Our Geek 2 Chic: SF emcee will be VentureBeat writer Jolie O'Dell, who has personal reasons for getting involved: “I write a lot about how learning technology can help underserved and at-risk kids,” Jolie told me. “Simply knowing that building your own company is a career option – a fact that many tech entrepreneurs take for granted – can be life-changing for these young people. I’m so happy that I can put my love of fashion towards a great cause."

Geek 2 Chic events transform young, successful science and technology professionals from big brands, startup companies, and government and academia into fashion models for one night to raise funds for the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), a national 501©3 organization that works with educators to engage at-risk high school students in learning, introduce them to business concepts, and help them launch their own businesses.

I started Geek 2 Chic way back in Fall fashion season 2010 as a creative way to highlight Microsoft's outreach to the tech communities in cities where we have offices, particularly via our BizSpark program for early-stage startups, and also our corporate citizenship and partnerships with nonprofits such as NFTE. Since that initial show, I've produced three shows near my home office in Washington DC at Bloomingdale's Chevy Chase, and one show each in Chicago (Fall 2011) and Los Angeles (Spring 2012), at Bloomingdale's Michigan Ave and Bloomingdale's Santa Monica Place, respectively. Each show featured some of the best-known young tech leaders in the region. Previous emcees have been NBC4 local anchor Angie Goff in Washington DC, Julia Allison in Chicago, and Shira Lazar in LA.

Our upcoming San Francisco show will be no different. Besides Jolie O'Dell calling the show, founders, authors, academics, digital monster creators (seriously), and geeks working for big tech brands like Facebook, Square, and Instagram, attendees can expect 27 outstanding young techies to strut the catwalk in Bloomingdale's fashions for one night only to raise funds for NFTE. A full model list is at the end of this post. Importantly, 100% of ticket sales go directly to the cause, as well as 10% of Bloomies sales to attendees who turn in their receipts. 

NFTE is a national partner in Microsoft's YouthSpark program, a collection of initiatives in the U.S. and around the world which empower youth to reach for more opportunity and change their world. “NFTE Bay Area is excited to be working with Microsoft both nationally and locally here in the Bay Area,” Krista Katsantonis, Executive Director of NFTE Bay Area, related to me. “We are also thrilled to be the beneficiary of the Geek 2 Chic partnership. As we work with Microsoft to integrate robust technology tools and learning into our award-winning entrepreneurship education program, we will be able to better utilize our global network of resourced and supporters to empower NFTE students to create their own paths to success."

Following tradition, the final model in the Geek 2 Chic: SF show will be an award-winning recent NFTE graduate. This year's honoree is 18-year-old Josh Siapno, the founder of Courteesy, a business which designs and creates one-of-a-kind bow ties from salvages vintage men's neckties.

Geek 2 Chic: SF tickets are $35 for general admission, but an upgrade to $85 VIP admission includes event seating along the catwalk, guaranteed access to an exclusive after party, and a VIP swag bag with goodies inside from Microsoft, Square, and more. Admission to the Third Wave Fashion-sponsored after party is list-only at Bubble Lounge (714 Montgomery Street in San Francisco) featuring music by DJ Hawthorne from 9-11pm.

I'm really pleased to be working with New York-based fashion-tech research and consulting company Third Wave Fashion on this event. I met the fine ladies of TWF at the Hearst Fashion Hack event we both sponsored during NY Fashion Week. “As a company whose sole purpose is to help people merge the worlds of fashion and technology, it’s a pleasure for us to see two companies as diverse as Microsoft and Bloomingdale’s come together in this way. We’re happy to see the world we live in strutting down the runway,” the founder of Third Wave Fashion Liza Kindred told me. (Liza will also model in the show.)

Here's the full list of models and affiliations:

Aaron Ginn, StumbleUpon
Ambar Munoz, Weather Underground
Amy Schapiro, Code 2040
Brian Solis, Altimeter Group
Christina Gagnier, Gagnier Margossian
Dan Toffey, Instagram
Delyn Simons, Mashery
Drew Hylbert, Opower
Elizabeth Stark, Stanford
Faryl Ury, Square
Gary Wu, LucasFilm
Heather Meeker, Meeker Quinn
Hillary Hartley, NIC
Ivannia De Alba, Facebook
Jacob Mullins, ExitRound
Jason Putorti, Causes
Jason Throckmorton, LaunchSquad
Jay Nath, City of San Francisco
Josh Siapno, Courteesy
Kevin Whittlesey, California Institute for Regenerative Medicine
Liza Kindred, Third Wave Fashion
Lukas Biewald, Crowdflower
Maria Ogneva, Yammer
Peter Revett Dixon, ThreatMetrix
Sarah Ware, Markerly
Sarah Austin, Pop17
Tracy Sun, Poshmark

Now these lean principles have entered pop culture to some degree and are popping up in some unusual places, even in more traditional industries like book publishing and government (the latter of whose budgets you may not associate the word "lean" with). The modern reality of government spending, however, is one in which employees who specialize in being more agile and adaptive to changing external conditions, doing more with less, and launching things before they are fully baked is being rewarded.

This new reality is reflected in the Microsoft Federal Executive Forum event entitled "Real Impact for a Lean & Modern Public Sector," being held today at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center just outside Washington, DC. The event will be attended by over 100 Federal executives in addition to Microsoft employees and business partners such as NetApp, Dell, and Accenture, and focus on IT topics as diverse as social software, big data, and cybersecurity.

The event will be keynoted by Greg Myers, the VP of Federal for Microsoft.

I can't give away the great content that will be presented to Forum attendees, but what I can do is pose the question, How does one even begin to think about what "lean government" means? To many, this may still be a somewhat radical concept. Or perhaps you understand the basic concepts but aren't sure they apply to your particular line of business.

Imagine that your government agency, or your city or county perhaps, is a startup. You have your mission(s) and employees, but for the most part, you don't yet have things like buildings, computers, and the like. The tech stuff. Where would you begin thinking about how to fulfill your mission if you didn't have an organizational legacy? Here are a few thoughts.

Lean working

It probably wouldn't surprise you to know that the government owns a lot of infrastructure, including buildings. A lot of buildings. About 14,000 extra buildings owned by the Federal government alone, which they are currently trying to sell. The government also owns all matter of other infrastructure -- vans, cars, all kinds of things.

Startups don't tend to own lots of things. When they start, employees typically work in a highly mobile fashion, using laptops and smartphones, from whereever they can. A successful startup may graduate from working at home and in coffeeshops to working in a co-working space or a startup incubator, to then finally lease some of their own private business offices.

A lean government would have to own offices and buildings of course, but would embrace telework, mobile work, and other flexible approaches that take advantage of cloud, mobile, and social technologies and also allow for a flexible lifestyle, while also perhaps saving money. Imagine if a local government had many non-public-facing workers work from home or wherever they want one day a week, and on that day they turn off the lights, the heat/air, power down computers, and so on?

Lean software

Despite their general proliferation, a typical citizen interacting with the government doesn't use apps. To pay student loans, you go to a website. To get tax forms, you download a PDF document. You get the idea. There's no question that governments are innovating and making their information more accessible and interactive, but a lot of the reasons we do things the way we do when we interact with the government is because of legacy systems (e.g., there's no particular reason paying taxes needs to look like a Form 1040 that you pick up at a local library or download in PDF format). 

And yet, a host of government agencies and startup companies working in the public sector space are experimenting with and deploying apps.Take for example, the new eBriefing app from MetroStar Systems in Virginia. It's a secure digital publishing solution for enterprises, with which you can build a briefing book and publish it to an internal bookstore. Ask yourself: Would a startup company have employees lug around giant three-ring binders to brief their CEO?

Lean communications

Government employees communicate in all the ways you would expect -- scheduled in-person meetings, phone calls at designated times, 24/7 email. So do the people at most any large organization. But startup companies operate a bit differently. Organized meetings give way to spontaneous conversations. Email gives way to IM. Their goal tends to be having very agile communications that obtain answers as quickly as possible and involve the fewest obstructions possible.

How can that type of startup communications thinking be applied to governments? Enterprise social media like Yammer gets you a long way toward that goal -- It can be made secure and definitively tied to an employees' identity. Users can upload documents, talk in a secure environment, and even use it from their mobile devices. Conversations on a platform like Yammer can be much more open and fluid than the same conversation occurring via an email thread, and it's also easier to follow.

But even the very popular Yammer has its limits. That's where unified communications software like Microsoft's Lync comes in. Lync is secure and tied to enterprise identities, and it can seemingly do anything: IM, phone conference calls, video conferences, desktop sharing, and what we call "presence" - the notion that based on a "red light-green light" toggle next to someone's name/photo, other employees can tell if someone is available, busy, away, and other statuses. I used Lync to give a webinar yesterday, where I spoke over the phone while sharing Powerpoint slides on my desktop with the group, and they were able to IM with each other during the presentation.

These three examples aren't exhaustive, but they are scenarios describing how "lean startup" thinking can be applied to governments. Governments will never literally operate like startup companies, nor should they. But the lessons of lean startup thinking can in many ways be applied to public sector missions when creative thinking, some modest risk taking, and the latest technologies come together into a mission plan.

If you're reading this, you're probably not at Microsoft's Federal Executive Forum. That's okay. On April 24-25, Microsoft is co-sponsoring (along with American City & County) the Lean Government Virtual Summit -- Enabling Modern, Mobile, and Efficient Government. You can get more details about it and register to attend here.

I don't even remember if I had a cell phone then. If I did, I sure don't remember really using it. It was probably a basic Nokia model that made calls. I know it wasn't a Blackberry or anything of the kind - I didn't get one of those until I was living in Washington, DC years later - around 2008 or so. During 9/11, there were no apps, no social media, no mobile communications, nothing really that enabled regular people to take photos of something and share them in anything close to real time.

Yesterday, I was on a conference call around 3pm EST and I got a text from a family member in Boston. I grew up in Massachusetts and a lot of my family lives in Boston area. Turns out, two of my family members went to watch the Marathon yesterday. One of them runs marathons, and was supposed to be in the race, but for an injury about six months ago. He would have finished just a bit faster than the time on the clocks when the bombs went off, if he had been running full speed.

I stopped working after that conference call, got some junk food, and flipped between about seven different news channels. I mostly watched Fox Business and MSNBC and CNN because they seemed to have the best video and breaking news and interviewees. I heard CBS was great, too. I watched them this morning. Norah O'Donnell was in Boston near the scene, seemingly on the verge of tears for two hours. I can't blame her.

I didn't have my Twitter feed on 9/11, and neither did anyone else. I didn't have Facebook either (it didn't exist yet; Zuckerberg was in middle school or so), nor anything else that we today call social media. But yesterday I did, and I tweeted. I tweeted a lot.

Social media has gotten me a bit jaded lately, but I have to admit that I'd forgotten how many people cling to it for information about loved ones and loved things. I follow a lot of very solid people and sources on Twitter and Facebook, and combined with TV coverage, I sent about 20 tweets with heavily curated and interesting news and quotes during the afternoon and early evening. I got 200-300 retweets and comments or so. My friend Tommy asked me last night why people reach out to each other with social media during a crisis. I replied that people always reach out to each other in a crisis no matter what; it's human nature. Social media scales human nature.

Technology played a big role in telling the story of the Boston Marathon bombing. The mainstream media, of course, broke news but also argued with itself in real time, the White House used Flickr to officially show that President Obama was meeting with homeland security advisers, and short video service Vine seems to have found purpose in tragedy. My Facebook feed was nothing but Boston. Somebody set up a public Google Doc so people could offer their Boston homes to those who needed a place to stay. Boston.com used their "viral video" site to post the most horrific and accurate video I've seen of what happened; it's all over TV this morning. The Reddit community is curating everything here.

The last thing I tweeted before I heard about the explosions in Boston was a link to "Photos from the MTV Music Awards photo booth." I feel a little silly. But at least now because of innovative startup companies and new social media creations, I have the ability to look a little silly in hindsight. A decade or so ago, I couldn't do anything but watch a rigged up TV in my lab and be quiet in my thoughts.

And data they have.

NYC knows that it takes an average of 546 seconds for NYPD to respond to a crime in progress, that it has 1,985 public drinking fountains in its parks, that its sanitation department picks up 12,000 tons of trash every day, and that an average of 100,156 parking tickets are given out per week. It knows this because of "big data," the hot catch-all term in government and business alike to describe adept number-crunching to better understand phenomena and solve problems.

In New York, such problems that can be tackled with data range from the mundane to the critical to the touchy. Among the mundane, NYC-based Foursquare recently hosted a hackathon in which one product, "Nasdrunk," matched Nasdaq stock exchange closing values with the level of location-based check-ins at NYC bars. Hackathons producing apps with a shelf life of a week or two are seemingly a dime a dozen these days.

Oil problem

But cities such as New York are more mission-focused on putting out proverbial fires and serving their citizens. For example, the New York Times relates how the OPSP used relatively obscure city data and geo-spatial intelligence to identify illegal cooking oil-dumpers:

Last fall, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection wanted, finally, to crack down on restaurants that were illegally dumping cooking oil into sewers in their neighborhoods — congealed yellow grease is responsible, the department says, for more than half of New York’s clogged drains. The question, of course, was how to find the culprits?

The antiquated answer would have been to have the health department send inspectors to restaurants on blocks with backed-up sewers and hope by chance to catch a busboy pouring the contents of a deep fryer into the street.

[The OPSP] dug up data from the Business Integrity Commission, an obscure city agency that among other tasks certifies that all local restaurants have a carting service to haul away their grease. With a few quick calculations, comparing restaurants that did not have a carter with geo-spatial data on the sewers, the team was able to hand inspectors a list of statistically likely suspects.

Other applications of big data, like the NYPD's use of it to guide who it stops-and-frisks, are more controversial. And yet still other challenges - like clearing the 9,662 trees that fell during Hurricane Sandy - are things virtually no one would complain about applying open data and new techniques too.

Open government and physical space

It strikes me that the best and most interesting uses of the one terabyte of data that flows through the OPSP every day, and its equivalent at other entities, usually have to do with the physical spaces of real life.

Meaning: When a new app takes one kind of digital data, mashes it up with other digital data, and then tells you something somewhat interesting yet not very applicable in physical space (i.e., what exactly would one do with the knowledge that there may be a weak correlation between stock prices and happy hour start times?), it doesn't tend to solve real-world problems, and thus it doesn't tend to form the basis of a long-term solution or startup company, and is therefore unlikely to have a long shelf life.

Conversely, an application of open data like tracking cooking oil dumpers and enforcing local laws is just about the opposite of sexy, but it's also extraordinarily important at a hyperlocal level. Think of parallel applications to everything from parking to noise complains to traffic to 911 calls. "What we're really running here is an office of New Yorkology," Flowers told the Times.

San Francisco is now Skillville

Across the country, San Francisco is the seat of American ingenuity in the digital space, and is no stranger to open government, big data, and innovative approaches. I recently had the opportunity to have coffee with Jay Nath, Mayor Lee's Chief Innovation Officer. He approaches "innovation" very broadly, not just considering digital and social technologies, big data analyses, and apps contests, but also - in the vein of Alec Ross' work on innovation in the State Department - in the form of taking creative approaches to solving basic problems.

One thing Jay and I discussed was Living Innovation Zones, which the city sees as an extension of what it's already been doing with open data. If it can open data for public usage, what else can it "open" for use? What if all the rooftops in the Financial District were "open" for solar panel hacking? What if portions of the Tenderloin were designated as "innovative street furniture zones," where citizens could experiment in a Furniture Hack of sorts and beautify the city and change super-hyperlocal dynamics (you see this in NYC a bit along Broadway, with zones of lawn furniture).

Granted, some of these assets are owned or controlled by entities other than the city; my impression is that some applications of Living Innovation Zones would require public-private partnerships, donations, or other arrangements. The larger point is that Nath and the City of SF are thinking outside-the-box on improving the city, and striving to take open approaches to government far beyond open data.

Skillville is another example of solving a real national and local problem - citizens out of work, underemployed, or in need of new job skills - with a creative approach. Here, people looking for jobs and opportunity can work on "micro-jobs" with local government and are rewarded through a bit of gamification with badges from which more benefits can be derived.

[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_SfQdhmzXZE]

As they state on their Knight News Challenge page:

Skillville aligns the resources of city government, job seekers and local employers to overcome challenges for all three groups. Cities get an infusion of new skills and creativity on projects, job seekers gain meaningful work experience, making them more competitive in the job market, and businesses get a filtered pool of candidates who have validated skills. By increasing collaboration between citizens, local government and private businesses, everyone wins.

Another example of public-private partnerships for civic innovation. And another example of a tech-savvy but not tech-centric approach to civic innovation. While online/digital tools are certainly applied to Skillville, a large proportion of the activity occurs in real-life among regular people.

Living in "whine country"

Applying creative approaches and big data to hyperlocal challenges sometimes results in quirky discoveries. For example, back in NYC, the OPSP recently discovered that "a significant percentage of 311 complaints derived from certain neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan — an area they now refer to jokingly as 'whine country.'"

It's not immediately obvious to me what the usefulness of such information about "whine country" is, but one thing that's probably true is that it'll take people with interdisciplinary training and broad interests to figure out the how and why of it all. Michael Flowers worked in the Manhattan DA's office, did tours at law firm Williams & Connolly, the U.S. Senate, and in Iraq before finding his way to the OPSP.

Jay Nath's career is a little more IT-focused, but he has previous private sector experience building things at an Internet company and before that he was a Pricewaterhousecoopers consultant who took a year off to wander through Nepal, India, and Thailand. The aforementioned Alec Ross spent a year of college in Bologna, Italy, participated in Teach for America, and co-founded the global nonprofit One Economy before joining the State Department at the start of the Obama Administration.

Now if someone could just explain the data showing that it's snowing today in Washington, DC, when we're supposed to be in Spring.

Update 1: Slightly different take on SF vs. NYC at TechPresident here.

There’s a lot of talk about a new wave of small tech startups in Washington, DC these days, and the recent launch of the 1776 startup accelerator space in a building across from the Washington Post has brought that excitement to a fever pitch. And it is exciting, with startups ranging from enterprise and cybersecurity types (Mercury Continuity, a continuity of communications company) to consumer technology (Hinge, a dating app), to fashion (SNOBSWAP, an upscale clothing marketplace) getting some investor love and media attention.

So when I saw that Washington Life magazine’s annual Young and the Guest List for 2013 came out, I was curious to see what tech folks made the list. After all, you might predict that some new people had popped onto their radar.

The Young and the Guest List, or YGL, is touted as “A guide to Washington’s most influential 40-and-under young leaders.”

Are you...on the list?

Full disclosure: I’m on the list. It’s a nice honor. So okay, I work for Microsoft, there’s one tech person on the list. Who else? Well, Jesse Suskin from Google’s communications and public affairs shop made it; he has a background in Republican campaign and staff positions, including a stint in the White House.

And then, well, there’s…um… hmm.

I can’t find any other people from big tech companies on the list. Perhaps they’re hidden deeply among all the Members of Congress, baseball and football players, restaurant and bar owners, and White House staffers, but I can’t find anyone from the Apple’s, IBM’s, Oracle’s and Salesforce’s of the world. I can’t even find anyone from Facebook. Twitter. Tesla. Square. Reddit. Yahoo. Anyone.

What happened?

Well, it’s not like tech’s YGL forces have waned. I went back and quickly checked last year’s YGL from 2012. Not many tech people on there, either. No totally brotastic people from Twitter and the like (there was one from Facebook but he’s since moved to San Francisco). Not even someone like Adam Sharp, who not only used to work for a Senator and at CSPAN but now runs Twitter’s team that acts as “ambassadors” to important government officials and staffers, and also effectively controls the flow of information between Twitter’s databases and the political pundits and professionals who want to know how many tweeple participated in a Twitter roundtable with President Obama, or how many people tweeted with positive sentiment during a political debate, or which way people on Twitter are saying they voted in a national election.

So, if not someone like Adam Sharp and if not larger organizations like Twitter, than surely, some of the hot young startups with their slightly younger founders?

Well, there are a few of them, but less than you might expect. Evan Burfield, co-founder of the aforementioned 1776 startup accelerator is a veteran of the list and still on it, as are Frank Gruber and Jen Consalvo who run the TechCocktail media company, and Shana Glickfield, a partner in the Beekeeper Group, a tech-savvy public affairs consultancy, and a couple of the co-founders of LivingSocial. Blake Hall the CEO of Troopswap is another returning veteran, as is Navroop Mitter, the CEO of Gryphn. Steve Ressler and Goldy Kamali, founders of government news/media companies Govloop and Fedscoop, respectively too. And who can forget Macon Phillips, the now long-time head of digital strategy and new media for the Obama Administration? In different ways, these are all tech/startup community leaders; no surprises here.

But new, up-and-coming people in the tech and tech/startup space? I could only find three.

One is Matthew Corgan, the CEO of Hotpads.com, a real estate site. Another is Justin Herman, currently the director of Federal social media policy and programs at GSA. And finally, Laura O’Shaughnessy, the CEO of SocialCode, a consultancy to help advertisers leverage Facebook and Twitter better.

That’s it. That’s all I could find. So for all the angel investing and meetups with 1,000 attendees and sojourns to SXSW and mainstream media attention, effectively zero of the founders of new, hot DC-based startups made the list of “Washington’s most influential 40-and-under young leaders.”

Is DC Tech irrelevant to DC society?

This isn’t a criticism of Washington Life’s list. The list is what the list is. And actually, I was kind of impressed with the fact that while the list grew a little (to 300, I believe), but the magazine simultaneously removed quite a number of people I know personally from the list between 2012 and 2013. So, some care on their end was definitely taken with choosing the names.

No, this is not a critique of Washington Life. Perhaps it is a tiny critique of the DC startup community. It’s easy to criticize any given person on the YGL, but overall it’s fairly representative of the most visible young people in the area and the young people most likely to be known in other major cities and therefore the young people most likely to be considered “ambassadors” abroad. It’s also a fairly good indicator of the people you’re likely to find at a Sundance Film Festival, a CES or SXSW, a Summit Series event, a Davos, or a NY Fashion Week (for what it’s worth).

Correlated with that, the tech and tech/startup folks I named above also tend to be those people. Evan Burfield was just with the Mayor in Austin. Peter Corbett, a longtime member of the list, was just in Davos. I was recently at New York Fashion Week helping to run a hackathon. We all have day jobs, but we also tend to take on larger roles of “ambassadors” (for lack of a better term), representatives, storytellers, wider networkers. Next year, I’d love to see some up and coming people from Acceleprise, The Fort, 1776, or other places emerge as the start of a generation of even younger leaders and genuinely start to displace us with new voices and opportunities and leadership.

[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU1xS07N-FA&feature=player_embedded]

The video’s language and feel is “adult,” yet simple enough for, say, middle schoolers to understand and possibly get excited about. Appearances by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Jack Dorsey (Twitter, Square), and quite a large number of other founders and engineers are eye-catching and inspiring as well.

Throw in some intelligent remarks by NBA star Chris Bosh and music artist will.i.am and you have a winning video. Turns out Chris Bosh was (is) a real nerd. Pretty cool. And according to will.i.am, who is currently learning how to code himself, “Great coders are today’s rock stars. That’s it.” he says with a smirk and a shrug.

Posted yesterday, the video already has 124,000+ views. It concludes with “To start learning a superpower, go to code.org” — catchy.

Code.org is a non-profit foundation founded by Hadi Partovi dedicated to growing computer programming education whose goals include:

• Spreading the word that there is a worldwide shortage of computer programmers, and that it’s much easier to learn to program than you think.
• Building an authoritative database of all programming schools, whether they are online courses, brick+mortar schools or summer camps.

Their vision is that “every student in every school has the opportunity to learn how to code.  We believe computer science and computer programming should be part of the core curriculum in education, alongside other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, such as biology, physics, chemistry and algebra.”  Code.org’s board of directors include Microsoft’s general counsel Brad Smith, investor and co-founder of Netscape Marc Andreesen, and Drew Houston the CEO of Dropbox.

Now, as the next effort in his quest to make use of big data to reinvent how we think about predictions and forecasting—and, coincidentally, to make potential contributions to enable Microsoft to build better products and services—Rothschild has turned his predictive attention toward another major media event of global proportions: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ 85th annual Academy Awards.

You can see his forecasts on his PredictWise blog — he got about 80% of the Oscar winners correct last night.