A screenshot of a draft of the License to Inspect tool, built by Azavea for PlanPhilly using the new L&I app. Click to enlarge.

If the deadlines of today are worth more than the deadlines of the past, the City of Philadelphia is due to release before the end of the year the first, most comprehensive agency data API framework in its history. It will power an online tool billed as a giant leap forward in city transparency.

Nearly two years in the making, an online application that allows unheard of data access to the city’s Licenses and Inspections Department — with as much as a year of deep digitized and categorized records to start — will be unveiled by built environment news site PlanPhilly, having been developed by GIS specialty shop Azavea with support from the city’s newly renamed Office of Innovation and Technology and with funding from the William Penn Foundation.

If fast tracked, the project, dubbed ‘License to Inspect,’ could be a signature good government initiative in Mayor Nutter’s reelection bid come November.

More likely, it will land around the new year and the process for the data release — sharing an in-house API to be built upon by a third party — could likely serve as a landmark example for municipal government transparency, a thoughtful, progressive move from a city government trying to raise its standing in the technology community. The trouble, of course, say numerous sources close to the matter, is how long and how much trouble the project took — and what will happen to the API once the app goes live.

Will the L&I data release be a treasure trove of lessons learned to continue the march toward all-agency buy in around data or will it be characterized as enough of a boondoggle as to keep other city department heads wary of the headache?

THE L&I DATA STAKEHOLDERS

PlanPhilly founding Managing Editor Matt Golas

In December 2009, Matt Golas was frustrated.

Golas, a former Inquirer New Jersey editor who helped launch PlanPhilly in fall 2006, said he felt the L&I website was woefully behind in sharing information that would make it more transparent and efficient in an online world. He and Harris Steinberg, the founding executive director of the civic engagement project PennPraxis, which houses PlanPhilly, began developing plans to do something about it.

“When there was something online about development, it was spread across different little websites, like the zoning board and city records and L&I and it was all in PDFs, showing no trends, no chronology, no followup,” Golas said. “It was the pits.”

Golas and Steinberg, joined by project partner Michael Greenle, had a meeting with then William Penn Foundation President Feather Houstoun and the communities grant team that had funded PlanPhilly and PennPraxis on other projects. The team brought in Robert Cheetham, the founder of Azavea, the oft-cited, civic-minded GIS shop (then under a different name).

“Is there any solution?” asked Golas, the old, affable newspaperman turned online news pioneer. Cheetham, the once budding city IT geek turned entrepreneur, was steadfast: “we just need to build it.”

THE PROJECT LAUNCHES

Fran Burns

All in that same month — December 2009 — Golas, Steinberg, Cheetham and a representative of the foundation met with Anuj Gupta, then the Deputy Commissioner of L&I, and soon with Fran Burns, who had been named commissioner of the beleaguered department a year before in summer 2008.

“When I came on, I was immediately interested in getting our information out there, sharing everything in whatever was the best, safest, most reliable way,” Burns told Technically Philly. “It also would save the staff burden of so many freedom of information requests, which should get out there in a timely manner, and show the public that L&I isn’t this secret group like it had been in the past.”

“We wanted this,” echoed Maura Kennedy, Director of Strategic Initiatives for L&I.

Golas and Cheetham had come with a vision: an online app on which the public could search for records, journalists could search for stories, and developers, legislators and civic groups could search for trends. Burns and Gupta were more than interested, Burns said, “we were thrilled.”

Before the end of the year, PennPraxis applied for a nine-month, standard $82,500 discretionary grant from the William Penn Foundation focused on, according to its website, the “development of a pilot web-based tool to increase accessibility of city data.” By January 2010, the project was already moving.

No formal contracts were signed, Golas said, because the priorities seemed clear: L&I would push forward its internal goal to create a process to release its data, PlanPhilly, PennPraxis and Azavea would build a worthwhile and popular tool and the William Penn Foundation would keep its foot on the gas pedal moving toward making city government more transparent and efficient through online tools. [Full Disclosure: The William Penn Foundation funded the Technically Philly Transparencity project, and PlanPhilly has recently become a client of Technically Media, this news site's parent company.]

Jeremy Nowak, the new president of the William Penn Foundation, which funded the development of the L&I API app

“We hope to enhance Philadelphia’s economic competitiveness by making the city’s systems more predictable and fair for both local and non-local developers and investors,” the foundation’s new president Jeremy Nowak said in a statement released for Technically Philly.

Once the data is released, it could be built and displayed, packaged and visualized, sold and shared in any otherwise legal fashion, Golas said of the understanding, a point Burns corroborated. “This data, very factually, belongs to the public, so we’ve wanted to get that back out in any smart way,” she said.

In early 2010, the project was evaluated by the city solicitor for any legality concerns and the online app was being conceived, from how the data would be geo-coded to how the search functionality would be visualized, Golas said. The foundation grant funded Azavea’s development, including the notification and user account functionality, though launching that is not part of this initial scope.

By summer 2010, Azavea had built the app’s draft framework and the data fields had been chosen and trialed. Because of capacity issues at L&I, the stakeholders agreed to a daily data dump process that would be automated (a plan later changed to be an API).

The application would include building permits, zoning variances, code violations, cease occupancy orders, refusal of plans, permit revocations, stop work orders, imminently dangerous conditions and unsafe structure and demolition warning notices, among other geo-coded fields. Each of those fields were planned to include, when available, the L&I transaction ID number, the BRT account number, the owner and applicant name, the attorney’s name, the property address, unit number, historic property flags, property type, council district, census tract, the L&I employee assigned, the date assigned, date and details of the last update and the date dropped, according to internal documentation obtained by Technically Philly. The app is planned to pull the last six months to a year of data from L&I’s internal Hansen system, which began being rolled out to department teams almost a decade ago, Cheetham said. (Information older than 90 days will be automatically moved to a secondary, non-public database, added Kennedy.)

“In short,” Golas said, with a smile on his face, “everything we could think of that the city has and the public wants but no one could get to without a few weeks of requests and expectations for a big mess in the end.”

By September 2010, everything was green lighted, and the plan was to roll out in the following few weeks, Golas said.

“But then,” he added. “We just suddenly felt the sea change at the city level.”

Another screenshot of the as-yet unfinished 'License to Inspect' app. Click to enlarge.

THE INNOVATION BACKUP

No one interviewed for this project would go much further than that. Beyond those interviewed, on the record, no one will say with any great detail what that sea change was, but when the tides do shift, it rarely sets a project back more than year. In this case, it has.

Off the record, the change is clear: the city’s Office of Innovation and Technology got involved. The whys and hows have come from others close to the project and a few other city employees who are watching closely, all of whom wanted to remain on background for fear of repercussions for criticizing their own or another city agency or a potential partner.

In summer 2009, Mayor Nutter signed an executive order to consolidate all city IT services under the new Division of Technology, led by the first ever cabinet-level Chief Technology Officer, Allan Frank. What that meant in practice was that the couple hundred GIS, admin, database and other IT staffers dedicated to specific city agencies suddenly answered ultimately, in theory, to Frank, not to their respective commissioner. That culture shift has been a slow one, resisted by some, as anyone involved will tell you. What’s more, there’s been a huge bottleneck of city IT projects: from down BlackBerry mobile phones, to dated computer software upgrades, to compromised servers to plenty more.

“So the theory became, if you want to get something done, you keep it from [OIT] for as long as you can,” says one lower-level GIS analyst, who asked to remain anonymous in criticizing publicly his own department.

City CIO Adel Ebeid

This issue is something Adel Ebeid, the city’s first Chief Innovation Officer and Frank successor at CTO, will face and one that his interim predecessor Tommy Jones made a top priority.

Already Ebeid has forced a moratorium on technology for the next month at the city level, though that hasn’t yet impacted the API project, which “is running on proven technologies,” said Johnson.

For now, time and time again, sources told Technically Philly that city employees who do want to move the ball forward have their own ways of doing it. The sudden “sea change” in the L&I project a year ago? Well, the thinking goes, L&I couldn’t hide the project from OIT anymore and once it was shared, it had to be assigned to OIT staff, reevaluated and added to an already cluttered prioritization schedule.

Others add that there are issues beyond the collision of two city agencies.

“There is simply a lot of incompetence there,” said another IT lead who has worked with the city IT shop but also asked to not be named publicly. “There are some very good, well-intentioned people at OIT, but there has never been a good culture to keep that top talent around. It isn’t the work, it isn’t even the money, it’s that the best people haven’t stayed there, so when someone who isn’t as motivated, not as talented, not as quick, gets multiple projects, that person gets overwhelmed very quickly.”

So work that could have taken weeks, or even days, has taken months, the IT lead said.

OIT did offer value, cautions Azavea’s Cheetham, when this line of conversation comes up in our interview.

“[OIT] said ‘We do not want to customize this application for L&I, we want to make an API using Open 311 that could be used as a basic framework for almost every city department.’ When DOT said that, instead of the data dumps that the L&I folks could manage, we said, ‘yes, please,’ Cheetham said. “That was the right decision.”

For her part, Burns, the L&I commissioner, said that the Office of Innovation and Technology has been an important ally, one that is working together with L&I to build something important.

“I can say though that we have been disappointed that this project has taken as long as it has,” she added, declining to go into further detail.

WHAT CITY IT HAS TO SAY ABOUT IT ALL

The city IT team was led by Clinton Johnson, a respected veteran of city services and a judge of the Philly Tech Week Open Gov Hackathon, with project management being handled by outside consultant Jeff Worthington.

Johnson says the delay — from receiving the project last September to now — “was just a bunch of scheduling problems, between OIT technical teams, the Azavea technical teams and the other layers, between L&I, PlanPhilly and PennPraxis. There were also gaps between the L&I data.”

His team, he said, is capable but managing more than most realize.

“We need to do a better job to educate the agencies about how long a well-tested, highly-available, secure and scalable product takes to be built,” Johnson said. “There is a high demand for resources at [OIT] and the resources don’t match that demand.”

No publicly shared deadlines for the project exist anymore, though, when pressed in late August, Johnson said, “I don’t think this should take more than a month or six weeks more,” which puts early October as a fair goal, he said. Azavea’s front-end final touches wouldn’t take more than, and probably much less than, 90 days, said founder Robert Cheetham.

“We’re just waiting for the API to be ready to work, with all the data fields we’ve planned for,” added Cheetham, who said he has halted development of the app until the framework is live. “We want to get this out as soon as we can.”

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Click to enlarge

In fall 2010, after finding out about the project, OIT was getting up to speed and marking internally the end of 2010 for a possible launch, as “the project was seen as a real priority,” Golas said.

Yet when initial prototypes were shared, “they didn’t include some of what we asked for and agreed to with L&I,” Golas added.

As the wrangling continued and the holiday craze came through, some frank conversations put April 2011 as the final launch goal. Months later, a full draft was shared in July 2011, and Azavea found a handful of more inconsistencies with the framework.

The website is designed — with some functionality dropped from this iteration, like user notification and account management — the application is modeled and the draft API is live. To date, the OIT staff is working on those eight bugs.

Johnson, the city IT project lead with a good reputation among stakeholders, says this process can go a lot smoother and will, in the future, particularly if all the city departments play nice with the consolidated IT office.

Clinton Johnson

“We need to get involved earlier in projects like this, to set expectations and get a sensible timeline in place. With the new CIO in and this significant shift in how we work together to prioritize efforts, I hope agencies will know to tell [OIT] in advance so we’ll be able to get resources together,” Johnson said. “Right now, the agencies will hide things from us… and the only way agencies will develop a faith in us is if we continue to deliver better than we have in the past.”

OIT has plenty to offer, Johnson went on, from the insight that led to the API framework to the actual framework itself.

This project work can “absolutely be used by others in city government,” Johnson said, adding that the API could run 10 to 20 interfaces, meaning a dozen or more data resources could be maintained by this one tool. From 311 to the Water Department to the police and fire departments to the Office of Property Assessment, “I couldn’t think of an agency that wouldn’t benefit from this,” he said.

Following the ‘License to Inspect’ app’s launch, there is a push to release the full API publicly, which will likely be the truest measure of success.

“[The Office of Innovation and Technology] has suggested that they are interested in making the API available to developers for free, and, if they do that, we will add it to OpenDataPhilly,” said Cheetham of Azavea, which built the regional open data catalog.  “We would be big supporters of this action.”

But there is hesitance at the city level. OIT officials say it’s ultimately L&I’s decision. On this point, L&I is a touch cooler: “We are discussing how best to proceed with this, but the department is firmly committed to making our data accessible to all,” said Kennedy, the L&I strategic initiatives director.

Indeed, all parties are looking a little weary from this battle.

It’s the kind of subject that brings about a certain kind of sigh from even the most tight-lipped of project stakeholders when Technically Philly would ask. When pushed for firmer deadlines, there’s an exasperation, a sense that the answer is as soon as it can happen, without much faith anymore in when that will be.

But, by most accounts, when it does get done, again expected before the end of the year, an important tool will have come alive, stakeholders pledge.

“This will finally offer the direct communication to the public that we’ve always wanted, to show that work is being done, even if it happens while you’re at work  or involves more steps than you realized,” said L&I’s Kennedy. “That is how we can grow confidence in our department. Who in city government wouldn’t want this?”

OIT leadership made many of the right decisions — going to a scalable API framework chief among them — so the next city agency data initiative will be a test of whether the consolidated office can bring the project closer to three to six months, rather than two years.

Before it even arrives, internally, stakeholders are championing the L&I product as something to marvel.

“No matter what happened to get us here, what we’ll have is what every city agency should have in the future” Burns said. “That’s something everyone should be paying attention to.”

Mark Headd shows off an early version of Phind It For Me during the BarCamp NewsInnovation Open Gov Hackathon April 30, 2011.

The developer behind a new text messaging service aimed at reducing 311 call volume was a Division II All American gymnast in 1990. That gives him his balance.

Phind it for Me is a new service based on an open source project [GitHub] that launched public beta in Philadelphia this week from Mark Headd, a ‘developer evangelist’ for the Voxeo Labs development arm of a national VoIP carrier.

Users send a simple text message from any SMS-enabled mobile phone with an address and a hashtag to find the closest location of a specific type of service, like a library, a school or a fire station, with plans for polling places and farmers markets in the coming days and more services in the future.

Phind It is based on Headd’s work during a Code for America DataCamp on the PHLAPI, which makes service locations more actionable.

“More people are getting smart phones, but they still aren’t nearly as available as cell phones with a basic text messaging service, which you can find around the world,” Headd, 42, said during the BarCamp NewsInnovation Open Gov Hackathon he helped organize. “This service could really give new people access to valuable information.”

A single 311 call costs the city $3.30, Code for America fellow Pete Fecteau said during the CFA DataCamp, so a tool like this that could cut down on simple requests, like the location of nearby services, could be seen as a city cost saver, though getting the word out remains a major difficulty.

After he builds out the service, which will include other services and directions, Headd says he hopes the project could be used in other cities. The application is built with Node.js, a hosted instance of CouchDB, in addition to PHLAPI and a new service from Voxeo that is currently in free trial, Headd said.

In his day job, Headd connects with developers on using various platforms from Voxeo, work that lends itself to being involved in hackathons, meetups and other collaborative work. Though Phind It is a side project of his, the relevance to his work is there, and that’s something Headd says he appreciates.

Headd lives in Wilmington, Del. with his wife and two kids — “Really cuts in on my hacking time too,” he jokes — so being able to juggle his interests and responsibilities is of paramount importance. That’s where the gymnastics comes in.

He is a 1991 political science graduate of tiny Cortland State University, where he had a successful gymnastics career, highlighted by being a 1990 Division II All American in floor exercise.

“It was a lot of fun,” he said.

He finished in 1994 is master’s degree in public administration from Syracuse University, near where he grew up, and went on to two different stints in state government, where he first started teaching himself to code.

“I wanted to advance some new ideas inside of government, and found that the best way to do that was to bring people a working prototype of something,” he said.

Through to 1997, he was a budget analyst for New York state Sen. John DeFrancisco, when he then served as technology adviser and IT lead for then Delaware Gov. Tom Carper, now a U.S. Senator, until 2003.

While in working for Carper, he taught himself IVR coding and built the first prototype of a tool that helped people in Delaware find libraries.

“Libraries are ultra important community resources,” Headd said, noting that tool’s similarity to Phind It for Me. “This has been a passion of mine for a while.”

After state government, he bounced around the private sector, including in the call center industry with Horsham-based TelerX and a voice response technology firm. All along, Headd says he was finding his skills as a coder were growing nearly as quickly as his interest in its application for improving government.

In fall 2010, he took the evangelist gig with Voxeo.

“I had been doing a lot of work with their platforms and solutions and just decided I wanted to help make them,” he said. “Plus, they have a real commitment to open standards and open source that I like.”

It’s this job, Headd says, that is allowing him to work with smart people on making tools for residents to interface with City Hall more easily.

“In some ways, its easier to affect change in government from the outside,” Headd said. “So here I am.”

Fresh off a name change, GIS software firm Azavea, formerly Avencia, has launched a free subscription plan for Cicero, its much-touted legislative district and elected official search API.

The plan offers users 1,000 monthly credits toward “any coordinate-based legislative district matching, elected official data lookups and/or map web service requests,” according to a release [PDF].

The company release leans heavily on suggesting the ‘Cicero Free‘ plan is for more limited organizations that want to add legislative data to their Web sites or online applications. The recently released Our Philadelphia platform, which was built by Common Cause Pennsylvania to track money in local politics, used a beta version of the free plan.

Play with it the free API here.

The Web was always supposed to be democratic. But for all the good government oversight resources online, local politics often fail to attract the spotlight of transparency.

After Hallwatch went under, Philadelphians were left without a resource for hard data about their elected officials.

It’s an issue that certainly interests nonprofit, non-partisan citizens’ lobby organization Common Cause PA. Enough so that the organization has harnessed legislative data API Cicero, the brainchild of Callowhill GIS development company Avencia, to launch Our Philadelphia. The Web site explores “the role of money in local politics and allow users to investigate these issues for themselves.”

Made possible by the Samuel S. Fels Fund, the site shines the light on local campaign contributions for city legislators. Users can create custom RSS feeds, search by address, as powered by Cicero, and track information and content relevant to other keyword searches.

So, for example, a Frankford resident might find it entirely peculiar that the top contributor to the campaign of his city Councilwoman Maria Quinones Sanchez is energy drink manufacturer Cintron Beverage, to the tune of $21,500.

While it now serves only Philadelphia, Common Cause intends to expand the database to the five-county region and include more original reporting, says James Browning, the direct of development for the group. The profiles of top donors for each elected official is the result of a year-long campaign by the group to make local campaign finance records more accessible, according to a release [PDF].

“Extracting the data from the city’s and the state’s equally crude electronic and paper archives was a job in itself,” Browning wrote in an e-mail to Technically Philly.

Other features are expected to be added to the site in coming months.

Avencia’s Cicero API, which is used to generate the address specific data culling, has made its rounds among political oversight groups.

According to a release: “it currently feeds elected district boundaries and elected official information into several public and private web applications for newspapers, election watchdog groups, philanthropic foundations, unions, arts organizations and private commercial firms.”

Perhaps the clearest example is Avencia’s partnership with the Committee of Seventy on online cudgel: the Redistricting the Philadelphia Region Web site, which lets citizens, “based on their address, look up their political districts, visualize them on a map and learn about the process of redistricting.”

Avencia also recently announced that it has extended ERSI’s ArcGIS Flex API to introduce support for OpenStreetMap, an editable map of the world, in its planning and prioritization software. Read more here [PDF].

Alteva

“I followed a girl to Philadelphia. The girl didn’t work out, but the area did,” he says.

And did it ever. After running, and then selling, his own technology consulting firm, Bumbernick, along with engineer Mark Marquez, wanted to start a company in a new sector that relied on monthly subscriptions. Bumbernick said he was enticed bythe stability of a monthly invoice, especially after his consulting days.

The two soon founded Alteva, a company that provides voice over internet protocol (VOIP) services to over 300 small- to mid-sized businesses. And, unlike many tech companies in the Philadelphia region, they are doing it all from inside city limits.

Alteva CEO William Bumbernick

The cornerstone of Alteva’s [pronounced ALL-tee-vah] business is undercutting large, bloated voice-based telephone systems that many business are forced to buy.

Most businesses run telephone systems out of what is called a private branch exchange (PBX). The PBX is a box that a business connects all of its phones to that, in turn, is connected to the telephone carrier.

“That box provides all of the call routing, extension to extension dialing, voicemail, auto-attendance, and it also provides call center queuing,” says Bumbernick.

That simple box can get pretty expensive. Bumbernick estimates that, for a company that has 100 employees, the phone system can cost $1,250 to $1,500 per employee or $125,000 to $150,000 per company.

“Our [data-based] solution is $30,000 for that same set of features,” he says.

In short, Alteva does for small= to mid=sized business what Vonage does for homes. Though, Bumbernick is quick to point out that business demand flawless, reliable telephone systems when the average residential user may not.

“If your phone bill goes from $70 to $20 at home and you have a dropped call, you just think, ‘Man, I saved $50, I’ll just call the guy back.’ Businesses don’t think that way.”

THE BIG MOVE

Anyone with half an eye on Philadelphia business likely often hears the following story:

A business that wants to serve the Philadelphia metropolitan area also wants to be located inside the city limits but instead chooses the outlying suburbs to avoid the crushing taxes. For Alteva, the story is quite the opposite.

The company is based in the Bourse Building facing the Independence National Historical Park in Old City (you know, the one with the overpiced food court in the first floor). The company used to be jammed into the corner of an existing office in Delran, NJ, but Alteva wanted to make its business attractive to the young engineers graduating college.

“We really wanted to place the business where [graduates and young engineers] work and play ,and Old City was the perfect fit for that,” says Bumbernick.

Alteva was also enticed by an incentive package presented by the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation.

LOOKING FOR ACQUISITIONS?

In its sixth year of operations Alteva has over 300 customers and 28 employees. Bumbernick says he plans to build the product like its shareholders are going to own it forever. Alteva forcasts rapid growth, planning to quadruple its current size in three years.

Though most of its customer base is local, Alteva has lines in 48 states and 14 countries and is seeing several market opportunities. The company is weighing whether to acquire an existing company or instead starting satellite operations to be built organically.

“We’re going through those steps right now – we are certainly considering growing through acquisitions or being acquired,” he says.

But Bumbernick doesn’t seem to want to sell anytime soon. He repeatedly mentioned how much fun he was having helming a growing local business.

“In 2003 we decided to hit the ground running – And here we are, six years later, going gangbusters and having a whole lot of fun doing it,” he says.