enterprise provider, appealing to enterprise buyers, or are you a consumer platform, appealing directly to end users. Since the end users are not making the ultimate buying decision, this can cause tensions.

Employ users as sales force

Challenges

ChallengesTension between user-focus

and enterprise-focus

4 Trends:

4 Trends:1 Spending more & getting less

2 Changing of the guard

3 The rise of the Civic Hacker

4 Gov’t as a Platform

4 Models:

4 Models:1 Be the platform builder

2 Build on the platform

3 Play outside the lines

4 The Enterprise End-Run

nyc people

A parting thought: People are re-thinking how cities work in lots of ways! Take Park(ing) Day for example: for a day each fall, people “rent” parking spaces (by paying the meter), and turn them into temporary public parks. Pretty awesome.

Thanks!

@nickgrossmannickgrossman.info

the opportunity for civic startups (long - web 2.0 expo)

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