By: Joe Stumpe
What can a city do better when a cadre of citizens – including talented computer programmers – get unfettered access to useful government data? Seth Etter and Open Wichita aim to find out. But reshaping a city through code requires more than simply navigating technical challenges.
The aroma of Mexican food wafts out of the break room of the Labor Party, a shared workspace in Wichita’s lively Old Town entertainment district. It’s been brought in to feed about two dozen people attending the monthly “Hack Night” held by Open Wichita, a volunteer group trying to make life better in Kansas’ biggest city through the sharing of information and technology.
Despite Open Wichita founder Seth Etter’s urging, the food finds relatively few takers. The participants, mostly men and women in their 20s and early 30s, seem much more interested in talking about where the organization is headed.
Etter, craft beer in hand, stands in the middle of one group that’s throwing out ideas to increase voter participation. Another group sits around a long table, hatching strategies to promote the local food movement. A handful of others hunker over laptop computers, discussing a proposed mobile app that would make public transit easier to use and a website devoted to reducing infant mortality. The size of each subset grows and shrinks as people come and go. There’s no agenda, no one taking minutes and nothing like Robert’s Rules of Order in effect here.
The effort inches forward. By the end of the night, for instance, a consensus is reached that the voting initiative should collaborate with a similar project already underway by KMUW, the local public radio station, rather than stand on its own.
“I don’t see it as one big end-goal,” Etter says. “This group and the efforts we’re working on, they just kind of lay the groundwork for a lot of other awesome things to happen. It’s more kind of laying the framework for citizens to be moreengaged in their city.”
Later, Etter says he’s happy with the progress. Rather than one handy app for bus riders or easily accessible list of local food sources, Etter’s vision for Open Wichita is broader: the engagement of citizens, by and for citizens, in all sorts of fields using technology and previously inaccessible sources of data.
“I don’t see it as one big end-goal,” Etter says. “This group and the efforts we’re working on, they just kind of lay the groundwork for a lot of other awesome things to happen. It’s more kind of laying the framework for citizens to be more engaged in their city.”
Open Wichita, in other words, is open ended. And part of that is due to the leadership of Etter himself, a techie who’s not just focused on solving technical challenges. He’s also been a relationship builder, cultivating allies within city government and quick to recognize that hacking Wichita’s civic challenges will require a lot more people to be involved than just the city’s coding community.
But there are formidable challenges. For one thing, even with widespread engagement of the community, there’s the question of whether Wichita’s relatively small pool of technological talent is big enough to help foster big scale changes.
Furthermore, even though Etter has found receptive ears at City Hall, getting governments to more fully embrace open data principles figures to be an ongoing challenge with plenty of ebb and flow.
Josh Stewart, a spokesman for the Sunlight Foundation, a national group that advocates for government transparency, says groups such as Open Wichita “face all kinds of challenges. You need buy-in from the institutions within the government itself, and you also need some sort of civic tech infrastructure to supply talent for your city to do this. For every city, not all of those things are going to come together.”
Hacking for Change
Open Wichita is indicative of a new civic reform movement emerging across the country, summed up in the phrase “hacking for change.” In other cities, open data groups have created apps to let citizens track issues of public policy that are important to them as they move through the channels of government. Apps can perform broad tasks, such as allowing citizens to view health inspections of restaurants, keep up with traffic reports or notify local governments of problems they’ve spotted.
Other apps help people locate alternative fuel stations, monitor air quality and be alerted to earthquakes and hurricanes; view safety reports of various products; and even connect people who know CPR with those in cardiac arrest nearby, to name a few.
Some cities have created open data portals that citizens can mine for information and even appointed high-level managers to make them operate as effectively as possible. For instance, Kansas City, Missouri, hired a chief data officer in early 2015 for that purpose. The idea is that making government data open and accessible will allow smart, innovative people to come up with creative ways to make use of it for the public good – often without further involvement from government officials. Wichita has an open data portal, created about six months ago partly in response to Open Wichita, although it contains only about a dozen data sets and is not easy to navigate.
Etter, a 26-year-old 26-year-old who grew up in El Dorado, earned his associate’s degree in web development from Butler Community College and has taught part-time in that program. Since 2011, he’s run his own freelance web design business and then worked for several Wichita-based companies with large technology components. In his spare time Etter enjoys live music, yoga and penning blog posts about his love for Wichita.
Most recently, he’s taken on a new job with the OpenGov Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that develops open source software for use in the public sector.
“I write code for them,” says Etter, who works from Wichita. “The main thing we work on is called Madison. It allows legislators to put draft legislation in the system so the public can see it before it goes to a vote, can suggest edits, comment on it. It could be used by any kind of legislative body.”
In keeping with the principles of open data, anybody can download Madison and use it without permission. “We found out the country of Georgia is using it to write their constitution, which is cool,” Etter says.
Even cooler – from Etter’s standpoint — is that his hometown is using it. The Wichita city manager’s office recently posted a proposed open data policy for the city on the website (drafts.wichita.gov/).
Open Wichita is an outgrowth of another group, called devICT, which Etter started in 2012 to bolster the local web development community through social events and educational programs. He’d also closely followed the efforts of Code for America, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that’s been called “the technology world’s equivalent of the Peace Corps,” and knew that regional affiliates Code for Tulsa and Code for OKC were up and running.
Etter favored the inclusiveness suggested by a similar group called Open Houston. “I like the word ‘open’ better than ‘code’, because code immediately shuts out a certain group of people,” Etter says. “We need more than just developer and code folks to make an impact.”
Etter has placed an emphasis on engaging more than just usual voices who’d show up to a coding event. While developers can build technology, it takes designers to make it look good, marketers to promote it, business thinkers to scale it up, and subject matter experts who know the ins-and-outs of the area a project affects.
The first Open Wichita event at the Labor Party last June, on the National Day of Civic Hacking, attracted about 30 people and lasted 10 hours. Over the course of the event, the group decided to focus on five projects: increasing voter participation; reducing infant mortality; promoting local food; helping reopen the Lake Afton Observatory; and getting the city of Wichita to adopt an open data policy. The last is the concept that data collected by the government should be open to citizens to use as they see fit.
Even before the inaugural Open Wichita meeting, Etter found a couple of very important allies. They include Mike Mayta, the city’s chief information officer, and his boss, City Manager Robert Layton, who were familiar with Code for America and the open data movement in general.
“When you go down there and here’s a bunch of kids – and I use that term nicely – spending their own time to try and use technology to make this a better community, it’s pretty cool,” Mayta says.
Mayta attends the monthly meetings of Open Wichita and seems to enjoy them, joking about the contrasts between him and most of the group’s members in terms of age, weight, hairline and tattoos.
“When you go down there and here’s a bunch of kids – and I use that term nicely – spending their own time to try and use technology to make this a better community, it’s pretty cool,” Mayta says.
Mayta sees something contemporary in the way its participants work, mimicking what some call the new economy based on short-term collaborations. “It’s really interesting to me,” he says. “These people just kind of collaborate, they meet, they create things. They’ll come and go. If others don’t show up, they’ll go over to another project. It’s really kind of free flow.”
Mayta is able to tell Open Wichita members about the types of data generated by the city and what format it takes. What he hasn’t done is simply give them access to all of it. Some of it is off limits due to privacy concerns, or is not in a format that can be utilized by the group. Much more data could be open, he says, but at a cost.
“What a lot of cities did is they outsourced their open data and posted their data sets, usually at a cost of about fifty to one hundred thousand dollars a year. In some cases that might be okay. Look at San Francisco, with its large tech community. Here I wanted to be a little more strategic and kind of say, ‘Hey, what do you need?’ I don’t want to just spend a whole lot of money.”
In a city with a budget of $227 million this year, $50,000 to $100,000 might not be seen as cost prohibitive, Mayta says, but then added: “Do we want to spend $100,000 doing that or fixing streets?”
The city possesses hundreds of data sets. Most requests from the public and media are for data about crime and city spending. The city has posted the former in open data format, although it is not automatically updated as it would be in some systems. Within two years, the city expects to have a system in place that posts financial records and other information in open data format and keeps it updated.
Mayta and Layton also back Open Wichita’s call for the City Council to adopt an open data policy to store information that isn’t private in a way that doesn’t require the city to function as the filter.
But there will be competing values at play. On one hand, there’s the desire for openness, which city officials support. But there are also the values of efficiency, protecting citizen privacy, and even the concern about losing control of what people might do with open information.
Etter says he understands the city “can’t just up and change every system they’re using to manage the city at this point. But going forward, he added, any data that doesn’t violate privacy concerns “should also dump into a system where people can grab it and do what they want with it.”
Encouraging Exploration
Etter’s success in building bridges with the city is another example of how building Open Wichita has been as much about building relationships as it has been about writing code.
Another early supporter of Open Wichita was Aaron Wirtz, known for zany TV commercials he created for Super Car Guys, a chain of Wichita used car lots (“Where buying a car doesn’t have to suck!”). He presented a much different appearance at January’s monthly meeting of Open Wichita, bringing along his infant daughter in a carrier that he rocked gently throughout the evening.
Mikel Bowyer, president of the ICT Food Circle, works with Sara Greenlee, left, and Stephanie Keomany, center, during an Open Wichita meeting earlier this year.
“Our first father-daughter outing and I bring her here,” he says.
Wirtz was drawn to Open Wichita because Etter reached out to him to pick his brain on different marketing ideas. Although Wirtz gets paid for handing out that kind of advice as a professional marketer, he wanted to help because Etter asked.
“What I’ve noticed is that a staggering number of organizations are unprepared to ask for help, asking specifically ‘I see you can do this, this is what we need.’” And when some organizations do get help, Wirtz says, “They are unable to make those people feel appreciated. People want to feel like their unique efforts have made a difference.”
One of Wirtz’s roles with Open Wichita is to make sure members are recognized in blog posts and short videos he makes for social media. Wirtz says the structure of Open Wichita makes sense to him, even if the monthly meetings appear free form in nature.
Most of the actual coding and web developing gets done between these sessions, with participants communicating via the web.
“There is no shortage of talent within the group,” Wirtz says. “I think the challenges we are facing will be focusing and executing, seeing projects through from the beginning to the end, keeping people motivated and actually developing projects that offer real value instead of kind of revisiting the wheel, or trying to get attention for things that aren’t useful.”
Variables at Play
The Open Wichita project that developed quickest is low-tech, at least by coding standards. The ICT Food Circle (“ICT” is the federal aviation code for Wichita’s Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport) is a website directory of farms, restaurants and other businesses selling locally produced foods, from beef and bison to eggs, honey and sweet corn. The idea is to connect the growing number of consumers interested in local food with the people raising it.
Mikel Bowyer, who manages a Wichita restaurant called Public at the Brickyard, says he presented his idea for ICT Food Circle at Open Wichita’s first meeting and immediately got a positive response from other participants. Today the group has a board of six people, including Bowyer as president (“which means I talk the loudest”); a farmer liaison; and directors of technology, marketing, research and strategic planning.
Because the effort is driven by volunteers who are often giving their time for a personal passion, a different kind of leadership style – a kind Etter and others in the group excel at – is necessary to keep the ball rolling.
Although the group has obtained a database listing hundreds of properties zoned for agriculture in Sedgwick County, the website currently has about 60 listings mostly compiled from personal contacts. The group has talked about plans for another project – an event that would introduce farmers to young consumers in what Bowyer called a “rock star setting.”
Because the effort is driven by volunteers who are often giving their time for a personal passion, a different kind of leadership style – a kind Etter and others in the group excel at – is necessary to keep the ball rolling. Open Wichita is a group where leadership requires skill and personal credibility, and individuals engage effectively with each other. This isn’t a situation where it makes sense for anyone to give a lot of orders or commands.
“Seth communicates so well,” Bowyer says. “He has total dedication to the community, which trickles down. He’s very good at connecting with people and reaching out, and then, as he reaches out, keeping everybody on the same page. He’s very human, too. He shares a willingness to improve the community. You’d never know he has a thousand things going on. When he feels pressure, he reaches out to people.”
This year brings more milestones for Open Wichita. In June, the group will play a key role in a 24-hour Hackathon during Wichita’s Riverfest as part of a National Day of Civic Hacking. Participants will collaborate and then pitch technology-related ideas to a group of judges that includes Wichita Mayor Jeff Longwell. One year after its start, Open Wichita will be open to the public as never before.
So far, Etter is happy with the pace that Open Wichita has made progress. If anything it’s grown more quickly than he expected. But the level of the success that the project attains will depend on a couple of variables at play.
“There are two primary factors and maybe a third that will really shape what all this looks like in the end,” Etter says. “One is the number of technology proficient professionals that we have here in Wichita. It’s going to take some skills. Another is an interest in being civically engaged. Just because they have those skills doesn’t mean they choose to use them. The third factor is that the city stays on board, commits to an open data policy and releases a lot of open data. There are a lot of things that can be done by a rich civic hacking community.”
Getting there, though, will also require hacking of a different sort. Perhaps you could call them leadership hacks — the kind of actions that will inspire people past hurdles and toward a shared goal of using open data to create a better city.
This article was originally published in the Summer 2016 issue of The Journal, a publication of the Kansas Leadership Center. To learn more about KLC, visit http://kansasleadershipcenter.org. For a subscription to the printed edition of The Journal, visit klcjr.nl/amzsubscribe
