San José Wants to Be the ‘Demonstration City’ for Smart Technologies

Officials in the city of San José focused on the private sector, not other municipal strategies and roadmaps, in crafting their newly released Smart City Vision.

The city wants to be viewed as a place where companies co-create with local government—a demonstration city—so Mayor Sam Liccardo selected an investment manager at Cisco Systems and savings director at Opportunity Fund to head up strategic partnerships in March 2015.

Bloomberg Philanthropies named San José one of its What Works Cities in December, and the city’s new chief innovation officer, Shireen Santosham, began studying Fortune 500 companies’ digital strategies for inspiration upon her January appointment.

“I looked at what large organizations are doing to stay competitive and stay connected to their customers,” Santosham told Route Fifty in an interview.

Like most cities, San José’s vision emphasizes housing, traffic and public safety, but leaders also hosted study sessions with San Francisco’s chief innovation officer, Jay Nath, and experts from companies like Seattle-based Socrata to understand what being a smart city means.

Getting digital infrastructure connected and using the data collected is a top priority, Santosham said, and partnerships with groups like PwC to reduce emissions citywide are just the beginning.

“The tech community really wants to help. They want to be engaged,” Liccardo said in an interview. “They want to demonstrate and test the latest ideas.”

Piloting Projects

San José’s data team is small, but it’s already put an internal app in police officers’ hands identifying traffic fatality hotspots and notifying law enforcement of violations to look for on any given street corner.

While there are no concrete plans for a partnership piloting autonomous vehicle projects, Santosham said, most next-generation transportation companies are based in Silicon Valley—a proximity that’s ripe for future collaboration. But the city, California’s third-most populous municipality, must next build out a work plan to take advantage of its Bay Area location.

“We don’t expect we’ll be able to eat this elephant in one bite,” Liccardo said. “We’re looking for internal champions to push for change and where demonstrations and the use of analytics and data tools can drive cost reductions and higher performance.”

First, San José must codify an open data policy.

More than 600 datasets will be released in 2016, Santosham said, increasing citizen engagement and unleashing the talent of tech-savvy residents. Only then will insights begin to be made between departments and antiquated systems replaced with a layering of analytics on top.

Digitizing the city’s rent-control registry of a little more than 40,000 housing units is high on the to-do list to protect against rent-raising abuses. Permitting is another pain point for citizens, so San José is working on digital approvals before rolling out advanced data analytics in 2017, Santosham said.

Closing the Digital Divide

Another goal of the Smart City Vision is making San José more inclusive. To that end, the city is part of a tech hire initiative that aims to place 1,000 youth lacking a four-year college degree into tech jobs within the next one to two years.

Unlike nearby San Francisco, San José hasn’t yet taken any big steps to create a framework to bring universal broadband access to all its citizens, but that doesn’t mean Internet access for low-income families isn’t being looked into.

“The connectivity imperative is there,” Santosham said.

For now, the city is strategizing how to minimize lack of access where there’s the greatest need, not just for youth but seniors, who are often isolated and whose capacity to help the city frequently goes untapped.

Universal coverage is the endgame, and San José has watched Google Fiber’s work in places like Kansas City with interest—understanding the majority of citizens can’t receive access at no or low cost that way.

“There are intriguing new technologies at play, and we’re in conversations with some providers I believe could substantially reduce the cost of gigabit-speed access,” Liccardo said. “While we may have started a bit behind other cities on our innovation agenda, we have the opportunity to leapfrog them where we’re open to piloting some of those newer technologies.”

While a bond measure covering the public cost of building the digital infrastructure would be nice, he said, widespread investment on that scale is unlikely with “most cities still chasing their tails filling potholes.”

Whatever solution San José chooses, it will need to be one where the private sector is deeply engaged to reduce the cost of scale, Liccardo added.

The city’s East Side Union High School District—the second-largest high school district in the state—is using Ed-Tech bonds for tech purchases because the funds can be drawn over time. That’s useful when tech typically needs to be upgraded every four or five years and could lead to a model for closing San José’s digital divide.

Demonstration City

San José officials have seen other cities do plenty of cool things, but Liccardo said they’d like to demonstrate “useful” innovations and “intend to be leading the country in offering solutions other cities can learn and benefit from.”

That starts with the Smart City Vision the city has just put forward.

“This is really about thinking about tech as a way to amplify human impact and to get the best out of our staff, to help citizens connect with the city better and think about new ways of working,” Santosham said. “Tech can’t replace people, but it’s about, ‘Are we using the best tools?’”