Privacy Talk with Hector Dominguez, Open Data Coordinator at the city of Portland, : What are you doing in the city of Portland and Smart City PDX?
“This interview recorded on 31th March 2023 is talking about privacy and digital marketing.”
Kohei is having great time discussing smart city and privacy.
This interview outline:
- Introduction
- What is your career until working at the city of Portland?
- What are you doing in the city of Portland and Smart City PDX?
Kohei: Hi everyone. Thank you for joining the privacy talk. I invited Mr.Hector from Portland. He is a great practitioner, especially for the public sector, the city and open data. I was an admirer of his work. Then I’m happy to invite him to have an interview on this show. So, Hector, thank you for coming today.
Hector: Thank you for having me.
- Introduction
Kohei: Awesome. First of all, I’d like to share his profile. Hector comes from a mixed background of entrepreneurship, research and non-profit organizations, with expertise on Internet of things, advanced analytics, robotics and automation and Artificial Intelligence.
Hector has developed sensor networks for agriculture, food production, forest monitoring and the oil industry. Hector has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering with a focus on manufacturing solar concentrators and sustainable manufacturing.
So it’s very curiosity. Thank you for having talk Hector this moment.
Hector: Yeah. I’m actually very curious about how this conversation is taking us.
Kohei: So let’s move on to the interview agenda today. I’m so curious with your career since you have some engineering background as well as you have been working on the city of Portland. So, could you share about your history? Why did you start to work of the city of Portland?
- What is your career until working at the city of Portland?
Hector: Yeah, well, that’s a long history. I have to say that as long as the framework I am an immigrant here in the US. I’m originally coming from Mexico.
So my native language is not English, it is Spanish. As an immigrant, I also experience other immigrants here in this country leave through, you know, not being a citizen of participating fully in all the democratic activities in the city.
That also gave me a different perspective on how we interact with technology and how we integrate ourselves in this community here in Portland, so as you mentioned in my bio that I’m coming from engineering, I’m coming from a mixture between academic work and the startup community.
So I’m an engineer. I like building things. I have to also mention that I lived in Japan. I was part of this exchange program between Mexico and Japan in 1999, where I went to Tsukuba to work on and learn much about robotics, engineering and automation.
Dad gave me also one of the initial exposure to another community different to mine, another culture different from mine and learned how to navigate through all that.
So my own interests back in my hometown in Mexico. My hometown is Xalapa in the state of Veracruz in the Gulf of Mexico.
And much of my family actually works on agriculture like the rural areas, they had sugarcane and coffee farms here and there. Even though my core family live in the city, we very often went there and I grew up also very close to in the 80s.
To people who were actually doing permaculture and organic agriculture, even though my nature is doing and working with machines.
I have this other mindset that I recognize that nature is very important. We need to work with nature all the time.
And that has been my motivation on why I started doing things on trying to apply technology in agriculture, technology and production, technology and fish farms for instance, in Mexico and try to support farmers building information networks in Mexico around that, sensor networks and all that.
There was a point where we’re not just here in Portland. I co-founded a company called Smart vineyards. So smart vineyards was using sensor networks to help farmers to manage irrigation for agriculture for grapevines production.
And then, well the project was there for a number of years, about like four or five years. Then we start having you know, it’s a startup environment.
We started having issues with the business itself, with our business model where technology and then it came the opportunity to join the city within the Smart Cities Program, and because of my background and my own personal interest.
I decided to move from the startup. And now to work in the public sector. And yeah, I joined the City of Portland as the Open Data Coordinator.
And you know, open data means trying the government to proactively release data and information that government uses for decision making, in an open way, so when everything is available, however, the very first question that we asked ourselves was what is really open and what is not often which took us to start working on privacy?
Because privacy is a human right. My program is smart city. This program started working in collaboration with our Office of Equity and Human rights in Portland. This has been the partnership that we started since 2018. And with that, we have been doing all this work together.
Kohei: That’s very interesting. Since Portland is one of the cities that is admired by the Japanese people because it’s a very great design and great environment and circumstances for Japanese, taking relax and kind of compact city.
I think you are involved in Portland, Smart City PDX. Maybe that’s a kind of a great initiative to lead the Smart Cities residing in Portland. Could you tell us your work at this initiative and also you are involved in the open data ecosystem in Portland? So could you share the details about that?
- What are you doing in the city of Portland and Smart City PDX?
Hector: So Smart City PDX and smart city program in Portland was created after the federal government in the US had a smart city challenge around transportation in 2016.
（Movie: Smart City Challenge Finalist | Portland, Oregon）
So it was a big award, 40 million dollars to the city, good actually proposed the base project. At the time in Portland, started working with the Bureau of Transportation, the Bureau of planning and sustainability, in collaboration with some community organizations.
They put together a project around this idea of bringing transportation services in equitable ways. So that serves everybody regardless of who you are. Then the city actually was one of the finalists for the challenge back in 2016.
But Portland did not win so, it was Columbus, Ohio, who won that award. However, there was a collective effort. So it’s a big collective effort that the city decided to create this smart city program as a way to start looking into these emerging technologies back then.
So it feels like a long time ago but it’s not too far. 2017 was when smart city program was created. And then the smart city program, and open data in Portland has also been really long time so, was one of the very first cities in the US to have an open data ordinance back in 2009.
Back then, Portland very different ecosystem in terms of who was doing what open source software was having a very bright time then. So a lot of different companies were using and developing open source. Many people were working in collaboration around this idea.
It seemed back then 2009, that would be a great solution. For open data, open source is a great combination. However, back then technology wasn’t really ready for such an endeavor.
Like you can imagine servers, networking was slow developing, maintaining open source was very expensive, there were not enough developers, so particularly the project of open data started to go down, and then it was idle for like a number of years, probably since 2012.
Then smart city came to live, that group decided to bring open data to life. And then it was in open data join smart city program, and that’s how I got hired in 2018.
And once I started again, once I started working with open data, I started also like taking over privacy work, and developing some privacy principles and all that, while smart city was also focused on back then, trying to figure out how to use sensor networks like for traffic monitoring, how to use sensors or technology for emergency preparedness and earthquake happening here in North Portland.
All these different lessons learned where now back when technology was not really ready. pilot projects didn’t work out as expected, claims around using artificial intelligence back in 2018, 2019, were not really giving the results as promised, so rather our programs and shifted, rather than focusing on these pilot projects, we started focusing on basic infrastructure for the city on policy making.
So, with the time we can actually be working on all these different issues and technology is ready internally, and that’s where we are right now. So after five years of work, we have a number of policies that are helping us to use technology in more responsible, responsible ways.
And we are also having the stand to have critical mass people with all of different backgrounds, working on data working on technology, that we hope we can start now. Like delivering the data products that the city needs.
Kohei: That’s very challenging work in the public sector, I assume. I think in Portland unanimously passed surveillance technology policy in recent that you publish on your website which is a very interesting action from the privacy perspective because it’s in a very challenging, how we can protect the consumer rights and the human rights against the surveillance but you are enacted by these political actions.
Could you tell us why you could pass this new policy in Portland and also there were some concerns of the facial recognition as you mentioned, in 2019, 2020 around. So could you tell us about it?
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