the following podcast is producer sponsored by a community member the content views and opinions expressed are those of the participants and do not reflect those of b m c or the town of belmont b m c welcomes your comments  a mac computer recently i've been a lifelong windows user and as i sat at my front room table with my twenty six year old daughter sitting across the table from me about every thirty seconds i would look over it  and ask how do i do this or how do i do that and it was an experience that impressed upon me the fact that what i thought i knew about technology was probably old and out of date and if that was true for me on a personal level it was probably even more true on a public level and i thought others might be interested as well i'm learning more about technology and how it effects our town government so that's all along when winded introduction to why i've asked paul roberts to join us today paul is chair of the information technology invitees re committee i tak for about and we're going to talk about how technology and how government work together so thanks for stopping over thanks for having me roger it's a pleasure before we really get started can i can you give us an introduction to who years more than ten years from precinct eight and former school committee member and let's see personally i'm you know husband and father of three daughters all going to the belmont public schools a d have lived in town sence two thousand and five and when we moved right around the time our our oldest was about start kindergarten wimber professionally i am journalist and have been for the last sixteen years i write about our entire time i've written about cyber security which when i started covering it in two thousand and two was a fairly obscure topic mostly limited to the technology press and now we as we now  started about six years ago started my own publication called security ledger and i've basically had my own sort of small media business sense and that's how i make a living and the end i tacked the information technology advisory committee  has what as its church it's an interesting committee we are not members nine appointed members who are actually appointed by three different bodies within town the board of selectmen who support who appoint four members the school committee appoints four members and the library board of trustees appoints one member and i am actually the library board of trustees appointee to the committee so it is interesting in its makeup it is mostly  information technology professionals who you know are working in the field who have a background either as computer science engineers network engineers you know physicists and folks who have you know the kind of deep knowledge of technology back when it was initially formed which i think was in the in the early ninety's it was a period in which the town was released darting to build out an information technology infrastructure so the earliest deployments of personal computers and then computer networks to connect them within the town and i tacked back then was really a reservoir of know how about everything from you know kind of purchasing to networking tournament so we were really a resource that the town could use i think before the town had a full time i t director or even an i t department to help with some of those challenges and then over the years we have as the town has accrued both both director for the town and for the schools and you know library has its own i t person the police and public safety folks to move to more of an advisory role helping them to assess and evaluate bigger picture projects for example you know the towns you know say before that technology is going to completely change the way local governments interact with their citizen more with their constituency you know have my accurately represented well yeah yes i mean i think you know technology is going to is is as we can look around us and start to see you know the you know a bunch of different  developments technology wise are kind of prompting all kinds of changes in our in our world in our society so you can look at the advent for example of the smart phone and and  services for example like lift ride sharing ride hailing services that really really or i used a lime bike to get over here a bike sharing service and that just simply would not have been something  possible in the days before the smartphone because there would've been no way to do the transaction right i mean how do you get a rent from you'd need a bike stand and there just wasn't you know there was enough critical mass for that to support paying somebody to have a bike stand and then where do you put the bike stand so i mean it's you know smartphones in that technology ubiquitous internet connectivity are going our try reading transforming our lives spaces our environments and we can see it with right helling services we can see it with online shopping and amazon we can see it with bike sharing services air b n b this sort of shared economy and it stands to reason that those changes are going to work their way into both the government space and of course a local government space as time goes by i would say right now we're at the very early days very early stages of that transformation but it will accelerate over the next ten to twenty years now i was it a board of selectmen meeting one night and you were you were there and you were demonstrating a technology that allowed for not only remote access to  the meeting but remote inner activity in the meeting eating out is that what it was because i couldn't remember what it was called but somebody could be sitting in front of a laptop watching the board of selectmen or any other committee right and not only watch the committee but really able to participate yes it's called meeting al and it's it's actually pretty it's it's a pretty amazing piece of technology and also in some ways very  high up in that company and she was actually the one who brought the meeting out to the selectmen meeting and demo to it for us which is really nice of her to do so i guess backing up a step from that one of the things that i did and i've been at the head of  e change kind of an i t advisory committee or refocusing of the mission of i t advisory committee from from merely advising you know as i said on kind of a big big long term questions related to i t to actually a much more kind of hands on role in the community and fostering change and and researching issues that might prompt you know technological change in adoption here in belmont's government one of the things that we've decided to as a committee is really lead by example to show the way to that we might some of our government might leverage technology to foster transparency to foster interaction with the public who by and large spend a lot of time online right and one way we've done that is with by streaming all of our full committee meeting subcommittee meetings we generally don't before committee meetings for the last two years we have streamed using very simple set up with a laptop streaming means somebody can sit at their home in front of a laptop or a desktop good point you know and watch and watch the committee me that's correct that's correct so we use a platform right now we're using which is an online meeting platform that lets say people who work in the private sector might participate in remote meetings with their colleagues over a platform like zune we've used in the past google hangouts which is a free platform that google offers and yet says you can sit at home in your living room or in your bed  and not only see what's happening in the meeting but also be able to ask questions talk to people in the room and so on we've we've been able that in our meetings using a very low cost set up with a u webcam that i usually set up on a tripod somewhat above the table and it sort of it's sort of looks down on the table which is great it didn't cost anything and you get a pretty good sense of what's going on the meeting however it's not perfect in particular you know it it sometimes people are off camera because they're kind of sitting proximal to the to the webcam sometimes they can be hard to figure out who's saying well yeah who's saying what you know this kind of a jumble of sound so meeting our all is a technology that basically you planted in the middle of the table and it looks sort of like an amazon echo or something or like a sound bar it's kind of a tall cylinder it looks a little bit like an owl which is why they call it meeting  and it's got a three hundred and sixty dollars degree camera in it so it can see all the way around the room and it's got mikes so it can hear all the way around the room and basically the cool thing about it is that they've designed software that will basically that three hundred and sixty dollars degree image and focus in on the face of whom ever is talking so when you plant it there it takes that image of every but he said it around cedar on that table parts is it up into a bunch of different faces and then as people talk those faces kind of slide in and slide off camera become bigger or smaller and sort of recreates for people who are not in the room the sense of being at the table and seeing everybody participate and my impression would be and correct me if i'm wrong here sometimes i just feel but that there is a generational shift there that there is a younger generation who would jump at the ability to use that remote participation in a way that perhaps my generation would not as i see it yeah and i mean i you know again i mean i have an online media company you know i do a blog and i a podcast and webinars and i host in a you know i do a technology event so i think all day long about how to reach people online i don't know so i think i'm brilliant at it sometimes i don't think i'm very good at all but i'm thinking about it all the time and you know what what i recognize and what's obvious is yes that not only on people but frankly most people who are out there as professionals working in the business world are getting consuming most of their information online from websites from podcasts from news feeds via email via video and you tube and i look at my daughters you know the amount of video they consume via you tube and netflix and so on hulu is astounding and it's just how they it's how they absorb things and then when you look at local government what you see is that it's a totally different paradigm you know it's about you know being in the room where it happened as they say in hamilton so you got to be in that town meeting room conference room one on a tuesday evening it's one hundred and thirty and if you're sitting there seated there then you'll hear what's going on if you didn't well you know you can read the secretary's notes when they get posted on the website you know it's just not how people engage these days so i look at it as and even though it's not like we get tons of people who remotely to our streamed meetings that's not really the point the point is if they want to they can and the nd point is by streaming them and then having the the video of that session if they want to on their own time you know listen to that meeting fast forward to a particular part of it or or understand what's happened it's there for them in a format that they can access well that's an interesting question how how does one archive a video if somebody signs in front from home an ass committee a question does that all get captured somewhere and become a public record yes so that would all be part of the video you would have the video of both the people in the room and then the people captured on the video would be the attendees and then if they were to ask a question either via text or voice that would be that would be captured as well so yes i mean it depends on the platform that you're using as to how much of that interactivity is capture but certainly if they were to vocally ask a question then that would be that would be preserved as part of the video and then i would say to folks you know go to youtube and type in i t advisory committee or belmonte advisory committee and you'll find our youtube channel with all of our meetings archived there as videos that you can watch and listen to and not to denigrate the committee but if the planning board were to do this when they considered their marijuana zoning back yes there could be a lot of people who would say i've got three kids at home i really can't go to town hall for sure two or three hours but if i could stream it on lining go to particular parts of it of course that would be a big deal sure and not just people with young kids but you know folks who are seniors who don't feel you know up to going out on a snowy evening or you know braving the ice at this time of year to go to the town hall you know they can they can watch from their kitchen and participate as well ask questions so there are two questions there which is or there are two points there one is the public participating and the other of course is committee members participating oh of course right you're on a business trip or you have a childcare conflict as a committee member allowing committee members to deliberate vote via some remote technology for example you know webcam is another issue and i t advisor committee right now is putting together we've done a survey and we're putting together a report for the selectmen on that very thing both allowing the public to participate remotely which is kind of a no brainer and in fact doesn't require selectman approval but allowing committee members to deliberate vote participate remotely that does require approval from the selectmen to do because of the open meeting sir i'd like to change directions just a moment because i don't want to give the impression that whole town government is is committee meetings and hearings and things like that so i'd like you to let your imagination wander for a bit one of the big issues in belmont is traffic of course is is there a technological solution i'm not going to ask you to solve the traffic problem this morning but does technology play a role in addressing traffic so it depends on how far you want your brain to wander roquet so i would say if you were to ask that question just flat out could technology provide a solution to the tremendous you know traffic problems and solution may be overstated yeah or some kind of remedy yeah  kind of baldly like that sure of course in the in the short term i don't think that there's a technology technologic fix to these problems because as i mean i mean tell you anything about this you know you forgot more than i ever know about this but you know the traffic problems in belmont are structural problems that are much bigger than bell sure they have to do with the lack of transportation alternatives they have to do with you know residential and commercial development that doesn't take traffic into account they have to do with the reliability of our public transportation infrastructure they have to do and they have to do with new technologies like ways in google maps that have allowed people and g p s that have allowed people to start to leverage technology to modify their you know commuting patterns to try and you know gain some kind of efficiency but that's had a spillover effect in towns like belmont that sure i don't think anybody really  anticipated you know so in but if we were to step back from and say well what what could we do i mean i'd say obviously the st thing to do would be to of course to have a both federal and then state and then local transportation vision and that involves getting single drive single occupant vehicles off the road and providing environmentally you know healthy sustainable mass transit options or policies  technology that involves having the will as a country and as a state to tackle these problems and right now we just don't have that well beyond that though you know you could look you could look at things like you know it i mean if you look at the fact that the that the master unpick has gotten rid of tolls and now we just have license plate scanners and little you know radio pods in all of our cars and that's all done transparently you look at things like smart you so that and do some form of congestion pricing so that if people are driving through town you know during certain times of day they're going to pay more and if they're driving on these roads at all they're going to pay some fractional amount you know zero dollars five cents or something to belmont for the for the pleasure for the right to do that yeah that's technology already exists we could deploy it and that could be a source of revenue that would incidentally also impose a cost on people to cut through belmont and benefit the town we would need state approval to do that the state would really need to change its thinking about allowing that type of activity but there's no reason that could happen now today the technology already exist and listening to you talk about that it seems to me or it strikes me that indeed towns are sort of unique in their ability to experiment with different responses in a way that in a way that the state and certainly the federal government could not yes it's interesting i mean i think you know we all kind of tend to look at countries that are you know scandinavia or germany or whatever and where they do these you know they have these very kind of ambitious you know federal visions and goals and they pursue them we don't really have that the united states we definitely don't have a federal vision or goal right now but there is you know it sort of states of the incubators of democracy and sort of localities are the incubator is for all different kinds of things so smart city and smart town initiatives are one of those and while in general the u s is behind other parts of the world china and europe in asia and europe and some of these things looked at in the context of individual communities cities you know chicago new york boston in some ways there is some really interesting stuff going on some really interesting experimentation going on i'd like to ask you about one of the downsides of increasing reliance on technology we hear about the information intrusions financial institution and soon and credit card companies things like that and then we see bellman institutions such as water and light installing smart meter is how you work on information security is there a concern there do you have a concern should the public have a concern so i mean i'm the cyber security guy or one of the sever security guys on the panel yes and no so yes there are definitely concerns about about technology like smart meters being vulnerable to various types of cyber attack in theory in practice there not much evidence that that there have been attacks against these types of infrastructures so people should be listened sleep people should not be losing sleep and the benefits to the community of connected infrastructure like smart meters so where we can basically passively can collect real more or less real time metering data as opposed to periodic lee sending human beings around to read meters and paying them just to that that's a huge advantage to the town that far outweighs the very marginal low percentage risk of some kind of cyber incident that said the town and all towns need to be asking very hard questions of their vendors their nd and rd party suppliers about issues of data security data privacy data integrity cyber security you know frankly a lot of vendors who supply governments and you know large companies and infrastructure providers have not been in have and have not are not in the habit or not accustomed to being asked probing questions about those issues and in my experience they generally don't have good answers to them so cyber security has not been a priority for them because frankly the threats and attacks weren't there and therefore their products while they are highly reliable may not necessarily be very secure and perhaps when a wrong direction it perhaps isn't just a cyber attack but if somebody has information on my electricity use for every fifteen minutes of a day they know a whole lot about what's going on and in my household they know when i'm gone they know when i'm home yeah yeah sure i mean that is definitely a concern of course they would they would not be able to passively collect that data so they would need to have access to the systems of the utility to look at roger cold electricity use patterns and of course if they have access to the utility then arguably we've got a much bigger problem than them figuring out you know of course when you're at home but but yes and this is an issue that comes up a lot for example with you know cell phones and the various apps that track your activity and of course definitely with smart home you know people are adding more connected devices to their homes which is you know vendors might say things like well we you know we collect data but it's anonymized you know you can't you can't tell who the person is just based on the data they're sending us it's just the machine you know the devices address and yada yada yada but folks have shown pretty pretty readily that while it may not uniquely identify a person you can uniquely identify a person if you look at the pattern of the data know your identity as roger coleman is not in this data however if we look at that data like your patterns of movement in electricity use and so on we may well be able to figure out that it's roger colton's data we're looking at if we've got enough data points or different types of data from your home in your surroundings and the new york times i think has done some really interesting work on this on sort of de anonymizing people from their data and basically saying you know this pattern of movement is this person so those are things that we as a community and as society need to be very thoughtful about and it's hard for belmont because we're a small community we're at the end of the you know where the customer and we're not a huge customer from from their standpoint so we can ask hard questions and we can push back and we can make try and make smart purchasing decisions and contracting decisions based on the answers that we get  end of the day we may be forced to choose from a small part number of vendors who provide these particular products and services and and maybe in a position of kind of picking the least evil thank you very much we're out of time  committee and what i take away from this is that technology is going to affect every single aspect of of local government the way it interacts with the the community the services it delivers the way it delivers those services it's going to be wonderful it's going to it's going to be tremendous for members of the community and for the types of services belmont can provide to its residents and it's going to be a big change thanks for stopping over it's been great committee you've been listening to community conversations you can stream community conversations online through the b m p podcast network media dot org and you can also find community conversations at i tunes by searching for the b m c podcast network thank you again for two paul thank you the listeners for tuning in i'm your host roger colton i will talk to you again next time