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(tommy wright): good morning and welcome tothe fall 2015 meeting of the census bureau scientific advisory committee. we are delightedto have everyone join us as members of the committee and look forward to a really productivesession. we had a really good orientation yesterdayand i'm - even though i knew much of that i was just energized with my colleagues sharingwith the new members a very high level but also detailed view of what goes on at thecensus bureau. so i hope others share that as well. my name is tommy wright and i'm the designatedfederal official of this committee. i am required to preside over the advisory committee meetingas specified by the federal advisory committee

act. before we begin please notice a sheet at yourseat outlining emergency exits and safety procedures. the proceedings are being recorded and transmittedlive by etv and on webcast by way of the census ustream channel. please be advised that anyside conversations will be heard. every time you're ready to speak, please turn on themicrophone and clearly state your name for the record. so that is very important to alwaysstate your name. all meeting materials have also been postedon the census advisory committee web site for the public viewing online.

before proceeding with the review of today'sagenda, i would like to introduce those sitting at the head table. to my left is our committee chair, barbaraanderson. next to barbara is tim olson who is the actingassociate director for field operations. to tim's left should be bill bostic. and hewill, i think, be joining us a bit later -- maybe. next to bill is - spot is lisa blumerman whois the associate director for the 2020 census. next to lisa is my boss, tom louis, the associatedirector of research and methodology. and next to tom is the associate director- reported as the best director at the bureau, enrique lamas who is associate director fordemographic program.

to my right is this empty seat. (john) willbe joining us this afternoon. next to that empty seat is nancy potok whois the deputy director and chief operating officer of the census bureau. next to nancy is harry lee who is acting directorfor information technology and chief information office. and (unintelligible). barbara and i will share the facilitationof your deliberations today and tomorrow. between the two of us we'll do our best tokeep the discussion moving. ensuring that we hear from everyone who has comments, andwe'll try to stay on schedule.

we'd like to welcome staff who are participatingby way of etv, webcast, and public participating in person. i don't see anyone from headquarters.in the department of commerce i do. yes we do want to - yes, who are you? yes. you're on the program. yes. we'll be hearingfrom you. and any congressional staff members? any regional staff representatives from regionaloffices for the census bureau? okay. ipad demonstration. now, there will be a demonstration by (kennethmccathran) from the telecommunications office.

is he here? is there going to be a demonstration? (kenneth mccathran): yes. good morning. i am(ken mccathran) from the it directorate. tommy wright: all right. (kenneth mccathran): the it directorate isproviding tablets for viewing the presentations and taking notes, or doing web browsing. mostlikely the tablets are open to the agenda today. you could reach the home screen by touchingthe home button which is the button to the middle of the right side of the tablet.

the tablets are also paired wirelessly tokeyboards so as you're typing notes you can use the virtual keyboard or you can use thewireless keyboard. there three applications on the home screen.the first one, maas360 contains all of the presentations and the agenda. the middle icon,that says notes, is for taking personal notes as you're here at the conference. and the iconin the right called safari is for web browsing. and it is connected to our guest wirelessso that you can connect to the internet to do browsing. to maneuver around the tablet if you pressthe home screen it will - the home button they'll take you back to the home screen andthen just simply touch the icon that you want

to open the application for. if you do have any questions or difficultywith the tablets during the conference you can look to the staff that'll be standingby -- myself, (kenneth mccathran), (carl wilcox) who is here also. and i believe we also have(wayne bryant), but we'll be stationed towards the back. so if you look towards the backone of us will come to assist you. tommy wright: thank you very much. we actuallymade use of this in the orientations yesterday and things were just perfect. thank you very much. today's agenda review.

our meeting agenda reflects a broad rangeof topics. it was developed in response to our need to share and introduce critical researchand program developments requiring your attention. in addition, the agenda has topics you recommendedon critical program areas, research and methodology. and in reviewing the responses to the recommendationsfrom the last meeting last night and reviewing also the agenda, i think that that statementis certainly true that the agenda always reflects the input from the committee as well as immediateand sort of timely needs or problems of particular interest at the census bureau. sessions have allotted time for discussions-- presentations and committee member discussions -- as well as an opportunity for you to jotdown any notes you might have following the

presentations. all presentations, papers, supporting materialsand note sections are loaded on your ipad. before moving on to the agenda we want tothank all of the presenters for today, the discussants, working group presenters, theadvisory committee coordinator, and working group subject matter experts for their diligencein collaborating prior to this meeting. alot goes on in the background -- an awfullot. first on today's agenda is our committee chairwho will be barbara anderson who will bring remarks and introductions of the csac members. following barbara, nancy potok will provideexecutive remarks on important census bureau

programs and activities. and as i mentionedwe will hear from (john), the director, this afternoon. then we would hear from chip walker who willpresent the census business builder demo for small business and chamber of commerce editions. ian kalin, chief - (and we just heard) chiefdata officer for the department of commerce will provide an overview. we'll break at 10:10. after the break billbostik who has just joined us will present on the big data followed by a report fromthe big data working group. before breaking for lunch we'll have a professionalphotographer coming in to take our group picture.

so, lunch is on your own and starts promptlyat 12:00 noon. the census cafeteria is located in that direction.just past the registration desk. at 1:00 pm we'll come back. we'll have theexecutive remarks by john thompson, a census bureau director. at 1:30 lisa blumerman and amanda williamswill present the update on the 2020 census program followed by a discussant and committeediscussion. we'll break at 3:00. after the break, (jessie meisel) will presentthe census software development kit overview. after that barbara anderson will moderatethe committee's discussion with the discussion

of overall impressions of what happened todayand will take place. we will end promptly at 4:15 today. please note we try to inform people becauseeveryone has busy schedules of upcoming meetings. so far this is the last meeting for 2015,but for calendar year 2016 the dates are april 14 and 15, and september 15 and 16. april14 and 15, september 15 and 16. once again i'd like to remind you to alwaysmention your name and speak directly into the microphone each time you speak. as a reminder to the audience, during anyof the question and answer sessions occurring later today, only committee members are permittedto ask questions and make comments of a census

bureau panelist. the public will have an opportunityto comment tomorrow morning at 11:00 am, during a time set aside for public comment. if anyone intends to give public comment,please leave your name at the registration desk. if you have comments that exceed twominutes, please submit your comments in writing at the registration desk. a little housekeeping. members should stopat the registration desk for travel reimbursement materials during today and tomorrow. due to federal regulations involving governingmeetings and conferences, refreshments that you see are for committee members only.

for those committee members needing to ridea bus to the hotel, the bus will leave promptly at 4:30. fifteen minutes after we have toleave (today). restrooms are behind us. in that particulardirection. please welcome, barbara anderson. barbara anderson: hi. i was told that onething i can do is to have you go around the committee members and say your name and whereyou're at. as such we have six new members which is a lot, but i think five are here,but i think this would not be a bad idea. so, allison, do you want to start? allison plyer: sure. i'm allison plyer. i'mfrom new orleans.

did you want me to say more? i'm sorry, icouldn't hear. barbara anderson: what your organization is? allison plyer: i'm with the fata center innew orleans. we track economic and demographic trends particularly on the recovery of theregion and so we use a lot of census data. barbara anderson: i think it's good to knowwhere people are because there's a mixture of expertise so it's good that people know. andrew? andrew samwick: i'm andrew samwick. i'm aprofessor of economics at dartmouth college in new hampshire and i'm also the directorof our nelson rockefeller center for public

policy and the social sciences. my researchinterests are in applied microeconomics especially public economics. kathy pettit: hello, i'm, kathy pettit. i'mwith the urban institute with the social policy research organization here in d.c. and i alsodirect the national neighborhood indicators partnership which is a network of 30 organizationsacross the country that help local stakeholders use data. and, finally, i'm on the board ofthe association of public data users. jack levis: my name is jack levis with ups.i'm a senior director of process management responsible for methods and procedures andsystems for small package operations, the brown trucks you see. as it turns out, deliveringpackages and taking a census have a lot of

similarities from the operation standpoint.so, that's why i'm here. ken simonson: i'm ken simonson. i'm a frequentuser of census business and economic data. i'm the chief economist for the associatedgeneral contractors of america, construction trade association. i'm a fellow and past presidentof the national association for business economics -- a professional organization for peoplewho use economic information in the workplace -- and also involved with several other groupsof business economists and research directors. willie jasso: willie jasso, sociology, newyork university. i study things like basic theory, inequality, migration, probabilitydistributions. bob hummer: hi, i'm bob hummer. i'm with theuniversity of north carolina chapel hill where

i just moved after being at ut austin for19 years. so i'm at chapel hill in the carolina population center and department of sociologyand there i'm working on the national survey of adolescents and adult health. juan pablo hourcade: good morning. i am juanpablo hourcade. i'm an associate professor of computer science at the university of iowawhere i'm also associate director for informatics education. my area of specialization is humancomputer interaction. barbara anderson: i'm barbara anderson. i'ma sociologist demographer from university of michigan. i work on lots of demographictopics. most of my research has been on other countries, but i've also done stuff on theunited states -- which is not a bad country

to study -- and i'm happy to be chair. dan? dan atkins: good morning. i'm dan atkins.i'm a professor of computer science and information at the university of michigan, ann harbor.and i've done work in descriptive collaboration systems. babs buttenfield: i'm babs buttenfield. i'mwith the department of geography at the university of colorado, boulder. i'm a geoscientist.i study geo visualization and design of multiscale databases. noel cressie: good morning, everyone. my nameis noel cressie. i'm professor in the school

of mathematics and applied statistics at theuniversity of wollongong. i'm also the director of the center for environmental informaticsat that university. irma elo: i'm irma elo. i'm a professor ofsociology although i was trained as a demographer at the university of pennsylvania. i directsomething called the population aging research center at penn. i also chair the committeeon population statistics of the population association of america. peter glynn: i'm peter glynn. i'm a professorof operations or surgeon management science at stanford university. sunshine hillygus: sunshine hillygus, professorof political science at duke university. and

i direct the duke initiative on survey methodology. jeff lower: good morning. my name is jefflower. i'm from the private sector. i work for a company called iic technologies. mybackground is in mapping and remote sensing, surveying and gis. and i think it fits wellwith some of the innovative techniques that the census is looking at for updates. barbara anderson: i think it was helpful to goaround and see something of the range of expertise on the committee. when i was asked to be on the committee, whenbob groves was the director of the census bureau -- he was director before john thompson-- he told me that earlier the - this committee

had been representatives of organizationsrather than people - the individual expertise. and his view was that it was kind of a rubberstampproof. and he wanted to change the nature of csac and put on individuals that he actuallythought were well-qualified to give advice to the census bureau. so he changed the gamein terms of the nature of committee members. and what has continued to happen is there'sbeen a change in the composition of the committee in terms of the changing expertise that wasneeded and the kinds of things the census bureau was doing. as the census relied moreand more on surveys and as there were plans with the census to became skimpier and skimpierthere were more survey research and service statisticians on the committee, there aremore people with computer and computation

expertise as there were developments in thatarea that we know about and would hear more about, there were more gis neighborhood studyexperts as there was increased concern with geographical detail and an increasing attentionto the mandate to use administrative data to reduce respondent burden and to be cheaper-- eventually. we're all here with - as a result of appointmentsfrom the director of the census bureau. people are typically appointed for a three year termand they are either reappointed or not at the prerogative of the census bureau director.and it's not unusual at all for people not to be reappointed. i think, occasionally,people are not reappointed because they almost never came to meetings or never said anything,or never said anything helpful.

but i think what's much more common in termsof people not being reappointed, that since this is a congressionally mandated committeeand there's a limit on size, if you want to expand and change the expertise, some peopleneed not be reappointed. and this is the main reason why people are not reappointed, andthat is up to the census bureau director. the direction of the committee membershipover the past several years has to be - been to some extent have somewhat fewer academicdemographers, but the census bureau has by no means abandoned their need to appoint demographersand their need to appoint academics. of the six new committee members this time, threeare academics and one is a demographer. so this respect both for academics and for demographershas continued.

as you know, that we're an advisory committee.we give advice. we're not an oversight committee, we're not a policy formation committee, andthe issue is, can we say things that are actually constructive and helpful to the census bureau. we can be very critical. we can say that they'vedone things wrong. they come to us with issues that they think as tommy was saying that theythink we ought to know about, but also where they're trying to decide how to do somethingand they want advice or where there is a problem. and we also bring up issues as tommy was sayingand suggest them to the census bureau for the agenda. and we occasionally have hopefullypolitely but pretty directly - even in the recent past - told the census bureau that theythought that what they or some party was planning

was not the best way to proceed. and we have effected changes in plans andprocedures, and changes in how they are doing things. it was at our suggestion why thereis a session about demographic surveys other than the cps and acs focusing on surveys,income, and program participation for example. what i recently found out and communicatedwith some of you, i found more about this than i kind of ever wanted to know in mylife that the census bureau has very careful procedures and keeps very good records aboutthe sending out of appointment letters and reappointment letters. and these things arelooked at by a lot of people and it's very, very difficult. i wouldn't say impossible,but very, very difficult for something to

flip through that system that's not supposedto. on the other hand i also found out - and censusbureau people i think were very candid. i don't know, that's just what i thought. thattheir system of keeping track of who they've sent on when they've sent letters or certificatesof appreciation is not nearly as good. and they don't have good records on that at all.and as a result of these conversations they're going to clean up their recordkeeping systemand keep much better records of this so that in the future if they're asked did you sendthis or that letter to this or that person on this or that day they actually will knowand will have a firm document or a record. so in this way even in this area althoughit's not what any of us might have wanted,

we've improved their procedures. okay. the other thing which the continuingcommittee members know -- and it was mentioned somewhat yesterday -- as tommy said todaywe're going to have a discussion toward the end of reaction to topics to date. there arealso other sessions we're talking about this. and at the end of the meeting we have a - andthere's also discussion over e-mail. there's two kinds of suggestions or recommendations thecommittee can make. there are formal recommendations to which the census bureau need to respondin writing -- and they do. they can be friendly recommendations, but they're real recommendations.and then there are suggestions which we just say we think you ought to think about this.

and after the meeting, the people who arethe discussants will be - of a given session that's discussing these sessions will be thelead person in developing recommendations or suggestions in that area. and we'll havediscussion and see what people are concerned about. and for things where there's not adiscussion we'll figure out who's going to lead that. but also in the course of the discussionhere and in things afterwards, anyone can send in any comment they want in terms ofemailed discussion of what we should proceed with. i think this is a worthwhile committee. thisis my fifth year on the committee. my first meeting as chair.

you know, we don't do it for the money. almostall of our expenses will be (ding), you know. but we do it because we think it's importantand we care about the census bureau and we want to be helpful even though we don't alwaystell them things which at the moment they want to hear. and often and hopefully in thewisdom of reflection they realize there's actually something to what we said to themand they modify things based on that. thank you. tommy wright: thank you very much, barbara. we'll now hear from nancy potok. nancy potok: thanks, tommy.

good morning, everyone. good morning. man: good morning. nancy potok: as tommy mentioned i'm nancypotok. i'm the deputy director and the chief operating officer of the census bureau. iwould like to welcome all the committee members to our fall advisory committee meeting andespecially the new members -- which i'll touch on in a little bit -- and also to convey ourdirector john thompson's regrets that he couldn't be here this morning. he really did want tobe here, but he unavoidably cannot be here, but he will be here this afternoon.

i'd also like to welcome everyone who is watchingthe advisory committee via our webcast or listening in. and i know that all the committeewho've been on the committee know this, but for the benefit of the new committee membersand for the members of the public who may be watching, i really can't emphasize enoughhow important the work of this committee is to us. barbara touched on it a little bit, but therecommendations, the suggestions, the workgroups, the conversations that we have here in thesemeetings are really crucial to helping the census bureau shape how we interact with theamerican public whether it'd be methodology, technology, operations, research -- all ofthose interactions. and it really follows

through all points of what i would call thesurvey lifecycle or the census lifecycle which is very similar from the way that we put togetherour metadata, design our surveys to how we implement that in the field with data collection,post data collection processing and, of course, dissemination because that's really what it'sall about. is getting that information to the public in a way that all segments of thepublic can use it whether they'd be researchers, school children, business owners, whoeverneeds to get access to our data for a variety of purposes. and i think as we talk more about some ofthe advances that we're making in places that we're going with our business processes andour technology, you'll see that that's a big

goal of ours, is to - talk about technology. sometimes it's as simple as the battery. to make our data widely available, widelyusable to really improve the lives of people in multiple ways. whether it's being usedto grow the economy, to create jobs, to do important social science research that leadsto policy decisions, we take that mission very seriously. and this committee is key. i think if youlisten to the variety of backgrounds that people on this committee have, very key inhelping us do that work better. as barbara mentioned there's been a lot ofchanges to the committee since our last meeting.

so, first of all i particularly want to welcomebarbara anderson as our new chair. this is her first csac meeting as the chairperson.so, for the benefit of those of you who are new on the committee or who may be watching,barbara is the ronald freedman collegiate professor of sociology and population studiesat the university of michigan. she's conducted extensive research on the relation of populationand development in the role of data and data quality in those areas, and she's consultedon data and research with many foreign governments including estonia, china, and south africa. in addition to her work on csac she servedon the national science foundation review panel on sociology and the national instituteof child health and human development population

research committee. so, welcome, barbara.we're really pleased and just delighted that you've agreed to serve as chair of this committee. i know we went around the room and the newcommittee members introduced themselves briefly, but i'd like to give you a little more backgroundon some of the committee members. i'm not going to go in the order that they are sitting,but i will just introduce all of them. so we met juan pablo hourcade. he's an associateprofessor at the university of iowa's department of computer science. his main area of researchis human computer interaction with a focus on the design implementation and evaluationof technologies that support creativity, collaboration, information access, and health for a varietyof people including children and older adults.

welcome, juan pablo hourcade. kathryn pettit is the senior research associateat the metropolitan housing and community policy center at the urban institute. andher research focuses on measuring and understanding neighborhood change. kathy is the recognized expert on the useof neighborhood data in research policymaking and program development, and on a varietyof small-area local and national data sources. and thank you for joining the committee. allison plyer is the executive director andchief demographer of the data center of new orleans as she mentioned. that is a privatenonprofit organization devoted to independent

research. she's the lead author or the new orleans indexseries. and that was developed in collaboration with brookings institution to analyze thestate of new orleans recovery and later to check the region's progress towards prosperity. so welcome. we're delighted you're on thecommittee. krisha rao who wasn't able to attend thisweek's meetings, we do look forward to meeting him in the spring, but i'd like to mentionhim because he is a new member of the committee. he's the director of economic product andresearch at zillow. and he leads a team focused on producing impartial data-driven economicanalysis on the u.s. housing market in transforming

real estate data and economic trends intoinsights and research for consumers, industry professionals, policymakers and academics.so we're very interested in getting in input in the spring meeting and working with himon the committee. jeff lower, welcome. he's the executive vicepresident of iic technologies as he mentioned. he has over 22 years of geospatial experiencemanaging programs for the u.s. army corps of engineers and an alphabet soup of otheragencies including usgs, navfac -- i guess is how you would say that acronym -- usda,and nga, among others. mr. lower just completed a two-year term as president of the managementassociation of private photogrammetric surveyors. that's very impressive if i can't pronounceit. it must be serious.

andrew samwick is the sandra and arthur irvingprofessor of economics and the director of the nelson rockefeller center for public policyand the social sciences at dartmouth college. since joining the faculty of dartmouth in1994 his scholarly work has covered a range of topics including pensions, saving, taxation,portfolio choice and executive compensation. in 2003 and 2004 he joined the staff of thepresident's council of economic advisers, serving for a year as its chief economist. so thank you very much for serving on ourcommittee. we feel very privileged that you're joining us. so welcome to the new members, welcome barbaraas new chair, and thank you all, again, for

serving. i'm going to continue for a few minutes andgive you a few updates on what's happening at the census bureau. i'll start with some staff changes that wehad in the past few months. some of you may remember from prior meetingsour cio, brian mcgrath. he has left and taken another job at the department of justice.so to my right our deputy cio, harry lee, is now our acting cio and carrying on thegreat work that we're doing here. we're in great hands with harry acting asour cio. and i think when you meet our team later in the day who's working on severalof our systems initiatives. you'll see why

we feel confident that we're able to moveahead if we're working to fill the cio position. i don't think she's here today, but shirinahmed is now the assistant director for decennial census program. so what that means is she'slisa blumerman's deputy -- the number 2 position. shirin moved over from being the assistantdirector in the economic programs directorate. and we also in the decennial area have a newhead. we reorganized the decennial directorate post 2010 and we consolidated all the it for decennial in onedivision. so we have a decennial it division now. and the new head of that is atri kalluri.and he was a census employee. he's moved over from the geography division to head up thateffort for the decennial directorate. we also recently created a new office that'spart of my office. it's the organizational

transformation office. the office is headedby ruth ann killion who many of you may know she headed up the demographic statisticalmethodology division for a long time here. but now she's heading up our organizationaltransformation. the office is very exciting because as wetransform the way that we work, as we move towards really being able to change our workculture to be more collaborative, to foster more innovation, to do a lot of business processreengineering, to take advantage of new technologies and ways to become more efficient and bringin data from lots of different sources. it's a huge cultural change in the organization.i think anybody who's ever been through that kind of transformation will agree. and so,we really want to stay focused on that.

we want to make sure that we're not just changingthe business processes, but we really are addressing all of those things that we needto when we change the business process so that we're successful. that we're really sharinginformation across the agency, that we're focusing on how we can better collaborate,on how we can create more spaces for innovation as we move to do our business differently.and so, ruth ann reporting to me is heading up that effort. also, the senior leadership of the censusbureau will be meeting later this month to really prioritize our initiatives and updateour strategic planning. so we're very excited about that and have been doing a lot of preparation.so i think input from this committee today

will really help inform some of the strategicplanning that we're doing later this month. and, lastly, i know you probably won't noticethis on the first floor, but we are in the process of moving the bureau of economic analysisinto our building and they will be here in the spring. the move was announced last fall,really, by the department of commerce. bea's lease was up and they needed some placeto move to. and this offered a tremendous opportunity for us to increase our collaborationon moving forward with improvements in the economic statistics by having them here rightin the building. so we're delighted that they're moving in. moving is also the - is the major processwhere we're consolidating space so we're actually

moving thousands of people in this buildingto free up continuous space for bea. and that's underway right now. so lots of people arepacking up, moving, unpacking, but the work continues. and once we get over that movinghump we're very excited about all the opportunities that will be before us for increased collaborationwith bea and how we can move forward in the economic statistics arena. i will touch briefly on the 2016 and 2017budgets. 2016, all i can say is read the newspaper. you probably know as much asi do in terms of whether we will have a continuing resolution and stay open. as of october 1lots of people are speculating as to what will happen. i have no inside informationon that. so like all the other federal agencies

we are just moving ahead and hoping for thebest, and we'll see how 2016 shakes out. 2017 were - i can't talk muchabout what we're requesting for 2017 because we're in the middle of the internal administration2017 budget process. but i don't know - and if you're familiar with that we put togetherbudget request that goes through the department of commerce. it goes to omb, and then thepresident's budget is put together. and usually the whole president's budget goes throughcongress usually, in either late january -- around the state of the union address -- or earlyfebruary. so we are on that timetable. we're in themiddle of that process, but while it's in process and until the president's budget comesout i'm really not at liberty to discuss the

specifics of what's in there. so that's all i can say about budget and iguess i'm thankful that this meeting is - was scheduled for september and not october. on some of our programmatic things, i thinkyou'll be hearing a lot more about this today so i won't talk too much about it. of coursei do want to mention the 2020 operational plan because we're gearing up to release ouroperational plan for the 2020 census and plan to roll it out at a project management reviewsession on october 6. that will be webcast -- just like this meeting.so, if you're not in town and can't come in person you certainly can watch it on the webcast.

this is our roadmap to how we are going toconduct the 2020 census with a lot of the design decisions that we're going forwardwith included in that. and lisa will be talking about that in a lot more detail. so, definitely,i'm going to say about it now and stay tuned for lisa's session. cedcap which is the center for enterprisedata collection and processing is really the integration of how we are changing our businessprocess reengineering and moving that into new systems development or purchase to reallychange the way that we conduct all the steps in a survey lifecycle or in a census. and the philosophy behind that is that there'sa lot of commonality in the functions that

we do whether it's a business survey or ahousehold survey, or conducting a census in terms of starting with standardized metadatarolling into instrument design. how we do the data collection multimode, whether it'sinternet, not so much paper anymore whether it's on a laptop or be a telephone, an operationalcontrol system, they can deal with multimodes and use the business rules, post data collectionprocessing, and then dissemination. there's so much commonality in those processesthat we realize that we could be a lot more efficient and really streamline our processesand take advantage of being standardized for multiple ways if we could bring the wholecensus bureau to use enterprise-wide systems. and that's what - that kept us all about.so it's a combination of the business process

reengineering and taking advantage of thetechnology. you'll be hearing something about that andwe're very happy with the progress of that. and especially this month we had some bigdevelopments because our first operational systems rolled out for cedcap on schedule.they're working great. and we have to refresh our laptops that weuse for the capi interviewing for the household surveys, that our field representatives uselaptops so we had to replace them. they were at the end of their lifecycle. and we were able to use cedcap's first productreleases in that refresh by putting them on the tablets. that's our address listing system.so we replaced our old one with the new enterprise

listing system that everyone will use andthen a mobile case management system. so we're very excited by that -- the systems.the listing system has been tested in the field before we've rolled it out and we'revery happy with the way that it rolled out and how it's working right now. i want to touch a minute on dissemination.i think you'll be seeing a demo of some of the ways that we are enhancing the way thatwe disseminate data to reach more people to make it easier to use our data. i think we'vementioned before several times - so most of you who've been on the committee should beaware, but for the benefit of the new folks on the committee we - a few years ago we changedour whole model for dissemination by moving

our data to an api so that we could work closerwith developers who could take our data so that we could not only have census data combinedwith other data that developers wanted to combine with, but also so we could combineour data more easily and make it more flexible by moving away from sort of a pdf table formatand letting people combine the demographic and the economic and the census data in waysthat were most meaningful to them. and that afforded a lot more flexibility. so we'vebeen moving forward with that. and so we called the effort to have an enterpriseway of disseminating data that way, cedsci. and what we're doing is we're taking all thedata. it comes to the central shared services platform and then it will go out in the formof api's web tools, data visualizations, maps,

et cetera. and so you're going to see some demos of that,of some of the new tools that we have. and that's a census business builder for the smallbusiness edition which we have put out for small business entrepreneurs. andwe're really excited about that. also, something else that you'll hear aboutis a software development kit or sdk that we put together that makes it much, much easierfor developers to access our api. we call it citysdk. we have taken it around the country to varioushackathons and it's really a tool box for developers to be able to get to our data mucheasier. you'll be hearing more about that

as well this morning and we're really excitedabout these efforts. and then, of course, our plan is to have abeta of our new dissemination system particularly for all of our data dissemination as the replacementfor american factfinder where our goal is to get a beta version out in the spring thatour users can test and give us feedback on before we go out with the final version thatwould replace american factfinder going forward. so we're moving ahead expeditiously with that. so with that i'll wrap up my remarks. i knowwe have a very full schedule. and again, i can't express my appreciationenough for your work on this committee. as barbara mentioned you're not compensated forit and so your dedication and your willingness

to help us improve this data is really - itmeans a lot to us and we do appreciate you taking time out of your lives and your schedulesto help us and to help really the american public have better data and get it quickerand more efficiently but still maintain the very high quality gold standard that is partof our mission to do. so thank you again. tommy wright: we do have a minute or two incase there's a question or clarification. yes, kenneth? ken simonson: this is ken simonson. nancy, could you give us a little more detailon the fy '16 appropriations bill. i believe

the house passed one. the senate committeemarked one up, but it hasn't passed the senate. but they both would really slash funding forcensus. nancy potok: yes. i don't have the exact numbersin front of me and our cfo isn't here, but we did not - we didn't get what we requestedand we didn't get that either in the house or the senate mark. the house was lower thanthe senate. where we end up - i mean, most of the cutsare sort of cuts that we would take across the board on various programs. it's goingto make things very tight across the board in any case, but, you know, the biggest increasesthat we ask for are for the decennial census because it's cycling up.

and so, any time - just generically i'll sayany time we have to make cuts in the decennial which we've had to do every year from ourrequest up until now, what ends up happening is we delay things. we keep pushing thingsback because up until now we have been doing research and testing to try to come up withour operational plants. so anything that wasn't directly related to the four big areas wherewe've been trying to cut cost in the decennial in our plan has been to - and we've been talkingabout this for a long time - to cut $5 billion from the cost of what it would take us ifwe repeated the 2010 design. so in order to do that we really had to focusour research and testing on four areas. there's lots of other things that we have to do thatwe've just delayed, and delayed, and delayed.

if we have to keep delaying in '16 the resultis that we start to see the compromises come in in the design. because we're really movinginto an implementation phase, we have to develop the systems. we have to move forward withcedcap. we have to be able to deliver. so, now aswe move in to more of an implementation in the development stage - and that's reallygeared to doing an end-to-end test in 2018, so when we start to make cutswe - you know, we have to be able to conduct that end-to-end test in 2018. so other things start to get compromised.either we can't move forward with new designs because we don't have the money to test thaton some of these other activities or we just,

you know, we'll repeat what we did in 2010. so you start to see chipping away at our abilityto deliver what we originally promised, but we are staying on sort of the critical pathfor these core activities that we absolutely have to get done. so, you know, where we endup is really going to be sort of how much can we do beyond staying on this criticalpath for 2018 in 2016 are the things that we can push back to 2017. and those are sort of ongoing decisions thatget made on a case-by-case basis when we see how much money we're actually going to get. ken simonson: an additional concern i haveabout those appropriations bills is the treatment

of the american community survey. can somebodyaddress that? nancy potok: yes, the american community surveyrequest has been cut so we're - you know, depending on the size of the cuts or the kindsof things that we look at, how do we keep this survey going, maintain the quality ofit, are there things that we can do methodologically, are there things that we're going to haveto do with the sample size. we're really sort of exhausting all possibilities in terms oflooking at how we keep the survey going. we're absolutely committed to keeping highquality survey going. and there's always a number of options on the table of how we dealwith the funding cuts. and those are just decisions we have to make when we see whatthe final funding numbers.

tommy wright: all right. thank you very much,nancy. it's george walker on the program, but i'vebeen instructed to say chip walker -- who'll now tell us about the census business builderdemo: small business and chamber of commerce editions. chip? george walker: thank you very much. i'll justget in to where we're going here. good morning everybody. today i'm very excitedto be here to present to you census business builder small business edition as well asa brief demo of the chamber of commerce edition, but before i dive right into the demo i justwant to say that this tool represents the

census bureau's commitment to the commercesecretary's strategic plan which is america's open for business and what agencies can doto make their data more available to businesses to help america thrive. this was a collaborative effort, and althoughit originated under bill bostic in the econ directorate, all the directorates who hadcensus help contribute to what you see today. but really, more importantly, this is a usertool. we've been building this tool for about a year. we released it last week in san franciscoat america's small business development center's conference. but between the point that wehad the prototype last september and the time

that we introduced it, we literally travelledfrom all across the country from the east coast all the way to hawaii. and we receivedfeedback from over 2000 users -- some of them business councilors, some of them small businessowners themselves -- and so they really deserve as much credit for this tool as much as anyonein this building does or our partners with esri. so what you see here is a tool that's designedto help someone that owns a small business and may want to expand it or someone thatis maybe starting out. and maybe they're not sure exactly where they want to locatetheir business or what type of business they want to open up.

part of some of the user-friendly tips wehave here is you just can scroll over the top of any particular icon and they will tellyou what's in there. what you're going to see is these are broadindustry-based icons. we have about 60 industries in here and about 49 different variables. so for this example we're going to look atrestaurants. so we go to food services. and these are allthe different industries. one thing from the very beginning that thedirector and the deputy director told us is that we were free to move away from some ofthe conventional things that census does. so you won't see in here anything about tractsor anything that is sort of the nomenclature

that we use here. we tried to reduce everythingto simple language. and so, these are all tied in the backendto naics codes. but you're not really going to see the naics codes because a lot of peoplewhen they go on their computer to research a business they don't really - they may noteven understand what a naics code is. so let's say we just want to open up a restaurant.and then we're going to come over here. so, for example, i'll just show you righthere where it says city and town. in census verbiage that would be place, but we foundif you're doing focus groups and talking to numerous people, they didn't really understandwhat place meant. so we changed it to something that fit what the average person knows.

so we're going to look at fairfax. and we'regoing to go to fairfax county, virginia. and then we get a little prompt here to go tothe map. and then the map opens. now why this is populatingi'm going to tell you what's going on in the background which is some unique things. the base map was produced by esri and what'sjust happened now is the tool exists on the amazon cloud and it's made two api calls tocensus. it's gone to the tigerweb api to pull the shapes that you see for the counties andthen immediately it's gone back and it's pulled the data associated with it. in this particular case the very first variablethat populates the field is population.

now, one of the neat things about this toolis although we pick fairfax county for population we just need to click around the map and wecan explore the map very easily to see what the population of surrounding areas mightbe. obviously population would be one variable that might be important to a user. we also found out from talking to users thatsometimes they wanted to see more of the underlying geography -- what was going on in the background.and so we built in a transparency slider that allows to hide more the data - more of thedata layer and look at what's going on in the background. if i don't move this back.i will really mess up. so you can also hide these little things here.so, again, you can explore more of the map

without looking at the data itself. so what's in here? so, when we look at the areas of my potentialcustomers this is the american community survey, acs. acs was a strong partner in this effortas well as the other directorates and it represents some of the most powerful data that we havein the tool. for example you can look at socioeconomic characteristics such as median household income,percent in poverty, high school. while the tool doesn't tell you what shouldbe most important to you as a small business owner, you have to come to the tool with someknowledge of what variables are most important to you. we tried to pick the variables fromtalking to people that we felt cover the broadest

range of businesses. when you look at what industries we have inhere, we picked industries that are, one, very popular. and they also have a tendencyto have a high failure rate as well. one thing that's very interesting that wefound out during our tours and our focus groups is the average small business owner just startingout does not actually have a written-out business plan. their business plan is in their head.they also frequently don't go to a lender to get a loan. they're either taking out anothermortgage on their house or borrowing money from friends and family when they first startout until they grow to a certain level. when we look at other businesses like mine-- another powerful dataset that comes from

the economic directorate -- this is whereyou can look at what your competition might be in a particular area. we've also gone - andso you have the employers, non-employers and key ratios. what i want to show you here whichi think is a powerful part of the tool is in the key ratios we can take employer andnon-employer establishments and we can add them together. and, again, every time you change the toolit's making a fresh call to the apis to get the data. the simplicity of that is when thedata changes the user doesn't need to know it's changed in the api and the next timethey use the tool they'll have the most recent dataset available to them. it doesn't requirethem to download any data to their own hard

drive. all the data is stored in the api.and, again, we're leveraging the amazon cloud. so now you see in fairfax county, virginiathere are 837 total restaurants. and, again, you can explore the map and see where elseand what's going on out here. sure. irma elo: this is irma. what are non-employerfirms? george walker: non-employer firms are firmsthat don't have any employees in which they're paying taxes for. so if you just opened uplike a consulting business and it was just you that's considered a non-employer firm. irma elo: so all the small businesses whomight start out of their garage then?

george walker: excuse me? irma elo: most people would know them, whostart a small business out of their garage? george walker: they might not know that untilwhat - i can show you. so if you go over here to non-employers youcan see a tool tip right here. so a business organization or entity consisting of one ormore domestic establishment locations under common ownership or control. so we tried - and you're right. so we triedto put in tool tips wherever we can to kind of help the user along. because of the length of the presentationwhat i didn't show you is you would enter

this tool from a census business builder toolpage from census.gov. and on that tool page we have about five videos which are shorttutorial videos that walk you through how to use the tool. so when we promote the tool we actually - iwould not - or we don't send someone right to that first splash page, we send them tothe main tool page where there's frequently asked questions, there's tips and tricks.and there's the five videos that show you. what we're going to do in a future versionof this tool we're just - we're going to take and put a video link right on each of thesepieces so that if you get to a particular part of the tool and you're not sure whatto do, you don't have to go back to that first

page, you can go right in to the intro videoright there and that will pop up for you. the next part i want to show you here is - well,let me go back here once again quickly. so this tool is sort of breaking new ground.and one of the things that we've done here is we've added data into this tool that didnot originate at census. so if you look over here we've added consumerspending. and this consumer spending has come from esri. and where esri audit is theyhave purchased data from the credit card companies on all types of consumer spending. so, for example, we could look right hereand we could look at total consumer expenditures on dining out. so you could look at how muchpeople are spending going outside of their

house to buy food at restaurants. there are literally hundreds on these variablesand as we get more user feedback we will refine them further. one thing we want to do withrespect to many of these variables since they're right now in totals is we either want to give youaverage or per capita so that that might be a little more meaningful. another addition to the tool is you can actuallyfilter among a number of different variables. so we're going to go here. we're going topick socioeconomic characteristics. again, this is coming from the acs. we're going topick median household income. we're going to select that variable.

and then what you see here is in the countythat we've selected -- so right now we're in montgomery county. maryland -- you havemedian household income between 46,000 and 122,000. now, let's see you want a high endrestaurant, then you can edit this with this filter bar and you can change it. so now we'regoing to adjust it to that level. and then we apply the filter. and now what you've seen happen here is thesecounties that have been grayed out no longer fit the characteristics that you've set uphere in this editing tool function. so you can function up. you can filter up to threecharacteristics at a time. so it really allows a small business person to really delve inand sort of look at the niche that they want.

one thing interesting about this and the wholetool in general is we've been approached by other federal agencies. so noaa was interestedin this. for some of their disaster work that they do, they would actually probably usethe slider in the opposite director. they would want to look at counties that are lowerin income and may not be able to recover from a disaster as quickly. at the end of the day what you want to dois you want to create a report. to save a little time i've already created this report,but you would just hit here and then you would get a report that looks like this. fairfaxcounty full service restaurants. this is the first time that you see the naicscode. we put it here because there are other

tools within census that if you want to divein deeper you can use the naics code and get a lot more data than we're delivering here. and what you see here is you see the demographiccharacteristics, you see the socioeconomic characteristics, the housing characteristics.where we can we're putting in time series. we have the other businesses like mine. andthen each of these allows you to either print the whole thing and then each of these allowsyou to download these charts in various different formats -- whichever one the user prefers.and like i said we are going to continue to upgrade this tool and make changes to continueto make it more user friendly. so that's census business builder small businessedition.

and right now what i want to show you quicklyis the chamber of commerce edition. when we were demoing this tool in cincinnatiat the chamber of commerce executives annual meeting a year ago, they asked us if we hada tool that could help them. we didn't. but bill said that we could make one and we madeone. and so this is what we have here. and so, this is what we have here. and so,one of the challenges of chambers, unless you're one county or (something), they're- it's hard to - they can define their geography but census didn't have a geography calledchambers of commerce. so this right now is in its beta version. i mean, its prototypeversion, and it allows the user to build a chamber of commerce by either selecting counties-- one county or multiple counties.

so we're quickly going to build the chamberhere. so we edit chamber. we pick an additional county. we add that to the chamber. we'll just pick three quickly here. so now we have sort of a regional chamberof commerce made up of three counties in virginia. you can name the chamber. so we're just going to name this the csac chamber. and so we've named it that. and that willbe captured in the report that you print out when you're done with this. the unique thing, it has the same functionalitythat you've seen before in the previous edition.

what we tried to do is use census businessbuilder as sort of the main platform for these two different tools. and so census businessbuilder is sort of a tree trunk and then these are just the different branches. and we couldhave other ones come up. and so the great thing about this is we willneed to at least pick one variable here. we'll do that. let's pick total population. so what we've done is we introduced this toolin montreal in august and we have been soliciting feedbacks -- with a feedback button righthere -- so we can make the changes that are needed before we go forward with the publicrelease of this tool which will be in december. so you have some unique factors here thatare kind of neat. one is you can create a

report which aggregates all the data for allyour counties in your chamber or you can look at a report for the individual chambers ifthat would be beneficial to you. again, i've pre-done the report to save sometime. and this is what you see. you have your chamber of commerce there. you have the samedemographic and economic data that we saw before, but where this report goes anotherway as we start giving you businesses broken down by naics sector because that's somethingthat's obviously very important. the sectors -- and what's going on in their various sectorsis very important to the various chambers of commerce. we also give you all your non-employer businesses.some chambers are very interested to know,

for example, that there are 45,000 businessesincluding adding up in all the sectors, what percentage of those businesses is the chamberactually representing. they can know where they might need to do marketing. so that's it. that's census business builderssmall business edition and chamber of commerce edition. happy to answer any questions. yes, bob? bob hummer: okay. this is bob hummer. it's fascinating. thankyou.

the question i have, you mentioned esri andthe credit card data coming in. so jacks not here and i can - you know, what ifesri goes out of business? and so, how dependent are you on those particular partnership -- so,if you had a fight with whatever companies are supplying this -- and how adaptable isyour tool to the kind of changes that you might see and new businesses that you mightrely on, all the ones that go away? because my, you know, concern is that you could endup with a tool that, you know, businesses are wanting to create something and there's,you know, bad links, bad data, old data that kind of thing. so i just wanted to get yourfeedback on that. george walker: sure. and that's a really goodquestion.

so, we're in a contractual arrangement withesri. they were the primary developers of the tool. they developed everything up untilthe point to where you hit create report and then at that point census develop the reportthat you saw. census owns the code so even if the relationshipfor whatever reason stop with esri we would still own the tool. we would have to decidewhere we want to host the tool --whether inside census or keep it on the amazon cloud or goto a census cloud or something of that nature. with respect to the dataset, i guess any timeyou bring in a third party dataset -- in this case we're paying for that -- you're at riskof losing that at some point. now, some of that data comes from bls, i believe, andwe could get that. and i guess we could potentially

purchase data from credit card companies aswell. there will be - we want to add in more thirdparty datasets. sort of the requirement would be that obviously it would be useful to thetool, but it have to be accessed through an api. so we have future plans to add in more thirdparty data. but sort of what our - one of our philosophies has been is we know we sortof know what the users want and we're trying to deliver that to them. and so, we've sortof gone on the user side when we've sort of entered into this third party data. we're even considering letting you bring inyour own data. if you wanted to take points

on a map that you get from bing or from googleor from yelp or something and overlay it on top of the tool that you're seeing -- no oneelse would see that -- that you could do that noel cressie: thank you, chip. it's reallyinteresting, what you're doing... tommy wright: your name? noel cressie: ...and very commendable. tommy wright: mention your name. noel cressie: noel cressie. thank you, tommy. so my question is level of geography. i noticedyou did this by county. i also noticed there

was a choice we could drill down to neighborhood.i'm not sure what a neighborhood... george walker: yes, so let me go back to thetool very quickly for you. so, yes. so you do have level of geographyhere. so we're looking at - let me switch the characteristic here just so i can showyou. of course the demographic data is going togo all the way down to the tract or neighborhood level, but once you go below the county levelyou're going to lose a lot of your economic data. but i can show you this very quicklyjust by going to my potential customers. and let's just look at populations to be quickhere. so, yes, you can take the tool down at anypoint.

another thing about the tool is you couldkeep all your parameters the same across here. go back here just by clicking here and changeyour industry without having to start over again. but, yes, you just go and click, i don't know, zip code if you wanted to. noel cressie: sure. ((crosstalk)) george walker: ...making the calls. and themore refined your geography gets a little longer for the tool to populate, but thenit's going to pop up with a zip code map. and, again, you can explore that map and justlook at the zip codes and get the data that apply to that particular zip code. or we couldgo down to the neighborhood level.

so, yes. so that's where it goes. but again when you get down to this levelof detail you're going to lose your pure econ data. you'll still have your socioeconomicdata coming from the acs, but you're going to lose your econ data. noel cressie: thank you. that's a good point.can you also do the chamber down at the local level as well? are you combining... george walker: the chamber builds from a county,okay, and so the location is a little bit different. but, again, we're just lookingat counties here. now, one of our - we have a couple of challengeswith the chamber tool.

noel cressie: right. george walker: one is that some chambers willbe nice and neat. it will be a county or series of counties. but some chambers may take apart of a neighboring town or a neighboring city and that presents challenges for howyou include that, and that's something that we're trying to do for the next version. we've talked to chamber of counties executivesthat say that their county is divided into three or four or five chambers. and so, thoseare some of the challenges that we have to work to with our partners here at census tofigure out how we can do that and display it properly.

noel cressie: yes. so, i guess that's wherei wanted to end up, that notion of mismatch areas that do come up so that it's on yourradar to do. in terms of some of the data that's missingat the lower level, is there any thought of imputing at those lower levels or do you just simplysay i don't have it? george walker: well right now we say we don'thave it, but i would say that everything is on the table for a future discussion. noel cressie: okay. george walker: what we want to make sure thatwe do, obviously we want to deliver quality data to the user, but we also want to makesure the user understands what it is that

we're delivering to them. and so if we canfind a way to deliver data that the user doesn't have to be a researcher to understand whatit is that they're looking at then i would see no reason why we wouldn't put it in thetool. what we've tried to say - and i don't knowif ian kalin is speaking later or right after me, and i demoed the tool for him and he usedthe term magic middle which is trying to find a tool that's easy to use, that givesa rich dataset, but not too much that you overwhelm the user. noel cressie: thank you very much. tommy wright: yes, barbara?

babs buttenfield: babs buttenfield. thankyou, chip. i'm also interested in spatial resolution.you're saying that the api is accessing acs data. so the first question is tempo resolution.is it one, three or five year acs data that it's accessing? george walker: it's accessing the five. babs buttenfield: the five. and do you say that somewhere? george walker: yes. so, one thing that wetried to do with the tool, our sort of thoughts and from talking to users is they just wantthe data. they're not really interested in

where the data came from. they're most interestedthat it came from census. they look at that logo and they know that it's a valuable resourceand that they can trust the data. they're not so much interested whether it came fromthe econ directorate or whether it came from the decennial or whether it came from acs. however, we do provide links to all thoseand particularly in the report that you see where it's being sourced and then you cango into - let's see. you can go into - so for more demographic and margins of erroryou can click here. so in all these we provide where the source data is and then you cango in to it and delve deeper. babs buttenfield: great.

and one more question. if the api is accessingacs data that's going to limit the spatial resolution, but because the acs data doesn'tgo down as far as the decennial data. george walker: that is true. that is true. babs buttenfield: yes. george walker: so, we can go down to the neighborhoodlevel with acs. so it depends on the type of business youwant to open. if you're opening a landscaping business you're probably interested in countiesor multiple sets of counties. if you're opening up a daycare you're very much interested inneighborhood. whether people work there or live there that's where they're going to taketheir children. so, it really depends on the

type of business. but we have not - we arenot going to below the tract level at this time. babs buttenfield: okay. thank you. tommy wright: tommy wright. i understand billbostic has a comment and then juan. bill bostic: i was going to say when noelwas asking about the term neighborhood we used that term because no one knew what atract was outside of this building. so the feedback that we received from the users,they understood neighborhood. tommy wright: thank you, bill. juan pablo?

juan pablo hourcade: juan pablo hourcade. so, two quick questions. first is, what volumeof user you're expecting? how many users a day? george walker: we're not sure yet. so oursort of outreach plan has been to target the intermediaries. that's why we have been introduced- we introduced the tool at america's small business development center councilors conferenceand they're people that on a daily basis work with numerous small business owners in theircommunities, they're also deeply tied in to economic development in their regions. i willsay though that we have a big opportunity coming up and that we've been contacted byfacebook and we have a meeting with them next

week for their small business promotions programarea and so that could be a big chance for us to really leverage this - leverage thetool. juan pablo hourcade: and so my follow-up was,what are your plans for obtaining feedback from the users now after deployment? so,how are you planning to get... george walker: so our roadshow continues.i have a colleague, andy hait who is in pennsylvania today presenting to that statedatacenter. so we have a travel scheduled to the extent that we're permitted to travel. we have a webinar later on today for mbda--minority business development at commerce. i'm going to new york city later today topresent the tool for the department of commerce

natural capital roundtable discussion. sowe keep on reaching out whatever where we can. we also over here, on both tools, we havea send a feedback link and so at any point in time we are asking for feedback from theuser. we look at this feedback as a team on sharepoint. we analyze it and if it's somethingthat we think is a good idea then we try and queue it in to a future edition. right now our next edition of a small businesstool, we hope to come out this winter. juan pablo hourcade: and a quick follow up to that.are you planning to make use of the logs of how the tool is actually being usedto see...

george walker: yes. so we have embedded analyticsinto the tool. and so we analyze the analytics on a regular basis. dozens of analytical points. tommy wright: bill? bill bostic: as we've taken this out to get feedbackwe have also run across a number of professors that want to use the tool in their entrepreneurshipclasses. so that's another market that we hadn't thought of originally when we developedthe tool. tommy wright: dan? dan atkins: i just want to... tommy wright: say your name.

dan atkins: i think as you're well aware oryou'll quickly learn as word gets around. entrepreneurship is just - you know, a newentrepreneurship programs are flourishing in practically every university these days.so this will be, i believe, a very important tool to use there. and so, i would encourageyou to be proactive in trying to reach that. i don't know exactly, you know, if there'sa intermediary or an organization or something, but i'll do a little digging and let you knowif i can find one. but just don't wait for random professors. try to be proactive inmaking this tool available. tommy wright: nancy? nancy potok: i just want to go back to a pointthat noel was making and make a link to a

broader issue that we'll be talking abouta little bit later today. and that's this issue of different geographies for differenttypes of data. one of the areas that we're really pressingahead to explore is seeing if we can get our economic data at smaller geographic levelswhether that'd be through imputation modeling using other datasets that we can go out andpurchase that are out there and available like credit card data. that's really highpriority for us. so when we get to the big data discussioni think that we really would appreciate hearing a lot from members of this committee in termsof looking at how we can move forward with an aggressive research program particularlyfocused on getting economic statistics at

smaller geographic levels than we currentdo because that's very important to us and it's part of our operations with bea becausethey're also very interested. we know that there's a lot of demand out there to get theeconomic statistics at smaller geographic levels. so when we are talking about big data later,that we really would appreciate any input because it's very challenging for us to matchup the demographic in the economic data right now based on these different geographies.that not only that we're collecting at those levels, but the different quality that weare looking at and it's just a very high priority for us so that we can move forward with moreof the ability to combine data at smaller

and smaller geographies because that's whatpeople want and that's what we'd like to be able to provide. the quality is a big issuethere. george walker: one thing that we're stronglyconsidering as well is it occurred to us rather quickly when we first started demoing thechamber of commerce edition, that this tool could be used for a lot of different typesof organizations beyond just the chamber. so we're now taking under consideration anew name for this before its public release because you can go in here and name it anything.it could be a fire control district or anything that you can build by the geographies thatwe allow you to build in this tool. so we don't want to limit ourselves by people notseeing themselves because it's called chamber

tommy wright: sunshine and then irma, andthen i think we might have to call it. sunshine? sunshine hillygus: so, i just wanted to firstsay i absolutely love that idea because that was my first response. it doesn't necessarymatch up to chambers, but it does have lots of other uses. i also want to second babs' comment as wellthat i think that there are some information that is easy to sweep under the rag and reallymake sure that it's - that it, you know, only people who use it. but that timeframe is actuallyquite relevant because there can be such dramatic changes over a five year timeframe.

but the actual thing that i wanted to sayis have you thought through unintended consequences providing this level in detail of data? andthis to some extent goes to juan pablo's comment about understanding how users are using thisinformation because we know in other realms that with the explosion of data -- for instancein politics -- that it's contributing to - with micro targeting (unintelligible) polarizationand here the concern is, is this going to contribute to segregation, food deserts,right? that the use of some of this information could be used in ways that i think that perhapscollaborating to better understand what information being used in the system could ultimatelybe something that we might want to know. george walker: the only thing i would sayis that all the information provided here

is already available publicly in the api sowe're not bringing in anything new that's not already out there for users to use indozens of tools. one of the things that's a driver of thisis census and other government organizations as well, when they don't produce a tool forusers to use someone in the private sector does. they'd take the data and they repackageit and they sell it. so, part of our thought is that there are things that government canprovide to the taxpayers without the taxpayers who have already paid for it paying for itagain. tommy wright: irma? irma elo: yes, i'd like to make a - go backto the small area data. i think that's going

to be critical for many users. and i'm sureyou're aware, but even the five year data -- the acs five year data -- is problematicat the tract level in many places and there's quite a bit of work being done outside censusto try to figure out how to - and like nielson is doing work, new york city is doing a lot ofwork, that it's really - we think that pulling five years is going to give us good estimatesand it isn't. so when you're doing this modeling work, i think that's another partof the modeling that you want to include. even though it's there it's not good data. and also i was thinking another - sort ofin response to sunshine, is that this could also be used not just by businesses but community-basedorganizations and people who are doing citywide

development to address exactly who does it.so other things. but that's where the small area data would be very important. and the point going back to what babs said,the timeliness, like how often it gets updated and people understanding, that some data arefive years old and some data are maybe from yesterday. and making that sort of very clearon the topic. tommy wright: thank you very much. and thank you very much, chip. i want to apologize for letting the time slip.this is a very bad habit, but it seemed appropriate talking about data and it's even more appropriatebecause the next person is going to be the

data - chief data officer at the departmentof commerce. ian? ian kalin: we have apparently been sittingdown for about 90 minutes and so behavioral studies will show that the human ability toretain information -- i mean, active listeners -- has dramatically declines. so while i openup my presentation i please encourage you all to take one or two minutes to just standup, stretch, and get a cup or water, but i will start in 120 seconds. so please returnby then. one minute. start coming back to your chairs. as interesting as the side conversations are,i unfortunately have to pull you away from

them for a wonderful presentation here. okay. i see people getting their coffee, that'sgood. but i would also please encourage everyone to please return to their seats. i also haveto invoke the favor and benefit of the csac? how do you pronounce this? woman: csac... ian kalin: csac chair. he is much more authoritativethan i am so - or dfo. dfo and then barbara is the chair. okay, yes. both of them aremuch more influential than i am so we'll see if i have to pull that trigger to get folks to returnto their chairs. barbara anderson: okay. so do what he saidand sit down.

ian kalin: so much more polite. i'm the guest. i'm just going to get started. first of all thank you all very much for theinvitation and for this opportunity to chat a bit about data. i had a presentation in mind -- i'm prepared-- but based on the extraordinary experience at this set of tables and the conversationsthis morning i'm going to completely change what i was going to talk about. going to talk about something a bit more, i think, relevant to the discussions that have been taking place. so what i'm going to talk about this morningis a data ecosystem. not so much census scientific

aspects operation data itself, but how itfits in with a larger strategy in context. i'm going to tell three stories about ecosystem,and then i'll open it up for questions and perhaps regain a bit of this schedule. first i'll start with a random demonstrationof a company that i don't really know much of anything about. this is not an endorsement.i'm not branding or advertising this company. i'm simply describing something that's public on their web site. this is a company called sizeup. they receiveda grant from the small business administration. and i'm going to scroll down to what thisbusiness can do. but it can size up your business, provide some metrics as to where it perhapsshould be placed.

you'll see that there's a number of mappingtools for finding a competition, measuring a supply chain. you'll see an esri map here.a ground truth base map to where some of the basic demographic statistics can beleveraged for understanding where a business or operation should be placed. it has certainfeatures for identifying revenue per capita, average employees, underserved markets. perhapsit feels a little similar to -- well i don't know -- the census business builder that youset the demonstration up. but this is from a private company. this isa for business enterprise. they are clearly leveraging census data todeliver their product. so is that a problem? it's a great thing.

is it wholesale, retail, where do we fit inwithin the larger ecosystem? are we fueling this business? i have no idea or anythingabout this business. i've never met them. i've no idea who's there. i just happen to have - as an entrepreneur seen stuff like this before. i would argue this business probably wouldnot exist without census data. so where are we within that ecosystem? are we wholesale?are we retail? are we empowering job creation? are we actually helping folks to better understandhow they should grow their business, and where is our competitive strength? where is ourstrategic advantage to collect and disseminate this information so that we can empower morebusiness and nonprofits and other organizations

to create products like this that can actuallyhelp folks to expand their business, live the american dream, and serve their customers. so that's one ecosystem- i'll say- question. the second one i'll talk about is somethingwe call google. so from a demographic perspective there wasinteresting milestone reached just a couple of weeks ago. one billion people logged into facebook on the same day. within 24 hours 1 billion people went on facebook on our planet.kind of amazing in terms of the basic population statistics and accessibility questions ofwhat people are - how people are accessing information across the world.

and the way people search, primarily, is apparentlynot really on facebook, but more on google. and so i'm going to do a live demo of theinformation that may be available and ultimately delivered either directly or indirectly fromthe census bureau. so let's start with the typical question,what is the population of california. so notice when the answer comes up it's notjust the web sites over here. you also have an interactive data visualization cited inthe census bureau. right down below and the world bank for some ridiculous reason frommy perspective. you'll have what's called the - so that'scalled a fact bar. you'll also have a knowledge panel -- that's what they call it in the righthand side -- which has some additional information

which is also pulls from the u.s. censusbureau with an opportunity to provide feedback. but not to the census bureau, a feedback togoogle. interesting, right? right? so, okay, that's kind of interesting. that'sour information being disseminated through, apparently, the world's largest data distributor.okay. well, that's seems a good fit. what about some of the other aspects of - we'llsay the services the government provides? so let's say something like i just lost myjob. exclamation point. that's not a question mark. notice how there's no fact bar. notice howthere's no knowledge panel. there are no direct

links to other types of services. when infact we actually measure a lot of that information we have a service to help folks get out ofthat situation or you can - and for those of you who have laptops in front of you, feelfree to google or search or bing or yahoo. this is not an endorsement. i'm just describingthe internet a bit. find other types of questions in terms of theway our information is actually relating to some of these human experiences -- like homelessnessor food deserts or what is the quality of my school system. right? the questions thatpeople actually ask themselves that had direct demographic. income, wealth, housing, businessimpacts, these are all the data services and products that the census collects anddisseminates.

and just for fun let's compare - there's anumber of universities here. anyone want to shout out their favorite - let's go with sportsteam or ncaa ranked buckeyes. ohio buckeyes. let's take a look whathappens when i say buckeyes. all right, here we go. so we have a interactiveschedule and also some - i'm going to get - wikipedia. yes, wikipedia information ona good sports team. now, how come that comes up as a definitiveauthoritative gold standard answer to a question about, well, sports. right? but when we lookat certain things like - let's do it - compare it with an example, let's say what's a sensitive one? let's go with something provocative. there you go.

well the poverty income report has eitherjust come out or coming out very shortly. so, how large - oops, can't spell. large isthe homeless population in san francisco? no fact bar. no knowledge panel. yet we producereport on that. but where is the disconnect? why isn't itbeing collected? it's an ecosystem. people are not necessarily coming to the census.govto answer all their questions, they go in to where they normally would -- apparentlyfacebook and google -- and increasingly more so as even our regular non-smart cellphonesare basically being destroyed. and i could be able to buy a non-smartphone in two years-- even in developing countries. so what does this mean for the way that wedeploy our operations? what does this mean

for the - as nancy spoke about the mobile-enabledsolutions for conducting surveys as generally speaking all government survey participationrates are declining, but facebook is dramatically increasing, where is that middle? where isthe right way to leverage our expertise within the u.s. government as statistical - independentstatistical data to collectors and disseminators, and then integrating with this larger ecosystemto actually collaboratively achieve our common goals? so the last ecosystem story i'll tell is somethingthat was brought up this morning. we have in department of commerce a strategy -- thankfully-- and it also includes data. so i guess i'll just - i heard it's recognized - that there'ssome veterans in the room and also some new

faces to this (unintelligible). how many folks have seen this before? haveread it? all right. awesome. i'm so glad to see that. so i'm here to tell a story. we have a reallyspecific plan on data. and it is public. and that you can see here commerce.gov. you goto the homepage. just click on the strategy tab and you can go through and get to the,you know, the details, you know, the large 45 or whatever page version and then the executivesummary. but data is - i'm just going to - make medo this. sorry. i know the acting cio is right there.

security. yes. here we go. so, data is one of the five pillars of thedepartment of commerce's strategy overall. we all get evaluated on this. i know performancereviews it's like a form. it's a section of how we all must measure, conductand operate our business throughout the entire department -- all 12 bureaus. and you can see the details here about how importantit is for us to improve. as - kind of hard to read- i recognize, i'll zoom in a little bit. improvethe way we are collecting information, disseminating it and maintaining responsible practices formaking sure the information is accurate, maximally

available to the public in its raw and high-qualityform, while also rigorously protecting privacy confidentiality and security. so this exists. this is our marching orders.and there are a number of fantastic projects and programs to improve and build upon theextraordinary success and amazing expertise as demonstrated, for example, by the historicbrilliance of the census bureau's data collection and dissemination. recognizing that importance and our strategicfit within the - really the way services and powers are portioned in our country, i thinkit's also fair to say we have room for improvement. there are some good questions we can ask ourselvesabout how can we advance our operations and

keep pace with the modern data ecosystem toimprove the quality of services that we're delivering to the american people. so, that's where i'll stop. i have so manymore things i'd love to share, but i also want to be - respect the time and clock here.and i'd like to also, of course, provide ample time for comments and questions. so, what should be public servants of thecensus bureau and the department of commerce be doing better for the american people? tommy wright: thank you very much, ian. just for a point of clarification, in casepeople are wondering you don't see census

bureau on the data, it's there, but it's esa,right? ian kalin: oh the acronyms, yes. sorry aboutthat. tommy wright: yes. andrew? andrew samwick: yes. andrew samwick. i was impressed with the way you were framingthe questions. two comments. one, it seems like fred, thedata archive at the st. louis fed is out there in front and i - you didn't do it, buti think if you did a google search you start to get their charts pulled up immediately.so i would encourage you to look at that as an example.

and the second thing is, i must be gettingold because i thought the purpose of doing a google search was to get a whole bunch ofthings that i would subsequently click on. and so, maybe you're over emphasizing justhow important the results page - the initial results page is for google. i wonder if youthought a little more deeply about that. ian kalin: i definitely thought about that very deeply andits a wonderful question. you know, the - these examples i don't think are - they don't answerevery search for every human experience. i just thought to share this up as ecosystemexamples. these are signal flares of how innovation is taking place and data is being distributed.it is not wholly represented. i think it is also fair to say, though, thatthe way in which we use to share information

has to be subject to fair market challenges.is the market broadly speaking - statistical, census, surveys or otherwise, is the way we'resharing data the same as it was ten years ago. if on some level the answer is, not really.the scope has changed. the scale has changed. cloud computing have become cheaper. mobiledevices have been distributed to a much larger extent. the way people - just the amount ofdata on people is increasing in vast amounts. and to the sense that those are real marketfactors, i think it's fair for us to at least analyze them. to see whether they do impactor whether they should - whether they should impact our internal government operations.

so these are - again, these are more questionsthan statements or endorsements, or direct declarations of how things should be. tommy wright: yes. allison? allison plyer: allison plyer. it's absolutely great to, you know, ask thesequestions and think about the ecosystem, i think. and i think, too, whenever we do thatit's really important to recognize despite the proliferation of smartphones -- and thatbeing the only phone that folks will have -- there's still a big gap in people's usabilityof these devices and the way that they process and taking information often is not technology-basedin some large portion of the population.

even in the united states takes in informationnot through technology. so the work that the census does in disseminating in other arenaseven through press releases to broadcast media is still very, very influential. we don'twant to totally ship the operations toward a technology centered user... ian kalin: and i think that's a great point.i mean, this is not a replacement discussion, it's an "and" discussion. and that actuallyrelates in some strange way to even the basic levels of budgeting in business. so, if it's not just - okay, traditional pressreleases, radio, television. and it's not just those that have good electricity, reliableaccess to any laptop, but how do we enable

those people to get into the field to theninform folks that aren't connected to the information super highway. i think our challenge is that the expectationsof what government services should be doing is increasing, but apparently our budget andresources is at best holding steady or more likely declining. so we have a widening gap.we have a widening gap of expectation. it's an "and" conversation. we have to be allthis additional digital technology field engagement while at the same time with less resourcesto do so. and i think that's the real challenge. tommy wright: yes. ken? ken simonson: ken simonson.

at the risk of taking away from the next discussion,can you or bill bostic talk about how you're working with census on big data and on creatinga center for providing information to other agencies or helping them stand up with otherkinds of data sources? ian kalin: yes. there's so much going on.cedcaps, cedsci, the projects that were described initially, those are kind of capstone examples.the census bureau generates so much big data and statistical information not just for theuse within census but also other federal agencies. i remember there's a lot of money being - comingin to census just to help interior, labor, bls actually function. so, i say that politely... so i want to just - without doing an injusticeto the extraordinary amount of work i'll just

leave it at that to briefly highlight thatthat is very, very large and active operations. and i'll also briefly say thatthere are some really interesting innovations that are also just in the past few monthshave been launched. you're going to hear a little bit about citysdk--which is a project that is really innovative and basically translating data in a big datalike way between different organizations and connecting communities with that. cedsci is a massive project. that thing isin many ways reengineering the way data is architected throughout the census bureau.and if it's done the way we are hoping it does it can also be a model for how big datasystems are deployed throughout the federal

government. we just launched something called the commercedata corps. it's basically an exciting entrepreneurial new team that's bringing in some of the nation'sbest big data sciences to work alongside experts like those that exist within the census bureauto have a partner side-by-side relationship where we're bringing those with deep statisticaleconomic experience and some of these brilliant high-powered technologists to work side-by-side. and at first, of course, they have no ideawhat they're saying to each other, right? once you translate their respected expertiseyou realize, wow, there's actually a lot of great stuff that can be done to bring in someof these modern big data computing with the

core capabilities of the different bureausand line offices that have been producing and working on some of these reports for sometime. there's an entire big data initiative launchedby the white house. census bureau is a champion of that and have a number of projects beingdeployed to support that initiative. actually i think harry might be better to speak aboutthat one. and, again, in the interest of time i'll justleave those at the headlines, but very, very happy to provide more information if you'dlike it. tommy wright: jack? jack levis: jack levis.

of course i've been in many conversationslike this and they're fun. and i think it's a strategic discussion and that's where youreally need to think through it. you know, are you a data provider or are you an insightand information provider and application developer. and that was the comment that i had in myhead as i watched the previous presentation. you know, does sizeup, are they now a customeror a competitor. and that's strategic because now even with the previous discussion, somebodyis going to have new ideas and pretty soon you're going to need to grow and once youopen that door you have to be willing to take it and i think, you know, that's just a firstexample and then you just got to decide where i want to be.

and i don't know that answer, but it's strategicto say when somebody calls that up, do i want the census bureau to be the one up there.am i going to provide the application and the inside. and that's a strategic discussionthat i think needs to be had, make the decision, and then, you know, go forward and say we'renot going to. ian kalin: yes. i completely agree. and ithink it can't just be done at the commerce or federal government level. it has to bethe data product or the data level and really the customer level. who was benefitting fromthis and where is our best fit. i would say through dramatic oversimplification,generally speaking the government in my personal opinion - this is not a department policy.my personal opinion, the government tends

to - all governments tend to excel at wholesalenot retail. we tend to be better data collectors, not app builders. in general. jack levis: same for my own company whichis why... ian kalin: okay. jack levis: and that's why i've been in thisdiscussion before. and it's just strategic discussion of where do you want to be. ian kalin: yes. but even at the same point it can't just bepure wholesale because then our data is so misunderstood no one can even access it. there'sa spectrum depending on the product and a

good example would be maybe the weather serviceas a counter example. that when you get a cellphone text message there's a hurricaneabout to hit your house, that's a retail product. you're going to act on it provided for bythe u.s. government distributed through a series of collaborative partnerships throughthe verizon and at&t networks which allow us to send that text message. but that's agovernment data product. that's a retail product. and i'm actuallyreally happy that that product exists. and i want it to be a fire department regardlessof whether it's profitable. that you need to be there. right? so there is that larger question about this- i agree with the strategic fit. and, of

course, the fun of this and in many ways thechallenge, it changes - it's changing increasingly at an increasing rate particularly in theworld of data dissemination. and so, yes, that set of questions is exactly why the secretaryhas been so clear to basically challenge all departments of commerce department to addressour inventory. datas a pillar. look at it, where do we fit, where should we fit, do we need to changea few things, do we need to invest more. jack levis: but again it would change thosewords from data to something else. jack levis: it's information. it's insight.it's beyond providing it for somebody else to add to. that you're going to do the additionyourself. that's right. tommy wright: juan pablo and then sunshine.

juan pablo hourcade: yes. juan pablo hourcade. so, i just had a bit of a comment on the strategiesand i think overall it's a good thing that there's these third parties that are puttingto get - bringing together data from different sources. i think it's going to provide moreways to people for getting at the data. i think there is a role for government toplay though and that a lot of those third party solutions are going to be driven bythe market and they're going to be addressing the needs of people who can pay. and i thinkthe difference between the - that and government is that we're - in government is supposedto serve all of the american people. and i think there should be a role for us to providethose services and that insight for the populations

that may not get it from third parties that areout to make a profit. ian kalin: yes, absolutely. yes, there's a long tale as the field operationsof the census bureau can deliver through greater storiesthan i ever can. there's a long taleof the american people that are underserved and it is not profitable or reasonably costefficient to reach them. but guess what, we have to do it, but to do it for the benefitof our entire nation. i completely agree. sunshine hillygus: sunshine hillygus. and actually building on these last few comments,my concern actually with the strategic plan is that the focus under data is on the increasingamounts of data when in fact - right, it says,

deliver increasing amounts of data whereaswhere i view the role of government is back to wholesale and is about being the benchmark.right? it's about the quality of the data. and so, yes, we can use the twitter, you know,fire hose, we can collect information on facebook, but it's - we rely on the census bureau tobe able to go in and spend the money even though it's not cost effective to get estimatesin those places where you don't get it from easier sources. ian kalin: i absolutely agree. and i thinkthat may just be a error of editorial condensing. data is useless in and of itself. right? can't eat it, can't drink it, can't put it on wounds. it's not going to do anything. its how it informs decisionswhere it starts to extract value. and the ability

to drive decisions is the quality, of course,of the data. what i just pulled up off the screen is a highlytechnical set of information as to how the federal government has been very formal in establishing what good data looks like. and this is an example of something that basically powers of data.gov -- for those of you that have played with that web site. seeing nods of the heads. okay.and some funny like, "yeah, that web site. heh." i empathize by the way. but we are trying to also define what gooddata means. and it is - include certain basic elements that we've known about since thevery first library came in human civilization. is it well documented? is it well labeled?does it - have a high voracity? does it have

information to define what the elements are?or is it real time? does it have good access controls of this private information? arethere good principles to protect that private information while providing the ability to dohigher level extractions. so the many principles of all informationhas been literally set out through a presidential executive order. and so, i completely agree.it's not just a quantity, it's quality. i also know - and i think it's fair to say thatas you start doing perhaps a, you know, massive evaluation -- and we're doing this right now,by the way -- where are we in that evolution? where are we as a - how good is the data thatwe're sharing? you're going to see a very diverse spectrumof quality, you know, grades so to speak,

across the entire department of commerce andthe federal government as to how good our data is. and so, while there's the subsequent questionof what are you going to do about it, how are you going to make that better, what'sthe incentive for the person who's publishing that information, and how are you going toactually even deploy some of these rules that already exist, you know, basically there'sa bit of breakdown somewhere. we know what good looks like, it's just nothappening, so why not. and then as you start pulling the thread, you really get to thecore aspects of the challenges we face within the federal government and the responsibilitieswe have to overcome those challenges and still deliver this information back to the americantaxpayers who pay for it.

sunshine hillygus: and where i think it'sespecially relevant is coming off of nancy's comments about budget and the fact that we'relooking at a constrained budget situation and tradeoffs are going to have to be made.and, again, in terms of my view, right, the tradeoff can't be. we've got to increase amountat the expense of quality and i think quality has to be - because that's what everyone elseis doing, right, out in the market but it can't be what the government does. ian kalin: i see this - and somebody, pleasetime check me and pull me out of the stage if i need to, but i completely agree there'san evolution. when some parts of the government have never published anything before, justgetting anything out there is a massive and

perhaps unfortunate revolution just to shareanything with anybody ever. by the way that includes - and for those of you that representlarge organizations, i use to work in a university, even sharing between universities like departmentscan sometimes be really hard. but sharing itself is a form of success. the census bureau is at a higher order operationof data dissemination. you can't compare them to a lot of other parts of government andso therefore, i think, fairly speaking these standards of success shouldbe different. it's not just, can you get the information out there. they've had that coveredsince what? the 1700s? i don't know. a long okay, 1790 they've got that covered.

now it's a different set of questions. itsquestions about quality, levels of granularity at different geographic intervals, frequency,the accessibility. the integration, the dictionaries. for those of you that have ever provided afeedback on american factfinder the atomization of the data. that you can't ask that questionto - fairly, i think, to some of the other organizations that are really just catchingup which is why perhaps quantity even started. that was just the prime of the pump, but thatis an insufficient - i agree, insufficient metric once you get to the point. well, the data is out there. can anyone useit? and really? and how do we know it? and how do we then react to that constant agileiterative feedback? i think that's the right

- the better metric for census at this stage. tommy wright: kathy? kathy pettit: hi. it's kathy pettit with theurban institute. i mean, i think that i would disagree withyou about the other agencies. that i think there's a lot of exciting things going onat cscb around design. i talked to the health statistic folks about tying the data to policyactions. so i was just wondering the chief data officer role is pretty new and how thelessons - i've seen a similar presentation at, you know, epa or hud or other things witha lot of resident questions, but it would be, how do you learn together with the otheragencies that are working on the same problems?

even though the census does give, perhaps,more data it's not, you know, more important data i would say than the other agencies. ian kalin: sure. i'm sorry to hear that youdisagree. i didn't mean to discourage or insult other federal agencies. i'm not even surewhat i said that would lead to that comment, but, yes, we love our partners. i mean, wecan't work without them. so, a very tactical answer to the questionis, that there are a number of processes, tools, and people groups to facilitate collaboration.i know that the american federal government is arguably the largest organization in theworld. so, you know, if anybody has ever been a part of a small company, our collaborationcould arguably not be very good.

and yet, still, there's an amazing numberof things that are going on. you know, i very stark perhaps or very public in,you know, plain language with my criticism only because i know that we just have so muchmore that we could do and we care about it so much that it's just, you know, so muchis happening just within arm's reach. we have biweekly meetings on - for open discussionsfor open data. there's a monthly open government forum. there's the regular cio council ofevery cio in the federal government. we have our entire geospatial community which i believeactually has been more active for longer periods of time in terms of inter-bureau collaboration. there is an amazing community. we're veryactive in some of these -- the best practices

and dissemination through github and stack overflow.there's new programs from gsa like 18f, the u.s. digital service, the presidentialinnovation fellows that through project-based deployments are bringing some of the innovatorstogether on collaborative projects between the agencies. and there's versions of thateven within commerce -- within the 12 bureaus so, yes. i mean, there's so many examplesof how this sharing is taking place. i think there's more to do and i also think that wehave that balanced - i mean, i really want to express a polarity. i think it's a betterway of saying it. we are america's data agency. we are one ofthe most important data disseminators - collectors and disseminators of any government in theworld.

and actually i'll just pull this up as a quickexample to prove that point right here. if you look at - i don't know if you've seenthis web site, analytics.usa.gov. it's the largest single deployment of basically webtraffic that anyone has seen. from a number of web sites, number of users, and consistentlydepartment of commerce is almost always four or five spots in the top 10. right? and evensome of these projects that are not commerce, like myuscis, commerce actually help buildthat. right? so we're touching a lot of the most popularways in which the information is being distributed, but at the same time, i think we really haveto ask challenging questions about how effective and modern are our operations. are we wherewe want to be?

and i understand that even in the last meeting,in a presentation on cedsci -- and i looked at the agenda of the meeting before -- apparentlyyou had a presentation on the census bureau's additional transformation roadmap. we getit, right? modernization is happening. this is already taking place and the responsibilityhas been taken onboard and so while we continue to distribute valuable information and collaboratewith our partners, i think we also have to improve the rate of and the quality of thecollaboration that's taking place. kathy pettit: okay. tommy wright: peter? peter glynn: peter glynn.

ian kalin: hi. peter glynn: i just want to follow up on whatjack had to say earlier. the strategic issue that faces the census bureau. you talked a little bit about weather servicedata and my understanding is that, you know, there are a lot of private sector meteorologicalservices and so forth that monetize that dataset. i assume that the census bureau is also seriouslythinking through, you know, what its role should be relative to private sector groupsthat will monetize this and maybe put the data in a form that is easier to use for theconsumer. i also take the view that, you know, thereneeds to be a data access on the part of those

that don't necessarily have the ability topay, but there still will be this tension between how much does the census bureau doand how much, you know, what point you hand this on to other companies and so forth thatcan actually monetize things. it wasn't completely clear to me -- for example, in the discussionabout the business builder -- our business about, you know, what is it the census bureauactually views as being its core mission and where that gets handed off to private sectorcompanies that i think monetize stuff. ian kalin: yes, that's an interesting point.and this is where product planning is essential for each specific data product. i mean, yes,the answer to that specific question is really dependent on the users.

and by the way, i want to give an extra shoutout in celebration of the census business builder product and process. they did a betterlevel and a more extraordinary level of customer engagement, focus groups, feedback, talkingto business, talking on profits. the level of engagement that took place before theywrote the tech spec was wonderful. and frankly the only way they could build something withthis quality like that. and they continue to do so. for better for worse that is a relativelyuncommon practice within, i would say, data products, their data applications within government,and they did it the right way. it's amazing. and by the way, also, from a really even legalset of questions, can we really even host

esri data on a public government web site?is that even allowed? they did it. bravo, because it's great and it works really wellin helping to inform people. now, you know, the question before, what ifesri goes out of business, i don't know, what if the government gets shutdown in a month?we're all kind of asking these questions, right? and by the way i should point out when thelast shutdown happened -- well i don't even know, two or three years ago -- the census data wasthe most popularly mirrored and replicated data from the private sector than any otherpublic dataset because it is so essential. companies said, "oh to hell with it. i'lljust share it myself to help other people."

census, more than any other public datasetanywhere in the united states. so it's kind of interesting. its like, whenwe got shutdown the private sector helped us. so weird, right? so we got - there's a really interesting setof questions strategically about all these different operations and ultimately it hasto be driven by the users. what do people need and then where do we fit within thatneed. nancy potok: i just wanted to -- this is nancypotok -- address a couple of points that were raised. since the strategic one was the mostrecent i will say that we have given this a lot of thought from a strategic standpointand basically we've concluded this is not

an either or proposition. so something morelike census business builder is out there for really tiny businesses and people whowant to start businesses who wouldn't necessarily have the money or the know how to subscribeto the third party providers who are resellers. so, for example, when the secretary of commercepenny pritzker first started and she came out to the census bureau she said that shebuilt her business -- which was assisted living homes -- based on census data, but she didn'tknow that she was using census data because she had the resources to subscribe to thesethird party providers. some of which add value and some of which just repackage what theycould pull from american factfinder. i know that there's a lot of researchers andstudents out there who are not going to subscribe

and pay for census data that we have to retail.we have to put it out there for free. that's always been a part of our mission. so all we're doing now really is trying tomake it easier for our traditional retail customers to access and mix and match our data, butwe also are working very closely with the third party providers because that has alwaysbeen a part of our ecosystem. for ever and ever there's been repackagers who take censusdata and resell it. and so, now, that environment is a littlebit different which is what i think you'll see what we're doing with citysdk which isnot - it's a wholesale tool kit for developers who will then create their own apps. we'renot creating the apps, we're just putting

the tool kit out there for app developersto be the retailer of our data. so i think as we've thought this through wecannot abandon our traditional retail customers who cannot afford to pay these third partyproviders and who need just easier and faster access to our existing data let alone anyadditional data we might be providing. but we will not abandon either the third partyproviders and now this new system of app developers who are just another form of the third partyproviders. so we have a place along that spectrum strategically for all of those things. andi think a lot of that is just a balance between how much effort. so, for example, we developed some apps initiallybecause we wanted to get the attention of

app developers when we put our api out there.so we put like sort of america's economy and dwellr, and pop quiz out there. so we developedthree apps as kind of bait. you know, hey, look at these cool things you can do withcensus data. but we didn't view ourselves as being that's our mission, is to developapps. what we did was then put the tool kit out there so app developers -- after we'vegotten feedback from them -- could take it and run with it. so they're not mutually exclusive, i guess,is what i'm saying. and we do put a lot of thought into it. i do also - while i have the mic i want togo back to ken's question on the big data

center and big data because that's the nexttopic coming up. and what i'd like to do is just very briefly put a framework out therefor thinking about this and particularly sort of where did the chief data officer fit intothis picture versus census. so if you think about it as sort of expandingrings of big data at the core is for us anyways is census bureau and what we have always donein terms of pulling in data sets and using them to combine with census data and we continueto do that. so traditionally we've used administrativerecords from other agencies in some areas like in our review of the american communitysurvey which you mentioned before, you know, we're really aggressively looking at, "what areour administrative data sets that we can pull

into - make it easier for our respondentswho object to some of the questions on there? are there other sources of data that we canuse from records?" so that's a very traditional use of that. wherewe're expanding it particularly on some of the economic statistics is looking at someof the commercial data sets that are available that we can also bring in and measure quality.so our view for big data center is partnerships where we can start to address measurementand quality issues when we're combining data from multiple places in new ways and that'sresearch that needs to be done and that's where we want to include the academiccommunity and other users and different partners to really address those kinds of issues --- qualityissues --- and measurement issues when you

do that. the next kind of ring is partnerships thatwe have with other federal agencies where we're doing research projects with microdata--- their microdata and our microdata. we're allowed to that because we get a benefit fromit under the law --- so that kind of includes other federal agencies that we're workingwith them. we have a number of projects under way withthe national center for health statistics, with - we work with social security. there'slots of agencies that we work on - with statistical data to improve that. the next kind of ring,i think, goes to legislation that's pending that would create a commission that wouldlook at setting up a federal clearinghouse

for data. now i will say that is geared towards agenciescombining data to do better programing evaluation, to better inform policy, and to understandoutcomes from various federal programs --- so it includes not only statistical data, buta lot of administrative program data. i mention that because the legislation specificallysays, "that the census bureau would host that commission," and the census bureau has beenmentioned as a place that eventually --- should the commission recommend it --- could hostthat clearinghouse which is a big expansion of how data can be shared among federal agenciesand overcome a lot of existing barriers. and then the last ring, i think, goes towardswhat ian was talking about which is, "can

we put data that's already public, can westandardize the metadata in such a way that we can more easily share it between agencies?"it doesn't - we overcome some of these confidentiality issues, it's already open data but it's sodifficult to combine it and exchange it even within the federal government and then bringin private data that might combine with it. and i think the chief data officers at theagencies --- and correct me if i'm wrong --- but those are the kinds of issues that they're tackling,"how do we find that data? how do we connect that data and do it in a standardized wayso that it's high quality and meaningful to the users?" so i sort of think about it as these, you know,it's very census bureau -centric, obviously

because the census bureau is the central ringin this particular model but for our purposes and as we talk about data, i just think it'suseful to keep that kind of expanding framework in mind and what the various roles are andwhere we have partners and where we're going with that. if that's helpful. (ian): i just feel like there's one echo onthat and i promise all, i'll take my data geekiness away and i'll let you get back tothe rest of the agenda. thank you so much for that nancy. 100% agree. there is kind oflike the way data touches everything you can't just have outside, just inside, just division,just the project. well, so much of this evolving space is reallydefining those success metrics. in our case

it happens to be set forth by the strategicplan but the execution "the devil's in the details". i'll just give one more big dataexample because i'm so excited about it i have to just share it but i also have to sanitizeit to not give the actual name of the organizations but the partnering because the press releaseis still coming through and not public until next week. gdp --- gross domestic product --- very importanteconomic metric. published by the bea. largely relies upon information from the census bureau. and,again, it would dramatically oversimplify something that i'm not qualified to talk about.the raw data for that port tends to be genuinely be through surveys and calls and connections.what if we could get real-time big data information

from every credit card transaction in america--- for at least the consumption portion of that five metric piece that creates gdp's--- so roughly 60% of gdp is consumption. what if we got that through real data --- real-timedata --- from every credit card in america or every financial transaction system andatm for those in the cash economy? that's actually pretty cool and that would dramaticallyincrease the quality and arguably the accuracy of that gdp metric. well, we're looking at that and there's abig data size project going on right now to make that happen and so i hope to - thatsomeone can talk about that with census leadership perhaps at the next meeting.

(tommy): thank you very much ian and everyonefor this conversation and exchange. ian gave us a two minute break earlier. we'rescheduled for a 20 minute break. my performance is not looking good and-- i'mnot doing a very good job here. i wonder if the sense of the committee isto say we'll take a 10 minute break and maybe be back at 11:05 am? is that a reasonablecompromise maybe? thank you very much.

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