BmoreSmart and MD SEA have merged, bringing together the two Baltimore organizations focused on providing learning and networking opportunities for social entrepreneurs. This merger allows the organizations to combine efforts and host high-quality events that meet the needs of the entire social enterprise community. In fact, the first one is coming up on September 24: the Mid-Atlantic Regional Summit 2012.
Over time, you'll see the name BmoreSmart replaced with MD SEA, but we're not going away. Scott Burkholder is a member of the MD SEA Board, and MD SEA will continuing posting news and events on this website.
If you have any questions about the merger, please don't hesitate to ask. Otherwise, we hope to see you at an upcoming event.
Social Enterprise Alliance Maryland Chapter enhances and encourages sustainable solutions to social problems
2012 January Meeting Notes - Open Government
Rico Singleton, the Chief Information Officer of the City of Baltimore, met with BmoreSmart on January 23, 2012. Due to the size of the projects they are undertaking, his office's priorities haven't changed significantly in the last quarter. He wanted to do a lot less speaking at this meeting and hear more from the community.
Heather Hudson, the project manager for OpenBaltimore, spoke briefly. She expects to upload more data shortly. In particular, the red light and speeding camera data should be up soon. Recently several sets were loaded: vacant buildings and lots, the subset of vacants in the Vacants to Value program, and Environmental Control Board citations. Ms. Hudson is interested in hearing from the community about the data sets and is looking for feedback about which data sets she should pursue next.
Mr. Singleton talked about a few items he's exploring:
Mr. Singleton would like someone from the community to help start a civic hack day or apps contest. He's also been talking with community members about an accelerator for civic apps. It would be like a local mini-Code for America.
Next members of the technology community talked.
Heather Hudson, the project manager for OpenBaltimore, spoke briefly. She expects to upload more data shortly. In particular, the red light and speeding camera data should be up soon. Recently several sets were loaded: vacant buildings and lots, the subset of vacants in the Vacants to Value program, and Environmental Control Board citations. Ms. Hudson is interested in hearing from the community about the data sets and is looking for feedback about which data sets she should pursue next.
Mr. Singleton talked about a few items he's exploring:
- Improving the crime mapping database
- Allowing personal cameras to be submitted and used as part of the existing blue-light camera network.
Mr. Singleton would like someone from the community to help start a civic hack day or apps contest. He's also been talking with community members about an accelerator for civic apps. It would be like a local mini-Code for America.
Next members of the technology community talked.
- Shea Frederick, a local developer, presented the software that he and others have created using data from OpenBaltimore. In particular, he looked at Spot Agent and Baltimore Vacants. He would like to see national data standards, which would make creating and scaling apps much easier.
- Mark Headd, an open-data evangelist, talked about what was happening beyond Baltimore. He mentioned SeeClickFix, Open City, Civic Commons, and Code for America Brigade. Mr. Headd suggested that volunteer developers are not well suited for working on internal systems. However, when volunteers work on external systems, the city has more time to work on internal systems.
- Rodney Foxworth would like to see resources mobilized for low-income communities to be able to use technology.
- Keisha Reed and Andrew Coy talked about technology and it's role in education. Baltimore's technology sector wants a pipeline of technology savvy employees, but Mr. Coy has students that struggle with using a mouse in his introductory technology classes.
- Ed Mullin, a local CIO, thinks that the boring stuff is the important stuff. The city needs more people willing to do the boring coding that makes it work.
January 2012 Meeting - Open Government
Rico Singleton, the Chief Information Officer of the City of Baltimore, and BmoreSmart are getting together again to talk about open government and what's happening at the Mayor's Office of Information Technology. You can expect presentations from the community about what they took away from the September meeting as well as an update on his activities.
The meeting will be January 23, 2012 from 6 pm to 8 pm. As space is limited, you'll need to register by Thursday, January 19 to attend this meeting.
The meeting will be January 23, 2012 from 6 pm to 8 pm. As space is limited, you'll need to register by Thursday, January 19 to attend this meeting.
2011 October Meeting Notes - GiveCorps
GiveCorps is an online community where people can support local nonprofits and get rewards in return. At October's BmoreSmart meeting, Jamie McDonald, one of GiveCorps co-founders, and Peter Jackson, Vice President of Merchant Relationships, talked about the recently launched social enterprise.
Weekly, GiveCorps features five nonprofit organizations with a specific project to fund. Each day an email is sent to the GiveCorps subscriber list highlighting one of these projects. When a subscriber donates to a project, he or she can opt to receive a reward from one of the listed local merchants. The GiveCorps Foundation processes the donations and provides the tax receipts. In thirty to sixty days, the nonprofit updates the donors about the project's progress and success.
Jamie and Beth Falcone, GiveCorps' other founder, developed GiveCorp in response to two trends: large numbers of donors pooling small amounts to create large amounts and the online coupon trend. They want to see 500 people giving $25 a day, which would create a pool of about $5 million to support local nonprofits. This would put GiveCorps among the largest donors in Baltimore.
GiveCorps was launched mid-summer. The most important task for them has been building their subscriber list. A key part of building the list is having a presence at local events and marketing themselves as a way for college students to find out about new Baltimore stores, restaurants, and so on.
Since the launch, GiveCorps discovered that their initial assumptions overestimated how quickly the list would grow. To address the gap, they've been experimenting with more ways to spread the word, including sending a weekly email to highlight local volunteer activities and off-beat community events.
So far the largest donation has been $1,300 to Baltimore BORN; however, the average donation has been $40.
Weekly, GiveCorps features five nonprofit organizations with a specific project to fund. Each day an email is sent to the GiveCorps subscriber list highlighting one of these projects. When a subscriber donates to a project, he or she can opt to receive a reward from one of the listed local merchants. The GiveCorps Foundation processes the donations and provides the tax receipts. In thirty to sixty days, the nonprofit updates the donors about the project's progress and success.
Jamie and Beth Falcone, GiveCorps' other founder, developed GiveCorp in response to two trends: large numbers of donors pooling small amounts to create large amounts and the online coupon trend. They want to see 500 people giving $25 a day, which would create a pool of about $5 million to support local nonprofits. This would put GiveCorps among the largest donors in Baltimore.
GiveCorps was launched mid-summer. The most important task for them has been building their subscriber list. A key part of building the list is having a presence at local events and marketing themselves as a way for college students to find out about new Baltimore stores, restaurants, and so on.
Since the launch, GiveCorps discovered that their initial assumptions overestimated how quickly the list would grow. To address the gap, they've been experimenting with more ways to spread the word, including sending a weekly email to highlight local volunteer activities and off-beat community events.
So far the largest donation has been $1,300 to Baltimore BORN; however, the average donation has been $40.
2011 September Meeting Notes - BmoreSmart Meets City Hall
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Mr. Singleton has been the CIO of Baltimore for the past nine months. It's his first local government role. Previously, he was the Deputy State Chief Information Officer/CTO at the New York State-Office for Technology and the Chief Information Officer at the Ohio Treasurer of State. He is a native of Columbus, Ohio but now lives in Baltimore City.
Working in Baltimore and in city government has provided a few surprises for Mr. Singleton. He wasn't used to the operational focus that a city has (fixing potholes, mitigating floods, and so on) and is baffled at the lack of standard processes, the under-investment in technology infrastructure, and how difficult collaboration and communication can be.
http://twitter.com/#!/tracycgold/status/118827873267224578
Beyond learning how Baltimore City Government works and handling the normal day-to-day challenges a CIO faces, Mr. Singleton also has had to deal with threats to the City's technology infrastructure from tropical storms, earthquakes, floods, and fires during his short tenure. Most of this work has been done without help from the other MOIT leaders. He's had to hire both a Deputy CIO and a Chief of Staff, positions that were empty when he arrived, and is still looking for people to fill other key roles in his office.
Despite the additional challenges, he has hit the ground running, establishing several priorities for the Mayor's Office of Information Technology (MOIT):
- achieving IT service delivery excellence;
- building a smarter city;
- enhancing IT governance;
- enhancing constituent engagement;
- maximizing return on IT investment; and
- modernizing legacy systems.
The MOIT has also racked up some significant accomplishments in the past several months, including launching OpenBaltimore, releasing a Mobile 311 app, setting up an eRecruit system for hiring new employees, and improving internal operational efficiency.
While Mr. Singleton will continue to push his office to implement systems and processes that improve how Baltimore City Government employees serve their constituents, he recognizes that MOIT has some significant challenges to overcome.
- MOIT is under-resourced. This is both because the Baltimore budget does not set aside enough for technology as well as because some of the limited technology dollars available have been spent poorly. Mr. Singleton said that MOIT has been too lenient when dealing with vendors in the past, allowing them to negotiate directly with the purchasing department and not holding them to high standards. He has started to hold these vendors accountable.
http://twitter.com/#!/tracycgold/status/118816338243371012
But even if more money is made available through holding vendors accountable, Baltimore is spending only 1 percent of its budget on information technology. The average government entity spends 2 to 4 percent of its budget on information technology. - MOIT is reactive. He would like to see MOIT become more proactive and prevent problems from happening rather than reacting once a problem has happened.
- The decentralized nature of IT makes creating efficiencies difficult. The responsibility for Baltimore's information technology is currently decentralized, although a consolidation plan has been developed. Prior to implementing that plan, MOIT is working to repair their reputation and showing departments they can confidently rely on MOIT for information technology services.
- No one has been responsible for project management. Project management was handle haphazardly until a project management office was established on Mr. Singleton's arrival. Damien Sharp, who was also at the BmoreSmart meeting, was hired to lead this office.
- No IT governance policies exist.
http://twitter.com/#!/mheadd/status/118816789042954240 - Important systems are running on obsolete and out-of-date technology systems. Baltimore uses a 40-year-old COBOL/CICS mainframe to run the systems that collect 90 percent of the revenue for the city. Staff with expertise in this area are retiring or at least thinking about retirement. It's difficult to find people with the skills needed to run or service the mainframe.
http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanjulian/status/118817826587934720 - The culture of MOIT needs to change. Mr. Singleton wants to see the culture of MOIT change. To date, it's been a very traditional and conservative workplace, but he would like to see that change to where staff can take advantage of telecommuting arrangements and the culture accepts the best of what Baby Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials have to offer.
- Data center facilities are inadequate. Baltimore City's two data centers are located in aging buildings without proper environmental controls. Also, disaster recovery procedures and policies need to be put into place.
- Finding the right people with the right skills is very difficult. Mr. Singleton expressed that it is difficult to find talented people who will take positions with MOIT due to low pay and Baltimore's problems.
- Baltimore MOIT has done too much custom development, which leads to needing to do too much maintenance. Historically, MOIT has looked at custom solutions first, which means they have spent a lot of time developing and maintaining custom solutions. Mr. Singleton has changed this. MOIT now looks at cloud-based solutions first, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions next, and thinks about building the solution themselves last. He recognizes that Baltimore isn't the only city with its problems and that solutions likely already exist.
http://twitter.com/#!/kbladow/status/118814112477229056
Mr. Singleton is looking for open source solutions as well. The Baltimore City Government website was built using DotNetNuke.
http://twitter.com/#!/kbladow/status/118832316054380545
Participants were amazed by the list of challenges that Mr. Singleton listed.
http://twitter.com/#!/TomLoveland/status/118833229854806016
http://twitter.com/#!/wraydo/status/118824301737676800
http://twitter.com/#!/mheadd/status/118820538301956096
After giving the group this overview, Mr. Singleton stopped for questions.
OpenBaltimore
The topic of most interest was OpenBaltimore and plans for releasing new data sets. More data will be released shortly and will be parking and food related. It should include data about hybrid parking locations, farmers markets, and food deserts. Mr. Singleton strongly supports the OpenBaltimore project, has hired a project manager, Heather Hudson, to manage the project, and would eventually like to see a portal that contains data from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.
Unfortunately, the roadmap for releasing additional data isn't clear. MOIT struggles to get data from other departments. The audience suggested that MOIT let them know when the process was getting stalled. That way the public could direct their requests to the appropriate department instead of at MOIT. Another speed bump is that the MOIT Socrata expert, who was leading the real-time data publishing projects, is leaving.
Several participants recognized the good work done by the people behind the Baltimore City 311 Twitter account. Mr. Singleton was happy to hear the feedback.
Contracting Practices
MOIT currently has two prequalified standby agreements, which will be up for renewal shortly. Mr. Singleton would like to see more diversity in who is able to provide contract information technology services to Baltimore and will be putting out a request for proposal shortly. As always, local businesses are encouraged to respond.
For project-based work, MOIT abides by the Baltimore City Government procurement process. To be eligible for these projects, businesses need to be registered with Baltimore City and agree to the City's terms and conditions.
Life Outside of the Office
While Mr. Singleton spends a lot of time working, he does have interests outside of the office. He spends time with his family, travels, skis, SCUBA dives, golfs, and plays squash. He also enjoys listening to live music and is always looking for new places to go hear it.
How Can the Community Help?
Mr. Singleton would like the community's help with increasing the information technology budget. Due to the timing of his hiring, he didn't have a lot of success last year. This year he's actively looking for support for increasing the information technology budget and will be putting in requests to the Innovation Fund Committee as well.
For those that missed it, the slides from Rico Singleton's presentation are available online.
A huge thank you to Mr. Singleton, his staff, and Tom Loveland for making this event happen.
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