Approved Minutes — original pdf

Approved Minutes

Technology Commission https://www.austintexas.gov/content/technology-commission REGULAR MEETING MINUTES Wednesday –October 8th, 2025 – 6:30PM City Hall– Boards and Commissions Room – Room 1101 301 W 2nd St., Austin, TX 78701 Please go to http://www.austintexas.gov/cityclerk/boards_commissions/meetings/10_1.htm for backup materials associated with this agenda. All ATXN (City Channel 6) programming is cablecast on Spectrum, Grande Communications, and Google Fiber on their cable channel 6, on AT&T U-Verse Channel 99 and webcast online. Over 20 meetings per month, including this commission meeting, are available on demand online, typically within a found at: http://www.austintexas.gov/page/atxn-video-archive. the cablecast. Schedules and video can be few hours of The Technology Commission convened in a REGULAR meeting on Wednesday, October 8th, 2025, at 301 W 2nd St, Austin, Texas. Current Commission Members Keith Pena-Villa ‐ Mayor Kirk Watson Brian AM Williams ‐ Council Member Natasha Harper‐Madison, District 1 Steven Apodaca – Council Member Vanessa Fuentes, District 2 Carina Alderete ‐ Council Member José Velasquez, District 3 Suzanne Heritage ‐ Council Member José “Chito” Vela, District 4 Thomas Rice‐ Council Member Ryan Alter, District 5 Rachel Frock‐ Council Member Krista Laine, District 6 Benjamin Combee ‐ Council Member Mike Seigel, District 7 Nicholas Eastwood ‐ Council Member Paige Ellis, District 8 Ibiye Anga – Council Member Zohaib “Zo” Qadri, District 9 Milena Pribic ‐ Council Member Marc Duchen, District 10 Board Members/Commissioners in Attendance in person: Steven Apodaca, Chair Milena Pribic Board Members/Commissioners in Attendance Remotely: Benjamin Combee Nick Eastwood Suzanne Heritage 1 Brian AM Williams Board Members/Commissioners Not in Attendance: Keith Pena-Villa Rachel Frock Ibiye Anga Carina Alderete, Vice-Chair Thomas Rice CALL TO ORDER Chair Apodaca called the Community Technology and Telecommunications Meeting to order at 6:35 p.m. PUBLIC COMMUNICATION: GENERAL The first ten speakers who register to speak no later than noon on the day before the meeting will be allowed a three-minute allotment to address their concerns regarding items not posted on the agenda. There were no members of the public that signed up to speak. APPROVAL OF MINUTES 1. Approve the minutes of the Technology Commission regular meeting on September 10th, 2025. Motion to approve the meeting minutes was made by Commissioner Eastwood and seconded by Commissioner Heritage. The minutes were approved on a vote of 6-0. DISCUSSION ITEMS 2. Review of Digital Inclusion Week activities across the City of Austin and Austin Free Net’s Tech for All Fest (Jasmin Vargas, Chief Executive Officer, Austin Free-Net) Jasmin Vargas from Austin Free-Net summarized all the Digital Inclusion Week activities going on around the city, specifically highlighting Tech for All fest. The full presentation can be viewed at this link: https://austintx.new.swagit.com/videos/357600 DISSCUSION AND ACTION ITEMS 3. Discussion and approval of the Grant for Technology Opportunities FY26 Improvement Action Plan 2 Staff liaison and Grant for Technology Opportunities Program (GTOPs) staffer, Dan Martinez, delivered a presentation highlighting the recommended improvements or edits to the GTOPs process. The first few items presented were the discontinuation of grant review binders, enhanced monitoring of the question and answer process, the creation of an application walkthrough, the removal of formal office hours, timelines shifting up for two GTOPs pathways, and Spanish language assistance for all GTOPs pathways. Chair Apodaca asked about the average overlap of clients between GTOPs Mini and Capacity, the pathways that are having their timelines shifted. Chair Apodaca is concerned if this change would affect those applicants who were potentially wanting to apply for both pathways. Dan Martinez clarified that applicants between pathways are not identical but there is some cross over, but that this change was thought out and the timelines for applications will be staggered. Jesse Rodriguez, GTOPs program manager, tagged that these programs somewhat differ and that the bandwidth burden of all pathways has been considered when recommending this adjustment. Commissioner Combee asked if GTOPs staff was concerned about a lack of review panelists between all pathways. Dan clarified that acquiring review panelists has been historically a challenge for this program but if the commission assisted by sitting in on panels and sharing this opportunity with their network it would go a long way. Dan also mentioned that the public information officer assigned to their team would assist in gathering reviewer interest. Jesse added some additional context, delays in contract processing and the application system in FY25 led to roadblocks in issuing payments. Adjusting the application windows would allow for more flexibility if there were any potential delays. The next changes to the program that were mentioned were an added vendor registration number input field, setting a specific window for GTOPs decision protests, and enhancements to the applicant guide. Commisisoner Heritage asked if the vendor registration requirement would extend to applicants of GTOPs Capacity, to which Dan confirmed that it would. GTOPs staff mentioned that additional guidance will be included for designing performance measures for GTOPs Mini, and that contract overview meetings will be consolidated into one sole mandatory meeting. Finally, Dan recommended that the award buckets for all grant pathways be adjusted to cut down on the contract negotiation process. GTOPs staff presented three options, the first cuts down on the number of contracts, the second would cut out GTOPs capacity entirely, and the final one would increased the GTOPs request cap to $40,000. Commissioner Combee asked if cutting down on contract negotiation would assist with contract oversight. Dan confirmed that he believed it would. Jesse clarified that GTOPs Capacity does not have any performance measures but do got GTOPS Mini and Core and that GTOPs staff wants to increase their auditing ability. Chair Apodaca asked if standardizing the award amounts would potentially affect any organizations who may not be able to spend that full amount. Jesse mentioned that he was not concerned with any organizations potential inability to spend the full amount. Some organizations have mentioned in the past that the current award amount is not sufficient to 3 sustain an entire program, merely keep it afloat. Jesse stated that he believes that the only negative impact of standardizing awards may be the funding of less nonprofits overall. Commissioner Pribic asked if there was overlap between the applicants of GTOPs Capacity and Mini. Dan answered that there is a lot of overlap between the applicants of both these programs. Chair Apodaca asked a clarifying question, looking to understand the time out period for returning GTOPs applicants. Dan mentioned that that rule only applies to GTOPs Core and is a rolling 5-year window in which an organization can only be funded 3 times within that period. Commissioner Heritage asked about the level of performance reporting required for all of the Grant pathways and if it was scaled according to the size of the award. Dan answered yes, the performance reporting does scale. And Jesse mentioned that the reporting requirements have been cut by a significant amount. Commissioner heritage then asked which option was ideal for the GTOPs staff. Jesse answered that Option A, reducing the number of awards and standardizing the award sizes for core was the preferred option. Jesse highlighted the concerns with options B and C. Chair Apodaca agreed that option A would give organizations some predictability in this process in terms of their finances. Commissioner Pribic thanked Jesse for clarifying that option B may not be preferred due to the recent popularity of GTOPs Capacity. Ann Eaton, executive liaison and department head for GTOPs staff, mentioned that Austin Economic Development has multiple small business resource programs that they support and that they hope to loop GTOPs awardees into. Chair Apodaca asked if any recipients have made use of these resources yet, to which Ann was not sure but that it would be stressed in their years GTOPs marketing efforts. Motion to approve the FY26 GTOPs action plan was made by Chair Apodaca and seconded by Commissioner Pribic. The plan was approved on a vote of 6-0. 4. Approval of the 2026 Technology Commission meeting calendar Staff liaison mentioned that the calendar is not too different from the version adopted for 2025. The first edit to be noted was the name of the commission at the top of the page from Community Technology and Telecommunications Commission to Technology Commission. The first date of note was the March meeting, this meeting is usually held outside of City Hall to avoid issues with South by Southwest programming and traffic downtown. The second notable date was the November meeting, which could not be held on the usual date of November 11th since that was a city holiday, Veterans day. Dan recommended hosting this meeting a week earlier on November 4th instead. There was some discussion in the room about when election day occurred, but liaisons concluded that it would not be an issue since Election day fell on November 3rd. Commissioner Heritage suggested moving the March meeting up by a week in case any commissioners had to participate in South by Southwest programming. The group concurred. 4 Motion to approve the Technology Commission 2026 meeting calendar made by Chair Apodaca and seconded by Commissioner Pribic. The meeting calendar was approved on a vote of 6-0. 5. Review of the current status and approval of consolidation of the Technology Commission’s working groups. The chair began this conversation by mentioning that the public surveillance working group has slowly found that a lot of their items of concern have had overlap with the artificial intelligence working group. Commissioner Williams chimed in and stated that while public surveillance and AI are not the same, AI is a regularly used tool for public surveillance. He believed that there is a strong case for merging these groups and if need be a sub group could be formed to design any recommendations that are more specifically tied to surveillance. Commissioner Combee asked if there would be any quorum issues with merging the two groups. Chair Apodaca stated that he does not believe it would be an issue since the only members on these groups so far are himself, Williams, and Pribic. Commissioner Pribic mentioned that the AI working group was still looking to streamline their goals so there was potential to neatly combine both groups. Motion to approve the changes to the Technology Commission made by Chair Apodaca and seconded by Commissioner Williams. The changes were approved on a vote of 6-0. WORKING GROUP UPDATES 6. 7. Public Surveillance working group updates regarding further meetings with surveillance stakeholders This working group was previously combined with the AI working group. This item was not addressed at this meeting. Artificial Intelligence Working Group updates surrounding development of recommendation post stakeholder engagement Commissioner Williams recapped the group’s recent work, the AI group is planning to host a conversation over issues with AI, surveillance, and municipal adoption of AI with interested parties. He also mentioned that the group’s recommendation has been posted to the commission’s website. Chair Apodaca confirmed that he reached out to his assigning council member who is looking to create a formal resolution on the matter. Apodaca asked if any other commission members had communicated with their council members on this recommendation; Pribic, Williams, and Combee all confirmed they’d spoken to their district offices. 5 8. Planning updates from the Digital Equity Listening Session working group (Suzanne Heritage, District 4, Technology Commission) Chair Apodaca said that this working group is going to meet with Mo, Rami and Amelia from a few of the council offices on October 10th to walk through the proposed agenda and a list of community partners that plan to table at the event. Commissioner Heritage mentioned that the event will take place over a half day. The city will start with a presentation on the digital equity report before moving into workforce and skills and then a closing piece. The group has some proposed questions for the discussion and is looking to get representatives from all districts in attendance. The event will take place on Saturday, February 7th. Chair Apodaca asked if Jesse Rodriguez would be able to present the digital needs assessment that he helped design. Jesse confirmed that he would be happy to participate. FUTURE AGENDA ITEMS • Invitation to Internet Service Providers to speak on their low income affordable internet plans • Presentation on local radio management and emergency preparedness • Presentation by Dr. Sharon Strover on Public Surveillance and data insights ADJOURNMENT The meeting was adjourned at 7:56pm. The City of Austin is committed to compliance with the American with Disabilities Act. Reasonable modifications and equal access to communications will be provided upon request. Meeting locations are planned with wheelchair access. If you require Sign Language Interpreters or alternative formats, please give notice at least 2 days before the meeting date. Please contact Dan Martinez at the Community Technology Divison at (512) 974- 3510, for additional information; TTY users’ route through Relay Texas at 711. For more information on the Community Technology & Telecommunications Commission, please visit their website at http://www.austintexas.gov/cttc or contact Dan Martinez at dan.martinez@austintexas.gov The Minutes were approved at the December 4th, 2025 Special Called Meeting on Commissioner Williams’ motion and Commissioner Pribic’s second with a final vote of 6-0. 6