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.

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.]

Photos courtesy of the City of Philadelphia. Photo Credits: Mitchell Leff

It’s been a year since the City of Philadelphia hired Desiree Peterkin Bell as Director of Communications and Strategic Partnerships.

In that time, we’ve seen a more proactive approach to social media across Philadelphia city agencies, and even outside of it, like this week’s announcement that the Philadelphia Parking Authority would pursue an aggressive social media strategy.

When Technically Philly interviewed Mayor Michael Nutter last fall, social media was barely a blip on his radar.

Since Peterkin Bell took the helm of the office and began pushing the City toward social media engagement, Mayor Nutter has taken to Twitter, growing from 300 followers a year ago to more than 18,000.

That count doesn’t yet match the brand of Newark Mayor Corey Booker, Peterkin Bell’s employer from 2006 to Fall 2010, tweeted:

Though her early career impact will likely be attributed to her social media chops, don’t call Peterkin Bell — who earns a $150,000 salary from the City and lives in a home on South Broad Street, the Avenue of the Arts — platform dependent. In New York City, she worked under Mayor Bloomberg as Senior Director of Government Affairs for the New York’s marketing development corporation, working with brands like General Motors and Universal Studios to sell city assets for marketing purposes. She now uses that experience to persuade national media organizations to recognize Philadelphia’s assets as a continually growing and prosperous city.

At the heart of her role, she’s coordinating a centralized communications strategy that includes interface with national media, the city’s public access television channel, and making sure that no matter the citizen and no matter the message, the city is working to reach them.

After the jump, Peterkin Bell shares her experience in New York and Newark, the extent of her role as Communications Director, and where she think the city’s communications strategy is headed.

Having been in New York and then Newark, why Philadelphia?

I am slowly working my way through Amtrak. Kidding. [Newark] was an amazing experience and I had a chance to do a lot of stuff that wasn’t being done in other cities, but I was looking to do something different. I went to Swarthmore College as an undergraduate, where I met my husband. I always loved it here. I created a list of options [when considering leaving Newark] because my husband could be anywhere in the country because he has his own company. Philadelphia kept coming up on everything: arts and culture, integrity, government and responsiveness. Great Mayor, great nightlife, great place to raise a family.

What do you mean when you say you created things that weren’t being done in other cities?

In Newark, the challenge there was to break through traditional media clutter. I say clutter in a very respectful way, but the only attention we were getting was negative. A shooting was easy to get above-the-fold. If we were opening a fatherhood center or creating an earned income tax credits — pitching great stories — those were not highlighted nearly as much. We latched on to social media. It became a fundamental shift in how we as a city communicated. It helped define the city’s brand, helped define Booker’s brand. I saw that cities can be incubators of change. Philly has the best of those worlds: a strong engaged tech community and a government wanting to innovate and redefine the communications paradigm.

What are your core responsibilities as Director of Communications and Strategic Partnerships?

Traditionally, I oversee the press office, working hand-in-hand with our press secretary Mark McDonald. He does defense, I do offense. He’s an amazing asset because he’s been on the other side asking the hard questions. I do a lot of the un-traditional, social media and civic engagement. On the strategic partnerships side, I also think outside of the box about how we are creating communications mediums between citizens and government, working on things like the Department of Public Safety’s iPledge campaign. Philadelphia was able to get Education Nation to focus on the city. Chris Matthews did [Hardball] live here and Andrea Mitchell of Education Nation did the same. Those are un-traditional ways of communicating our messages and progress made in the city. It was sitting down with those folks, having a conversation first about why they needed to bring this to the city.

What are your priorities?

My priorities are to engage, educate and innovate. Sometimes it’s a video, sometimes it’s a press conference, sometimes it’s a Facebook message, sometimes it’s an event and sometimes it’s all of the above. As for innovation, no other Mayor in the country has partnered with a local broadcast station to do an unrehearsed, full-hour to take questions from every medium imaginable. But the majority of my time is spent around national media. I don’t want people to just see me as the social media conversation.

What have you been changing about the Mayor’s communication strategy?

What’s important to note is that the City didn’t have a communications director for two years. Absent of that, you had people creating communications on their own, to their credit. What you didn’t have was someone centrally located understanding how they were doing that. How many email newsletters exist in the city? How many Twitter accounts? Is there coordination among all of the press officers? It’s not necessarily changed, it’s just more open internally.

Second is trying to understand what tools exist: Channel 64, social media, Phila.gov, collateral materials throughout. Understanding what those things are and how they match with how people define accomplishments. It’s first gathering it, communicating it, and being very clear about those things.

So, how many Twitter accounts does the City have?

We’re still trying to find out. There’s definitely more than 12. In the process of finding out, I’ve also tried to let folks know that if we’re going to use this tool as a medium, how do we best use it? Often times, people started them because they knew it was a good thing to do, they just didn’t have a strategy behind it. Didn’t have a message they were trying to convey. Part of it was bringing in people from Twitter and Facebook to explain how best to use these tools.

Have you turned agencies or staff on to Twitter? Was it a hard sell?

A great example is Hurricane Irene. When you had FEMA telling folks to use social media to communicate, that’s when people said “this can be used in emergency situations if needed to communicate with masses.” But I always say that social media is a tool in a toolbox. It shouldn’t lead your strategy, but it’s part of your strategy, including a press release, press conference, a conversation with reporters. People receive information differently. Even in a digital age, there are folks who still prefer that you to give them a collateral piece of information or knock on their door.

What lessons about civic engagement have you learned, having handled social media side?

It’s a great democratization of content and influence. It allows everyday people to share what motivates and inspires them. It also allows them to be content creators, create a news cycle and influence policy. Knowing that exists and being a part of it means that we’re creating a direct line of engagement between government and that constituent.

You were an integral part of starting Newark’s public access cable station — how are you hoping to improve Philadelphia’s?

Channel 64 is a priority. In Newark, we literally built the TV studio. The great thing about Philadelphia is that the TV station exists here already. There are some smaller changes. We’re trying to post a lot more public service messages and we’re going to be announcing soon some new show ideas, focusing on ways to make it not just stodgy, but entertaining as well. The other thing that we’ve done is try to not just focus on just the Mayor’s press conferences in City Hall. There’s a lot of press conferences that are outside the city’s walls. It’s also helpful to change the backdrop.

A year in to this job, what have been your successes?

I wouldn’t count successes, I’d say progress. There’s still a lot of progress to be made. One was establishing the importance of this role. Second is getting people to also understand that social media can be a helpful way to communicate with constituencies. In order to support civic participation, a strategy is needed. Third is getting people to focus on Philadelphia who probably haven’t before, everyone from the Esquires of the world, the Washington Posts of the world, making sure our stories and our initiatives and our progress here in the city, from this administration, are highlighted as well. I’m learning new things every day.

What is the future for you? What do you aspire to? Are you interested in a federal role?

The action is on the municipal government level. I’ve had opportunity to work for the federal government. I’m more committed to cities, which are more apt to everyday change. Real impact is in cities.

Sam Katz is widely known in Philadelphia for campaigning. But he has had considerably more success in business.

More than a decade ago, he lost the mayoralty to John Street in one of the closest and most controversial big city elections in at least a generation, enough to warrant a celebrated documentary. Running a competitive Republican campaign in an overwhelmingly Democratic city was enough to make him a recurrent candidate suggestion, as recent as this mayoral race. No matter that a mayoral primary loss in 1991, a governor primary loss in 1994 and a failed rematch against Street in 2003 has tied losing in politics to his legacy.

Where Katz, 61, has maintained his air of success has been in business and government oversight.

In March, Katz was named the chairman of the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority, the state-created panel that oversees city finances and quickly became the public face of an important body that has often operated in relative public obscurity.

Katz, a former Central High School honor student and Johns Hopkins basketball star, made his wealth working from 1976 to 1994 for Public Finance Management, a firm that advises government authorities on efficient large-scale project management, as the Inquirer reported in 1999.

With that accrued wealth, the West Mount Airy resident dove into investing, taking roles in a half dozen or more investment properties of note in the region.

The native of Wynnefield in West Philadelphia formed in the late 1990s the early stage private equity fund Wynnefield Capital Advisors (though it went by variations of that name) and invested through that organization in a variety of ways until 2004. He is board chairman of BioAdvance, investing in “very early stage life sciences companies,” and a limited partner in Osage Ventures, which is being credited with rethinking how universities profit on intellectual property. Katz has also been involved in launching or leading WellSpring Biocapital Partners, Biotechnology Greenhouse of Southeastern Pennsylvania and other small boutique investment groups.

With that background and with personal computing roots dating back to 1983, it’s no surprise he’s also taken to direct partnership, including investing in Fort Washington-based data-driven campaign analysis firm CampaignGrid and advising cWyze, the interactive video startup with Queen Village roots that presented at the spring 2011 Switch.

And just to show that investing remains something of a hobby, Katz has set his eyes on producing The Great Experiment, a seven-hour series on the 400-year history of Philadelphia the city, kicked off with a pilot proof of concept on 6ABC this past spring.  [Support its Kickstarter here].

With that background, below, Technically Philly asked Katz about how Philadelphia has changed, how it’s stayed the same and what we can do about it.

As always, edited for length and clarity.

With more than 10 years of investing in Philadelphia behind you, what has changed from your perspective?

I don’t consider myself one of the serious investors, but in the period I have been involved in this, I have definitely seen more mature business models, more serious and more thoughtful, happening everywhere but here in Philadelphia as well.

Seeing viable businesses early, that just wasn’t the case earlier in the decade. Even right after the bubble, it was just about that word: “eyeballs.” Even now, it is extremely difficult to get support with just a business plan and a clever entrepreneur, certainly more than it was when I began. [The need for] scalability was not always the case, but now that’s the word.

What is something that is holding back Philadelphia’s entrepreneurial community?

The risk aversion. A lot of private equity here has… well, there’s still a tendency to punish failure here. There are some markets, faster moving ones, where the intellectual capital….of failure is seen. We don’t seem to have that.

We’ve heard that before. So what do we do about it?

The solution for fear of risk is more capital. There is a propulsion there. In the Bay Area, there are dozens and dozens of well capitalized firms chasing fewer and fewer Facebooks and Groupons. Capital needs a place to go, so there is a seeking for what is new and that involves greater risk. As that moves forward, the people who have failed are suddenly seen as valuable, as having had that extra experience.

Here, it is not a capital intensive region, There are good firms doing good things, but it’s just not an over financed market. The absence of that makes partners and general partners much more wary of backing people whose track records include being wiped out.

We hear that that’s because as a region, we do a worse job of connecting our strongest young entrepreneurs with the older mentors and the investment that can often come with it.

I wouldn’t have it framed as ‘we do a worse job.’ We don’t do as good a job.

San Diego has institutionalized entrepreneurial connectedness, seeding management into younger companies, having lots of social and technical professional interaction, shining a spotlight on the integration with leaders and the players, all through the Connectors Project.

When I was [CEO of] Greater Philadelphia First [from 2000 to 2003], we came up with a number of ideas but nothing really gained traction. The Science Center is trying to do some of this, and it’s a problem that is being faced by Pennsylvania Bio, the Eastern Technology Council and others.

What’s the problem here.

One of the problems is that there are too many owners of these processes, who want to own it without collaborating.

We have tremendous concentrations of national and federal funding in health sciences and research, but it seems like Boston is eating our lunch when it comes to building a network and reputation for success. We don’t seem to have a history of collaboration. All of these big, regional organizations are competing with each other. It undercuts our capacity to be seen as leaders.

Considering we’re not a center, we don’t do bad in new media, the cloud, consumer products. In health science, though, we are a center, a real hub, with Drexel and the Science Center and CHOP and all the research facilities, yet we are not hitting into the upper echelon of successes in the industry.

And on that front, if you had a magic wand, how would you solve it?

Well, I don’t have a magic wand, but to the extent to which competition creates islands between life sciences institutions, we need some more prospects with collaboration to serve as examples that the sum of the parts can be greater than each institution on its own. I don’t know if many in these industries see their colleagues as possible partners in a stronger, more entrepreneurial region, rather than competitors.

We don’t have a dominant hospital that is leading this charge and bringing everyone together: our good hospitals are all connected to universities and they are all competing for patients and dollars. There are too few examples of an institution taking on a major, ground breaking project and bringing on other institutional partners to take in large-scale funding that could change the industry and spinoff other projects, business and leaders.

How have you been part of the solution?

BioAdvance [of which Katz is chairman] is having serious conversations about that this year. We’re saying, ’10 years later, are we any stronger, have we met the objective — not just jobs alone but are we moving the needle on being a life sciences center?’

There’s probably a consensus around that table that we have not. We have not succeeded as a region to be what we thought we could be. One of the aspects was pharma being seen as a key stakeholder, and it has been on the decline in an unexpected way, so it could be the recession, but other regions are facing those same difficulties and we just haven’t moved the needle enough.

Are there legislators who you think are doing a good job representing innovation and entrepreneurship to help move the needle?

My answer might surprise you.

When I look at the Marcellus Shale opportunity — certainly with lots of risks — I see a transformative prospect for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. It is not often that a state gets, through no fault of its own, to create an entire new industry, to use that industry to lure others.

I don’t think the Governor does the best job of educating why that’s important, but his resistance to extraction tax shows he has a steely determination to do everything he can to have the Marcellus Shale get so deeply inbred in the economy and infrastructure of the state, so that by the time it’s mature enough an industry to have a tax, it won’t matter, and we’ll have other options.

[Editor's Note: PA Governor Tom Corbett nominated Katz to the financial oversight PICA board, as noted above, and Katz's investments span across industries. How to treat the Marcellus Shale industry in Pennsylvania remains a hotly contested debate, though Corbett recently received the highest polled approval rating of his short tenure.]

i have an admiration for what he does, if not an admiration for how’s he’s communicating it, so I’d say Tom Corbett is someone who is showing an impressive entrepreneurial spirit. There are ideas I don’t agree with, but he has seen this the same way the entrepreneur would see the new social media whiz-bang thing, a real, strong viable business venture that needs to be cultivated.

I’d also mention Rob McCord [the state treasurer who spoke to Technically Philly in February].

As far as legislators, well, I don’t think Philadelphia is represented by a lot of people who get technology. They are focused elsewhere. The day to day problems that most Philadelphians deal with, doesn’t leave a lot of time to be interested in bandwidth and ventures.

What are you excited about for the region?

I think the combined work of Steve Tang of the Science Center, Barbara Schilberg of Bioadvance and RoseAnn Rosenthal of Ben Franklin Technology Partners continues to be impressive. I think the combination of those three — they are not starting the companies or funding the companies, but making connections — really means a lot. They appear to be out there doing good stuff, and they don’t get enough recognition or encouragement.

Though, recognition and encouragement are two other things we don’t do very well in this region.

While we have you, what is the latest with the Great Experiment documentary on Philadelphia, other than the Kickstarter?

We ran our pilot episode on 6ABC this spring, and now we are working on the first episode of four shows for 2012, which we hope to follow up with four more in 2013 if funding permits.

And you’re already looking to 2026, what’s that about?

I’ve started promoting and advocating for a conversation leading up to 2026, which will be the 250th anniversary of the signing of Declaration, which has potential to be a dynamic and transformative event. For now, I’m involved in conversations with what we as a region can do, and we’ll be looking for more ideas in the future.

And with your new board chairmanship with PICA, tell us why our audience should care about the work you do there.

On multiple fronts, it matters.

In neighborhood renewal and building preservation, with new restaurants and new exhibiting culture and arts, Philadelphia is disconnecting from government and has become quite entrepreneurial. Most of it’s happening without permission.

Many of them younger but not all, and they’re making the place they live better. That’s the breeding ground for a guy like Rich Florida to point to a place ready for a knowledge based economy for science and engineering and media.

So, with the universities — brain factories – and with Comcast being arguably at the forefont of broadband and media, you have to ask the question, ‘why aren’t we getting and keeping a larger share of those businesses?’

The answer is money, the incentives, the regulatory environment.

The connection between what we’re doing at PICA — not making policy, just overseeing the city to avoid fiscal bankruptcy — is direct to affecting Philadelphia. We don’t attract jobs, we havent for a while. Every once a while, there is the exception, but we are not a destination for business. We know this.

If the city had a less onerous tax regime, we would be a natural for startups and everything that comes with it.

Let me push you on that because the Nutter administration has maintained that they’ve toed the line on the business privilege tax and other increases have been out of necessity, revenue shortfalls because of the economy. How would you grade the administration’s effort to do what you’re saying?

I wouldn’t. But the problems aren’t the administration’s making. They have been exacerbated by the national economy, sure, but given the economy, we have failed to take hold to try to fundamentally change the way we do business.

Given the opportunity presented, I think we could have done more as a region. Look at other places. You don’t have to like what happened in New Jersey and Wisconsin [with sharp budget cuts and union battles], but what we saw there were attempts at doing something big, taking on the financial instability a lot of governments have and doing something about it.

We haven’t seen that here.

Photo by Chris Sembrot.

Alex Hillman partied last night.

If Technically Philly were to suggest that Hillman was celebrating the anniversary of a building, he probably wouldn’t like that very much. Last night, the co-founder of Old City coworking haunt Independents Hall was at Frankford Hall in Fishtown with more than 100 other members of a community celebrating four years of formal partnership.

In 2007, Hillman and P’unk Ave co-founder Geoff Di Masi brought together a cast of freelance web developers, software programmers, graphic designers and their ilk to put an end to home office isolation and bring about greater collaboration and creativity. Thus was born the affectionately nicknamed Indy Hall. Four years later, the community has grown, as has Hillman — to full blown entrepreneur, handling a few roles aside from community architect.

Hillman, a week into his 28th year, came to Philadelphia in 2002 by way of Drexel University, after growing up “on 18 acres between corn and horse farms an hour north of here that surely pushed me to be a city boy.” He went to Drexel for the co-op program but even that couldn’t keep him, dropping out three years into the program to start work on his own.

Now, in addition to Indy Hall fame, he has helped build business strategy for ChoiceShirts.com, is working with web services shop Wildbit and is one of two behind creative directory WeWorkinPhilly, which could see some partnership with Technically Philly.

After years of coverage, Technically Philly grabbed Hillman for our first Q&A, talking to the Hellertown, Pa. native about coworking, business and what his plans are for his future.

As always, edited for length and clarity.

Indy Hall four years later: what’s the status report?

It’s still serving the core purpose we set out to do. It’s doing so many other things, but the main core purpose was to help find the people that are in your own backyard doing really cool things, in business and creative and technology.

Before we got connected to launch Indy Hall, I hadn’t met Geoff and he was doing cool things in a similar industry. I had no built-in way to meet people like Geoff. It started with Blogadelphia and Barcamp and those were the beginnings for the introduction of people. I had no idea what was going on. Four years later, people come here for any number of reasons, but the most consistent success is the first success: helping smart, cool, creative people in Philadelphia meet other smart, cool, creative people.

What is the biggest way Indy Hall has changed in four years?

The word ‘diversity’ is loaded because it means so many different things to so many different people, but that’s what comes to mind.

When we started, most people looked like me: they were young, 20-something creative, business, tech white dudes. Now they span age and race and industry and interests. When people ask who works at Indy Hall, now I say, ‘it might be easier to say the few who don’t.’

I’d also say the maturity of the community has been a big change. When I left for a lot of last year to do business development, it was a test to see what happens when I am not beating the drum and I came back to something better.

What is ‘better’ about the Indy Hall community now?

People in Indy Hall have stepped up into roles in Indy Hall and elsewhere. What’s interesting about creating a place where the services are not the core function is that it’s a blank canvas to do whatever you want to make of it. That creates a self-selecting group of people who aren’t going to wait for other people. It’s a pretty powerful engine.

What are specific examples of that happening?

The Barcamp organizing crew were members of and friends of Indy Hall, and they’ve gone beyond that. tweeted:

I haven’t been counting lineage, but we’re finding leaders training and mentoring new leaders…. All these people who were coming together or getting closer four years ago are still here making Philadelphia a better place.

And then there are still new faces coming through the Indy Hall community.

Right… like, Parker [Whitney], who is great at bringing people together and he knows it. He has worked endlessly at his creative skill [in video game development, where he and partner Jake O'Brien launched Flyclops]. He and Jake may not have a runaway hit yet, but they’ve earned respect in the industry, as this little startup.

Two years ago, when he first found IndyHall, I asked him what he wanted to do with his life and he said he liked playing video games and designing T-shirts. Starting a company wasn’t even in his field of vision, but he was just surrounded by people like him who were a little further down that road and he found his way and has become really devoted to Philadelphia.

He is now in a position to start helping other new people who come our way.

Indy Hall is a strong but small part of a broader technology community and, bigger still, of a city and a region. How has Philly fared in the last four years?

Four years ago, there were two significant shortages of perception around Philly [being innovative]: one was self-awareness because no one here knew what was in Philadelphia and the second was the outside perspective, where no one outside the city knew anything was here either.

We chose to tackle the first, and there’s a lot to be done, but more people in Philadelphia better know and are more likely to know about a tech, creative community here than four years ago.

It seems Philadelphia is just keeping pace, at best, with other cities. How does Philly differentiate itself, to help draw and retain talent and business?

I think many cities across the world all have the same resources, so everyone is growing and chasing at tech in a real way and mostly in a pretty similar way. Philadelphia is rare because of its scale. We’re a big city that happens to think it’s small.

The other distinct advantage, one I harp on, is doing things the Philadelphia way.

This city is really seeing itself in a new way, faster than elsewhere. Philadelphia, particularly at Indy Hall, is looking to do it our way, doing things bootstrapped because we’re resistent culturally to outside help. Groups that find ways to do that our way, on our own, are Philadelphia stories and are stronger for it. Other cities are trying similarly and will be more successful.

We’re still doing it our way. The DIY way and we have the ‘just get it done attitude.’ I’m proud of it. We’re in a good position as a national if not an international leader in creating these communities.

I’ll say this, in traveling around, when you have groups gathering around strictly around interest, like startups or web design, I think those are short lived, trendy communities. They will only be around so long as that interest remains the new hotness. So there’s not a ton of longevity.

Then there’s  a community of practitioners, of people who are just interested in getting things done and they happen to be doing that in creative, tech and business, and they’re actually doing it. That is what we have here.

You talked about Philadelphia needing to outpace other cities, when really, I want Philadelphia to out-last other cities.

We just had the Philly Geek Awards and we’re gearing up for the second Philly Tech Week, to be held the last week of April. This broad technology community is getting better connected, but it’s also still growing. Is this community so supportive just because it’s perhaps still small or can it keep getting better connected and more supportive as it continues to grow?

Community scaling is super interesting to me, and that happens best with that leaders breeding leaders I talked about.

As communities scale, fragmentation is not a bad thing. Natural fragmentation: it happens two ways. Either, you pretend it’s not going to happen and you get stress fractures, which leads to fall out, disagreement, fiefdoms, bruised egos and all these things, just the collatoral damage.

The other way is stay focused on relationships and use them as guiding lines. We recognized that this is a big city and so there are going to be different parts of the community. We see where our communities are separating, we acknowledge that and keep communication alive gracefully and elegantly.

We hear that after taking on bigger space, Indy Hall is again reaching capacity. Are you experiencing these same challenges?

It’s, like, where we do we fragment? I need to do a better job to grow this in smart ways. The Indy Hall House cohousing idea became a new outlet for that growth when we felt that the answer wasn’t to just add more desks. Just adding more desks will just lead us to a fragmentation that we’re not ready to deal with yet, and that’s OK, but with the house we can grow laterally.

What is the latest with the cohousing plans?

The people most attacted to the Indy Hall house idea are the ones who don’t need an office to work in but are interested in the cultural elements of Indy Hall. Here will be our shot at some kind of healthy fragmentation, of taking our style and bringing them to a new place with perhaps new faces.

It’s already been yet another learning process. I saw the Postgreen guys at the first Ignite, and I looked at Geoff and said, “I want to do something with them.”

I want to go in and learn the neighborhood so we  aren’t just building ourselves. I want to be much more inclusive. I want Indy Hall to last longer than i am the one working on it, and I want the house to last longer than I am living in it.

So, of course we have to ask, what does Indy Hall look like in the next four years?

Indy Hall, in four years, will touch more people’s lives. I don’t know what that means yet. How many people who are out there either don’t think we have what they need or they don’t know we exist at all — I bet we have a lot more of the second one.

A group from Wharton led by Tim Allen has lobbied for 20 percent time and part of that time is happening at Indy Hall. Tim is excited to bring people down here from Wharton, and I’m excited to get their take on why their perceptions are keeping them from working here.

So, I think we are going to see that, a lot of new ways that coworking and Indy Hall are working and touching more people in Philadelphia.

How have you changed during the last four years?

Indy Hall has had a remarkable effect on me.

When I started, I was building simple WordPress and Shopify sites, small applications, relatively simple websites for businesses. I was a web developer, nothing particularly innovative, but being around these people and working on my own as led me to find that I could be a part of products that help more people build better websites, rather than building a few myself.

I do love code and I do love to make things, but there were other people better than I am, so I wanted to find what I was better at.

And what has that been?

The transition into the strategic side of things…

Now I go in and learn the company and it’s like a heart transfer, if the new heart isn’t accepted by the body, it doesn’t work. So I’ve worked with startups to find out what they need and what would be compatible with them, if it’s a single role or a department or something else.

And that has translated into what is really your day job.

I came on with ChoiceShirts.com as a consultant on the marketing side of things and we found the real obstacle was the infrastructure. They were doing ecommerce since 1994 and someone else had always handled the IT. I said bring it in-house, and I filled that role, the CTO role, and worked myself out of a job, to bring them from an out-of-house closed source system to an in-house, open source one and then hired a successor. I’m getting involved again now on the leadership side of things, rather than technology.

How else do you make money?

I worked with Red Tettemer for almost a year, helped guide them through growing an interactive campagin, taking a new style of interactive work.

…Also, I started working with WildBit in December or so. They have a team of 12, and I was their first Philadelphia employee… I’ve enjoyed being in the trenches with partners and clients and getting their team to prioritize better, like not just talking to those customers when things go wrong but also when new possibilities are there.

So what will your future look like?

I know that if I were to say ‘if there’s still work to be done, I’ll never leave Philadelphia’ I would be shortchanging myself.

I have fallen in love with Philadelphia. I didn’t love it four years ago. I liked it enough to give it a shot, but now I genuinely love being here. Every time I travel for work or pleasure, I come back and it’s special. So, both for Philadelphia and myself, I don’t know if it’ll be in 10 years or five years or next year, but, in order to be happy and be valuable to Philadelphia, I’m going to need to have the perspective of being away from it. Philadelphia will always be home, but I know my future will involve being somewhere else for some time.

For now, I hope our impact has been more than inside the four walls we have in Old City, but has an impact around the world. To use something we say a lot, in the future, it won’t be called coworking anymore, it’ll just be called working.

• Philly Geek Awards: Recap and Thank Yous [Geekadelphia] — We rounded up the media coverage here.
• Q&A: Brandon Yoshimura, Loffles [Flying Kite] — After we chased their initial SEC filing and then reported on the Philly part-time startup Loffles and its co-founder Brandon Yoshimura, Flying Kite follows up. Yo, thanks for the link! Oh, wait…. Don’t worry the Business Journal did the same thing again.
• Q&A: Tayyib Smith, Little Giant [Flying Kite]
• Philadelphia’s 50 biggest firms’ stock prices fall [Philadelphia Business Journal]
• The Jawn: Explore, Discover & Improve Philly [Geekadelphia]
• A look at Philly-area companies on the Inc. 5000 [Philly Tech News] — Including the fast moving NextDocs, as we have reported recently.

The City of Philadelphia has a new chief of IT.

As reported first by Technically Philly Thursday, Adel Ebeid, the former New Jersey state CTO, will be announced as Philadelphia’s first ever Chief Innovation Officer at a press conference this afternoon.

Described as “the perfect immigrant story” by the city’s Managing Director Rich Negrin, Ebeid, who was born in Egypt but raised in Jersey City after losing as a teenager his father to skin cancer, rose through the ranks of New Jersey state government to become among the only cabinet level leaders that fiery Governor Chris Christie kept on.

Now, after ‘flatly’ turning down the offer, the soft spoken and succinct Ebeid is preparing to move his wife and new daughter to a city he admits he doesn’t know well to help inject innovation into the City of Philadelphia. Answering directly to Negrin, himself an immigrant story who lost his father young and grew up in a smaller North Jersey city, Ebeid joins Mayor Nutter’s cabinet in a role that is meant to “bring the most impact at the least cost,” he says.

Below, Ebeid talks to Technically Philly, before he even knows what neighborhood he’ll call home, about his priorities, his childhood and if he’s going to join Nutter and Negrin on Twitter.

As always, edited for length and clarity.

You’re going from a state job with more than 800 IT employees to a big city with fewer than 400. It has unique challenges and requires you to move from where you have always lived. Is this a job you wanted?

When [the search team] first called, I flatly said I wasn’t interested because I had never thought about leaving New Jersey and wasn’t sure this was what I would want to do if I did leave, but [city Managing Director] Rich Negrin, his staff and Mayor Nutter were very persuasive. I came to believe that I am now part of a team that is really improving Philadelphia. I felt that I was in the company of people who are extremely passionate. Although I knew very little about Philly, I was excited to be part of a team that hopes to turn around Philly and technology has always been a passion of mine to do that kind of work.

[Ebeib will be making $170,000, as the Inquirer later reported, considerably less than his successor Allan Frank, who made $209,000 and was the city's second highest paid employee.]

Are you coming in with new priorities?

I don’t want to be known as a the infrastructure guy. That’s often what the ‘I’ in CIO means, that you make sure all the IT basics turn on. I see my role as really bringing that new sense of innovation. Yes, we have a responsiblity to make sure data is secure and handle all those foundations elements of IT, but I think we have an equal responsibility to handle real innovation to help the customers who are eventually the tax payers get greater value and have a better relationship with the city.

So, for priorities, I want to help develop a stronger sense of entrepreneurship and innovation to bring cutting edge forms of technology from the private and retail sectors to the city. People have had different expectation levels from when they’re bidding on something on Amazon to when they are dealing with city government, but the younger generation is going to expect no difference.

If you want to do business with Philadelphia online, we need to offer the same or even better value [from the past] at a lower unit cost to the taxpayer. That’s what I need to do.

One of the first things I want to do before the end of the year is to reach out to the big, small and medium suppliers [of services to the city] to challenge them to help me solve the issues of making that process better.

These are the big goals. In my first 100 days, after doing due diligence, I’ll develop the real, specific strategy to decide on the right ingredients to get to the next phase of IT success here.

One of the big angles for innovation and efficiency is through the release of data, something that OpenDataPhilly.org has helped raise the awareness of. How big of a priority is that to you?

Well, history speaks for itself.

We have been very aggressive in New Jersey in publishing as much data as we can, who’s on the payroll and what’s the salary like what we have on yourmoney.nj.gov to comprehensive information, to different data layers and flyovers. We’re a very strong robust, GIS community in New Jersey and have a strong commitment to transparency and open government, something we’ll be bringing over.

Any data that is in the public domain should be published.

The only caution is that we want to make sure we’re publishing fact and putting data in the right context. I believe in transparency not only at the state level but behind the White House initiative at Data.gov. The more we publish data, the more public is well-informed and that is certainly a priority.

How public a role do you think you’ll play? For example, when it comes to an issue like flash mobs, do your think your leadership in technology in Philadelphia would mean you should get involved?

I don’t know the subject really well yet, but if the mayor were to see a role for us, I would think it would be to help collect intelligence to link individuals to events. As a city, you’re measured by how quickly and how well you respond to an event, and while technology may not have a pivotal role, there’s clearly a back office role to provide law enforcement the tools to link the events with individuals with intelligence and find creative ways to respond.

So if not with a public law enforcement issue like flash mobs, where will the public see the ‘innovation’ happen in your title?

I can guarantee you that what Philly is doing by announcing a ‘Chief Innovation Officer’ is thinking about squeezing value out of processes.

It’s not that no one cares about the infrastructure, but with cloud computing and virtualization, the infrastructure part has been made a commodity, anyone with the team can do it. The real question is how do you squeeze out that value.

You’re not going to solve real problems by maintaining servers. While that’s important, the more important questions are ‘How do we mine data and turn that into intelligence? How do you provide a consistent set of tools across different silos in government? How do you develop tools to combat fraud and abuse?”

In all of those ways and more, I’ll certainly start the things, even if I might not be the one to finish them.

What did Mayor Nutter seem to most want out of you?

He said, “Adel, we have the responsibility of bringing the best value possible out at the least cost possible. What you tolerate becomes your standard, so do not tolerate less than success.”

He’s very passionate about improving Philadelphia. He’s very passionate about technology. He might not have a clear bullet point on technology, but he wants to use it to make Philadelphia better.

I would have thought someone at his level would only have five or 10 minutes to talk to me, but we almost spent two hours talking. That’s what did it for me, when you see a top level executive give you that kind of support, when you see you have a seat at the table of the mighty, when you see you’re going to be empowered, those are things looking forward that make you want to get involved.

Why should the tech community care about a new CIO?

Because I am going to need their help to take on the challenges we have to face.

I believe in public-private partnerships. I am not smarter than the folks who are out there, I am smarter by the people I surround myself with. I will look forward to working with these folks to help this city. I need to figure out exactly what problems need the most fixing first, but the technology community and its businesses are extensions of us. All of those technology companies, particularity the small ones, are going to be vital. We’re not going to get the job done alone.

Why should average citizens care?

There’s a generation who will be interested in our civic engagement as it becomes more in-line with what they’re used to on social networking. But, really, if we integrate our services the right way, the only way the general public will care about city IT is if there’s an absence of leadership or a real failure.

So are we going to see you on Twitter with Mayor Nutter, Rich Negrin, Rosetta Lue and others?

I’ve drank the Kool-Aid on social networks. This is about everyone having value and being available…. I plan to, but I need a good level of understanding first because I want the tweeting to be well informed and valuable. I don’t think anyone cares about me having a cheesesteak sandwich, so I need to get my arms around the issues. But it’s my plan.

The first consolidated Chief Technology Officer Philadelphia had was the outspoken and personality-driven Allan Frank, followed by his interim successor Tommy Jones, who was much more driven by the day-to-day ‘running of the railroad.’ Which leadership style is more like your own?

My leadership style in the first 100 days will be quite different than the next 100 days.

I don’t shout from rooftops, but I’m not one to dive in the weeds.

In the first 100 days, I need to do an assessment and know what kind of leader I need to be. Do I need to be leading from the front or be more of an enabler? I’m going to establish my team and my style once I really decide what problems we need to solve first. I’m not going to over promise and then under-deliver. Really, I won’t make any promises in the first 100 days.

So who will be on that team? Do you plan to bring anyone from New Jersey? You worked there with Tommy Jones in the past, is he staying?

I’ve worked well with Tommy in the past, but I need to know what Tommy wants to do in the future. It’s probably part of my assessment.

I have a lot of contacts from the last 23 years, but I’m not looking to cannibalize New Jersey because that’s where my heart is. I might run into some great talent here and they might certainly be the candidates to build a team around. I need to know what kind of team to build first.

[For his part, Jones said this in an email to Technically Philly: "As for sticking around, that's Adel's call. There is still tons and tons of heavy lifting to do to support all the new innovation we're pushing for, and I'm a weightlifter. So, I suspect you're still see me around for a while."]

Rich Negrin called you ‘the perfect immigrant story.’ Can you tell us a little about it?

My family came from Cairo, Egypt when I was 10, in 1974.  Four years later, my dad passed away from cancer. My mom had a defining moment, she could have easily gone back overseas where we had a strong family network. She decided to maintain my father’s dream, worked hard to provide for myself and my two sisters and now we are all happy and prosperous.

My dad wanted to create new opportunities. He wanted us to be all we could be. It’s very hard to do that in some places. The United States was the perfect haven for those who wanted to do that. He came here to do that. We’re all very thankful and remember the day we came overseas, the friendships. I grew up in Jersey City, near church and the restaurants and stores and it was a place I loved.

The native of Glasgow, Scotland moved from Alexandria, VA to take the Vice Provost for Research gig at Drexel University in September and is awash in a continued University City renaissance that most Philadelphians from even five years ago wouldn’t recognize.

The engineer-by-training spent 20 years at the venerable National Science Foundation and is here to push forward Drexel’s reputation as a serious research institution.

“The tipping point for that is going from the individual cottage industry notion of research with deep expertise to a place where we are bringing the researcher across a variety of other fields to create a sum greater than the parts that can attack bigger challenges,” Crawford tells Technically Philly , her accent aglow. “So it’s taking new technologies and bringing together the creative arts and engineering or whoever else and pull them in that sandbox to have the largest impact possible.”

Now living in Center City, Crawford says she brings from NSF “an understanding of the topic barriers in these large projects.”

Below, Crawford talks about why Drexel was the right choice, the coolest research happening at the university right now and more.

As always, edited for length and clarity.

Why leave NSF for Drexel?

I really believe this is a unique college with unique skills, and I’m interested by institutions stepping up to the next level. Drexel has gone through tremendous growth, both in revenue and new colleges and schools. I sensed here an opportunity to do something new. Instead of tweaking, I feel like the institution is at a tipping point. The strength is the small teams of investigation, research and activites, so now we’re ready and have enough core competency to move up to the multi-disciplinary and group efforts that create institutional impact… I want to be a part there.

What is the coolest thing you’re around at work?

A Drexel University team of engineers, scientists and biologists have developed a carbon nanotube-based device for probing single living cells without damaging them.

What will that do?

This technique will allow experts to identify diseases in their early stage and advance drug discovery. The research led by Dr. Yury Gogotsi, professor of materials science and engineering and director of the A.J. Drexel Nanotechnology Institute, and Dr. Gary Friedman, professor of electrical engineering, uses the nanotube-based device, known as a cellular endoscope, to evaluate cells about a thousand times smaller than a human hair.

The cellular endoscope interrogates the intracellular environment of living cells, delivers fluorescent quantum dots and analyzes molecules inside a cell without the cell recognizing the needle’s presence. Drexel’s W. M. Keck Institute for Attofluidic Probes now manufactures the smallest endoscopes ever created, with endoscopes providing a potentially transformative technology for studying the fundamentals of single living cells and more broadly, for cell biology.

What problem does that solve?

Today, cell biologists usually destroy a large number of cells to extract cellular components and biological molecules needed for identifying diseases and analyzing effects of new drugs, or to achieve a better understanding of how the cell functions. Glass pipettes are widely used to inject material into cells. The pipettes cause too much damage to remain within the cell for a long time and are not designed to report information in the form of optical or electrical signals from within the cell. The Drexel research team had an idea for a minimally invasive cellular probe, the tip of which could remain within the cell for a long time while reporting important information in the form of optical and electrical signals and transferring tiny amounts of material to and from the cell. This probe is similar to an endoscope employed by doctors to perform minimally invasive operations inside human patients, only much smaller.

The Drexel team is funded by the Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team National Science Foundation grant and the W. M. Keck Foundation.

How are you finding University City?

First, I have visited most of the innovation hubs of the country — Boston, San Diego, Silicon Valley, the I-4 corridor in Florida — and I have been flabbergasted by Philadelphia, with just the number of institutions that are making research contributions. The connectedness in this region is amazing. Everyone seems to know everyone else. People find it compelling and never leave. It’s nothing like Washington D.C., a city of transients.

This is a region of people who come and they stay and they’re excited by so many institutions of higher education and so many teaching hospitals and vibrant pharma and investors and incubators . There is huge potential here, some of which is probably untapped. I have been amazed by the connectedness and networking.

The University City Science Corridor along Market Street, well, that is a huge asset for the region. One of the things we [at Drexel] were talking about was doing an asset mapping to connect people with like minded individuals and organizations. The faculty understand where we have competencies. That’s one of the important things we have to do regionally, have a better understanding of everything we currently already have. We have a huge number of possibilities here, like all the students and the growing propensity for staying in the region.

I’ve been very excited and somewhat surprised at the level of activity here.

How can we do better of getting the country or the world to recognize Philly’s community of research and innovation and knowledge?

It’s being involved in the right conversations and many of our regional partners are, but it’s getting involved there to establish national priorities. I think there’s opportunity to do more of that. If you look at the conversations in Washington around innovation and innovation policies — things that impact economic growth — we need to make sure that we’re sharing through hard work and show what we’ve learned and growth. We need to share that on a national level.

Is Philadelphia engaged in those conversations enough in city and state government, well, there should be clear champions for innovaiton in the city and the state. I don’t think it needs to be one champion, but we should know and look to them.

Rob McCord, your Pennsylvania state treasurer, wants you to have empathy for him.

Just about the highest ranking Democrat in state politics has an easy laugh and a friendly manner. But, he says, if you’re going to describe him, you ought to start first with his entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurs ought to stick together.

Since 1994, McCord, 51, served as a senior executive at Safeguard Scientifics and founded the Eastern Technology Fund. He co-founded Pennsylvania Early Stage Partners and, from 1996 to 2007, he led the Eastern Technology Council [Official bio here].

He’s a venture capitalist in background, a Harvard kid and a Wharton grad by education and now he’s in his first term safeguarding $120 billion in public funds. In that role, McCord is offering the office up to his base –  whom he describes as “job-creating, technology-orientated entrepreneurs”– for advising, investing and as a potential client.

If nothing else, he thinks the Philadelphia technology community ought to know who he is. If only because he grew up on the Main Line, invested in tech businesses here and, well, because when it comes to statewide representation, Philadelphia could use a friend.

Fortunately, McCord is swearing by the position for now, despite prognostications to the contrary that suggest he is a sure bet to run for governor.

“I love being treasurer. People who watch me will know, it looks a lot more fun to be treasurer than in Congress, which was another option,” McCord told Technically Philly. “I plan to run for reelection [in 2012], and I do not take it for granted. So I’m obsessively focused on the treasurer’s office.”

In between calls on his Blackberry, McCord met with Technically Philly in a crowded Cosi in Bryn Mawr to talk his background, how he could have a big impact if only he had a billion dollars and illiquid assets.

As always, edited for length and clarity

Not a lot of VC guys end up in office, why does your past fit the job?

My background in finance has proven acutely and extremely valuable in this position. No one from the Wharton School has held statewide office, I believe, let alone state treasurer. Nobody who gets in arguments about asset allocation has ever run for state treasurer. There have been bond underwriters, but not someone who talks about illiquid assets and entrepreneur-spurring assets. I have spent a lot of time in that area, so I thought with my venture capital background, I was able to really delve into these other issues that interested me.

I have… a good background to be in a chief investment officer role. …I just think it’s valuable for entrepreneurs to be represented by entrepreneurs and be asking the question ‘when we put this money to work, how much will come back in job creating, innovation-spurring endeavors in Pennsylvania?’

Rob McCord is sworn in as the new Pennsylvania State Treasurer during a ceremony held in the North Office Building. JOE HERMITT, The Patriot-News

Where is Philadelphia in this scheme of entrepreneurship compared nationally?

I’m a glass half full guy. Pennsylvania is doing very well, not perfect, but very well.

Most regions in the country couldn’t just add water — give them a certain amount of money — and have jobs follow. Philadelphia is one of those regions.

Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, is another. Very few people in the southeast known what is happening in that southwest portion. It takes more work there, but it’s real… I look at it region by region, and Pennsylvania has a uniquely high number of those regions that can offer wealth from entrepreneurial-ism.

So just add water?

Yes…if you had another billion dollars, if you said to entrepreneurs that we will back your company but you have to be located in the Greater Philadelphia region… there are few entrepreneurs who would say ‘no way, I can’t make that work.’

When you look at our operating costs when compared to Silicon Valley or San Francisco or Manhattan or Boston or even Austin, TX, we’re right up there with the rest of them [in terms of being a competitive place to be].

The Research Triangle in North Carolina and Philadelphia are two of the country’s best lower cost centers of entrepreneurship.

…I would say San Fran, Boston and Austin are ahead of us in the sexy for young people factor, and that means we should put more work into reminding people what a great place it is to live here. But when you look at your overall cost of doing business as a young, only modestly funded entrepreneur living in say Center City or Old City Philadelphia to the same pay living in Manhattan, it is just hugely different.

The lifestyle in Philadelphia is much greater than what you might say is Greater Connecticut, but you simply have more money washing around Greater Connecticut because you have people saying I want to be within 45 minutes of the doorstep of my portfolio CEO. The increase supply of capital makes the difference… [but don't think Philadelphia isn't competitive in a national way.]

…So, yes, if you gave me a billion dollars in venture capital in this area, I could make it one or two, but of course if you gave me the first five draft picks, I could improve the Eagles, so it’s harder than that. …In the end, we need to continue to sell Philly as this great region that it is but also be growing the entrepreneurial community that we need with the help of the schools to support it.

To some extent Ben Franklin Technology Partners is meant to invest in only locally-based companies, but is it realistic to think others would do the same?

[In my venture career], we certainly set up soft goals for how much investment and success we hoped to have in the local region. If you look at groups like Penn State alumns, Carnegie Mellion alumns, fans of Greater Philadelphia and if more private groups could increase their soft goals [around Philly-specific funding], that could start something.

Some career fiduciary bureaucrats are resistant because they don’t want to reduce possible earnings. So it’s about early funds. I would love to see nonprofis like foundations be involved where we run an experiment, we invest in a for-profit-way but the profit goes back in a foundation. [The foundation network] only invests in locally-based companies, and if they can prove the profitability and sustainability of the experiment, they open it up beyond Greater Philadelphia… It’s about understanding the value of various, strong local hubs of investment and entrepreneurship.

What is your role in making any of that happen?

In the treasurer’s office, people reach out, and we try to put them in touch with appropriate investors. Right now, our coffers are dry, like lots of governments….

They should continue to come say to us that ‘we’re a growing company and venture eligible and can you introduce us.’ The odds of us getting you fresh funding is very low right now, but we sell this region. As I travel around the country with conferences and meetings, and I’ll say to private equity managers that you’re a fool if you ‘re looking at Greater New York but not Greater Philadelphia. A lot of big companies are looking at more rollups — complete acquisition — so a local company gets wrapped up into a national scale… we can help connect there.

A sub item of that is that a lot of people are not ready for venture capital but don’t know it, so often we spend time educating people about that, and people want a sounding board on how to grow their companies, whether it’s angel or other moves, and we can help.

So other than reaching out, how should this community interact with you?

Offer empathy. [laughs]

…They should know that this is someone who has invested in companies like mine, who has grown companies like mine, who, to a certain extent, has worked at companies like mine, so at least I’m someone who empathizes with the cause. I’m a Democrat but a market-minded Democrat… so when an entrepreneur reaches out to me and tells me what legislation is hurting or helping them, I want to hear it and I listen, so know at least that there is representation in statewide office.

Big companies get a lot of representation because they buy it. … I tend to think job-creating, technology-orientated entrepreneurs and service providers who go out of their way to support them as my base. …So I want to help however I can….

We are something of a clearinghouse, so we can guide people to the services that their companies need. We have ginned up demand generally in the need for information technology support in Harrisburg.

Why is IT in government an important match?

There are two different directions: as cost reducer and quality of life improve and job creator.

As a cost reducer, when less money is used to get the same work done, you almost always need to call on technology, so we’ve been able to cut [treasury] payroll 16 percent while increasing productivity by 25 percent in our direct service areas.

How? What are specific examples?

In a number of ways… We improved decision rules in the Bureau of Unclaimed Property with on-going searches, some automated with various technologies, to look for people who reported [or when it has been found in government control.] Half of that unclaimed property doesn’t get collected. That’s a tax-free, limited effort to bring in revenue and reduce the cost of government. That’s since we we came into office… and just one example.

Similarly, we reduced the fees in our Vanguard [college savings] tuition account program… with increased tech both in Vanguard and in treasury with customer service and in simple maintenance… So look at pa529.com for details. We dramatically reduced fees, increased the amount collected in and reduced the cost of government through technology.

….We have to face that regardless of the exchange rate between China and us, uneducated labor will be less expensive outside our borders, so we have to create high value work. You do that with relationships and protectable technology advantages.

And that’s what I do best: relationships and protectable technology advantages.

Tommy Jones

Allan Frank and Tommy Jones could probably make a decent buddy team movie together.

Frank, who will next week leave his post as the Chief Technology Officer for the City of Philadelphia, is, by all accounts, high energy, a self-described ‘ideas man’ with a gravely voice and an ability to capture the attention of audiences that are usually expecting a stodgy bureaucrat to talk about servers and network capacity.

Jones, who has been Frank’s deputy since November 2009 and will become interim CTO on Feb. 1, would probably be the straight man of the duo. Though he has a playful chuckle, he is more serious and details-oriented than Frank.

In a phrase, if Frank might be more likely to ask ‘why can’t we?’ Jones would be the one to ask ‘how do we?’

Jones had been Deputy Chief Technology Officer in Washington D.C. for two years when he moved to Philadelphia to take a similar role with Frank, whom he had met at a function three months earlier.

“I like people telling me how impossible something is to do.,” Jones told Technically Philly earlier this month in a small conference room on the 18th floor of the Market Street Division of Technology headquarters. “[Frank] was telling me what he had going on, and he said ‘Tom, I need someone to come make this happen.”

Come he did, in November 2009, eventually settling into the Art Museum area. Now he has to actually make this happen. Fortunately, he says he has energy too — saying he’s a 26-year-old in the body of someone who is 53.

Jones, who grew up in Charles City County, Virginia, boasts a career that has taken him to various corners of the technology world, from retail to software development to accounting and other fields, including four years in the U.S. Air Force in the 1980s. Below, he talks about why slowing down is the best way to get the most done and what’s going to be different under this interim leader.

As always, edited for length and clarity.

What is your number one top priority when you take on the interim CTO title next week?

Number one for me is customer service. Our customer service sucks. I’m going to admit that, the internal, DOT to the other agencies. I’m admitting that because I realize the sheer volume my people are dealing with.

One of the things I did [when I got here], I did a snapshot of emails — remember i told you my network group was two people? In September, October and November, those guys were averaging almost 1,000 emails a day. Now granted, a lot of those were CCs and things like that, but how do you not drop the ball when you’re getting that volume of emails? I can’t keep up with that.

So we’re focused very heavily on getting both control of that so we don’t create more traffic than necessary that makes it easier to drop the ball and also working with the organizations to say ‘guys, I know you have 58 projects, there’s no way we can do 58, so let’s focus on 10, let’s stop talking about the other 48, we can revisit them in six months, but let’s focus on 10 and i can actually get work done and you’ll be happier.’ So number one for me is focusing on customer service.

Do you have second and third priorities to round out an agenda?

Now, if I focus on customer service, that eliminates some of the thrashing we did. That gives me a little bandwidth to go back and get what personally my second issue is, and that’s I gotta get my network faster because it’s the foundation of so many things we want to do.

I also want to rebuild Phila.gov. I’m a very consumer-orientated person, so if you look at what i did in D.C., we took  the dc.gov and you look at it now it’s being rolled out as we speak. It went  from focusing on a department to focusing on what do you need to do. If you’re trying to get a business license, why do you care what department handles it? You care, can I get through this process. So we’ve been working with some of the departments, like L&I and commerce to build sort of a portal that makes it easier for a business person.

Are there any plans you will be changing?

The plans in place now aren’t just Allan’s plans, they are our plans.

We have been working on them for a year, fighting, arguing, changing…. Ninety-eight percent of what is there, I was a part of and agree with. It says interim role, but I look at it as my job until I’m replaced.

I think I have a slightly different focus than what you may have heard before. It’s not different than Allan, but we have both learned so much in the last year. We have so much, so many problems in the sheer capacity we have available to us that I got to focus on how the ‘running the railroad’ capacity can get a little more efficient and we’ve really got a huge focus on priorities.

The demands and needs and wants of the city far exceed its capacity and you don’t up-capacity very quickly, so what we ‘ve been working with all commissioners, deputy mayors and directors is to identify the initiatives and really talk what are the real priorities. So let’s face it, we don’t have an open checkbook, we can’t do everything, so some of those priorities are the ‘running the railroad’ priorities and some of those priorities are strategic priorities. So that’s where I’m focusing, to make sure we really have the priorities down.

Frank talked a lot about the Digital Philadelphia vision conceived in his tenure, which featured three prominent priorities, (a) of opening up more agency data, (b) of digital inclusion measures and (c) using technology as an economic driver. How do you personally prioritize those very big, simultaneous goals he had?

Those three priorities are very important to me.

I’ve come to realize the way we did it before was Allan drove a lot of the figuring out how to get the strategic initiatives off the ground while that meant someone had to be here worrying about the operations. So we sort of split the load. We’ve both did both, but which one we focused on [was clear].

In doing that, we both came to the realization that [the city has] such a crumbling infrastructure… compared to other cities. The years have taken [their] toll, and our network teams and server teams are minuscule in size compared to similarly sized cities.

I hate to use the word ‘slowing down,’ but in a sense, I’m slowing down out of necessity.

Before coming here, you spent two years with the city of D.C., which is generally considered a city government that is more progressive than Philly’s. What are the biggest differences?

It’s hard to compare. I look at Philly being where D.C. was seven years ago.

D.C. was crumbling seven years ago. The mayor was able to come in and convince all the people necessary of the massive infusion necessary of money and capacity to get D.C. to the state it should be at, and they got the money in the door.

Philly has a mayor who understands that and is working extraordinarily hard to support us, but we’re in the middle of a fiscal crisis, so there’s a ‘I understand the need and I’m going to work as hard as I can to fill it, but I have some unfortunate realities forced upon me.’

What happened in D.C., we had went through the three years of pain of putting in a full-fledged procurement system [to track contracts] that was all online. I didn’t worry about a contractor time sheet, contractors had to sign in the system, put in their time and got automatically approved and if I needed a contractor or skill set I logged in [to a database of approved vendors].

We went from an average of four months to get someone on — which is bout what it is here in Philly — to three weeks. I don’t have that technology in place today. I have a city that supports me doing it and a mayor in support of that, but you can only move so fast with the fiscal constraints we have. If you asked me what my frustrations here, it isn’t with people — I know I can make massive reform and efficiencies here — but in the current financial constraints.. It’s limiting us all.

D.C. went through this seven years ago and hit this when the times were better and went through the building to get reform.

So what is the core change once you take the lead next week?

In the last couple months and on Feb. 2 more so, there will be a much greater emphasis on getting these boring foundational things working, such as reducing the number of projects we’re attacking so we can knock them off, such as the data centers cleaned up, such as finishing off the network. Allan put more energy into the big picture stuff than I will for the next six months. I think if he was here Feb. 1, he would be doing the same thing because we’ve both learned. We need to focus.

Every Friday, Technically Philly brings you an interview with a leader or innovator in Philadelphia s technology community. See others here.