About | San Jose MOTI

Building the San José of tomorrow.

In the urban heart of Silicon Valley, San José City Hall must embody the innovation of the communities we serve – it’s what our residents expect. We also have to do more with less as the most understaffed big city government in America. But the public sector status quo is a weight: challenging it requires a scrappy team of outsiders to inspire – and institutionalize – new ways of thinking and doing.

To accomplish his goal of making San José the most innovative city in the US, Mayor Sam Liccardo assembled MOTI, the Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation, to leverage best-in-class ideas, talent, and resources through public-private partnerships and pilots to tackle the most pressing issues facing San José.

300,000 residents

... to be connected to free community wi-fi in East San José by the end of 2022. $1M in grants to community organizations focused on bringing digital skills and access to our neediest 4,000 families.

30+ products and pilots

... launched to improve police transparency, pandemic response, pedestrian safety, mental health, and autonomous vehicles planning, et al.

100+ STEM talents

... engaged to tackle City's tech challenges from SJSU, Harvard, Stanford, and Google.org — with ~90% externally funded by partners like Coding it Forward

Leadership

Chief Innovation Officer, MOTI Director

Clay Garner

Clay serves as Chief Innovation Officer to the Mayor of San José – America’s tenth largest city. His mission is to leverage the ingenuity of Silicon Valley to improve San Joséans’ livelihoods, access to opportunities, and city experience.

As the top tech policy unit in the City, Clay’s team has spearheaded San José’s first digital privacy policy, developed a new data science capacity-building initiative to improve city services, accelerated the rollout of free community wi-fi for 300,000 residents, deployed transportation pilots in traffic safety and autonomous vehicles, and initiated procurement reform for the City to better work with startups. San José was named the nation’s most innovative local government in 2020 and 2021.

Prior to his time at San José City Hall, Clay worked for Google in product marketing. He has also consulted on mobile health projects for the United Nations Population Fund. Clay holds a Master of Global Affairs from Tsinghua University in China, where he was a Schwarzman Scholar, and a B.A. from Stanford University. He speaks fluent Chinese and Spanish.

Deputy Chief Innovation Officer, Senior Advisor

Stephen Caines, Esq.

Stephen is an accomplished technology policy professional with a proven track record of success in Government, Academia, and the Public Sector. He currently serves as the Deputy Chief Innovation Officer for the City of San Jose and Senior Advisor to Mayor Sam Liccardo. He is a Legal Technologist, Policymaker, Academic, and Attorney. His main areas of focus for the City include Privacy, Public Safety, Digital Services, leading the Internship and Fellowship Program, Digital Inclusion, and Intergovernmental Relations.

Prior to working for San Jose, Stephen completed a two-year residential fellowship at CodeX – The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics where he researched government and law enforcement use of facial recognition and surveillance. He was also a member of the Day One Project’s Technology Policy Accelerator Cohort and was most recently published in “The Oxford Handbook of AI Governance”.

Stephen is passionate about the democratization of STEM and technology policy education for the youth, increasing government transparency, and generating mutually beneficial partnerships between the City and local non-profits. Stephen currently serves on the Board of Directors for Good Karma Bikes, a California NonProfit of the Year Award winner. He holds a Juris Doctorate degree from the University of Miami School of Law with a concentration in the Business of Innovation, Law & Technology.

MOTI Alumni

Shireen Santosham (founder), Jordan Sun, Carolyn Wu, Kaylana Mueller-Hsia, Joy Hsu, Christine Keung, David Albán Hidalgo, Apoorva Pasricha, Julia Chen, Vicki Sun, Patricia Wei, Kunwarpreet Singh Behar, Justin Mata, Flor Sario, Beatriz Aldereguia Pons, Christopher Maximos, Kevin Li, Kin-Yip Chien, Yvonne Tram, Hannah Chu, Chithra Anand, Sophia Lugo, Athena Shiravi, Chen Huang, Edward Huang, Jessica Seamands, Nikita Kalje, Karina Chen, Insha Momin, Jasen Lo, Cici Tran, Vivian Nguyen, Clayton Summit, Fengling Zhou, Edwin Zhang, Kevin Shaw, Saritha Podali, Ramya Ravichandran, David Kastelman, Zhanat Seitkuzhin