May 9, 2017 Meeting – Seattle Community Technology Advisory Board (draft)
Topics covered included: Reports from the Cable and Broadband Committee, E-Government Committee, Privacy Committee, and the Digital Inclusion Committee; discussion of Technology Matching Fund procedures; CTAB SharePoint site; a discussion of autonomous vehicles by UW Law School.
This meeting was held: May 9, 2017; 6:00-7:45 p.m., Seattle Municipal Tower, 700 Fifth Avenue, Suite 2750
Podcasts available at: http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/CTTAB/podcast/cttab.xml
Attending:
Board Members: Heather Lewis, Mark DeLoura, Karia Wong, Chris Alejano
Public: Dorene Cornwell, Harte Daniels, Lloyd Douglas, Christopher Sheats, John Krull (schools), Torgie Madison, Aida Joaquin Acosta (UW), Steven Maheshwary, Ian Griswold, Ann Summy, Gaites Swanson (UW), Daniel Healow (UW), K.K. Harris (UW), Drew Wilder (UW), Wiliam Covington (UW), Greta Knappenberger via phone
Staff: Virginia Gleason, Derrick Hall, Cass Magnuski
23 In Attendance
Meeting was called to order by Heather Lewis.
Heather Lewis: Good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us on a Tuesday evening in this beautiful sunshine. We’re going to get started with a round of introductions, starting on the outer circle. Just a reinder: Please speak up, as we are recording.
Introductions
Heather Lewis: Do we have someone on the phone? {unintelligible}. Cass, for the record, that’s Greta Knappenberger, and she’s a member of E-Gov. The first item on our agenda tonight is approval of the April minutes. Can I have a motion?
Karia Wong moves to accept; Mark DeLoura seconds. Minutes pass.
Heather Lewis: Next up on the agenda is Technology Matching Fund discussion. And that will be led by Chris Alejano.
TMF FUND DISCUSSION
Chris Alejano: I guess I could give a general timeline on what is remaining. I was going to talk about it during the committee report, but all things said, we are sort of set to convene the review team. There is a group of CTAB members, City staff folks, and community members that will be reviewing TMF proposals pretty soon. So applications were due on the third of May. It sounds like we’ve got some good proposals. We haven’t seen them personally yet. But there is supposed to be a review kick-off meeting happening tomorrow on the 10th, just to convene the review team to go over certain protocols and applications, and so on. We hope to do the review scoring on June 1 and finalize the award allocations around the June 5-9 period. And then, depending on the timing for the next CTAB meeting, we will be able to approve the TMF recommendations that move forward from that review committee. We’re on timeline for getting all of that accomplished, so it should be a fun time. For the record, folks from CTAB that agreed to be part of the review team, including myself, are Eliab Sisay, Mark DeLoura, Amy Hirotaka, Heather Lewis, Jose Vasquez from CTAB; Delia Burke and Vicki Yuki from City staff; and then community representatives Julie Pham from WTIA, Jen Hughes from Ventures, Will Pew from Tableau, Jacob [unintelligible] from the E-Gov Committee, John LeFevre from ZemZem. [unintelligible]. So it’s a nice mix of board members and community members.
Heather Lewis: Thanks, Chris. Next up we have the CTAB SharePoint site.
CTAB SHAREPOINT SITE
Virginia Gleason: One of the things that we’ve talked about for a long time is figuring out a better way to share documents with committee members. Christopher Sheats raised the issue last month hat it would be nice not to have to be concerned about public disclosure requests. So we now have a SharePoint site, and there will be a separate folder that will be accessible to the committee chairs and the members of those committees, and then the board members will have access to the entire site. It’s up and ready to go. Heather, I asked you to see what we’ve got up. I’ll be sending invitations to people to join it, but you do have to have a Microsoft account to be able to access the SharePoint site. I can send out instructions with a list of the types of accounts that would allow you to have access if you don’t regularly use SharePoint. I will send that out to the CTAB members tomorrow.And if you have any suggestions about how you would like to have the site organized differently, I can show you…actually, I can’t because it’s not letting me into my SharePoint site from here. But I’ve got a folder for each committee. I’ve got the minutes, the audio recordings, the bylaws, and then we have a monthly reconciliation that we do with the boards and commissions about who is on and when their terms start and end. That will all be up there and available for you to see at any time. But I know, especially for the committee chairs, it will be very handy to be able to have a place to put your minutes and your notes and then also to be able to go back and look at historical information. So, I’m gathering up as much historical information on the committees as I can find and putting them in those committee folders that are on the SharePoint site. Once I get your email, I will give you access to the site when it’s up and ready to go.
Heather Lewis: Thank you for putting that together. If we committees have previous information, that would be helpful, should we share that with you?
Virginia Gleason: Send it to me, or upload it yourself onto the site. Whichever way you want to do it, I’m happy to help.
Heather Lewis: Thank you very much. Chris?
Christopher Sheats: [unintelligible]
Virginia Gleason: It will be to the committee members, but for you, you’ll be able to get everything for the Privacy Committee. We have one set of SharePoint sites that have external availability. But we’re going to give access just to committee members. It wouldn’t be publicly accessible.
Christopher Sheats: [unintelligible]
Virginia Gleason: If we have portions of that that we want to put on the web site, onto our blog, we can do that.
Harte Daniels: Public information is there now.
Virginia Gleason: They’ll still see everything we’re putting out on the seattle.gov public facing web site. This is more just a place for us to store documents and share drafts and things. Suggestions that anyone has about how they want to have access, or who they want to give access, we’re open to that.
Heather Lewis: Thank you very much, Virginia. Next up, we have committee updates. The first committee update will come from the Cable and Broadband Committee.
CABLE AND BROADBAND COMMITTEE UPDATE
Karia Wong: We moved our April meeting to May 1. We were concerned that there might be protests, so we actually had a phone conference instead of an in person meeting. During our meeting, we had this session on the goals that we want to reach in 2017. Our committee goals for 2017 is to have a plan to evaluate the current low income broadband internet clients. Such as the rates, and the coverage. Our main focus will be Internet Basics from Century Link and Internet Essentials from Comcast. We will also evaluate other plans within the City, and also compare those with other states to get a better picture of our position. We also talked about the marketing and assistance for enrollment in the current programs for income eligible individuals and families. Because we all feel like we don’t know how many are actually benefiting from the programs. At the same time, a lot of people don’t know about the programs, or they don’t know that they are eligible. We thought that might be something that we should work on this year to get an idea how things are going. We also talked about how to follow up with the building issues for Century Link customers, because it has been an on-going agony for a lot of people. So that will be the focus for us this year.
Heather Lewis: Do you have a time and location for your next meeting?
Karia Wong: If Tony Perez is with us, we usually meet on the sixth floor of this building. If Tony cannot join us, this building is closed to the public by 7:00 p.m. So we will be either meeting at my office at CISC in the International District or we will decide on a location before the meeting.
Heather Lewis: Do you have a date in mind?
Karia Wong: Usually the meeting will be held on the last Monday of each month. The upcoming meeting will be on the 29th of May. is that Memorial Day? I need to check on the availability of the committee members. Usually, that would push the meeting a week forward.
E-GOV COMMITTEE UPDATE
Heather Lewis: Thank you. Next up is the E-Gov Committee. I will give the update. We are moving forward on a couple of projects. Joneil Sampana and Lloyd Douglas are working on a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) with Bruce Harrell’s team at the City Council. We are waiting on next steps there. Also, the E-Gov Committee has partnered with the Privacy Committee, and we will be looking at a number of Smart Cities-related projects. One of the reasons why we have the autonomous vehicles team from the University of Washington’s School of Law here today is because there is a lot of interest in Smart Cities projects within the City, and we at CTAB have asked Michael Mattmiller how we can potentially be helpful in working with the City to make recommendations with regard to Smart cities-related projects and work. Most of those will be coming, and we will provide updates over the next few months. We’re getting that partnership started. Our next meeting will be the last Tuesday of the month and I will put it on the board. We will be meeting at the Microsoft location in South Lake Union. That’s 320 Westlake Avenue North. The time is 6:30 to 7:30. Next up, we have the Digital Equity Committee.
Karia Wong: Just one question. What does CRM stand for?
Harte Daniels: Customer Relationship Management. It’s a sales and marketing kind of thing to try to find out what people are doing, are interested in, etc. The dynamics that they are using … most modern CRMs have an ability to monitor Twitter and find out what is trending with the residents. But you can also input other data that you have so that residents that do not have access to broadband, do not have access to internet, do not have access computers, can still be represented and their needs derived.
Heather Lewis: Chris Alejano or Mark DeLoura, would you be so kind as to what is happening with Digital Equity?
DIGITAL EQUITY COMMITTEE UPDATE
Chris Alejano: I updated everyone on the Tech Matching Fund work. The other piece to our committee conversation that we had was around this idea of starting a Digital Literacy Coalition. So, we had recently had a conference call with some folks down in Austin on what they call the Digital Empowerment Committee of Austin, which is basically a network of nonprofits, educational institutions, and other stakeholder groups in the Austin area that are trying to improve the community’s ability to participate in a digital society. Part of the reason why we wanted to connect with them is just to sort of see what it is that they’re working on, and if we could perhaps model some of their work up here around this idea or this theme around digital literacy as a component of the larger Digital Equity Plan that the City has. It was a really informative call. They were able to share with us what they’re working on. I think one of the largest take-aways from the conversation is that it really started as an initiative that the City started in terms of pulling together different stakeholder groups, and really starting from a grassroots approach to figure out what these entities want to work on towards their core mission. I think it’s been up and running for a couple of years now, but what has been nice about it is that the City has pulled away from being the primary driver of the work, so it’s really now in the hands of different nonprofits and local businesses or otherwise that are part of the stakeholder group. They pushed forward three or four initiatives that they are championing. That said, as it relates to our work, and whether that’s just committee work or the entire board’s work. there are possibilities here to consider in playing a role relative to some of the local digital literacy organizations that are trying to promote that, whether it’s for students or for families, or for the elderly or otherwise. Trying to pull these folks together to engage in some effort that we can collaborate on that we couldn’t do if we did it alone. One of the things that we’re thinking about was trying to identify a smaller working group that can help be the steering committee, and start batting back and forth what digital literacy really means, maybe cross-walking that with what is in the Digital Equity Plan and trying to figure out where this thing might lead us. But at this point, it really is in this exploration phase. We’re really just trying to figure out for ourselves where this work might sit or initially be launched, whether that’s at the committee level or if that’s a CTAB thing. The other nice thing about it is if everybody starts pushing on a shared challenge that we have as a board is trying to pull in–whether they are Tech Matching Fund recipients, or just other community groups, and the work of the board to put their voices up on a pedestal and figure out our role to continue to elevate that and be the advocate or the voice on their behalf, have them be able to verbalize their own needs or otherwise. In any case, that’s where we are with the Digital Literacy Coalition stuff. I’d be curious to know whether other board members or other folks around the room have thoughts.
Heather Lewis: If they occur at a later time, is it okay to reach out to you guys?
Chris Alejano: Yes, totally. And again, this is just emerging work. We have nothing hard and fast, but it’s something that seems to make sense to us. It’s a very small committee right now, among myself and Mark DeLoura, and Jose Vasquez, and Eliab Sisay. Delia Burke and David Keyes push into that. So, there’s only so much that we can do as a foursome or a fivesome to launch this thing. We’re really looking to pull in more folks into the conversation.
Dorene Cornwell: I think starting with what does digital literacy need, and working with some Tech Matching Fund recipients, the actual organizations that receive the grants or some of the people they serve, is probably a great place to start. I was trying to help my mother deal with some stuff on her phone the other day, and her question was, “What’s an app?”
Chris Alejano: That’s real.
Dorene Cornwell: That’s real. For what she was going to do, she’ll be just as happy using crib sheets for now. I said, “Mom, can I play with your phone for a minute?” Every time I try to do something, I think, don’t let her touch anything.
Chris Alejano: Another starting point I was talking about, too, was that folks who pull together to craft a Digital Equity Plan are sort of low hanging fruit. Folks that we have already engaged in this work, maybe this would be a good reason to pull them back in to try to operationalize some of the pieces that are in the actual Digital Equity Plan.
Harte Daniels: About a month or two ago, I had asked at one of the meetings with Jose Vasquez about one of the things that he brought up was similar but not the same, the Digital Equity Network….
Chris Alejano: Yes, it’s the same thing.
Harte Daniels: So, you’re specificially focusing on Digital Literacy. The questions that we had were about evaluating the TMF and people that had had the TMF, how do you do that. And then the second was finding cross-pollination among those groups. I have gathered reading materials and I can give them to Virginia Gleason, on thought leaders, philanthropy, evaluation and how you conduct that. The question that Jose Vasquez had was nonprofits are already struggling to understand, to answer questions on evaluations. The questions that I was researching for Jose Vasquez were how to do that in a way that would impact them more. The second was that I felt the conversation with a thought leader on enterprise graphs, and with the constraints of low and no impact on Seattle IT, no funding, using open source, and the ability to look at open information on your TMF people, and it would in a way that tools would not be able to reveal those that require you to know a question in advance on what you’re looking for. This would be able to reveal the relationships that you didn’t know actually already exist. And he agreed that he would sponsor that and allow and teach somebody from the community. So this would be the Digital Equity Plan building community capacity and bring somebody through a case study on a small pilot. The TMF is small enough to have a pilot. And then you could use it elsewhere inside. Regarding that conversation, I have reported it out, but I haven’t sent my minutes out.
Heather Lewis: Thank you for doing that. And would you mind picking that up offline afterwards?
Harte Daniels: Yes, I was going to talk to Virginia Gleason about it.
Heather Lewis: Perfect. Thank you. Chris Sheats, would you be so kind as to provide us with an update on the privacy committee?
PRIVACY COMMITTEE UPDATE
Christopher Sheats: Yes. We met on the first, and we started out with a really lengthy discussion, probably an hour and a half, on the Surveillance Ordinance amendments. It sounds like the Surveillance Ordinance with the committee might be postponed. Nonetheless, the committee is near completion of a formal community response with our suggestions on what we want to do. We also discussed broadband privacy. As you all might have heard, the Mayor, on May 3, released information about a specific Seattle IT that allows the City to limit ISP selling of personal data, which has been really excellent. It’s not a perfect thing, but it’s definitely something. And then, lastly, we discussed the Privacy Impact Assessment that Seattle IT released, concerning advanced metering for the Smart Meters. We are currently looking at starting our response to that, to get feedback on what we think. We want to get your response. We’ll be having our next meeting on June 5, but we haven’t scheduled a facility yet.
Heather Lewis: In the usual window?
Christopher Sheats: Yes. Six to eight-ish.
Heather Lewis: Okay, thank you. As soon as Virginia gets back, I’ll have something to say to her, but i the meantime, can we open it up for five minutes to public comment? Anyone have any questions or comments, or community dates that they want to share?
Lloyd Douglas: There’s a new comment period coming up for the FCC. Our good friend came up with a new URL to go to. It’s http://gofccyourself.com, and I recommend that everybody go there when it comes around. It saves you from a bunch of confusing clicking to get there.
Dorene Cornwell: And it was characterized as a cyber attack by someone from the administration because of high volume.
Harte Daniels: They give you a commentary period of ten days. I think if you want to remove things from education, you need a comment period of more than ten days.
Heather Lewis: Do we have any other comments, news? Dorene!
Dorene Cornwell: AMay 18 is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. I know there’s an event at Adobe in the late afternoon. I don’t remember the exact time. Officially, the hashtag is #GAAD2017, but I haven’t checked to see. People write all sorts of things about disability issues.
Harte Daniels: There’s a position open right now that’s kind of hard to fill. They need a program manager for accessibility and understanding the goals and their development. If anybody knows anyone, they’re not finding enough people with that knowledge base. It’s a Microsoft. And I can give you the connection. It’s not a full time job, of course. It’s a contract. And the pay is…we’ll talk later. The other comment was in addition, I’ve been working off and on with different people over the last year and a half on an idea for framing ideas from the neighborhood. We need to flesh it out because a person may not have language for creating a project. And then, eventually we need to find a sponsor and a nonprofit academic, City government or business sponsorship to take those ideas to fruition. It’s similar to the Digital Literacy, but more about receiving those ideas tht the people in the neighborhood themselves. If anybody is interested in learning about the framework that I put together, they can see me.
Heather Lewis: Thanks, Dan. Chris, did you have something to say?
Christopher Sheats: Yes. This Saturday, at the Delridge Library, from !:00 to 3:00, the Seattle Privacy Coalition is meeting to discuss what we’re calling the Citizenry Threat Model, where we break down a lot of privacy concerns that typical, normal, citizens have on a day to day basis. We’re going to be putting something together to help educate the general public on general issues around privacy and technology.
Heather Lewis: Thank you.
Steven Maheshwary: I have a broader question. On May 19, the Seattle YMCA is conducting this Get Engaged application to solicit a new youth member to be appointed to one of the various committees across municipal government. I’m interested in applying to be a part of CTAB, and was wondering, just for my edification, if you could maybe say something about things you are looking for, maybe priorities you’re hoping that a new member might be able to help address. Or subcommittees that you think you’ll be staffing, that kind of thing.
Heather Lewis: Well, does anyone want to take that? We have four committees: E-Gov, Cable and Broadband, Digital Equity, and the Privacy committee. We’re in the process right now of doing some strategic planning work. We are hoping to better align ourselves with our other key stakeholders. There are three key stakeholders. Please feel free to add if I’m missing any. We work with Seattle IT, our partner here at the City; also the City Council and the Mayor; and then the community. So, we end up being a bridge between these various stakeholder groups. We are interested in advising our City stakeholders on issues of technology related to the community. We just had a round of board applications and interviews. One of the other things that we emphasized this time around was the potential for partnerships and collaborations. So that was something we were looking for. In addition to that, of course, interest in working with one of the committees, cooperating with us or working together in some other way.
Virginia Gleason: I think for that particular committee position–that is different from the other ones; it’s a one year appointment and that goes from September to September. So this is probably about the time, probably in June, you would get those applications, probably think about them, for appointment at the end of August. so, now is the time. And we’ll work to get that posted about application dates for that Get Engaged position. The timing is perfect.
Heather Lewis: Thank you for coming today. We appreciate it. I wanted to provide an update on the outstanding to CTAB board positions. We had a tremendous group of candidates. It was really a struggle, because so many people were terrific. And we are so appreciative that people took time to apply, and took the time to come in or speak to us by phone. We have a small group here tonight, and we had a small group at our last meeting. So, we have had some difficulty ensuring that all of the CTAB board members were on the same page. We will, however, absolutely finalize the decisions tonight during the executive session at the end of tonight’s meeting. And then, we will make notifications. So, you have our sincere apologies for the multiple delays. We are so appreciative to everyone who applied to work with us, and hope they will all continue to work with us, regardless of whether or not we have room at this time. Virginia Gleason has helped us to work with Seattle IT to explore the possibility or having a couple of additional seats going forward. So, we will keep you updated as we learn more.
The last announcement before the break is tonight is our last evening together at CTAB with Virginia Gleason. Virginia has been an absolutely extraordinary partner. So, on behalf of the CTAB community and board, we just want to thank you for everything that you have done for us, and CTAB will miss you. So, if you would give Virginia a round of applause…. [applause].
Virginia Gleason: Of all of the boards that I’ve worked with, this is absolutely my favorite board. I love working with this group. I’m just amazed at the commitment of the people who work in this group, and how much time they give. And having had a chance to update web sites, and peoples’ bios, it’s a pretty impressive group of people. So, I’ve been really happy to work with you. I’m heading back to law enforcement, going to dive right in to an interesting challenge. I’m going to be on the Command Staff at the Oakland Police Department, helping them deal with a couple of recent problems they had. So, I’m going to be down there for probably about year or so working on that. But I will miss this group a lot. I look forward to our Tuesday meetings. And, when I come back to Seattle–I’m not sure whether or not I’ll come back to Seattle IT, but I hope to see everyone again when I return.
Heather Lewis: Thank you very much for everything you’ve done for us. We wish you the best in Oakland. Well, it’s 6:44 and we have time for a break. It will be a little bit longer than usual because the Autonomous Vehicles team is coming from a class at UW, and will be here at 7:15.
Virginia Gleason: Another option, if you wanted to not have such a long break, if you could go ahead and do your executive session before they come for your recommendation that you make for the board member. You do need to make the recommendation in open session, but the discussion can be at the executive session. So, if you want to, you could do that for whatever period of time that the board members need and still have the UW folks be on the right time table.
Heather Lewis: Sure. Should that happen in this room?
Virginia Gleason: No. I have a room set aside for the executive session, and that’s why we went a little heavy on the snacks, thinking that people would be sitting here for a little bit. So, you could either do it after you have your little break, or before. Whatever works for you. I’ve got it all set up for you.
Heather Lewis: Sounds like that will work. we will be back. Please feel free to help yourselves to snacks. We will back back by 7:15 at the very latest.
EXECUTIVE SESSION
Heather Lewis: I think we’re ready to get started again. We are very excited to have a UW group here to talk to us about autonomous vehicles. Do you want to introduce yourselves and to talk a little bit about the project?
UW LAW SCHOOL AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES REPORT
Gaites Swanson: My name is Gaites Swanson. I was the lead on this project, which really means I didn’t do any extra work besides just ask people to turn in their papers. Because this is a wonderful team. This is Danny Healow over here. He was a fantastic team member. We had a whole bunch of other people as well. A couple of them might be coming up, so we’ll introduce them as they walk through the door. Do you want to say anything, Danny?
Danny Healow: Sure. My name is Danny and part of my interest in autonomous vehicles specifically comes from — prior to UW Law, I lived in Mountain View. So, I was surrounded by a lot of early autonomous vehicle testing. It’s really neat. It’s pretty amazing to see how it can integrate into community. i was fortunate to see early efforts around that. In working on this project, Gaites and myself, and our entire team are really hoping to figure out what are those best practices that are out there, so we can make sure those are incorporated into any plan for Seattle and the State of Washington.
Gaites Swanson: If there’s anybody in here, raise your hands if you’ve done any work with autonomous vehicles. Did you plan any legislation? Are you writing a news article about it? Just raise your hand. One thing that a lot of people who aren’t as involved in technology don’t realize is that most major car manufacturers have committed to producing a wholly autonomous vehicle. And the latest date that people are saying is about 2021. That gives us a four-year window. But if we’re to believe anything that Elon Musk is saying, we’re looking at a wholly autonomous vehicle within a year or two at the very most. So, it’s right around the corner, and it’s something that we need to be thinking about, as you guys obviously are, since you’re sitting here.
One of the biggest challenges when looking at any kind of policy on an automated vehicle is trying to figure out what is it. What terminology do we want to use? A lot of people use ‘autonomous,’ and ‘automated’ interchangeably. And for those purposes, that’s fine. But’ you’d think there’s a slight distinction. An autonomous vehicle would operate without a human deciding where the destinations are. It might just operate on a patrol route, or respond to phones without any human intervention. an automated vehicle is one that would follow human direction a little bit more closely, and wouldn’t just go out into the world and do its own thing. Typically, the word I like to use is ‘automated vehicle.’ That’s what we use as part of our project. It’s really not a big deal. Just casual conversation.
Another might be trying to draw a line between what each vehicle’s capabilities are. We have some regulations. We have some guidance–from suggestions that we should use the Society of Automotive Engineers standards. In order to determine what that is, there’s a chart here that looks complicated. I encourage you to look at it, but basically what it is is it divides up vehicles based on what they can do into a total of six. It goes from zero to five. So you hear that there are six levels of automation, but it goes to five because it starts with level zero. It’s a programming thing for you.
Anyway, right now, most vehicles that are on the road are level two. We can expect level three vehicles, which is conditional automation. right now, we don’t have any vehicles that are really capable of driving from your driveway to a destination without a little bit of human intervention, or a human ready to take control. That’s basically where the line is. But the cars are getting closer. We’re right there. The cars that are being tested are right on the edge, and a lot of other manufacturers are testing those vehicles.
From a regular perspective, cities, states are looking at a lot of different issues that we have to come up with. And we did look at what cities and states need to consider. We’ve highlighted a few issues that we think that both cities and states will need to consider. Some of the more important ones that we’ve highlighted are issues like preemption, what state or federal regulations are going to preempt what cities want to do or what cities think that they need to do in order to best handle automated vehicle traffic.
Hi, guys. We’ll pause here. This is Aida. We’ve got Drew and KK, and of course, Professor Covington. So, these are all part of the automated vehicles team. Aida, you could come up and sit over here, if you’d like.
A couple of other things. Market influence, municipal authority, traffic management, and vendor lock-in. It could be possible, in terms of building infrastructure that you get locked into a vendor. Or there could be some ways in which a vendor would monopolize the interaction. That could be an issued handled at the City level, but not as much an issue at the federal level. And then just generally dealing with transparency. And then you compare that with a whole bunch of other challenges that states will be facing and cities will also have to keep in mind as they look at local regulation, viability, coordination, insurance, what to do with DUIs, what level of automation is appropriate to allow people to not be able to take control of the vehicle. Testing, deployment, training, and new development. With that, I’ll pass it on to Danny. who will talk a little bit about a couple of the states have done.
Danny Healow: States are taking more action by the day. So, this will be changed pretty much every day. At the moment, 14 states and the District of Columbia have all passed some sort of automated vehicle legislation. This takes a lot of different forms. There is no one set of rules that different states have taken. These range from everything from simply establishing a committee to study the issue, to allowing manufacturers to test their technology, and finally, the furthest approach is to simply allow consumers to operate fully driverless cars in their daily lives.
The most accepting states right now are kind of a surprise. They are Florida, and as of yesterday, Georgia. And in each of those states, if you’re a consumer and you have a fully automated car, you’re allowed to operate it with no human in it whatsoever. That’s pretty interesting. One particular state that’s mentioned in nearly all literature, though, is California. As you can probably imagine, simply because of the location in Silicon Valley, but also because as of mid-April, which was the latest available data. There are currently 30 companies that have a permit to test in the State of California. So, a lot of action happening there.
Some interesting facts about the California example in particular are the legislature first directed the Department of Motor Vehicles there to start studying the issue and implement legislation back in 2012. It’s taken quite a bit of time. They’re really trying to make well thought-out legislation and regulations to minimize any bad effects that can happen from automated vehicles. Testing was first authorized back in 2014, and just a couple of weeks ago, the public comment periods ended for actual public deployment of automated vehicles. So we’ll be seeing that probably in the near future.
Unlike the states, the federal government has yet to pass any formal regulation. Back in September, the U.S. Department of Transportation issued some guidelines and some policy recommendations for what they hope the states and local government serve the attitude that they take in adopting legislation related to automated vehicles. For the most part, the Department of Transportation seems to not want to see a whole lot of things change when state and local governments are regulating automated vehicles. The federal government will still largely govern safety standards. They still want the states to largely govern registration requirements and things of that nature.
Gaites Swanson: We put together a little bit of draft legislation and Aida Joaquin Acosta is going to go ahead and talk about that. It’s mostly focused on the state level because that’s what we were targeting. It might provide some helpful perspective about what kinds of issues we’re considering, and some of the ways which we think are the best to approach some of the really difficult challenges that are going to come up.
Aida Joaquin Acosta: Thank you. We were a team of five members, and we came up with three different blocks of measures that we included in the field. The first block would be administrative issues for coordinating all activities that are related to autonomous vehicles. That committee would include agencies like the Department of Licensing, the Department of Transportation, the Police Department, also the privacy chief officer in Washington State. This committee will have first, coordination function, but also recommendation function. So they will issue all the reports necessary to evaluate what are going to be the impacts of autonomous vehicles, in deployment, in the society, in every single sector. We first proposed the creation of this committee.
The second block of measures that we include in the bill were operational. How is the autonomous vehicle going to be tested? Be deployed in Washington State? What is going to be the impact on insurance and privacy? For the testing part, we proposed that every company that wants to test a vehicle has to previously notify Washington State that they are going to do that. So, from that, everyone is informed, police departments, all of these coordination committees that I introduced. They are going to know what’s happening. And they can create plans. For the deployment, the company has to show that they are doing well with that, that their level of performance is satisfactory. We also proposed the establishment of a specific number of plates that signify that this vehicle is an autonomous vehicle, so everyone outside can clearly see that. Apart from this testing and deployment, we have issues like privacy. We were really concerned about how these vehicles are going to impact on the privacy of citizens. We used the expertise of the chief privacy officer to evaluate all of the privacy policies that these vehicles are going to have. The third part is insurance. We said that for private use, we should use the same measures for insurance, but for activities like ride sharing, we would have a specific insurance. The thing about these vehicles is that in the beginning, they are expected to be so expensive that the expected use is going to be more like car sharing than a person who is buying this vehicle for himself. So, ride sharing is going to be the first use.
Finally, after the administrative, after the operational things, we also talk about some immediate regulatory aspects, for example, what is going to happen with people who are driving under the influence. If you are in an autonomous vehicle, and you are not driving, you may not be found liable of being in a car with a high level of alcohol. You are in a vehicle, but you are safer. Also, what about traffic? There are situations is which one lane may be blocked, and you have the two yellow lines, the autonomous vehicle will come here and say I cannot go because I cannot cross these lines, so I cannot move. It might be necessary to consider some exceptions for this kind of vehicle. That was, in a nutshell, the three main measures that we addressed with our bill. Thank you.
Gaites Swanson: We’re open to questions. We’ve obviously been working on this for a little while. Hopefully, we can answer whatever you guys have for us.
Karia Wong: How about mechanical failure? What is the category, and what are the consequences? Legal responsibility?
Danny Healow: Okay, I’ll answer the questions. Let me know if this is responsive. Right now, people are already responsible for the maintenance of their vehicles. There might be more technology in the car, but individuals will still be responsible for making sure that it is kept up, making sure that they are following the manufacturer recommendations for repairing the vehicle. That probably won’t change. In terms of an autonomous vehicle that has a problem while it’s driving, really we have a liability scheme that we’ve set up where if somebody has maintained their vehicle, it will probably be the manufacturer’s fault for not handling their vehicle correctly, or properly alerting. It’s highly dependent on the proper maintenance.
Karia Wong: I remember when the hybrid cars were first introduced to the market, there were tons of issues and recalls. I’m just wondering with that introduction of the automated vehicles, will there be any special considerations or preventive measures?
Gaites Swanson: I guess in terms of the actual situation, say some critical component broke on the car, they seem to be building in a lot of redundancies. if there were some sort of critical failure and you were on the highway, you could identify a safe place to pull off to the side. But in terms of making sure there are manufacturing issues like with hybrid cars, I don’t know that the legislation is necessarily the best place to do that. Companies will definitely have an interest in making sure they build reliable cars from the start.
Harte Daniels: In the case of cars and car recall, you were on the level of federal at one point, would this fall into the federal area.
Gaites Swanson: I believe that is generally going to be handled at the federal level. There are already a lot of mechanisms for car manufacturers that have recall issues. So that is most likely going to be handled at the federal level. I’m not sure that there would be a state level issue.
Ian Griswold: In coming up with the draft legislation, what were the stakeholder groups you chatted with? Did you talk to industry folks who are building these vehicles? I assume you talked to our chief privacy officer.
Professor Covington: We talked to Michael Mattmiller. We talked to a number of officials. We worked with some people who work with industry. There were a significant number of stakeholders who were involved, but I think the key thing is this technology is coming so quickly that we need to stimulate a conversation. And I think that’s one of the main goals of our legislation, to bring all the people together so we can address some of the other problems that will roll out of it, such as environmental issues that will come out of this. It will be the type of thing that will help us solve the last mile problem. Things along that line. We’re prepared to talk to a lot of people and we’re really want to have this conversation because the technology will probably be here quicker than we think.
Ian Griswold: I guess that was my second question. What was the legislative intent? I read the bill a few times and it seems like there is this apparatus around testing, and then there are regulations around the DUI stuff. I’m just kind of curious. Is the purpose to start a conversation or does it actually propose something that will become law?
Gaites Swanson: Both.
Ian Griswold: Both?
Gaites Swanson: It’s both. Basically, our approach when we drafted it was let’s take a look at what exists in the world, for legislation that’s out there. Let’s figure out what is the best. And then we also went to the theoretical world, like the legal academics, and tried to figure out what they were thinking are the best approaches. So, it’s a lot of what’s the best practice now? What worked? What didn’t work? It does cover a smorgasbord of possible issues. It may not have the focus that some other bills might, but we really did try to represent the best practices that we could find. So people would know a good way to move forward, even if they don’t use our whole bill as the Washington State automated vehicles legislation.
Virginia Gleason: One of the things in Seattle is we need lots and lots of process on everything. And one of the areas where we have a lot of focus are some of the social justice aspects of it. I was curious to know if there are some strong stakeholders–I think of the groups that I am closely involved with, such as people who are disabled, and people who are older, where having these types of vehicles would be a life changer for them. To be able to have those resources. Are you drawing those folks in as stakeholders to help maybe push some of these over the hump? Because they are very influential in legislative sites.
Aida Joaquin Acosta: I just wanted to add that we went in November to a conference and we presented the work that we were doing. We had contact with many people there. I remember talking to a person who has a vision problem. She was going blind. She said that autonomous vehicles were going to change her life. She was worried and asked that we please tell manufacturers to advise her which side of the vehicle to exit. She was thinking that autonomous vehicles can help her. But she really needed to transmit that to manufacturers.
Virginia Gleason: One being the Washington Chapter of the AARP where there are some benefits to these types of vehicles beyond what is available with public transportation that would have some tremendous advocates who would be strong supporters.
Professor Covington: Please understand that I only have these students for 20 percent of their time. Four hours a week.
MEETING ENDED AT 8:00 P.M.