name when they reported. so, for a human, looking through it, it is really easy, so, it is easy to see when a committee has just has a slight difference in a name but for a computer of course, it is something that is a little harder to pick out and so thankfully, because he works with the data every day, he has had this challenge as well and he was able to help us out. but, at some point, in the future, maybe this will, this data will, i will be a little more consistent and it may be all reported electronically, and be able to have some of those inconsistentcies worked out so that it is all, very

clear and whether or not things are misreported, they are all easily attributed to the same group. let's see. i think that that is all that i have to talk about. did you want to talk? >> sure. >> hi, i'm steven, again. yeah, so i wanted to talk to you about a part of the project that i spent some time working on, thinking about. and which is, peter and both peter and (inaudible) already mentioned the sort of organizing and understanding of the data. and for a visualization/computing project, the data format, and structures that are very important, and i, and there are a number of sort of technical issues that are, that i can touch on i guess.

so one of the first things that we tried to do with the data, is simply draw a correlation between things and so you saw ash's visualization, that drew a correlation between lobbying event, and contributions. and we were interested in doing the same thing for lobbying events and voting records. and you know, and for every variable in the data set there is a corresponding correlation that can be made against all of the other variables in the data set. and so we were also interested in connecting this data set up with other ones and so beyond the 460, what can we connect it to. and so as sort of in the computing space, the term for what we are trying to accomplish is called a mash up. and so it basically a combination of multiple different data sources. off not, you know, the sources

are... the people who create the sources are not, you know, connected to each other, but they are publishing, information, independently and so it could be twitter, and the 460 and seeing if there is any overlap. so for our purposes, we were working with mash ups between different parts of the government for the most part. and so, it is, we found a number of challenges, and in making things sort of connect to each other and so joined together in a line, so that we can make comparisons. and we found, that we found that there is a number of difficultis in doing that. so, going forward, we have a number of plans and we have plans in place to make that sort of process easier to carry out, so that we can join with other data sets. and you know, make other more interesting visualizations reduce the amount of sort of

noise that we have to sit through, because there is a lot of data and only a small amount of it is relevant and only a small amount of it has interesting, leads and stories to tell. so, really, finding ways to zero in on what matters, is difficult. and in doing so, we need a place to put the data. and as a government website, sfdata, or data, sf is not able to host community data sets and so as we make, you know, modifications, or filter things a certain way, join up things in a certain way and we need a place to put that data, and so, one of the things that we are doing, going forward, is we have been working with an organization called decan that has a similar, and i don't know

if that is, and that is something that is, but, basically it is a place for us to put processed data sets, that we can then, so it is like a down stream, utility for, you know, when we pull the data in from the data sf. and it gets put in and it gets processed and put into our data store. one of the things that we have done, for this project, with, in terms of processing data is adding geographic enrichment for the data and so the data from data sf, comes with latin long, associated with it and latitude and longitude coordinate and so for a contributor, you can see where the contribution was made and that is useful, but we might want to know from a lat long, what state was that lat long from? what sf district was it from. what california county did the

money come from? and you use that, you know, enrichment, to show further correlations between things, do we find that certain kinds of activities are associated with certain geographic regions. and you know, to answer that kind of question, requires, some sort of processing. and processing a data set for that geo enrichment can take, hours to days to find the positions within these geographic regions. and so, there is a lot of processing that needs to be done, and there is a lot of sort of intermediate data that needs to be stored, and going forward we are going to be looking at more of that, and seeing if we can make more out of sort of this foundation, that has been provided to us. and so, yeah, we are very excited and one of the interesting things that i wantsed to mention about the 460, is that since it is state wide form, we can use this, these tools that we are building on top of the 460, for

other organizations who work with it and so there is a branch of code for america over in oakland and one in sacramento and they are sort of all over the state that do the similar things to what we are doing. and we can share the tools, that we are using to analyze and enrich and structure, the data. and so that we don't have any repetition of work and so that we can all sort of stand on each other's shoulders and make progress with these things. and, yeah, so, those, maybe, we rambled a little bit. but, there are a number of sort of technical, social issues with these different brigades going forward. and we are going to continue working with the ethics commission, and as much as possible. and for, you know, the foreseeable future, continue working on this project, which is really just a sort of start. so, yeah.

thank you. >> for the public, can you tell us the name of the website? it is hard to see on the screen. >> yeah, the website is transparent voting.com. this is the url that we have chosen for this particular visualization we have the get hub repo which is the place where we store our code, and we can put a link to it on this page, after we go. >> great, so the people want to go and play with this site, they can go to transparent voting.com? >> correct. >> voting. >> >> questions from the commissioner? s >> commissioner andrews? >> you know, first of all, thank you for the presentation, i did my absolute best to keep up with all of the terms after the url, i can kind of drift and thank you, and thank you for your or what you are providing on the volunteer

basis and, so these are some of these are just the fire questions that you can answer, quickly and they tend to run around the organization. so, code for america is a national organization and it is funded, and it is a non-profit and it receives the funding itself, where are the headquarters? >> washington, d.c., i believe. >> and then it has a loose franchise model of them and then at least the latitude to define your own name and those types of things, is the ultimate goal, and you are all volunteers, and thank you for your service and i suspect that you have other means to keep yourselves a roof over your head and fed. would you be... (inaudible) e

>> you know, they are working in civic tech and they typically work with a smaller local government. and you know, but i think that the government actually write to them and they have projects that they are interested in and would like someone to come in and work with them and so they actually have these fellows that actually work with the local city governments to help them with the processes. so that is the main part of code for america. and then there are the local, sort of chapters, they are called the brigades, which is volunteers from within the xhunlt community itself, who come in and we meet, every wednesday there. and then, we have the different projects and everybody gets to choose a project that they would like to become an ongoing part of. >> i see, at least the chapter aspiration is not necessarily to get to a funded level, or a contract, or a series of

contracts that you would be providing this particular service, but just, this is your... >> this is a very different (inaudible). >> we appreciate it. >> it is a very different ethos, and i think that it is not... it is part of what you would probably have heard of as hacker culture. which is very much deeply have a deeply open data, and open government, and open force, and so this particular project is open force, which means that anybody else could take what we have built and reuse it somewhere else. and so, it is part of that ethos. it is not necessarily about like getting out there and making a bunch of money, although, code for america, does have an incubater where they help the start ups but that is not the goal. >> thank you. >> no questions? commissioner hayon? >> my first question, is this a

permanent project that you will essentially supervise? >> it is an ongoing project, part of code for america. and so, code for america will hold on to everything, we build. and you know, everything will be live, they do have some not... so we have some nominal sort of fees that we have to pay for the hosting and that is not a huge amount of money and these, and whatever we built will be there and it is always going to be there. and it really is the question of how it is going to progress. right? >> and who is going to continue to provide. >> and input the data, and that changes from day-to-day and year to year, and election to election. and then, i assume that we will have a link to that, and we will have a permanent link to that website mr. st. croix?

>> sure. >> well, we have, because i mean it is very exciting and it is a wonderful project and i would love to already go on the site and play around with it as i am sure that anybody who has an interest in these numbers and this data, would want to do. and to make our own correlations. now, that is my second question. is you showed the correlations that you have drawn or gave us examples of. and so if i were to go on your site, could i create my own correlations and you know, ask the website to put those correlations together, or does that have to be created by you? >> we have to create it. >> you have to create it? >> yeah, this is not quite at that level. >> but it could be some day. >> yeah i mean that it is one of the many possibilities as peter and steven explained, these are some of the

challenges technical challenges that we face, and we really came into this very super idea, was big and we are going to do exactly what you said, but the reality is, these are human beings filling out forms, and so, it is full of errors and lots of issues, and it takes a lot of time and a lot of work. >> reality is like that. >> yeah. >> okay. >> thank you. >> but it is a great work, thank you so much. >> i can elaborate on the contribution piece a little bit. >> one of the things going forward, we were working on, is a system that enables outside contributions, and that is one of the reasons why we decided to find our own content, what is called a content management system for hosting our own data sets, so that if you ended up importing this into excel, and did your own analysis, you could give us the data and we could put this on the internet. you know? and sort of under our name and in our system as something that

can be, you know, built on that is not necessarily endorsed by the government, but it is part of our organization's effort to make the data more understandable and usable and so we are working on some very, you know, sort of basic tools for doing that. but, it is early stages, but it is a focus of ours. >> commissioner king? >> you have done a good job in allowing the general public to get into the weeds of things like a general election and in regards to funding an election and who is involved, and the whole aspect of following the money which is or tells so much about government, and the transparency and the lack of transparency of government and that is enormously valuable and i want to ask you a question which may be unfair and if it is, feel free not to answer it. since you have gotten into the weeds and you have seen, how elections and balloting works

and where the money is coming from and where it is coming from. have you formed me kind of opinions relating to one way or the other? in regard to the whole process itself? that you would like to share with us? >> i think that we had, some ideas, just about in the future, being able to track future lobbying money and i think that some of those conclusions will come after the elections and just, after yeah, after we have some more information, just from lobbying and what politicians have done. then, i personally might have some more conclusions on that.

but it has been interesting to see where money has been coming from so far, but in some ways, i am curious, how that will influence some of the candidates, for example, for the board of supervisors. >> i hope that you do follow up on that. and i would love to hear your conclusions on those things. >> yeah. >> thanks very much. >> thanks. >> commissioner hayon? >> i have another question, you know, a lot of journalistic entities follow the money and their organizations that devote themselves to that and i am just wondering have you partnered with any of these groups such as propublica and even nate silver and the work that he does, and you know, vox, and any of the other number of sites that are out there. that do this kind of reporting on money and lobbying and you

know, the influence that it has and then there is all of that money that is very difficult to track and that can't be tracked. but i am just wondering if you formed me partnerships on that basis, and then, after that, i have a question for you steven. >> so, the main thing is that a lot of the organizations that you are talking about are largely focused at the federal level. that is a major difference and so i did personally work for another organization called working in that same space, called vitocracy and the great things about the things on the federal level is that you have many, many organizations that clean up the data for you, and very easy to go in there and build stuff on top of it. the challenge at the state and local level, is that we actually don't have that or those kinds of institutions that actually do the same level of work. so that is why we are going to be working with the other groups, similar brigades who

are working on the same thing together and hopefully we can create something, the gray thing being 460, as a forum and that is the for the entire state and so that actually helps us build something. we will be reaching out, to journalists within san francisco, and with this project, and then, you know, whatever feedback we get from them will incorporate that into the next. >> thank you. >> and steven, my question for you, is now that you have worked with this group, with code for america, and the san francisco brigade, what are your hopes for the future collaboration and how we at the ethics commission can use this and take advantage of it and make it available very clearly to all of the public that has an interest in this? >> yeah, i think that these kinds of technologies. >> actually a question was for the other steven.

>> oh, >> my question is for you. >> okay. >> we are both named steven. >> i am sorry. you are both steven. you may have thoughts on this too, but for our expert at the commission. >> well, you know this is the first group like this that we really connected with and i think that it is because we started to post this information on the city's open data system and because it is so accessible and so i hope not only will this relationship continue, because for this group, i mean it has been a major learning curve since the summer to produce this site and so now they have a little bit of experience with this and so i am moving for this group that this will continue and then i am also hoping that it will help us with other cities as well. because, i have worked a little bit with the group of oakland, and i know that there is a group in san jose and again in sacramento, and so there are a lot of different projects that

are going on independently and i hope that going forward they can start to work together more to produce sort of one more unified site, and another sort of exciting development, which i have not had a chance to talk to them about, is that in the last week, net file, which is our vendor, for our electronic system is also the vendor for all of the electronic filings in the other cities, posted a website and, the programmers like this group, can actually tap into the data in any city in california, and then they also took the state's data and included it as well. and so you can actually tap into all of the data state wide and so you could build something like this now and again, this is only, it has developed in the past week, so a lot of stuff is moving at the moment. >> thank you. >> any other questions from the commissioners? >> well, thank you very much for the presentation. we appreciate it, and thank you for your hard volunteer work. it is really great, and i think

that the public is going to greatly benefit from it. [ applause ] public comment, on agenda item three? >> i too would like to compliment these volunteers, the website looks terrific. i think journalists larry bush at city report.com would absolutely love this new website. so, keep on encouraging them to work with mr. massey. >> david, pilpal speaks an individual, three comments, it would be nice if the group could explain the light blue and the dark blue, and the difference between the blue and the red and i just saw it quickly. >> and i think that there is an explanation, and a legend, but we could not see it very well. >> okay. >> and it would be good if they can ensure that there is good

contrast, i know that there are problems with the video, but just in general it looks like the contrast could be better, on their site. and just in general, i recall in dealing with campaign finance data historically, the problem is that the data really is inconsistent all over the place and so there are typos and there are, wrong addresses, and zip code inconsistencies and one campaign will report a contributor as a lawyer, and the other will report it as an attorney and so when you try to aggregate the data you have to clean those things up and it is extremely time consuming and i just recall that in the past efforts and so if they have, put in time to try to clean that up, that is all to the good, but it really is a mess trying to work through all of that data. so any way, thanks for all of the work. >> the next item on the agenda

is... >> what is that? >> do we need... >> the next item on the agenda is hearing on the merits regarding ethics complaint, 18-121029 in the matter of bob squeri. >> good evening, commissioners i represent the staff of the ethic commission in this hearing. and it does not appear that the respond ant is here for this case. and was involved two violations of the code section, 1.162 a one, which requires the disclosure statement and a campaign ad to be a certain size and in this case, the respondent ran for district

supervisor in 2012 and distributed two campaign ads in the form of two hangers and the statement that is smaller than is required by law. and you have been given a brief, along with eight exhibits. and the staff would request that you accept those exhibits as submit and rely on them and make a determination that the respondent committed both violations that they are not here to contest the violations. respondent was notified by the hearing by personal service on september 5, and notified on every step of this process since its initiation and has not come tonight. so, i would request that you find the violation based on what has been given to you already. >> can you state for the record what specific efforts you have made to contact, the respondent, and whether you

have ever spoken to him? >> sure. sure. so, the complaint was initiated in october of 2012, he was first notified november 7, 2012, by letter. by letter, again, december 5th, by letter again on january 3, 2013. and then, again, in march of 2013, i also made various e-mail and telephone attempts no messages were ever returned to me. and he was sent a probable cause report in march 28 and he did respond but did not attend the hearing and his response was that he was not going to attend. and the accusation was then sent to him in july, second, 2014, and again, i made repeated attempts by telephone to try to resolve the matter by this process, and no messages was ever returned to me. and so then, the hearing notice, for this hearing was sent on september 5th, and after i sent that i did try to contact him a couple of times

as well to see if we can resolve it through the settlement or some other way and again there has been no response. >> questions from the commissioners? >> you know, in my view, i think, clearly you have been able to meet all of the elements and that there is certainly has been a violation here and i think that the only question to me is the size of the penalty. and you know, for a failure to print the campaign committee in the correct font size, $10,000 does seem some what harsh. and i understand that it is a result of the respondent not at all cooperating or acknowledging the process. but i still do have some concern that that penalty is accessive. >> sorry. we can see that that is

actually high. it is the maximum. for this kind of violation, we would, that would not ever happen as a settlement. policies were adopted, back in 2013 that laid out very specific time lines and what penalties will be. this did actually occur, prior to those adoptions. the staff just used it as a guide to use it as something to consider and it is purely within your purview to do whatever you like. you could issue a lower penalty, or something in between. those are merely a guide at this point, like i said, i don't believe that it would be fair to impose those penalties on him because this happened prior to that, i included that as a guide for you. that was it. >> other comments or questions from the commissioners? >> i think that i share your

views, mr. chairman, that $10,000 is not appropriate for this kind of a violation. and i am reminded of a judge who once told me about he had a case before during the second world war and two plumbers were charged with sabotage because they cut a pipe on a job they were doing and he said to the f.b.i. and he said, well, what are you doing to suggest for a real sabotage? because they wanted to give about a ten year sentence. and i mean, i would think that for this kind of a violation, i would be much more comfortable with something in the range of 2 or 300 dollars. >> if i may, the potential help. settlements that are publicly available, on this violation, or very similar have been in the $500 range, when someone has cooperated at a early stage and resolved the matter in settlement without the staff having to go through all of

these steps. i will leave that there and let me give you some food for thought. >> commissioners? >> well, that being said, and you said that the respondent they in past years or others, they were cooperative, and they, settled at around a $500, range, and it seems that this particular gentleman has chosen not to participate with us and engage with us. i would recommend $500 of violation. >> $500 to $1,000, per violation. >> for a total of $2,000. >> what is staff think of that? >> this is a lot of time that the staff has spent on this and i suspect that could