christine, the newest member. and the other members and malcolm couldn't be here today but we are proud to work together on behalf of the people of the city and we are happy to have john fung head this up and behalf of the board and all of us and thank you mr. secretary. mr. administrator. senator feinstein, leader pelosi, congress woman spear and mayor lee and thank you all for being here and now it's time to make it official. it's sign that document. okay. [applause] >> thank you tom. and as we're getting ready to sign this grand slam document let me make sure we give a great appreciation to our county transportation authority who has been administering the funds for this great project and a great shout out to the union square

improvement district. i know there are businesses big and small that will suffer a little bit from the construction but they're going to be patient. they know the result of this is a great future for our great city and thank you to all of the businesses and we will be communicating with them all the time with all of the agencies. decades now ladies and gentlemen city residents and our city will know the vision started 20 years ago to today we built a great transportation system we're going to be proud of and this is part of our success, the greatest city in the world, san francisco. [applause]

>> hi, my name is jamie hooper. in this episode, we are featuring the romantic park locations in your very own backyard. this is your chance to find your heart in san francisco with someone special. our first look out is here at buena vista park a favorite with couples and dog lovers. it is as old as its neighbor and both have a significant forest a refreshing retreat from urban life. the pass that meander we do under a canopy of 0, redwood, pine, and eucalyptus.

chill out and this environment and you might see butterflies, and dandelions. blue jays fly between the eucalyptus. it is ada accessible. public transit is plentiful. six, 24, or 71 bus. we have conquered the steps we walked the dogs, and we have enjoyed a beautiful view the park has to offer. this is the place to take someone special and enjoyed a beautiful look out. " come to corona heights, located in the heart of this district. it offers a spectacular view of the downtown skyline, the bay bridge, and the east bay. the park is one of the best kept secrets. unlike twin peaks, it is hardly ever crowded.

on any given day, you will run into a few locals. hop on a 37 bus to get there with that any parking worries. locals can bring their dogs to run with other dogs. there is also grass for small dogs. >> it is a great place. it is a wonderful place for the city to provide these kind of parks. the dog owners appreciate it. >> take time to notice the wildflowers on the grassland. and keep your head on the lookout for hawks and other bird life. take your camera and be prepared to review the city in a way you will not forget. it is prominent with beautiful formations that are perfect to watch the sunrise from the east over the bay. this is another one of our

great look out. we are at mount davidson. it has the highest point of elevation in san francisco 928 feet. this is the place for you to bring someone special. enjoy all of the pathways, trails, and greenery that surrounds you. it provides a peaceful oasis of public open space and great hiking trails. the spectacular view offers a perfect place to watch the sunrise, or sunset, with someone you love. >> it is a good place to get away from the hectic life of the city. get some fresh air. the view is fantastic. >> wear sturdy shoes to conquer the trail, you have the feeling of being in a rain forest. mount davidson is also a great place to escape the noise and

the apostle of the city with your partner. -- bustle of the city with your partner. it is quite a hike to the top at mount davidson but the view is worth every step. this is the place to bring that someone special. for more information about reserving one of these romantic locations, or any other location, 831-5500. this number is best for special ovens weddings picnics, and the county for building. for any athletic field and neighborhood parks, call 831- 5510. you can also write us at permits and reservations. or walking in and say hello at old log cabin, golden gate park.

and of course you can find more information at sfrecpark.org. >> feel like it really is a community. they are not the same thing but it really does feel like there's that kind of a five. everybody is there to enjoy a literary reading. >> the best lit in san francisco. friendly, free and you might get fed. ♪ [applause] >> this san francisco ryther created the radar reading series in 2003. she was inspired when she first moved to this city in the early 1990's and discover the wild

west atmosphere of open mi it's ic in the mission. >> although there were these open mics every night of the week, they were super macho. people writing poems about being jerks. beatty their chest onstage. >> she was energized by the scene and proved up with other girls who wanted their voices to be heard. touring the country and sharing gen-x 7 as a. her mainstream reputation grew with her novel. theses san francisco public library took notice and asked her if she would begin carrying a monthly reading series based on her community. >> a lot of the raiders that i work with our like underground

writers. they're just coming at publishing and at being a writer from this underground way. coming in to the library is awesome. very good for the library to show this writing community that they are welcome. at first, people were like, you want me to read at the library, really? things like that. >> as a documentary, there are interviews -- [inaudible] >> radar readings are focused on clear culture. strayed all others might write about gay authors. gay authors might write about universal experiences. the host creates a welcoming environment for everybody. there is no cultural barrier to entry. >> the demographic of people who

come will match the demographic of the reader. it is very simple. if we want more people of color, you book more people of color. you want more women, your book more women. kind of like that. it gets mixed up a little bit. in general, we kind of have a core group of people who come every month. their ages and very. we definitely have some folks who are straight. >> the loyal audience has allowed michelle to take more chances with the monthly lineup. established authors bring in an older audience. younker authors bring in their friends from the community who might be bringing in an older author. >> raider has provided a stage

for more than 400 writers. it ranges from fiction to academics stories to academic stories this service the underground of queer fell, history, or culture. >> and there are so many different literary circles in san francisco. i have been programming this reading series for nine years. and i still have a huge list on my computer of people i need to carry into this. >> the supportive audience has allowed michele to try new experiment this year, the radar book club. a deep explorationer of a single work. after the talk she bounces on stage to jump-start the q&a. less charlie rose and more carson daly. >> san francisco is consistently ranked as one of the most

literate cities in the united states. multiple reading events are happening every night of the year competing against a big names like city arts and lectures. radar was voted the winner of these san francisco contest. after two decades of working for free michelle is able to make radar her full-time job. >> i am a right to myself, but i feel like my work in this world is eagerly to bring writers together and to produce literary events. if i was only doing my own work, i would not be happy. it is, like throwing a party or a dinner party. i can match that person with that person. it is really fun for me. it is nerve wracking during the actual readings. i hope everyone is good. i hope the audience likes them. i hope everybody shows up. but everything works out.

at the end of the reading, everyone is happy. ♪ >> so nicely here, and very happy that all of you could come out and join us, you know, on this evening. my namey. the director of the night rover challenge. i'm going to kind of be the moderator for tonight as we go through this first-ever challenge america summit. so i've got just a few things that, you know, i wanted to do with everyone before we get into the program. first of all, i just want to take a minute and have everyone just look around this room. in this room, we have amazing people that are corporate nonprofit, and government, all focused on challenge driven innovation in some way or another. this is a really powerful

interesting, innovative group of people that are gathered here to look at how competitions can drive innovation. that's what tonight is all about, is, you know, the next step in creating a real wave of innovation. my job tonight is just to give you a little bit of background on what we are what we're doing, and then gñ@ this really powerful group of ti so just to get going with that, i want to tell you a little bit about this thing called the night rover/< challenge. this is a collaboration between the clean tech open unoodle and nasa. it's a program from nasa's office of centennial challenges. and it's challengin the best innovators in america to create radical new energy storage technology. you know, way above what we have now. this is something very powerful, to be able to keep rovers going on the moon, in mars, things

that could be useful, in your cell electric vehicles something that just is a radical leap in new technology. but i don't want to go into a lot of detail on that. you'll hear more about nasa's efforts later. and what i'm going to do1r is give a little more background on challenge-driven innovation. and i'm going to do that just by plaijerrizing some people because it makes it a loteasier for me. i want to look at this quote, prize is a very old -- an old idea that is surprisingly powerful in our modern society. this is by a study that by mckenzie and company back in 2010. prize is a very old idea, very powerful in our modern society. surprisingly powerful in our modern society. mckenzie also said this 32,000 in 2010, there were 32,000no competitions, competitions prizes awards.

that's a big number. it could be bigger but it's a big number, for one year, 32,000 competitions happened. to continue on in myk mckenzie also said this while tens of thousands of prizes and awards are give out every year we've been struck by the lack of conferences or professional associations to share best practices and facilitate collaboration. now there's some kind of relationship between what doing here today and that. i don't know exactly what it is, but hopefully by the end of tonight and tomorrow, we can start j we're doing here can really start toqphp having an organization or, you know somethingd exactly what mckenzie is saying is missing. so this just brings me to myó last question. and it's why are we here. i'm not talking abá why we're here inca this room.

that's just one side of it. i'm not talking about why we're here in some galactic cosmic sense of theá@ word. what i'm talking about is a more important part of that question. i am missing a slide in there. so the important part of that question was why are we here in san francisco. and we're here in san francisco because san francisco is one of the most innovative cities in the galaxy and it's a very great place to be the home of the challenge america summit, the first-ever challenge america summit. so it's now my job to introduce our first speaker of the night, who is going to officially kick off the first-ever challenge america summit, somebody who has been verylfe instrumental in creating a movement around

innovation in san francisco. just a few months ago, announced october as innovation month inl-mj4p&c"p san francisco, and is doing a whole lot of work on, you know creating a@g real ecosystem for entrepreneurs, for governments for everybody to create new ideas and new innovations. please join me in welcoming mayor ed lee to the floor. >> [applause.] >> thank you. thank you, josh. welcome, everybody. now that i know where i'm at i want to welcome all of you, i want to of course thank the night challenge -- night rover challenge, nasa, of course, for being here. i also want to thank s.p.u.r. again for hosting it. you know, when i started working with s.p.u.r. many years ago i knew they were a spacey people. didn't realize it would ultimately end like this. wanted to thank s.p.u.r. because

they really have always been host for so many of our great ideas of how to do better planning in the city. i also want to thank -- i know jennifer is here as well -- i told you when i first met you, i love your title, director of prizes? are you kidding? of course she has the longer title, but i thought that when bevan dufty and i were creating the director of hope in san francisco that we thought we had a pretty good title but now i'm going to change over director of prizes. i may have to adopt that for some of our programs. but that's exciting for you to be here as well. certainly for green tech, open for their contributions here, because it's really a neat blend, with the efforts that we're doing both in innovation as well as being greener and trying to continue earning the greenest city of america title that we earned just this past year. we've been pretty lucky. as i announced this innovation

month, there has just been scores of ideas that has come forward about what we could do, how we could celebrate and how we could expose a lot more about what our technology companies are doing here in collaboration with so many others. but i'll begin by saying, first, you know, there are some things happening in our city that are just incredible. you know i didn't declare myself to be, you know, the tech mayor, even though i've kind of fallen into a lot of that. i actually wanted to be -- and earned the title being the jobs mayor. the jobs for the city has been my number one goal. and we've been doing pretty well. when i first began last year in 2011 unemployment rate here was 9.6. and just a few months ago we celebrated the milestone that it went down to 7.4. and that's like the third lowest in the state. well today, we got some even better news.

so how about we flip 9.6 a year ago, to 6.9. today, it's 6.9. >> [applause.] >> and technology is leading the way. we're home to now -- just within our 49 square miles we're home to 1,635 technology companies still growing over 225 clean tech companies, more than 100 biotech companies, and we have ownchone of those categories or growing more every month. imgetting excited because that means a lot more jobs. i think we will soon lead the whole state. and i kind of say that too because marin county has traditionally been lower than ours and so has san mateo. i think marin county has been lower because we have their wine, you will probably have some tonight and san ma taiee because it's our airport that

emploaxcju everybody there. so we will take credit for all three counties. i told jerry, i'm never going to complain to jerry brown what he has to do, has to cut is going to happen in the state legislature, because i used the first year and a half to insulate myself from all of that emotionally as well as programmatically to say i'm not going to let the state hurt our city or the federal government. we've got to innovate our way out of this economic dole drum and we are doing so with inviting people here. those of you who take this word challenge, and really can really seriously bring that to fore with your best ideas, this is what i'm doing with all these technology companies. i'm not satisfied with just hosting a new company in the city i want to know what they're doing who's working there, where they're coming from what they plan for the five or 10 years and how we can help them grow.

as they're growing their jobs i want to know technologically how we can help. that's why i love going to accelerators, to find out what are the next five years that we're incubating so when it comes like what happened last week with dr. yam naka working at gladstone institute at mission bay becomes one of the newest nobel prize winners in medicine working with uc-san francisco and the pharmaceutical companies there, they're on the verge of discovering wonderful stem cell research that will cure a lot of cancers in our lifetime. you're going to see some cures come out of mission bay. we're doing the right thing, we're creating this wonderful, exciting innovative spirit in the city and we're doing it not just with the companies locating here with the people that are here we're asking employees of the company to step up, through our sf city our tech chamber of commerce and volunteer their

time to improve things that are not working as well as we'd like in the city. we have on-line ability called improve sf that allows people to come on line tackle a lot of the issues that the city faces, allow for some c)eative thinking people who can't spend a lot of time in meetings with us, that can actually offer their ideas on line and we take those ideas very seriously. so we've been working on things on like how to make muni faster how to bring fresh foods to low income poverty areas of the city and our newest one just to given you a sense we wanted everybody to help us develop and design a new library card. talk about civic engagement. 2,000 submissions on line for a new designed library card. that leads me to a challenge that i would like to announce, as part of this night rover challenge, and that is we have been asking ourselves a question, along the lines of energy use in the city

something that has been hard for us to figure out. and that has to do with what would inspire you, as someone who lives in the city to give your data of your own energy use in the city, like your home energy use? all that data about when you use it what are your hot times your cool times. how about if we try to find some way to inspire people to give us that]h data in some coordinated way. because if we understand that 20 to 22% of our emissions comes from1ar residential use, you can imagine if we had that data coming from every household use in the city we could break that data down with involvement of creative people like see where there's patterns where we could lessen our carbon footprint and talk about better energy use.

that's perfect for us. that's what we're going to ask this challenge to present for our next improve sf challenge for the city. and that's what we'd like to engage people in. and then hopefully some time after this challenge is announced, and if we can get the best ideas out there, we will be engaged with you to select the best answer. and if there's an idea out there that can answer that question about how to inspire people, then hopefully wq can go into november a hack-athon sponsored by green biz and others to develop an app that everyone can use. that's a great challenge. that's going to be so worthy of contributing to a goal that we've had about reducing our carbon footprint as a city. it's not just the households. once we get that data out we could look at the data from a community.re level and look at the data from a citywide level to see what we can do. i'm encouraged by that. i didn't want to give my data up

to pg&e for various reasons. now iú] want to give it up for this challenge because i know people will be creative in having thisçe challenge to be something positive for the city. i wanted to announce that, get that out there with you, and join this wonderful challenge that you have, and i think about how we could work together. meanwhile, in between that stuff and in between celebrating the month and doing things we have to write a proposal to win the superbowl in san francisco. thank you very much. thank you. >> [applause.] >> thank you mayor lee.