At a 48-hour AI social event that began on Saturday, some 100 tech industry workers set out to use artificial intelligence to improve San Francisco’s stubborn issues: Homelessness, housing, car break-ins. Will they succeed, or are they being overly optimistic?
Either way, Mayor London Breed’s presence at this weekend’s Accelerate SF hackathon reassured the young AI enthusiasts who gathered at Fort Mason. “We’re here to partner with you. We’re here to not only see your ideas happen on screen, we want to implement some of the things that you are proposing,” Breed told participants on Saturday morning.
While the dozens of “AI solutions” for the city won’t be revealed until late Sunday, things seemed promising on the first day.
“I want us to be able to dig deep, to try and figure out how we get rid of redundancies in our city codes, laws, rules, regulations,” said Breed, who declared in May that San Francisco is “the AI capital of the world”
Unlike traditional hackathons that focus purely on technology, this has been the first civic hackathon in San Francisco since the AI boom kicked off. “[We’re] taking existing city resources and making them easier to use,” said Peter Hirshberg, an advisor to the hackathon, co-founder of Gray Area and an experienced civic hackathon founder. Hirshberg dates the history of San Francisco civic hackathons to 2008, when then-mayor Gavin Newsom opened up city data, giving engineers information to work with.
The 100 participants at this weekend’s event were predominantly male, many of them out-of-towners from other parts of the Bay Area. The group included a number of hackathon regulars, including one who has already participated in 12 hackathons this year. Some brought their own existing AI projects for feedback and opportunities.
After teaming up, they quickly jumped onto SF.GOV and ChatGPT to find available public data and possible projects. The immediate next step was to open Hugging Face to find available machine-learning models.
One group planned to use drones and AI to identify illegal dumping. Another had their eyes on public transportation data, “using AI to explore — if you had one more bus, what’s the best place to put that, and where are some areas that are underserved?”
Some participants thought they could potentially save San Francisco millions of dollars by addressing the public tree inventory, the EveryTreeSF Street Tree Census, which was last updated in 2017. A programmer wanted to accelerate the street vendor permitting process after seeing Mayor Breed’s tweet about enforcing food safety laws.
Several tech enthusiasts decided to help with the situation of “Homelessness in the U.S.” by first consolidating bits and pieces of knowledge from a variety of websites, studies, databases and personal blogs, and then creating a tool to help governments, nonprofits and individuals make informed decisions.
Several participants who had experienced car break-ins in San Francisco formed a car break-in crew. Similarly, one attendee wanted to create an AI tool to file automatic complaints for stolen scooters. Not far from him, a man strolled around the venue on a scooter to help brainstorm ideas.
Supervisor Joel Engardio suggested developing an app that would make it easy to report all crimes to the police.
A group set up a “Transparency Room” to work on projects such as monitoring where the money approved for a bill goes, or comparing a supervisor’s pre-election commitments with post-election results.
Emma Heiken, an aide to Supervisor Myrna Melgar and candidate for the Democratic County Central Committee, cautioned the enthusiasts that “anything that touches public safety and surveillance will be difficult in an ethical world and an ethical space. Anything punitive would be really challenging.”
Instead, she suggested an eligibility platform that would show everything a person is eligible for, whether it’s food stamps, small business loans, childcare subsidies or tuition reimbursement.
Soon, the event’s Discord channels were packed with people asking where to find details on 311 complaints, or the cleaning schedule of San Francisco sidewalks.
“Does anyone have any knowledge/resources on what a permit expediter’s job looks like, and where do they focus their energy? Is it personal relationships, or is it knowledge of the system?” someone asked.
Another question: “There are so many resources for zoning and districts. Is there a simple mapping of supervisor district and which neighborhoods are in that district? I found a list of neighborhoods (41!) and a separate list of districts with supervisors.”
“This is really going to take a long-term effort. We aren’t going to solve any of these problems in 48 hours permanently,” said Michael Adams, founder of the Civilization Lab. Adams gave the engineers a 101 on how San Francisco government works.
Still, “You need people like Accelerate SF who jump-start the process, bring smart people together, get them started on a technology solution,” he said.
Advocacy groups, including GrowSF, Abundant SF, RescueSF, also showed up at the hackathon. “I appreciate that they are engaged and active and getting people involved,” said Adams. “There are obviously more of the moderate contingent, and I’m just as happy to have progressive groups trying to reach people, get them engaged, get them involved.”
Many attendees planned to keep hacking until the lounge closed at 11 p.m. to prepare for their Sunday afternoon deadline. The software solutions will be evaluated on criteria including impact on SF, technical execution, creative use of AI, usability and long-term execution plan.
Great, politicians can’t figure it out so leave it up to robots to fix society. That’ll work out well.
Do tell! I thought we already had “artificial” intelligence coming from the City Hall.
How do we expedite permits OR How do we do what Walter Wong did but not be liable for the corruption?
Emma Heiken? The one who laughed about stealing a Chinese name a few weeks ago and still using the Chinese name on signs?
https://missionlocal.org/2023/10/whats-in-a-name-chinese-candidates-name-assumed-by-non-chinese-rival
Hilarious! What a great scam. Petty conmen and grifters eat your hearts out and behold: fraud elevated to performance art. Can I get an NFT of this “hackathon”, please? I’ll pay in crypto!
Apparently crypto bros blinded at the latest ApeConTulipFest by UV sterilizing lights are downvoting you. No fear; we see this BS for what it is too.
Mayor Breed is an embarrassment to a once great city. I have no doubt the zombie corpse of Mayor Mascone could do better.