Jackson West Interviews Chris Vein At Data.sf Launch

Listen to the interview here.

Jackson West : Asks what DTIS is doing to make information access requests and sunshine requests easier for both the public and for agencies to respond to. For instance, documents are sometimes typed, printed, scanned, then delivered as a binary, closed-format Adobe Acrobat PDF.

CV: "It is not to answer the larger question you're talking about, it really is machine readable data. It is not intended to deal with documents, or emails, or whatever. This really is the raw data required to build an application."

JW: "But how are emails not raw, machine readable data?"

CV: "Those are documents, they're created, and they're a separate classification than the data in a database. So, an email is an email, it's not -- in terms of machine readable -- a very specific definition. When you say machine readable, you don't need to interpret it. You just hook up an iPhone and it reads the dataset and there's no interpretation going on. With email, it's a system, a proprietary system, that creates files and documents, and that is different from what we're talking about today which is pure data, machine readable."

"So all I'm saying is what we're talking about today is different from what you're talking about."

"What you're talking about, quite frankly, is an issue around the sheer size and complexity of the city and county of San Francisco government. All of the different business units, different departments, and each one having their own ways of handling data, and rules and regulations and all that good stuff. So what we are trying to do and what the mayor has tasked me with doing is trying to figure out how I can take all of this disparate organization and people and technology and make sense of it, consolidate it, standardize it, in a way that will make all of us more efficient and effective, in your case from a sunshine perspective.

"So, that's what he's tasked me to do, and I'm doing a lot of review and analysis of all of the different systems in the city and all of the different workflows of the city to try and figure out how we could come up with a more standardized way of doing all of that, that one byproduct would be making it easier for sunshine.

"And I have to tell you it's a big task, it's a herculean task, one that I spend as much time on as I can. But that really is the intent. I chair the committee on information technology, and they're the group, a cross-departmental group, that's there to help come up with the policies for the city. So I report on this project through them and to them. So I guess I would just say check back with me periodically on how I'm doing with that. Certainly David Chiu from the supervisor's office is very concerned with how I'm going to consolidate and standardize.

JW: "Maybe I'm getting a little geeky here, but from a strict perspective, isn't one thing that every department in San Francisco has in common is, actually, the email database?"

CV: "No."

JW: "I mean, the Exchange server or anything?"

CV: "Not everyone has Exchange. I've got more than one email system."

JW: "I'm not a big fan of Exchange, hopefully they have something better by now."

CV: "Well, no, unfortunately we don't. And what happened with the last budget process..."

JW: "Right."

CV: "Money got cut for that."

JW: "I did see that. Yup."

CV: "Yeah... So no, we don't. We've got an aging email system and I'm desperately trying to figure out how to support the aging email system."

JW: "I guess I just ask because Twitter was mentioned very often, and, you know, one of the things that Twitter does is present this vast stream of unstructured data. And, you know, as Google proved to Yahoo and Microsoft, indexing unstructured data beats indexing structured data all the time. I guess that's my argument for sort of saying that email also qualifies as a machine readable format, although maybe on a higher level of development."

CV: "It is. And I think that the only thing I can say is that San Francisco, and you guys know this, is so decentralized. You have to deal with DPW and DT and Mayor's office and the Board and whatever. And what I've been tasked to do is try to figure out how to make that work in a different way, in a more efficient way, and I just, I haven't been able to figure it out yet."