Saskia Thompson

So says Saskia Thompson, who later this month will celebrate one year in her role as the executive director of the newly created City of Philadelphia Office of Property Data.

Her job is to square a dozen or more efforts and uses and agencies that track and rely on city address details — think permits from L&I and billing from utilities. The problem is that through the years, different city departments created their own processes and technologies, so whenever the U.S. Census comes around or the city wants to update its property tax assessments, there is a giant headache.

Oh, and then there is the ongoing issue of how many vacant properties are in the City of Philadelphia.

That will be in the hands of Thompson, a Detroit native (where she started her city government career) and University of Michigan graduate, who is serious and measured in conversations with Technically Philly, contrasting with her relative youth, punctuated by bright blonde hair.

Thompson, 42, who spent the better part of a decade working for Charlotte, N.C.’s city manager, is the steward of a project that she says began in earnest in 2009.

“There was an ad hoc group around the city that got together to say that the flow and the accuracy of property data is not what we’d like it to be,” Thompson said during a December interview in her small office in the Municipal Services Building across the street from City Hall. In 2010, six months after the ad hoc group led some departmental interviews and best practices research, the group gave recommendations to the mayor and managing director.

“The bottom line was that there was no real ownership of property data,” said Thompson, who lives in University City. “A number of agencies create it or use it or both, but we don’t have named data stewards for each property attribute that everyone in the city relies on.”

Thompson sought out a gig with the City of Philadelphia for as much as a year before the right gig opened up, she said, adding that after Detroit and her time in Charlotte, she wanted to work on the bigger stage of a large Northeast corridor metropolis.

She’s gotten her wish.

Housed in the Finance Department, which is also charged with the boondoggle of property tax assessment, Thompson first brought on a small additional staff last October and may do more. To do this right, she says, it will be another year before implementation of a solution begins.

Below, Thompson talks to Technically Philly more about her goals and why she’s not a data geek.

Edited, as always, for length and clarity.

Let’s start by defining what success is for this project.

Success is a couple of things.

It will have named data stewards for each piece of data and a clear process for tracking and maintaining changes. We don’t have that now. We have people working very hard every day to get this right, but it’s pretty much on an ad hoc basis. We need a much more formalized process.

[Secondly,] the ultimate success is that we know our data is trustworthy, transparent, easily accessible and it’s very customer friendly. I am a huge fan that government should be transparent and our data should be public, but we need to be on the forefront of doing that. The reason we’re not is not because we don’t want to share, it’s because we want to make sure what we share is accurate and want to do so in a responsible way.

What is the strategy for bringing together a mess of different processes around city property data?

There are a couple of theories of how you do this, one is the scorched earth theory, where you just take everyone that touches  the data and consolidate that into one department in one and place and we just start over. I’m not saying we wouldn’t do that at some point, but I felt like it wasn’t the place to start.

We don’t have the luxury of starting from zero. Work has to be done every single day. People are using this information. The data, while we know it isn’t perfect, isn’t so bad that services aren’t being delivered.

So I was interested in finding a way to do this while we do our other functions. And I knew we couldn’t get it done to make the property assessment deadline of 2012, so I proposed that we need a very small team to start with to to a deep dive of business process mapping in every department that touches every attribute across the city because we can’t fix this with technology alone.

There will be a technology component but that is going to come later.

This is essentially about how we do the work, who is responsible for which component. Who owns addresses? Who maintains the streets center line? How are changes to all of those data tables transferred and where is the chain of command to make a change and implement a change? All of those things to me may seem like technology is really about how we get the work done.

A year later, where is this effort?

I proposed a really deep dive effort — we’re still a few positions short — and [in December] we started the site visits to those that touch data.

What is the timeline and the ultimate goals we can look for?

The only timeline I’m willing to talk about now is the research and design phase. I’m not sure what implementation is going to look like. People want quick wins for obvious reasons, but we need to see… for example, it is possible we may need legislative changes in order to do this in a different way. We certainly know there are policy changes. And, of course, everything I’m talking about here involves a people component and to do that, it takes time.

So I expect to spend about six months doing the research phase and then a three to six months phase to design our solution.

Now, if we find some low hanging fruit that is more easily fixable, we aren’t going to wait to do that, but I’m not going to set a timeline for implementation until we’ve really done our homework.

And the other thing is I have no idea how much it is going to cost. There will be a technology component, there will be changes to our software, so we need to see the costs. Some of this might get done as we make other upgrades.

For example, we know we have an old mainframe at property assessment that needs a real robust CAMA system. Changes that we’re talking about, we may decide it doesn’t make sense to change other systems as part of another implementation, and that’s just an example.

Just to clarify, you’re saying that a year from now, we’re going to have the research on what is involved and a rough concept of what the solution is going to be.

Yes. And we would have a timeline for implementation.

Does this include the ever-present vacant property conversation?

Definitely related, now there are multiple efforts on vacant property because people are trying to tackle different things. But, yes, this is definitely a part of that.

The real hurdle remains the definition of a vacant property — is it Water Department turn offs or something else.

Yes, and so there is a committee, more than one, and the city is trying to determine its role. The city has a role in managing vacant property, but we’re also not the only player when it’s a property we don’t own. There are multiple efforts that are probably related, but we are not leading them, though we will be part of them.

Then talk a little bit about what data are we specifically talking about.

Think of all the attributes that touch a piece of property.

There’s the address, some cases there are multiple addresses. Our addresses don’t necessarily match Postal Service addresses, and they don’t necessarily need to. We use addresses for different reasons. We need to know where services are delivered, we need to know where it’s located, like street information and block ranges.

Think of all the things that touch property history, ownership, zoning and things like we want to be able to have a history of an address and have all outstanding permits that have been assigned to that address.

Our permit database — and we have one, we know what permits are assigned to an address – - but there’s no way to easily coordinate that, like how 911 routes police and fire or medic to an address. They are coming from completely different data tables.

Consolidation is a touchy subject at the City of Philadelphia, do you see your office owning this data?

I’m not saying that OPD is going to own it. That’s probably not the best way because we’re not the closest to this, what I am saying is that we will be in the centralized coordinating role and setting some standards for how these things are done and making the transition across the board.

Property data is an important type of city information, but certainly not the only one. Do you expect to take over other roles with city data?

I don’t know what this is going to look like in the end state. This is no different than a whole host of efforts in the city that involve business processes so we can optimize our data to have an integrity and translate that across units and the public.

Our focus is on property data. I hope that our process is repeatable for anything else we work on.

Do you at least picture coming out of this finding other dependable data sources that can be shared, outside of property or other ancillary benefits?

One of the things that we don’t have is a consistent process for releasing any kind of data. I’d love to see that done. There’s a more seamless way to get information from the city.

When I say there are other efforts going on, [the city is] trying to completely revamp our web process behind the scenes and our presence to the public, so how data becomes public is a part of many goals that are important.

Do you have a personal interest in data?

I’m not involved in this because of the data. I’m involved in this because I believe in making government as efficient as we can and moving it into at least the 20th century.

This is the third city I’ve worked for, and I like how cities work, I like the operations. There ‘s no other corporation that has as many core services as the city does.

Most corporations have three or four things they are responsible for and that’s it. The city is responsible for hundreds of core functions that if we quit doing, you would hear about it.

And so I come at it from that perspective. I want the city to be more responsive because I think they’re great places to live. Every city has its own culture and its own unique vibe and that’s how I got involved in it.

I’m not a data geek, I’m a city geek. I want to make the city work better.

New City Commissioner Al Schmidt ran on a campaign of reform for the beleagured Board of Elections.

When Al Schmidt first walked into his first elected public office as a new City Commissioner, he said it was like walking into a time machine.

Often criticized for being among the least transparent offices in Philadelphia, the Board of Elections has received an injection of new blood this year, with two new, reform-minded candidates winning seats.

Democrat and former mathematician Stephanie Singer shook the city’s political machine by besting the 36-year entrenched, if damaged, Marge Tartaglione, and then coasting through the general election. Because the city charter mandates one of the three Board of Elections seats be reserved for the minority party, Schmidt was caught in a testy battle with aging incumbent Joe Duda, from a decidedly different Philadelphia Republican Party since his election in 1995.

In the end, Singer and Schmidt, who ran similar campaigns on embracing web transparency and technology innovation for the office, won out, joining incumbent Democrat Anthony Clark.

“In Philadelphia today, the divide is less between the Democrats and Republicans, and more between the machine and the reform candidates,” said Schmidt. “The trouble is that some are good at pretending to be both.”

Not only is the culture of the office one in need of updating, so too is the physical City Hall office space, Schmidt said, noting that it looked “like nothing had changed in decades.”

To be fair, when he first walked into the office on Jan. 3, there were four or five computers there.

“But they never had an internet connection or even word processing software,” said Schmidt, laughing with a degree of incredulity. “They might as well have been poorly performing lamps.”

It shows how much Schmidt and Singer have to do to meet many of their promises.

Another story line exists with Schmidt, who lost a spirited 2009 campaign against City Controller Alan Butkovitz. With a few of the Republican City Council candidates, he represents a divide in the local GOP between an old guard that has focused on a small, if stable, slice of the pie for patronage jobs, and a newer reform movement that hopes to run competitively in citywide elections.

An educated former performance auditor from the federal Government Accountability Office, Schmidt 40, who is married and has two daughters in East Falls, is bright, cheery and prepared. Earlier this month, Pittsburgh-bred Schmidt sat down with Technically Philly to discuss his campaigns and plans for his new office.

As always, edited for length and clarity.

Give us the quick pitch on what your new job is.

The three city commissioners sit on the Board of Elections to decide matters before the election board, from polling place changes to much bigger things. They run the election machinery in the city.

The Board of Elections has roughly 100 full-time civil servant employees and an approximately $10 million budget, with offices in City Hall, at Delaware and Spring Garden and a warehouse in North Philadelphia. So it is an organization and operation that you’re running, and much like agriculture or farming, there is a time when you’re sowing and a time when you’re reaping.

You have two elections every year, a general and primary, whether it is federal or municipal only, so there’s always activity that takes place every year, but sometimes there are different things that occur. There is a voter ID bill being discussed in Harrisburg, that’s something new this year. There is another bill that would change how names appear on the ballot, having them rotate rather than some candidates just getting stuck with a low position. Special elections, we’ll have some of those this year. Those are examples of things that come up that we decide.

There’s no redoing elections. There’s zero room for error. That’s what makes this so critical.

Remind us of what you campaigned on and why you think it worked.

There were a couple of core principles that we ran on that we thought the office could benefit from.

One was greater transparency in terms of voters and people interested in getting involved in civic life in the city and having access to the information to make the most of it, including people who want to run for office, because it shouldn’t just be someone who is connected to some ward office.

Another element was accountability. There were previous Controller audits and other reports, including from Inquirer and the Daily News, that consistently pointed out its lack of accountability for how it spends its money and its responsiveness.

And to improve efficiency. Elections in Philadelphia cost more than any other county in the state, and it’s more than twice the average of any other county. It costs $10 per voter to run an election in Philadelphia and that’s more like $4 or $5 in the rest of the state.

Sure, but large cities present problems in terms of population and access that can drive up cost.

Well,yes, but it’s high in terms of the amount spent per voter when compared to other big cities too, so something is wrong there. But because [previous commissioners] weren’t transparent about how they spent their money, we don’t know what’s wrong until we’ve come into office. So we have a lot of work to do.

We’ve seen the reform movement in citywide offices happen before, perhaps most famously in the 1950s, so why do you think this resonated now?

My background is in political history — I have a Phd in political history — so you have different types of moments and sometimes they catch fire and sometimes they don’t. For example, there are plenty of things in city government to be outraged about every day and every year, like DROP which really captured people’s attentions and has had a significant impact on the results of elections, and other things are at least as abusive in terms of use of taxpayer dollars, but they never catch people’s interest. So you try to raise awareness of what you can, and see what interests.

I’m obsessed with Richardson Dilworth, Clark and that whole phase: they had been losing for 12 years before they were successful in the face of a Republican Party in this city that had once outnumbered Democrats 12 to one. Now, Democrats outnumber Republicans six or seven to one. I’m not suggesting that any change in the city either with our party or in city government will be easy but you’re certainly not going to succeed if you don’t try.

With a reform Republican breaking into a Democrat/Republican machine commission, the Clark-Dilworth comparisons are inevitable, but the difference, of course, is that whenever we have a seen a big watershed change in registration locally, it has at least nearly mirrored something happening nationally.

The Democrats had the wind at their back and the New Deal was going on, so the migration of African-Americans not only to Philadelphia from the South but also from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party…

So that changes a lot, but there are some notable people trying to reshape the GOP locally. Can a change really happen locally without a national trend to push it along?

Well, you just don’t know. I don’t want to overdo the Dilworth thing, but it’s not like when Dilworth is starting out that Dilworth knew there would be a New Deal or that African Americans would defect en masse from the Republican Party.

You just don’t know what’s around the corner. Now, there’s no sense whatsoever that there is going to be a change to the city that would be parallel to the Dilworth-Clark era. This is not going to be a Republican city in the foreseeable future. The Republican Party registrations have been declining for years and plummeting years ago. That has caused strife within the local Republican community.

One last politics question, in terms of being a different breed of local GOP candidate in a heavily Democratic city, do you see your role to make your party affiliation more palatable to more progressive voters in Philadelphia or to make party affiliation less important overall by suggesting it’s an outlier?

At least the way I’ve conceptualized it, we want a Republican reform taking place and Democratic reform taking place in the city. The objective is to improve and reform city government. The objective isn’t partisan. If we do the best job we can do, there will be a partisan benefit to it. But if you look at it through a strictly partisan effort, it won’t work.

Singer is in a different party, and I’m sure there are many things we disagree on, but in terms of city government, there are very few things we disagree on it.

There’s the old saying that there’s no Republican or Democrat way to fix a pothole, well, similarly, elections in Philadelphia are either going to be fair or not be fair, it’s not a Republican thing or a Democratic thing or a Green Party thing. Taxpayer dollars are either spent well or they’re not.

What are you excited about that would interest a technology community?

A lot of the changes are really primitive that still move the agency forward a light year.

Right now, there’s hardly any information available online. Only recently did they put information up on how to register for absentee ballots. Putting up past election results and things like that is primitive stuff but important.

We do look forward to some small innovations like being able to text your address and we can text back the location of a poling place.

When you look at the great work done by the Committee of Seventy, you realize they’ve done it to fill a vacuum left by the city’s commissioners not keeping up with this. Go to Seventy’s website, put in your address and find out where you can vote. It’s not like you have to go to City Hall and look through a big binder to find out where you vote.

They have information on how to run for office, and I think it’s all things the city commissioners should be doing.

What is priority one for you?

There’s one that is immediate and one long term.

The most immediate thing is that we have to propose a budget for our office for city council. There’s very little time. In past, the budget hasn’t been very transparent. We want to do more.

How?

Not just how much you have to spend, but on what.

A budget can be five line items, with $1 million for this and $3 million for that, or you can break that down more. I think City Council deserves that and we should do that.

And what’s the longer term goal?

My background is as a performance auditor. We can find ways to find efficiencies to save money and improve services. I’d like to lead a way to evaluate the entire office. There are many civil servants there who work very hard and know what they’re doing, but I suspect there are ways to further improve services and save money.

I think it’s foolish to just rush in and make changes.

Just because you win an election, doesn’t mean you’re right and know everything about how to improve performance.

So taking a little more deliberate approach to do the changes right is what that performance evaluation will be intended to assist with.

How would you judge success at the end of your term?

One thing we did from the start after election was form a a transition committee and one of their responsibilities was to assemble our commitments during our campaign, so now it’s important to look to those as a touchstone for as much as warranted for delivering on what we promised. Some may be impractical, but I doubt it and believe we’ll be able to follow through.

Two new faces on a three person panel, and Commissioner Clark wasn’t exactly out campaigning, so I doubt you know each other well. Will the three of you go out and get beers?

[laughs] Well, the Sunshine laws prohibit us from discussing business privately, but we can get together to discuss the Eagles but nothing before the commission.

What was the relationship between the commissioners in the past?

Marge Tartaglione made decisions and two other commissioners placed temporary employees, since the board hires a significant number of temporary employees before and during elections.

Is there water cooler talk in your offices?

It’s not like the City Council can go around and talk about issues, it’d be in violation of Sunshine Laws. though that seems difficult, it is in place for a good reason, to ensure transparency. Small matters like internal office needs can happen in executive session, but otherwise, we don’t talk about high-level matters.

….We’re going to do good work, and the voters will be able to know about it.

The University City Science Center will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year, but this month, Stephen Tang [Coverage] is marking his own anniversary: four years since being appointed President and CEO.

“I’m celebrating, but I don’t know if anyone else is,” Tang said, followed by laughter, in a telephone interview last week.

It’s hard to imagine that his staff wouldn’t: the Science Center has an increasing connection to regional and national innovation under Tang’s leadership, and if its programming is as successful as it appears, a closer connection to the regional community that is impacted.

The Science Center has stepped up its game in helping to define University City as a vital technology corridor in Philadelphia. Tang is actively seeking $20 million to fund in perpetuity its QED proof-of-concept incubation model. The rebranded Breadboard program has become a celebrated and energetic arts and sciences intersection that grew out of a once stodgy art gallery space. NextFab Studio, a high-tech prototyping workshop created in partnership with the Center, is now expanding to South Philadelphia. And though it just launched in 2011 and the Center’s Quorum entrepreneur clubhouse has yet to be measured completely, the resources of support are there.

Earlier this month, Tang joined the Innovation Advisory Board — a national advisory committee to the United States Department of Commerce — in releasing a report [PDF] about the economic competitiveness of American innovation.

The board, comprised of 15 well-known innovators like Arthur Levinson, Apple’s new Chairman, and Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs, had a notable local presence. Tang joined Natalia Olsen-Ortecho of Center City-based EG.

For those with an understanding of the issues confronting American innovation competitiveness, the report was certainly not groundbreaking in its overarching research:

• Federal investments in research, education and infrastructure were critical building blocks for American economic competitiveness, business expansion and job creation in the last century;
• Failures to properly invest in, and have comprehensive strategies for, those areas have eroded America’s competitive position; and,
• In a constrained budgetary environment, prioritizing support for these pillars are imperative for America’s economic future and provide a strong return on investment for the U.S. taxpayer.

The outcome of the report now rests in the hands of the Secretary of Commerce, who will put together a plan to confront these challenges. But in an election year, as Tang puts it, that process “is likely to be highly politicized.”

After the jump, we caught up with Tang to hear his thoughts on the report and on the fourth anniversary of his joining the Science Center as President and CEO.

Tell us about the Innovation Advisory Board and the process of putting together the report—

First of all, it’s an honor. If you look at the 14 people other than me, I felt like Vance Worley in a pitching rotation of Cliff Lee, Roy Halladay and Cole Hamels. Arthur Levinson is the Chairman of Apple. I mean c’mon! Irwin Jacobs is a founder of Qualcomm. These are impressive folks to be around. My first inclination was to listen to them. I love the saying: “You’re given one mouth and two ears, use them proportionally.”

Well, you made the starting lineup. Why do you think that was? How did you use it to your advantage?

I was able to fit in that discussion by providing practical views of how innovation is done at the grassroots. I was also able to put a spotlight on the Greater Philadelphia region. I’m in a very fortunate role that I see the world through the eyes of all [of the Science Center's] stakeholders. Certainly entrepreneurs and innovators. Academics and people involved with R&D. People in industry and venture capital. I think that my participation gave a view of how those things fit together and how regional innovation strength plays into the overall map.

Having now seen the full report, what would you have added or changed?

The report is broken into sections: research, education, infrastructure, manufacturing. What was not called out was how those things come together to build strength in innovation and then convert that innovation to companies and jobs. If you think about how to make America more competitive in the global market for innovation then you have to think, ‘why does it matter that the U.S. is strong?’ The next level is what parts of the U.S. matter because they have uncommon strengths in research or education or infrastructure. You get into discussion of regional innovation clusters and strengths. We could have focused on that aspect.

Second, the U.S. is unique in that we’re a melting pot. We share a future and not a past. How do we encourage a constant flow and replenishment of people and thinking? That’s where immigration comes in. It’s a topic that’s very polarized and it’s confused with illegal immigration in the border states. In Philadelphia, there are a tremendous amount of students that come from abroad, many of whom who come to study in STEM fields. If we don’t create an environment where they can stay, they go back and build companies that compete us against. There’s a defensive and offensive reason that policy should be much more accepting of people who are going to create innovation through our education fields.

What are the outcomes of the report? What surprised you?

I want to elaborate what I told the Inquirer: that “the line between policy and politics is very fine.” As part of the advisory board of 15 people, I think the report would have been different if it had been written by those 15 people. There would have been a greater sense of alarm about how far we’ve fallen behind. There would have been much more pointed and detailed discussion about what to do in terms of policy. The reality is that the report is a result of legislation. It was written by the Administration and we accept that. Those of us that live and breathe this understand that there’s got to be more structural changes to make us more competitive with innovation in this world.

Is this report actionable? What are the next steps?

The next step from this report is literally that Secretary of Commerce is charged to create a strategy based on this document on how to address these issues. It’s finding common ground with the issues in order to develop those priorities. The challenge is, we can acknowledge as obvious that this is an election year, so that strategy is likely to be highly politicized. We don’t know who will be President or how much ownership that president will have in this strategy. Unfortunately because of politics, we’re building strategy in innovation in fits and starts.

How does the report impact us on a local level?

I think we are as a region under-appreciated in terms of our innovation capacity. There’s still a view that we’re a blue collar, bare knuckles town. The reality is that our strongest industries are education, health care and life sciences. Yet other regions like San Francisco, San Diego, the Research Triangle, Boston, get more airtime than we do. [Having two representatives from Philadelphia] really created an awareness that Philadelphia wants to be known as an innovation center and deserves to be. It allows us to have other conversations with government, other industry partners and foundation sponsors, to enhance our overall approach to innovation.

You’re celebrating this month your fourth year at the Science Center. How are things different now compared to then?

I’m celebrating, but I don’t know if anyone else is [Laughs].

People tell me this is a tough job because you’re dealing with a lot of folks with different agendas. I knew that coming in to the job. What I’m most satisfied about is that Science Center is viewed as something that attracts people toward our mission of innovation entrepreneurship. That’s largely because we started out wanting to listen to needs. What I’ve tried to do, hopefully for many more years, is first fit in and then stand out. You can’t declare yourself anything in Philadelphia. You can’t impose yourself on the community. 

My most recent experience before the Science Center was a multinational company located in Japan [Olympus]. When you’re part of a subsidiary to foreign-based company, you learn as an executive that you have more influence than control over what’s going on. In Philadelphia, you’re better off trying to persuade people than to force people to do things. At all times, I want to be known that we’re under-promising and over-delivering. At end of the day, if people like us, they’ll gravitate toward us. If not, they’ll go some place else. 

What has changed across the city and region in the last four years?

We’ve survived some tough economic circumstances. I think that as a community you grow stronger through that because you’re forced to do more with less. Great working relationships are forged in those times. Sometimes when you’re in boom times, where there’s no need to work with other folks, you don’t develop that level of cooperation. I hope that we’ll come out of that downturn not just with stronger economic resources, but better relationships and better activity.

What do you hope to do in 2012? Any big changes on the horizon?

We’re beginning the process of raising $20 million to endow QED [proof-of-concept entrepreneur funding program] to make that sustainable in perpetuity. With Quorum, you have more great incubator companies that come through our facilities. We’re also planning our 50th Anniversary for 2013. We’re the third oldest research park in the country.

What’s your background? What got you to the Center?

Because I grew up in the area, and because I knew about the Science Center and knew its mission, I thought it was an intriguing blend of stakeholders that would be great to work with. My entire career has been in for-profit sector with exceptions of early stints in academia. I was leery of the nonprofit community but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the talent and commitment of people at the Science Center. And I’m able to sit at both sides of the table with investors and entrepreneurs. I’m able to bring all of this to the job every day.

Plus, I have a great passion and love for Philadelphia. I want us to do better than we’ve done before. It’s a matter of getting the word out there locally, nationally and internationally that we’re the place to be for innovation.

How’d you end up in Philadelphia?

I was the son of Chinese immigrants who both came to the county for education. I grew up in Wilmington and my first baseball team was the ’64 Phillies. Of course you know what happened to the Phillies that season— they were viewed as the greatest September collapse of all time. I grew to love baseball. I became a good baseball player in high school and college, and my parents encouraged me. You go to places that your parents didn’t go, just as they went to places that their parents didn’t go.

This summer, Langhorne’s Entertainment Games, Inc., a publicly traded company, announced that it had acquired Heyday Games, a social networking-focused gaming company.

Since June, we’ve watched as Entertainment Games has managed to quickly change its focus from the retail sales channel — essentially, getting gaming titles in the big box chains — to social networking focuses made famous by companies like Zynga, known for its FarmVille Facebook title.

This fall, the company launched Retro World, a series of Facebook games that hopes to tap into the increasing demographic of baby boomers landing on the social network. By acquiring rights to media that feature famous stars of the past, like Marilyn Monroe and Dick Clark, the company is hoping to create through Retro World a gaming experience that is a trip of nostalgia for the demographic.

So far, it seems to have been a success. In media alone, the company enjoyed a round of coverage from publications like VentureBeat, Inquirer, NBC10, CBS3, Games.com, Reuters, and The Hollywood Reporter, among others.

In the acquisition, Entertainment Games brought on much of Heyday’s management team, including Gene Mauro, who joined on as the company’s new President and Chief Operating Officer.

Mauro, who works from Connecticut, but bounces between that location and Entertainment Games’ locations in Los Angeles and its headquarters in Philadelphia, has been in the game business for close to two decades.

He says he had history with Entertainment Games as an outside director, a friend of the board since 2005. But because the retail sales channel has been in decline, he says, his task coming onboard to the company was to think about strategy and growth and how Entertainment Games could make an aggressive play in the emerging channels of social gaming and mobile.

Mauro says that adoption of Retro World has been strong, with over 30,000 active monthly users.

After the jump, we caught up with Mauro to hear about the acquisition, its new Facebook title Retro World, and the company’s new direction.

What have you been up to through the years?

In 2004, I founded Myelin Media out of Manhattan with Carl Icahn, a gaming company that worked on PC, console and handheld games. We had good successes. I was really curious and really following trends around social networks. MySpace was doing well and in 2006, I joined a small startup on the West Coast called Bunchball. We created web tools licensed by media companies to make their web sites more sticky, to almost feel like they play like games. In 2006, I ran marketing and business development for GamerDNA Inc., which we sold to Crispy Gamer.

Tell us about Heyday. What was the company’s interest in being acquired?

I also worked on PopTropica, which was engaged in story-driven experiences for kids ages six to 12. I saw that there was an amazing marketing blowing up in the 40+ demographic and thought, ‘if we apply popular game mechanics to an older demographic, how might that come together?’ That was the genesis of Heyday. We spent the first six months working on game designs and rather than fund Heyday with venture capital, we liked that Entertainment Games was a small public company, heavily discounted. We knew that we could launch a public product and create a lot of shareholder value.

Tell us about Retro World—

Retro World seeks to take two-dimensional images from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, and bring them to life in an animated approach that looks a lot like multi-planing, where two dimensional images can move behind each other to create sense of fluidity. We write stories that play like interactive TV episodes.

We’re trying to take on the popularity of social games. Right now we’re playing games that feel like Saturday morning cartoon [like Farmville, others]. Instead, what if we show [boomers] a style that’s designed to appeal to their sense of sophistication or past experiences. We’re trying to weave the fabric of these past decades in a way that rings familiar to the consumer.

How have you measured success since launch?

We’re seeing our monthly active users continue to come up and to the right everyday. We haven’t had a non-growth day yet. Right now, we’re coming up on over 30,000 monthly active users. That’s a number we’re excited about because we havent marketed or advertised at all, and we don’t plan to do that until we get more features and content in the product.

We’re measuring success based on returning daily active users. That’s number one that’s important to us. Our core concentration is making sure that of that population, we have returning users with same level of frequency. We’re adding more episodes and opening “arcades,” where users can go in and play not just point-and-click-games, but also play standalone arcade games.

What is the revenue model?

Our revenue primarily comes through the sale of virtual items. You can earn ‘Retrobucks,’ but if you run out you can use a credit card to purchase more. Virtual items are avatars, functionality within the game, furniture for your room, items to build up your car. That’s the majority of revenue. That’s not unique to us: $3.5 billion in U.S. dollars was generated through the sale of virtual items this year alone and is projected to grow to $5 billion.

We also draw revenue from premium sponsorships and as audience scales up, we’ll monetize through subscriptions.

How many people work for the company and where are they?

We’re now up to around 23 people, and we’re hiring. It requires engineering talent to keep that pipeline. Engineering is coming out of Boston where there is a very strong engineering culture. We’re able to recruit out of schools like MIT and Northeastern. So much of what we do is very specialized in animation and writing. We also have a series of contractors, designers, artists in Los Angeles. Langhorne [where Entertainment Games was founded] is our admin and HR office that keep the machine running.

What’s next for the company?

Social and mobile really is the future. You’re seeing that reflected in sales of console and PC titles: it’s not growing at the rate that social and mobile are. Far more people are playing mobile than ever have been in the traditional PC and console world, who would never have considered themselves gamers.

The economics of the traditional game market doesn’t make as much sense. It’s much more compelling to have direct access to consumer, as opposed to working with a value chain that distances you from consumer. Walmart, Best Buy: this is where market started, but you have to print a disk, get it in the box, work with distribution. There are lots of pieces that erode margin and increase risk.

We still have legacy business. We’re still selling games at Target and Walmart, because they are still throwing off revenues . But my expectation is that numbers will continue to decline and we will continue to transition our focus and attention on growth verticals.

Do you think you’re bringing that social and mobile disruption to Entertainment Games?

I wouldn’t say it’s a function of disruption. We had enough discussion to know who each other was. I know how the business was being run and where opportunities are. It was an optimization adjustment rather than disruption. Helping the company to acknowledge the change and shifts away from retail and more aggressively toward social and mobile.

Jim Querry at center, with the City of Philadelphia Office of Innovation and Technology GIS services group that he leads, including, starting at his right, GIS specialist Sarah Cordivano, GIS manager Brian Ivey, GIS application developer Adam Conner and system and database manager Julia Jia

In 1996, when Jim Querry started at the then called and still evolving Mayor’s Office of Information Services, there was a single Internet connection, an Apple dial-up tool at 1234 Market Street.

“That’s where you met to get on the web,” he said.

Fifteen years ago, Querry, who now leads the city’s geo-spatial information systems group that is responsible for mapping, tracking and evaluating city services, was joining an effort by some in the city to get ahead of what was already being billed as the digital revolution, a chance to bolster transparency and efficiency of government systems.

The Planning Commission, Querry said, led the charge to put the City of Philadelphia in a position to be setting the standard for what municipal use of GIS could yield.

To create the foundation on which the city’s crime analysis evaluations, trash collection routes and 311 complaint locations are determined, early city leaders chose platform tools from Calfornia-based Esri, now the global gold standard for GIS products. After early hesitance, Philadelphia became a leader in publishing its longitude and latitude-based map layers to state clearinghouse PASDA. By 2000, the city had won the prestigious Esri President’s Award, an honor again earned in 2008 — a two-time win that no other organization or level of government has yet duplicated.

Though other big cities have caught up in the GIS space in the last 10 years and the surging open data movement has captured public attention in other ways, Querry says the City of Philadelphia maintains some of the most dependable map layers around.

If accuracy is at the heart of making impact with data, then, Querry might argue, Philadelphia has a lot of reason to be a leader again.

Below, Querry speaks to Technically Philly, flanked by his young, four-person team, about the past, present and future of city GIS.

Edited for length and clarity.

When did the city’s GIS program begin?

GIS started as roughly a departmental effort in the early 1990s. In the mid-1990s moved to the enterprise, the city level. The first big milestone was lifting our very first central server so there was equal access to data.  Before that, everything was done through Unix, and so if you didn’t know what a Unix mount was, you didn’t have access to data.

Putting it all in one place in warehouse and giving everyone access to it in the city was a big step forward, that moved us into the true enterprise into the late 1990s…. Since then, the focus has been creating ways for more people to access this information.

How advanced was the City of Philadelphia?

We were leading the charge in municipal GIS, but everyone was at a different point and people caught up very quickly in the last decade. There was probably a point where we were out front in the late 1990s, but you saw other municipalities investing in GIS and then everyone in the last decade, so quickly most were on a level playing field.

We have done things over the last 10 years that I think set us apart from other municipal organizations, but others have too. Everyone has their own strength.

For Philadelphia to have launched efforts to digitize GIS so early, there must have been a champion. Who was it?

The Planning Commission, specifically Dave Baldinger, who was the deputy planning commissioner at the time, started GIS in the city.

They were the first to put the stake in the ground and say Esri was the platform, that IBM ERX was the hardware platform, that they were going to start creating data layers to share with other departments.

One of those layers was street center line, one was parcels, one was zoning, and then as other agencies such as the Streets Department started to get into the game, they took over what fit their business services.

So, the Streets Department took over the street center line and made it arguably the best street center line there is.

What does that mean to be best?

The data model: how spatially accurate and informationally relevant.

Your team is just four people: who is doing all the department-specific data cleansing and lifting?

City GIS is a federated system. You might call it a hybrid federated system.

The departments are really responsible for keeping up data according to their business practices. And we coordinate a lot of that, make it centrally accessible so departments can touch upon each other. We bring departments together and have done so since the mid-1990s to talk about common issues and coordinate.

What’s an example of something your team runs built?

This group is responsible for a number of things: sharing geo-spatial technology across agencies and customer service and helping customers do their business, like an agency like Streets.

So, for example, there’s this application that has been running for a while, it’s called the Guarantee Pavement Information System [that is run by the Streets Dept., but GIS built]. It’s a classic deconfliction application, that gives utilities and data providers a peek into the Streets Department capital program.

Meaning, part of the Streets capital program is that they repave all the streets every 10 years, so they repave one-tenth of the city’s streets each year. So we want to make sure that if you’re a big utility like water or gas, for your capital upgrade, you don’t show up the day after Streets paves that street, so you want to know about that in advance. We run that program and it has been running for about 10 years, which replaced a meeting of department heads to talk about what everyone is doing.

You said every municipality is good at something. How is the City of Philadelphia GIS team best?

We’re good at operations and public works.

What does that mean?

Pretty much things you can kick.

Wastewater and stormwater [impact models], snow routes, where we’re going to plow, and daily collection of trash. Day to day operational things, and then building the workforce on top of that in a reasonably organized fashion.

GIS application developer Adam Conner: I’d say that we’re also ahead of contemporaries with sharing data with something like OpenDataPhilly.org, rather than doing a stale FTP data dump.

What is keeping Philadelphia from being as much a leader with that data release as it was with GIS in the 1990s?

The issues the city has with data, like property data or anything, really comes from antiquated business practices. There are extenuating circumstances agencies deal with that people don’t realize. That’s not an IT problem, that’s a business re-engineering problem.

The new Office of Property Data job is meant to focus on workflows to find out why data is in the state it’s in.

The real answer is that the data developed in silos, using what technology was available a the time. if you could go back and build everything differently, all the data would be a single database.

How have you reacted to the growing interest in city data in recent years?

I’m not surpirsed by the interest. People have been asking for it for years. In the mid-1990s, it was tough to get the city to relase data, but it was 10 years ago we started posting to PASDA, and around then developed a data distribution policy, allowing for sharing information with educational and nonprofits and contractors with the city, but not commercial entities.

That’s what has been changing, opening up the data entirely. We’re sharing all data that departments are willing to share with anyone.

Still, data is one thing, information is another. If you want to know when your trash is going out, you don’t want to download a file with all of the trash days, you want a tool to get you your answer more easily.

Adam Conner: Using PASDA to post snapshots in time of our data and map layers has been great, but the real-time, the updated data tools make a lot more sense and that’s what people want… We want to do more of that too.

What did you think of OpenDataPhilly when you first heard this private collaboration was building a city data catalog? [Full disclosure: Technically Philly was involved in its early strategy]

It seemed like the next generation of things.

The city would never have the resources to pull off that kind of project. We need to focus on helping the customer agencies to do their business services. We need tools that have reasonable performance and are dependable and the data behind it all can be opened up and benefit the city in ways we can’t even imagine right now.

What has had a bigger impact: city mayoral administration changes or technology changes?

During the Rendell administration, the technology was very different obviously than today, and the Street administration was the transition from where we were to where we are now.

..During the Rendell administration, technology was limited to very few users and the drivers were the big business programs in the departments, like the stormwater cost allocation program that was the genesis for the first aerial imaging and plyometric mapping in the city. In the mid 1990s that was new and innovative and now it’s  just common place and expected.

Through the Street administration, it was about getting technology out of the backroom to make it more open and apparent to people, to unify land records databases from a technology standpoint.

Now, the Nutter administration is focused on the business processes, and the technology is almost taken for granted. Really, [Chief Innovation Officer Adel Ebeid's] big charge here is to bring this back around to a fashion that is sustainable and really and push for the funding to do that. We’ve been in a state of deferred maintenance for years. That’s not the sexy stuff, they just want access to it, the running the railroad, as they say.

….Mostly, it’s the technology changes [that move us]. The administrations may change focus, but the access to data, there is still a city charter to pick up trash and find where the bad guys are, so the technology has shifted more than anything.

The new ML-1 MegaTouch machines

AMI Entertainment Creative Director A.J. Russo

AMI Entertainment creative director A.J. Russo says he knows the secret to always winning at Photo Hunt.

“The best people cross their eyes and the two photos come together and it makes the differences pop,” he says. “I can’t do it, but I’ve seen people do it at our trade shows and they just go round after round.”

Perched on bars everywhere, the ubiquitous Megatouch touch screen game system has been entertaining pub-goers for over a decade, yet few know of the company’s Philadelphia origins. Best known for the aforementioned Photo Hunt game that has players scrambling to find all of the differences in two photos before the time expires, AMI Entertainment is based in Bristol and often uses Philadelphia as a guenea pig for its latest games and market research.

The company is working on its latest product line: a brand new machine that is best described as a combination of Megatouch and Xbox Live-like features, adding scoreboards, an in-game currency and social features. And with the company’s latest push on iOS, players are now able to practice at home with its free Photo Hunt iPad game.

“Before you go to the bar you can have a drink at home and play a little Megatouch and then go show off in front of your date,” says Russo.

We chatted with Russo, an AMI employee since 1999, about the next generation of touch screen games, how Philadelphia impacts its newest games and the time he helped a customer propose using one of his company’s games.

As always, edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about the new machines.

Our new ML-1 22-inch touch screens are multitouch and basically Megatouch reinvented. Everything is wide screen and high-definition and done in this brand new 3D engine and they are all connected to one another, so we can release things like the Megatouch battle arena which takes classic Megatouch games and makes them a best of three or best of five compititon. You can then post the scores to Facebook and buy weapons and upgrades for your games.

A lot of people don’t know about that Megatouch is from the Philly area. What’s the history?

It’s in Bristol, and before that it was in Bensalem. The gaming component has always been located here, which is kinda cool because whenever we release new games we do all of our beta testing here. We go out to all of the bars in Philly and restaurants in Philly and we’ll go and interview people. Even without them knowing, Philadelphia’s customers have a big influence on the games that ultimately get released.

The company (then named Merit Industries) was founded by Pete Feuer out of his garage 35 years ago, he was making everything from poker to trivia games. It was always his idea to put the games on bars, but back then it was just a screen with buttons underneath it. Every now and then you’ll actually run into these old machines. However, we’ve been exlucsively touch screen for around 17 years now. Before the iPhone was a glimmer in Steve Jobs’ eye, we were in the touch screen industry.

So, how good are you at Photo Hunt? Do you just go to bars and destroy your friends?

[laughs] No. There’s actually a trick to Photo Hunt. Remember those blobby pictures form years ago that had an image appear after you crossed your eyes? The best people can cross their eyes and the two photos come together and it makes the differences pop. There are people that can do this. We’ve been at trade shows and people just go round to round.

We were browsing around on YouTube and we saw that one gamer proposed to his girlfriend through Megatouch [video above]. What was that like?

This is actually an awesome story. This was two years ago and we got a call from a guy who had said “We play Word Dojo all the time. Is there anything you can do to help me propose to my girlfriend through the game?”

We were in the middle of a crazy development rush, but this was so cool we tried to figure it out. The guy arranged for this bar in D.C. to be open when it wouldn’t normally be open, the owner even had to bring in fake customers. We modified the software on one of our machines so as soon as you started up Word Dojo and you hit “T” and the software would know it was this guy and it would load the proposal.

We modified the winner animation so it would then come up marriage proposal on the screen and then we had a guy from our staff drive the machine from Philly to D.C.

What was crazy is that a day away from it happening, my wife went into labor and she wasn’t due for a couple of weeks. I had to make all of these crazy calls and explain to people the whole process. I was worried that this guy was depending on me and I was going to be unable to come through, but we did.

Comcast Ventures was thinking about content long before its parent company acquired NBC Universal. The venture capital arm of the cable giant counts Flipboard, About.com, SB Nation (now Vox Media) and BlogHer among its dozen of investments. Now with NBC in tow, Comcast Ventures has a powerful channel for helping its portfolio companies.

“We have access with all of these resources to help entrepreneurs and tell them how the market is going to evolve and give them heads up on what’s next for Comcast,” says Toth.

Like its parent company, Comcast Ventures has offices in The 67th Ward, Silicon Valley and San Francisco along with its presence on the 55th floor of the Comcast Center in Center City.

After being locally active during the first tech bubble over ten years ago, the firm (which is, as Business Insider pointed out, run by a woman) is dipping into Philadelphia once again funding five DreamIt Ventures companies through the Minority Entrepreneur Accelerator Program and was one of the investors in Invite Media, the ad platform that exited to Google in June 2010.

We spoke to Managing Partner Louis Toth shortly after the firm closed a $6.1 million investment in Catalog Spree in November. After the jump, read why Comcast bothers investing when it could acquire, how his firm views Philadelphia and why it invests in the turbulent media industry.

As always, edited for length and clarity.

How is being a “strategic firm” that’s part of a large company different than your average venture capital firm?

First off, it’s a lot of fun, being at a place like Comcast and NBC. It’s a tremendous platform that enables us to really be educated in a more in-depth way than a traditional venture investment firm that would be looking at a bunch of different areas. Here we focus on a few key areas around communications and payment technology. But we are infused with that knowledge by Comcast and the areas that we are in.

We have access with all of these resources to help entrepreneurs and tell them how the market is going to evolve and give them heads up on what’s next for Comcast. We can make things happen through our network and test products in our labs. We even have one company who is creating a products and an NBC show around that product.

Comcast is obviously a national company, but does the firm have any special connection with Philadelphia?

We did a fair amount in the first tech bubble in the Philadelphia area. We were investors in Half.com and ICG. There were lots of tech companies that were starting in this area. Tech declined afterward, especially here in Philly. Over a space of ten years we didn’t make any investments in Philly but that’s changed. We have made a couple new investments in this area: Invite Media and Packlate. We are active but we could certainly do more. That’s an initiative we’d like to put more effort in 2012.

We always wondered: why invest in companies? Doesn’t Comcast have the money to just acquire them?

It’s really not about locking up technology or getting talent on the cheap. We are really focused on building significant companies. We know there’s a whole wide world out there of other companies, customers and service providers. Comcast should get the first look at the technologies. I think we’ve only acquired two out of the 120-some companies.

Can you elaborate?

Say we invested in two companies that were able to develop a new type of video on demand system, and these companies had a better way of doing it. Comcast doesn’t need to own that. You don’t need to own the construction company that builds your house. We just want access to the best.

You guys invest in the media industry, a vertical that typically doesn’t scale as well as, say, enterprise tech. Why the focus on media?

The internet is a fantastic tool lowering the cost of content creation. When you have a community with SB Nation or BlogHer, the content is created by the community.  So we think that’s a powerful part of the business model. If you can distribute it, then it will be a whole lot of less expensive so it’s a viable venture investment.

People automatically assume that we need a tight strategic investment for everything that we do. We can certainly link each company to NBC Universal and Comcast but not everyone is going to know what the next thing is out there.

Sort of like hedging your bets?

I don’t think any large company can possibly claim they have a lock on innovation, so everyone is figuring out how to tap into great innovation centers. We’re one other mechanism to do that.

Womack in 2007.

Updated, Dec. 13, 2011, 12:41: Changed company named from NanoTec to NanoVec; corrected Dr. Nunery’s name.

When Dr. Chad Womack moved his nanobiomolecular startup company NanoVec to Philadelphia in 2006, he was working from an office located in front of University City High School.

Though he was born and raised in Philadelphia, he didn’t know the history of the school. Long drawn to education, he began wondering how the school was impacted by science, technology, education and mathematics (STEM) initiatives.

That was how he came to chair a School District of Philadelphia task force run by then Superintendent Thomas Brady to help shape a vision for boosting STEM opportunities.

“The school district was not prepared to address STEM as an initiative that would provide an opportunity for students to have a pathway into college, majoring in STEM, and then into careers,” Womack says.

It wasn’t the first time that he has been involved in the issue.

In 1999, Womack followed a health fellowship at Harvard researching HIV/AIDs to a research position at the National Institutes of Health in Washington D.C. His interest in STEM led him to D.C. Public Schools, where a year later, Arlene Ackerman would resign as Superintendent.

So it was that Ackerman’s departure from the School District of Philadelphia this summer was familiar to him. He was actively working to encourage STEM initiatives in the District, when he wasn’t working with The America21 project.

“Ackerman didn’t want to be bothered with it, but this is very typical of leadership in public education. To them, STEM is this special thing for whiz kids,” he says.

Womack’s The America21 Project is focused on empowering urban centers and communities through STEM education and workforce development, high-growth entrepreneurship and access to capital. With his new venture, he’s still actively engaging the District around STEM priorities.

After the jump, we caught up with Womack about the state of STEM education in Philadelphia.

Womack

We’re following reports that less than one percent of the District’s black students graduate college with a STEM-related degree. Given your vantage point, what does that make you think?

At a level where it’s left to a percentage point, you have to accept the null hypthesis. You have to round to zero. It means the School District of Philadelphia doesn’t make a difference in terms of their ability for post-secondary success. In essence, it means you have large swaths of the city that don’t have a bridge for their children into the 21st century.

How do you actionably begin improving these statistics?

One metric of success would be that we need a ten-fold increase. Let’s get that number to 10 percent in next five to 10 years. If Philadelphia is going to transform its economy, we need to ask: ‘What is the place-based value of growing up in the city viewed through the lens of tech-based local development? What is the likelihood of a kid growing up in West Philadelphia, in terms of employment in the technology industry?’

You were involved with a STEM task force at the District under former Superintendent Thomas Brady. Tell us about that.

One of the things that fell out of that was that the School District was not prepared to address STEM as an initiative that would provide an opportunity for students to have a pathway into college majoring in STEM, and then into careers. It wasn’t just a probem with content knowledge, but also skills that are STEM-related that would prepare them for work, like problem-solving, thinking creatively.

And you say that for former Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, STEM wasn’t a priority?

She didn’t want to be bothered with it. This is very typical of leadership in public education. It’s this special thing for the whiz kids. They see it as this initiative for the Mastermans and Centrals of the world. It speaks to the mindset of public education and it’s role in preparing kids for the future. Industry has actually been a leader and driver in STEM education and workforce development. They require the talent being produced, so they’ve been saying, ‘you guys need to do a better job because we need highly-skilled workforce.’ This is really about local and national competitiveness on a global scale.

And what are your expectations of new Acting Superintendent Leroy Nunery?

In Dr. Nunery, we have someone who does understand STEM. But he’s left with this $600 million hole in his budget. The question becomes ‘where do we get capital to drive STEM initiatives?’

What has to change to address that problem?

People have approached the District because of what they can get out of the relationship, instead of what they can contribute. They should say: ‘what can I do to help build capacity in the District?’

City Controller Alan Butkovitz and his office are good at finding the lede.

The elected official charged with auditing city government and council spending continues to make news by highlighting the most egregious examples of waste, fraud and mismanagement.

Like yesterday’s announcement that half a billion dollars of taxpayer money is being managed by outdated, unsupported technology from 1996 in the city’s procurement department. Or an October audit that showed, among  other shortcomings in the city’s often criticized Sheriff’s office, that its less-than-stellar website had apparently cost $2.9 million over five years. (Yesterday, a sheriff’s employee was charged with a scam that bilked the city out of $400,000, ahead of state Rep. Jewell Williams taking office in January.)

In his second term since first being elected to the position in 2005 following a 15 year tenure in the state House of Representatives, Butkovitz, 59, seems to enjoy the gig. He is serious and detailed, eager to discuss the 400-page audit report on the Sheriff’s office one recent November afternoon, with a tuft of his gray hair falling toward his cheek in a sunny corner office of the Municipal Services Building in Center City.

Butkovitz, a resident of Castor Gardens in the Northeast,, has not been without his critics. In his 2009 Controller campaign against a younger, more progressive tax advocate, Brett Mandel portrayed Butkovitz as a machine politician who focused less on auditing each city agency as the City Home Rule Charter [PDF] requires and more on bigger, headline-grabbing and politically-strategic investigations.

Still, with increasing frequency, Butkovitz’s claims of waste, fraud and mismanagement at the city level involve technology: IT infrastructure, agency software and the shortcomings of it all.

Below, Technically Philly talks tech, taxes and hackathons with the West Philly native and graduate of Overbrook High School and Temple University.

Edited for length and clarity.

Why is technology so frequently a subject of your recent reports?

There are always failures to reach agency goals because computer systems are inadequate. And they require multimillion dollar upgrades and the people are not able to be adaptive to it. Technology is a solution and so when it’s so behind, it causes problems everywhere. In the Sheriff’s Office case, it’s always an excuse for why the city doesn’t know what’s going on.

Nearly every municipality talks about being behind on technology. Are your expectations realistic for city IT?

I think a more major problem is that city personnel are not in a position to implement new technologies even when they are brought in.

Why not?

On the whole, city personnel are not familiar wtih these systems, and they want to do the way they’ve always done things. …We had that problem with 311, which is in part an issue that city goals were greater than capacity. The investment in the hardware and software is not made what is made in other cities and not enough to reach those goals set.

The city’s had a major deferred maintance problems for decades. So you see it in the Parks and Rec facilities with, you know, an injurious piece of metal sticking out and, yes, you see it with technology, in that they’re always just patching.

But is that just a reality of under-funded city budgets? Can the expectations be met?

Sure, PGW has done fine with goals [for IT]. If there’s leadership and mid-level management committed to changes, they get it done.

It bumps up against other priorites, like no tax increases, bad economy, no cuts in fire houses, no cuts in  libraries, and [technology] becomes one of those easy places to cut.

We also had this problem with rescue squad dispatch. …We wanted them to implement tele-nursing and other triage methods — by the fire department’s own admission, half of their calls are not emergencies. Because that can mean people that are in mortal danger are not getting service and someone with a minor ailment is, all sorts of procedures to improve priority should be implemented. [The city is] finally installing GPS devices in rescue squads because they go from one end of the city to the other, so it’s a good idea to not get lost — they’re not like police districts. The other thing is the need for ID software like police to find the origin of a cell phone call.

There is a company in Princeton [MONOC] we visited that have much more ability than that. They can, for example, identify nuisance calls: they do a check of chronic callers on certain days and times and can do diversion methods for those. There are things out there to show what is possible to do. And here, there’s a system that is decades behind that. — And the software behind the Princeton company is just $1 million. It’s not an expensive package.

What is the best example on return of investment for technology upgrades at the city?

We have an enormous unpaid tax, unpaid bill problem. And the technology the city has doesn’t allow them to track down delinquents when people move, for example. This is a city that has about $400 million in accounts receivable and taxes, unpaid bills of all kinds. We’ve done reports that when L&I does a demolition for imminently dangerous building, they don’t send bills out [to those building owners].

You don’t need to get to internal efficiencies [for ROI], there are standard accounts receivables that are owed to the city as a business that are just water down the drain because of the inadequacy of the technology of the city.

What’s the most egregious example of city waste because of technology?

Those accounts receiveable.

Why? What’s step one to improve that. Technology or workforce?

It’s technology and then updating workforce.

You know, [Illinois Sen.Everett] Dirksen in the 1960s used to say that if you take a billion here and billion there, soon it adds up to real money. So first of all, a half a billion dollars in accounts receiveable is real money. So it would be worth fixing, if it was just recovering the money, but it also has this impact of…. if no one is paying your bill [to the city], if you’re not doing a good job of collecting from this person, why should I care? So it perpetuates itself.

You just released a big report on waste in the sheriff’s office. What’s an example?

They charged for maintaining a website for five years $2.9 million years [laughs]… And it’s not very good.

So what’s the conspiracy? Was it a lack of understanding or real fraud?

It was organized as an insider operations so it’s highly suspect.

The private vendor happened to be the best friend and campaign manager [of criticized and embattled outgoing Sheriff John D. Green, who Butkovitz had said 'disgraced' the office]. So there was no internal control, no system to control them. Anything that came through got paid. They had free reign. Any bill that came in would get paid. We never found a contract that authorized any payment for websites. So they charged $2.9 million over a time for something that market rates could have kept to thousands of dollars.

They then turned around and they were advertising that if you wanted to bid on a sheriff’s auction, you had to send them $75 and they’d do it, rather than having anything online. They were getting paid from both ends. In a very sophisticated way, the Sheriff’s office was using their computer system to make outrageous profit.

And then they turned around and said ‘The reason we can’t figure out where $50 million belongs is because there’s a lousy computer system.” [laughs]

The sheriff’s internal computer system was so outdated, they couldn’t keep track of the money coming in from sheriff’s sales. If this was posted as a contract opportunity, in an era where technology costs are always lowering, is there some company somewhere in the world that could actually track where the money went? …I think so.

How did you first find these high costs?

The red flag that initially drew us into this was that the majority of accounting changes [in the Sheriff's office system] were cash adjustments, and it turns out the explanation for that was that the routine fees, repetitive fees they had to pay [for normal services] could not be accommodated in their system [audit p. 52]. Those were standaed fees that needed to be paid, but their outdated system couldn’t handle that, so they had to make adjustments for something that was so basic, it needed to be built into the system.

…That started [the deeper audit].

So there was a conspiracy?

There’s no indicating that anyone from the sheriff’s office was going to be rigorous with this vendor [for the website build]. [laughs] …That’s as far as I should go.

The Sheriff’s office is a great example of the potential for open data. The tech community in Philadelphia has a lot of developers who are interested in hobby projects that make a civic difference. They want city data to make government more transparency and efficient. Have you pushed for more of that?

It sounds like a great idea, and it’s the first I’m hearing of it.

You should come to a hackathon. We’re co-sponsoring one this weekend.

I’d like that… We have done things like we had a $500 cash prize that only went for few months [asking for suggestions from city employees about improving government efficiency in January 2007 and other times].

I also think of [newly elected incoming City Commissioner] Stephanie Singer and her [Election data] project, built something that can allow people to track real time information, district by district. So in the Taubenberg/David Oh [City Council] race, you were able to see that even when on Election night, Taubenberger was winning, you would be able to see that many precincts in [Councilwoman] Marian Tasco‘s area hadn’t reported, which were supposed to go to Oh. So it can help with fighting voter fraud, it’s not just idle curiosity.

With new blood in City Commissioner roles running Elections by way of Singer and Al Schmidt, who ran against you for City Controller in 2009, do you expect improved transparency, as they’ve promised?

Well, they could certainly accomplish a lot, but the problem has never been a lack of high hopes in Philadelphia. There have been a lot of high hopes in recent years. It’s more a question of implementation. I will give Stephanie credit because she built her own website years ago when the city said it couldn’t be done, so she deserves credit for implementation. …In Philadelphia, it can be harder to make good on high hopes [than in other places.]

Will Daniel had two babies in 1977.

One was launching Wilco Electronic Systems, the now Fort Washington-based, black-owned cable operator that focuses on serving low income Philadelphians. The other, of course, was his daughter Brigitte Daniel.

Though Will remains president and chairman of the company, it’s been Brigitte, 34, officially the company’s executive vice president, who has taken up much of the company’s vision and regulatory affairs — heavy lifting in the regulation-crazed cable industry. Recently named to an FCC committee on digital diversity, Daniel is hungrily taking on the digital divide and couching that as a fundamental of the company’s future.

Since 2001, Wilco, which employs about 45 people, has been the primary cable and internet provider for Philadelphia Housing Authority projects, while it continues to offer mainstream offerings at more affordable costs for low income Philadelphians in other ways. Brigitte was one of the driving forces in bringing together the Freedom Rings partnership that won federal broadband stimulus funding to trial ways at increasing broadband access and awareness in poorer communities.

“Wilco helped frame the conversation,” Brigitte said. “The city put together the [new computer] centers, we did the infrastructure. It was important to have the partnership. It isn’t easy to get everyone to play together in the sandbox.”

Brigitte seems the perfect heir for her father’s business, perhaps even more so when she mentions she hadn’t planned on ever joining the company while growing up in Abington. An alumnus of Spellman College and Georgetown’s law school, she found herself gravitating to the impact telecom has on communities while in school. After graduating from Georgetown in 2002, she did policy work for USAID in Ghana, West Africa, where mobile technology conversations were already stirring. She was hooked.

Now living in Fairmount, Brigitte is currently on leave from her role in the day-to-day management of Wilco, as she serves in the prestigious Eisenhower Fellowship program. Traveling to learn about how the digital divide is being handled in south Asia, Daniel landed in New Delhi in late October, traveled elsewhere in India, including Hyderabad, then Sri Lanka, Singapore and will move on to Malaysia before returning in mid December. (See her blog on her travels here.)

In a phone call from Mumbai earlier this month, Daniel talked to Technically Philly about Wilco’s relationship with Comcast, what’s the future of Freedom Rings and more.

Edited for length and clarity.

Tell us about Wilco.

We’re a really unique company. We’re one of the last African-American owned cable operators in the country. Many were bought and merged through the years, with all the consolidation in cable and telecom and security systems for the last 34 years. My father started the company in 1977, the same year I was born, so my father had two babies that year. We focus on buildings with multiple units, since we’re a PCO [private cable operator], not a MSO [multiple system operator] like Comcast.

Because there aren’t as many restrictions on us as a company like Comcast, we can customize offerings that are very focused, since we’re private, we can provide services at varying prices, so that’s why we’ve focused on affordability and low income communities. We got into [the Philadelphia Housing Authority] in 2001 as the primary service provider, though we have been there since the 1980s. We were there when it wasn’t trendy to talk about access because they were our communities.

Wilco has developed a niche around broadband access issues. Was there an interest before internet service was a part of what Wilco offered?

Technology changes every year, we were always for our poorer communities.

TV for a low income person serves as entertainment and babysitter. It means more than it does for someone else. That gets criticized sometimes but with fewer options, technology — and TV for much of our company’s history fit in that category — is a chance at impact and cost cutting. We’ve always meant to have a social service aspect to what we do. We’ve always focused on offering the most to those who have the least.

We can’t do what we can do if our people can’t benefit from what we offer. We didn’t do it because we got a merger, we do it because we want to do it and always have done it.

We’re in between technology upgrades ourselves, but where in a unique place as an industry and it’s exciting to be here.

We sense there’s some criticism of Comcast, noting that its low-cost broadband package Internet Essentials rolled out as part of its FCC deal to approve the NBC acquisition.

No, we’ve partnered with Comcast for a relatively long time. My father knew [Comcast co-founder] Ralph Roberts from 10 to 15 years ago. They were smaller, the whole industry was smaller, and all the owners knew each other. Ralph and my father have been friends for years. We buy programming for them, and we resell that programming at an affordable cost. They’re federally regulated so they can’t price differentiate. PHA residents are getting mainstream programming but they are getting it more affordably from Wilco.

Comcast [Internet] Essentials is awesome, it’s a great step to getting more people online. At least it sets the bar for what market providers should be doing, even if the FCC is approving it, the mandate or encouragement is making it clear that our country needs to be connected. The speed is going to be issue, the issue will always be bandwidth. The low income groups, they’re going to adopt to the technology and love it, and they’ll connect with people, but they want to connect with things like Skype and Youtube first, to catch up with everyone else, and those services take up bandwidth, so with more people using that capacity, I think it’ll be hard for the Essentials program to keep up. The speed is just an entry level, just a start.

So what’s the next step?

What we’re trying to do and what we proposed in the broadband stimulus grants was to provide high speed access, to layer on applications around health and jobs skill training and software and development. To have impact like that, you’re going to need more than what is being offered by the Comcast Essentials program.

Those days will come and we’ll find ways to get the speeds up. For a national platform, it’s a great way to get underserved people online. What we’ll almost immediately see, well, it won’t be a digital divide gap, it’ll be a bandwidth gap, between those who have it and those who don’t. I applaud Comcast and Cox and Time Warner and the FCC for making it a priority because before it wasn’t.

My biggest recommendation for the FCC is that this is great and kudos for making it a national program, but they have to be sure to not ignore the services that have been providing these services for low income people for years. If not, we’ll see minority-owned companies getting pushed out of the way. We need the encouragement of partnership, and that should come as we ask ‘how do you measure success of a program like Comcast Essentials?’ What is success? I don’t think that has been determined yet.

You’re currently traveling abroad as an Eisenhower fellow. Tell us about it.

Yes, so I’m a 2011 Eisenhower fellow, and the fellowship, which has been around since 1953 and is based in Center City, sends emerging leaders from this country abroad to find ways to collaborate and create dialogue about what you’re doing to find and share best practices.

So for us at Wilco, it’s technology. We’re spreading our wings globally: how often does a small cable operator get the chance to do that? You get to go wherever you want to go, and so we’re in India and southeast Asia because technology and innovation are skyrocketing here, particularly mobile and wireless infrastructure. The innovation is skyrocketing, the population is young and interested. We support low income communities and that’s the exact challenge that’s being dealt with here.

In many of our conversations here, we see a focus on new mobile deployment to reach across rural poor communities through fiber and wireless. That’s what we want to learn about because the problem with Freedom Rings [here in Philadelphia] is the infrastructure didn’t get funded [by broadband stimulus], so a lot of [Philadelphia Housing Authority] housing doesn’t have internet connectivity.

Everyone is going through the same issues, a low income population has needs for access for opportunity to learn and grow like the rest of a population. You look at the scale — India has 1.5 billion people, Philly is 1,5 million — and everyone is seeing that without access, you’re not a participant in government.

It’s a whirlwind fact finding mission so we can learn and provide the best access to low income Philadelphians. We have to implement what we’ve learned, so we’ll look at what systems could be used and partner with the city to make change.

I’m proud to say that I’m one of the first U.S. fellows to be focusing on technology from a service provider role. We are on the front lines of providing service to low income Philadelphians, and so we can use what others are doing abroad. And what helps is that once you’re in the fellowship, you’re always in, no matter where you travel, you have a network. Really, I’ve learned more about American technology companies here than in the United States because you can get a meeting wherever you travel.

We’re bringing the best ideas back to Philadelphia.

You also have one of those fancy federal appointments: being named to the FCC’s re-charted Federal Advisory Committee on Diversity in the Digital Age. What does that mean?

It’s about recommending policy for diversity for training and broadband and lowering barriers, ensuring universal access and adoption. It’s policy action, and recommending steps to the commissioners.

I think started with Michael Powell, when he was chairman, and while some of his policies were conservative, this group is very progressive. The point was that content was diverse and so diversity in providers mattered. When [new Chairman Julius] Genachowski came on, the role has become really focused on broadband, making sure it’s available and affordable for everyone, and providers are partnering with the governments for it. Genachowski’s legacy is trying to bring access to as many Americans as we can, particularly the underserved. That gap is widening and widening.

They’ve had a lot of the same big players, but there is some new perspective. They wanted someone to come to the committee with on-the-ground, in-the-trenches experience who can also speak FCC language. It’s a new cache for the company but also a chance to get in on these big conversations.

OK, explain something: in the cable industry, why can the small players like Wilco have a lower price point than a company at the type of scale of a Comcast?

Yes, so we’re a private cable operator. We have less regulation, less federal regulation, so we can sell something at a variable price that we determine that covers our costs.

We can only provide to specific communities, so it forces us to have a niche. Smaller cable operators have to focus on vary narrow communities that the big players aren’t hitting. We don’t just provide to PHA residents, but also to commercial business. We partner with other entities, not just providers but educational organizations. Our niche, as I said, is that we sell affordable.

Of course, there aren’t a lot of Wilcos because it’s very capital intensive. Customer acquisition takes time and relationships.

Why can’t Comcast just charge less? And if you are cheaper but providing similar service, why can’t anyone become a Wilco customer?

[laughs] Everything is regulated by the FCC and everything has a territory.

In Philadelphia, Comcast is the incumbent service provider. So you have to apply for a franchise from a municipality, to get council approval, to be the incumbent, to be able to offer service [using the city's broadband infrastructure] As a PCO, we do not have to do that. But because it’s by territory, we can’t provide everywhere. Well, at least today, broadband is not regulated in the same way, but cable is. So in your average single-family home, only cable operators that have a city franchise can offer service. [Satellite providers are a separate option altogether.]

So why does Wilco provide service where it does?

Our big client is PHA. We provide to those homes because in 2001 the agency put out an RFP to get a contract to provide those services. Before 2001, there were various partners private and small offering services, and we were one of them. We can’t go into a residential home because we can’t cross what are called ‘public rights of way.’ MSOs [like Comcast] pay a lot of money for a franchise, but they get to wire an entire city and get all those customers.

Wilco can only provide to private communties, in a building or in an enclosed campus, so PHA fits, or places like condos, multiple dwelling units. So as a small cable operator, you find your niche, what existing communities you can add value for. You pitch those communities and get a contract.

To close out, because Wilco and yourself particularly were involved in bringing together Freedom Rings, what’s the latest there?

As part of the fellowship, I’m learning lessons there too. We have to make sure that Freedom Rings is sustainable, after the funding is gone and the training is gone, we need to find new, affordable ways of doing what we do, improving access and awareness. We can’t exclusively depend on grants. We need to find new ways. Mobile phone development is a big part of being sustainable, as every phone will soon have browser capabilities and we can find cheaper solutions of training and making low income Philadelphians aware of what is out there. That’s the next big hurdle.

It’s still a good partnership, which is good, because it’s going to take a village to make sure this program will continue to be a success into the future.