John Paul Farmer: From Banking And Politics To NYC’s CTO

I'm John Paul Farmer, the Chief Technology Officer for the City of New York. I'm almost six months into this role as CTO of New York City, and I guess that makes me a grizzled veteran at this point. One of the benefits we've had, though, is a very clear vision of what we're working to do. Over a million and a half New Yorkers still don't have access to a mobile or home broadband internet connection. A problem that continues to plague one of the most populated cities in the world despite years of legal action against top telecom companies to change it. We can't accept this status quo because in the 21st century, broadband may be as important as electricity was in the prior century. So is New York City's new CTO the man to fix it? Let's meet John Paul Farmer. We are the ones we've been waiting for we are the change that we seek That message Inspired millions and it propelled Barack Obama my former boss To become president United States Farmer joined the White House in 2015 initially as a health care advisor during the passage of the Affordable Care Act It might not have been a position he saw himself in back in 2001 when he was a professor baseball player in the minor leagues or as an investment banker on Wall Street. I thought about it because it wasn't part of my plan. I had a nice life in New York. I had a girlfriend, a dog. I was happy. But at the same time I couldn't pass up the opportunity to positively impact millions of people. Farmer went on to become a senior advisor on innovation in the White House where he launched a presidential innovation fellows program. It's an initiative still finding success today. It pairs top innovators from the private sector, nonprofits, and academia with leaders in government. We identified problems, we brought in the people, partnered them with civil servants, and tested solutions to find out whether we were on the right track or not. We did things like saved 30% on foreign aid payments when they were moved from cash to electronic. We streamlined the procurement process. showed that we could save up to 41 percent when we included small businesses and gave them a more lightweight approach to the bidding process. Farmer left the White House in 2014 and went on to work at Microsoft, running its civic urban tech practice. It was there that he began to leave his mark on New York City, overseeing the launch of projects like Microsoft Translator. This is a platform that uses machine learning to eliminate language barriers. He also worked with Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration to create the the Tech Jobs Academy, a boot camp that provides tech training to those who otherwise can't access it. The idea was straightforward, but revolutionary. Number one, find out specifically which skills employers in New York City were looking to All this laid the groundwork for his first big project as New York City's CTO, the launch of New York City's Internet Master Plan. The beauty of the Internet Master Plan is that it takes into account... count the local neighborhood level needs and is open and flexible to how we solve those. Farmer and his team unveiled the plan in January 2020 and will continue to roll it out over the next 18 months. So here, we look at the areas that have less commercial fiber. It will make use of 70 million dollars in seed investment from the government to build new infrastructure, prioritizing the most poorly connected neighborhoods. It will also rely upon new partnerships. in the private sector that will see different solutions implemented in various areas of the city. And these partnerships aren't limited to big tech or telecom giants. We're always producing talent and so we look at the opportunity as the city of New York to engage with broader society to solve these problems. So when I mentioned communities there's incredible local knowledge there but then when we talk about the university system they're research labs when we talk about the talent being produced the number of computer scientists which is a priority for us and increasing the number of CS graduates at schools around New York City there's just an incredible amount of bandwidth and power here that we can really orient toward these biggest hardest problems that society faces for more information on New York City's internet master plan be sure to check out a report in the 5g exchange and if you have questions for farmer be sure to click on the link below. We'll do our best to get you answers. Till next time, I'm Diana Blast reporting for Current Insights.