China, BigData and the Role of Government

In the past couple of years, I have been working at OpenGov, the mission-driven startup that is leading the charge in powering a more productive and accountable government. Working with more than 2000 local governments, almost all in the US, provided me with more insight into, and much more appreciation to, the role of governments in shaping our lives and the challenges government employees encounter in order to succeed in their jobs.

Last week, I had the privilege of participating in a delegation from Silicon Valley to the 5th annual Big Data Expo in GuiYang, China. This fascinating experience gained me some interesting insights on China and its pursuit of economy and technology leadership that I thought are worth sharing.

Background:

A few years ago, as part of its long term planning, China unveiled a plan to become a world leader in BigData and Artificial Intelligence. As part of that effort, they designated the city of GuiYang, the capital of GuiZhou province, as the center of that effort. In China, once a decision like has been made, significant effort and resources are put into making it a reality. Among those efforts, an annual conference has been devised to be a center for knowledge exchange, investment enticement and show-off of capabilities. The conference is well attended and quite interesting, attracting over 50,000 people from all over the world.

Learnings:

China is Committed to BigData Dominance

In China, once a decision is made, movement happens in full scale. Huge investments are made into the effort and results start to show. Growth in the field is fast and prospects, if to judge by research and publications (not only by Chinese writers, but also Western experts) are for China to become the work leader in the space within a few years.

The plans discussed by some of the officials are very strategic and go 5-10-20 years out. Attention from senior party leaders is very telling too. China Daily had President Xi JinPing’s congratulation letter to the conference on its first page on the second day of the conference and devoted the entire back page to the conference. Multiple senior Chinese officials were present at the conference.

Chinese officials who provided keynote presentations described a wish for win-win, but almost all of them also included quite strong nationalistic messages, for example, about the need to own the technology and develop it internally as opposed to buy from others. This was strange considering the role of the conference in attracting development and investment in China and the official message of win-win.

The BigData Conference is Very Interesting and Highly Invested Global Event

The conference this year was the 5th annual one and has become a major international event. The opening ceremony started with messages from Chairman Xi JinPing and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

High caliber line up of speakers included Paul Romer, winner of 2018 Nobel Prize for Economic Science whose research on methods for addressing some of our time’s most basic and pressing questions about how we create long-term sustained and sustainable economic growth are most relevant to this discussion. Also among the speakers was Dr. Whitfield Diffie, one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography, who won the 2015 Turing Award, widely considered the most prestigious award in the field of computer science, for his work on this field.

50,000 attendees from 59 countries attended the conference, which had a strong agenda combining big stage keynotes, multiple workshops and an active vendor hall.

The event coordinators seemed to place significant effort on making this conference a global one. As part of that Morocco was selected as a key international partner, and there were a number of Arab delegations, as well as many from African nations.

A few special delegations on specific topics, including the one from Silicon Valley that I took part of, were another interesting facet of this conference and promoted knowledge exchange.

The Silicon Valley Delegation: Promote Knowledge Exchange

Positioned as “a delegation of experts to promote a dialog between Silicon Valley and GuiYang”, this is an investment by the Chinese government in “importing” knowledge. This is the 5th year in a row that this delegation is sponsored by the event coordinators and the format included a half a day of presentations and panel discussions. Adjacent to the actual event, there were multiple meetings with senior city officials and a few media interviews.

There seems to be a very genuine interest in learning: GuiYang's vice mayor sat through the entire half day of presentations and workshops and had multiple follow up meetings with us. The room was packed and overflowed by attendance that was close to 50% over number of seats available…

The delegation was skillfully organized by Wendy Xue, who did a great job assembling a very diverse group of people to maximize knowledge sharing. Among the team members were two Entrepreneurs, Zak Zielezinski, Founder and CEO of Declara and Chris Moris, Founder and CEO of Rettex, Martin Weszowski, Chief Designer and Futurist of SAP, Catherine Carlton, Managing Partner at Limitless Ventures and Menlo Park Council Member and ex-Mayor, Fred Walti, President and CEO of NGIN, Dr. Whitfield Diffie (2015 Turing Award winner) and Dr. Joseph Sifakis (2007 Turing Award winner).

The Role of China Government in Pushing Business into Less Developed Areas is Inspiring

GuiZhou has traditionally been among the least developed provinces in China. Located in the southern center of the country it is known for its timber, tobacco and tea, and its mountainous layout supports strong cultural diversity of minorities and a calm scenery. It is quite inspiring to see such an example of a government who makes an investment like this in an area that can most benefit from it. China could, after all, make this push in a much more developed region like GuangDong (near Hong Kong), ZheGiang or JiangSu (near Shanghai), Hebei or Tianjin (near BeiJing). They chose GuiZhou and are seeing the impact. GuiYang, the capital, grew more than 4x in last 10 years to over 5 million people today.

Paul Romer’s view on competition among cities in order to drive social justice alongside economic development was a very interesting message in the opening ceremony. China is a very planned economy and I doubt cities can compete freely with one another in the ways they can in the capitalist and open-market oriented Western world (see cities compete for Amazon’s second HQ). But, the ability to elevate a region in such a decisive and quick turn-around time IS a great benefit a government can inflict on its people and is commendable.

The Role of Government in Pushing Innovation is Growing

Data is power

Governments collect lots of data

Governments allow individual companies to collect data

Governments can promote significant innovation by promoting the sharing of these data.

This can and should be one of the roles the government play.

Further, BigData will provide a step-change increase in knowledge creation (Dr. Diffie phrased this nicely in his talk referring to “mining gold from garbage”), which is both intriguing and dangerous. Governments need to pay close attention to it to avoid the downsides. One key example is the role of governments in preventing misuse of personal information when the consumer does not have the clear understanding of their tradeoffs and/or does not have a choice in the matter (This was a powerful message by Paul Romer in his keynote).

The Future of the Workforce:

• Technology innovations in general and the power of BigData and AI in particular, are going to make significant changes on the workplace. A few presentations and discussion groups focused on that aspect and were quite interesting.
• Martin Weszowski focused a significant portion of his interesting keynote presentation (well, the guy is a futurist – what else would you expect?…) to the “Adaptability Index”, a framework to identify skills that will be most needed for success in the future. In particular, his message of: “Augment ME” was intriguing. Our future work is likely to be more of what many of us already do today, just 10X). Less work in an office. More meetings with people on video calls than across the table. We’re as likely to find people working in a hotel coffee shop in GuiYang as at LACI in downtown Los Angeles. We want to do all of this better, faster, and with more trust. Ever-developing technology accelerates and enables that more each day.
• The panel discussions on Smart Cities and how urban life is likely to evolve into the future was full of nuggets of knowledge. Fred Walti provided an interesting perspective on the value of linking CleanTech initiatives across the world, while Catherine Carlton added lots of very interesting perspectives on the duality in Silicon Valley, where on one hand there are plenty of new technologies and abundance of innovation, but on the other, there are lots of practical challenges in getting decisions and work done in local governments.
• My keynote presentation was a call for governments to change their way of work towards more modern and digitized systems that engage citizens in the ways they want to be engaged. The old way of working in governments (labor and paper intensive processes supported by on premise monolithic IT systems) is not a good fit with the emerging needs of both citizens and government employees. This is an area that is heavily engaged by BigData and therefore carries huge potential impact on the way governments work and the way their services are provided to citizens. The infrastructure oriented Smart Cities field is more main stream and advanced relative to the earlier-phase, emerging, GovTech sector.

All in all, it was a hectic short trip with almost as many hours traveling to and from China as time spent there. Nevertheless, it was a most interesting experience of how a government works in the other side of the world, a side that is so different from the Western world in so many ways (not the least the much more planned and dictated role of government, and the much more pervasive use of mobile technology by citizens). It was also quite fascinating to witness a relatively small city like GuiYang (only 5 million people, small in Chinese terms…) going through such a massive transformation due to the push on making it a global center for BigData.