John Tolva, chief technology officer for the City of Chicago, told
more than 500 people attending a reception Monday Sept. 19 for
nominees of the 2011 Chicago Innovation Award they hold the key to
transform Chicago the way the city was transformed in the 19th
Century.
“Our natural bounty today is data, knowledge, and ideas — they ‘form’
the establishment of new businesses and a more livable Chicago,” Tolva
said at the House of Blues.
The full text of his inspirational speech follows:
By John Tolva
Thank you for the introduction and thank you for inviting me to this
extraordinary event. It’s an honor to represent the city of Chicago to
an audience so focused on growing both the talent and the economy
found at the intersection of technology and innovation.
I’d like to take a moment to reflect on Chicago--style innovation,
from the perspective of the mayor’s office.
The urban economist Edward Glaeser has called Chicago “a city built
upon corn in porcine form”. He was referring to the city’s remarkable
19th century transformation of the natural bounty of prairie
agriculture into a higher value form of commerce: pigs.
But it wasn’t just Chicago’s efficiency in making use of “everything
but the oink”. Real innovation was needed in secondary industries for
the cold storage and transportation of all that pork. It was, in
short, a problem that spawned an ecosystem of innovation, helping
Chicago become the central node in a nation--spanning rail network.
It was the beginning of greatness -–- and it shortly gave way to an
even more revolutionary innovation. The birth of the American futures
exchange in Chicago was, in a certain way, the creation of a virtual
market largely decoupled from physical goods. An economy based on the
idea of a thing, rather than the thing itself.
We can effect this transformation again. Our natural bounty today is
data, knowledge, and ideas -–- their “form” the establishment of
new businesses and a more livable Chicago.
Mayor Emanuel created the role of Chief Technology Officer -–- and
another one, Chief Data Officer, a first in city government -–-
because he believes strongly that technology is a key driver of the
new networks of innovation that characterize Chicago. The Mayor has
set city government on a path that treats technology as an enabler of
government efficiency, a mechanism for public accountability, and a
facilitator of economic growth.
Let me give you some examples.
The city of Chicago is publishing new city datasets on the web on a
weekly basis – and refreshing these sets nightly. Some examples
include crime data going back 10 years, over 90,000 city contracts,
and salary information for every city employee. This lets Chicagoans
monitor the vital signs of their city. Efforts like these offer
opportunities for residents to examine the operations of city
government and highlight ways we could operate more efficiently.
And it opens up new opportunities for business creation: take Google’s
Chicago Open Data Hackday from a few weeks ago. 60 engineers,
designers, and entrepreneurs came together to develop applications
using the city’s data as the raw material. This is how small tech
businesses start: ideas and community – and we’re giving them a boost
with the city data. But this is also a new form of civic engagement.
We’re crowdsourcing ways of making the city more efficient and it has
URL’s like sweeparound.us, chicagolobbyists.org, and
wasmycartowed.com.
New forms of civic engagement extend beyond data of course. Recently
Mayor Emanuel convened a Facebook Live townhall. It was an
extraordinary event and not only because it had not been done before.
The mayor of course fielded questions live, but what made it
remarkable is the sidebar conversation: hundreds of Chicagoans from
different neighborhoods and different walks of life having a
substantive conversation about the future of the city.
It was a moment of real insight for city government. How can we use
technology to enable a very infrequent dialogue, one that was not even
possible a decade ago? One answer is chicagobudget.org, the vital
online discussion forum around the city’s financial health. Thousands
of ideas have spawned over 50,000 votes, city commissioners engaging
directly in the dialogue -–- and even a few phone calls from the
mayor himself.
What’s new about this is the ability simultaneously to address the
macro and micro issues of city government. Social media allows us to
address both the macro level issues -–- presenting the mayor to the
city as a whole -–- as well as the micro issues, solving people’s
problems, honing in on memes that point to potholes and sending those
on to 311. This is where personal responsiveness meets deep data
analytics.
We are also publishing performance dashboards so Chicagoans can see
how efficient various agencies are in delivering services. As an
example, we published dashboards on green and standard building permit
requests for the Department of Buildings. It’s a view into the fastest
growing part of the nation’s economy, through the lens of our own
city.
Approximately 30 measurements have been published to date,
representing the work of eight City departments.
You may have heard that the city is in the midst of an app creation
contest, Apps for Metro Chicago, which provides technology
entrepreneurs with the raw materials to help make the city more
efficient via the web, smartphones, Facebook – anywhere you can use an
app. It’s a great example of how we can engage the public to improve
the operations of city government. We don’t have all the answers and
we don’t always have the resources. This is a way of encouraging
public--private partnerships from the bottom up. It enables
entrepreneurs to build businesses that draw on over 200 publicly
available datasets.
Again, though, our efforts are not focused only on data. Mayor Emanuel
understands that Chicago’s public spaces are one of its greatest
assets. Which is why we are thinking a lot about how to open up what
we call “the digital public way”.
Now, you may recall in the early days of the web all kinds of Chicken
Littling that we’d move away from each other, tied only by network
communications, happily introverted in electronic cocoons. This has
not happened (in fact the reverse is happening if you look at the
demographic data -–- people are moving back to cities). If anything
the ubiquity of network technologies has proven that place matters.
Mobile computing and “checking--in”--style apps are ascendant
because we are creatures of place.
The digital public way is the next frontier in urban technology. We
see glimpses of what could be in other cities -–- networked transit
signage, smart travel systems, public objects on sidewalks that can be
queried in real time. But it’s disconnected, fragmented. We’re
interested in the city itself as a technology platform and we’d like
people like you to be a part of it, enjoy the city with it, and build
businesses upon it.
So that’s some of what city government is up to. But the city’s
industries and entrepreneurs are the real story.
Chicago has over 50 publicly--traded high--technology companies, 199
companies on last year’s Inc. Magazine’s 5,000 Fastest Growing
Companies, nearly 270,000 employees in the info--tech sector overall.
We have over 300 corporate R&D facilities, 3 federally--funded
research centers, and 16 metro area universities.
And then there’s our start--up culture, currently, in my opinion, the
hottest story in the country. Here’s a data point: Illinois is now
second only to California in VC Investment in Internet businesses.
We’ve had $23 billion ??in start--up exits over the last 5 years.
Venture capital from Lightbank, Apex, Sandbox, Hyde Park Angels, and
New World Ventures. Easily as important as the capital is the growing
pool of serial entrepreneurs serving as mentors to the startup
landscape and the diverse business community actively participating in
its own startup ecosystem. Add to this the support from places like
Excelerate Labs, the Chicago Entrepreneurship Center, Healthbox, Built
in Chicago and the Clean Energy Trust -–- and you can see its clear
we have the right accelerants to build our innovation economy.
It’s dizzying, and wonderful, a legacy and a destiny at the same time.
We’ve been doing it for over a century. We have the talent in the
private sector, in academia, and in our non--profits to capitalize on
any impetus city government can give. And you now have a new Mayor who
is not just going to support this – he is going demand it, push for it
and drive it.
Chicago rose to prominence as a national hub of rail connectivity in
the 19th century. Today our city is the world’s largest commercial
Internet exchange point by volume. It’s always been about networks,
about using technology to foster ecosystems of innovation. I’m here
today to thank you for showing such leadership in your fields. Chicago
is ascendant and our rise is fueled by your creativity and commitment.
Thank you very much.
