From the perspective of a city trying to move operations into the digital age, software often seems overpriced, inflexible, and more complicated than flying a jet, with no clear measurable return on investment either in cost savings or improved service delivery. Â From the perspective of the software provider who is big enough and smart enough… Read More
Infrastructure: John Oliver Explains it All (HBO)
So you don’t think infrastructure can be fun? Watch comedian John Oliver explain its intricate, critically important, hilarious fascinations in this video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpzvaqypav8 Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Infrastructure (HBO) Infrastructure investment will save lives. Also, from: Â CEO FORUM GROUP: “Infrastructure refers to the large-scale public systems, services, and facilities of a country… Read More
Global City Challenge 2016 Registration
Initial teambuilding workshops for the next round of the Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC) will take place November 12-13, 2015, at NIST’s Gaithersburg, Md., campus. Registration for the workshop is open. Please use this link to register:http://www.nist.gov/cps/global-cities-team-challenge-2015.cfm. An agenda and additional materials related to the November teambuilding workshop are forthcoming. The U.S. Department of Commerce’s… Read More
White House Announces $160MM “Smart Cities” Initiative
The Obama administration, in conjunction with the Smart Cities Council Annual Meeting, on Sept. 14, announced $160mm in federal research, grants and collaborations to help local communities manage major challenges using 21st century tools. As part of the initiative, the Administration is announcing: More than $35 million in new grants and over $10 million in proposed… Read More
Open Data Standards Affect City Spending Decisions
City decision makers should consider the new federal “open data” standards before building their own digital infrastructure. The DATA Act 2014  requires the Department of the Treasury and the White House Office of Management and Budget to transform U.S.federal spending from disconnected, hard to find documents into open, standardized data, and to publish that data online.… Read More
Improve City Services with Innovation, Technology
(excerpt from:  Using Innovation and Technology to Improve City Services) Cities are increasingly becoming the public sector service delivery engines in the United States. They have heard a call to action: residents expect cities to find ways to improve services. And cities are gearing up to do so. City governments, residents, and interest groups are… Read More
Five Elements of City Performance Improvement
The City of Carlton, Oregon engaged a team to establish a performance management approach that improves Carlton City government results. Under the new approach, the City would continually focus on its mission and goals and use performance information in management and policy decision-making. A results-oriented focus would permeate the City government’s strategic planning, budgeting, measuring,… Read More
The Future of Digital Services: Five Trends Transforming Government
Government is often perceived as being behind the digital innovation curve, taking significantly longer to adopt web-based solutions than the private sector, with less enthusiasm and less skill. But in recent years, federal, state, and local agencies are challenging that perception. Creating and optimizing digital services has become a top priority for government.The pressures forcing… Read More
New Evidence Shows Citizen Engagement Increases Tax Revenues
Evidence continues to show that citizen engagement, citizens participating in public policy issues, leads to increased tax compliance and higher tax revenues.  Quite a while ago, drawing mainly from the literature on tax morale, Tiago Peixoto at DemocracySpot posted about the evidence on the relationship between citizen engagement and tax revenues. As a side note, he is still… Read More
Software for Cities: Know your Problems Before Purchasing
Cities buy software but are cities really getting the problem solving value from that software? Understanding the value of the huge amounts of data now available and designing the software and databases to yield solutions to difficult problems through predictive analysis of the data leads into the next generation in city software. For hundreds of… Read More
Build A City IT Master Plan
Cities started  master planning in response to the evolution of zoning law which initially gave municipalities the power to determine land use patterns for commercial, residential, industrial and open space uses. The practice of land use planning through zoning has evolved and resulted in many new tools for shaping the City’s growth, economic health, housing,… Read More
City Software: From Silos to Platform
By Barbara Thornton. Originally published 9-27-14 as a guest post  in  Sangeet Paul Choudary‘s blog Platform Thinking, The New Rules of Business in a Networked World.  This post leverages the Magnet – Tools & Rules – Data framework that Choudary first alluded to in a Harvard Business Review article here.  In this post, Barbara uses this Platform Thinking… Read More
Feds Offer Bigger Playbook for Guiding Government Managers into Digital Era
On August 3, 2014 AssetStewardship.com posted Top 10 Tasks Required For Cities Acquiring Digital Software to help remedy the dearth of guidelines for municipalities investing in IT.  Not to be outdone, the federal government, on August 12, 2014, launched the U.S. Digital Service and presented a Digital Services Playbook.  We like this a lot.  There is a… Read More
Top 10 Tasks for Cities Acquiring Software
Cities face new and unanticipated challenges as they consider adding software. For city, town, county and regional governments around the world, this is the dawn of a new era, digital cities. Over 557,000 municipalities in the world and most of them still rely primarily on paper processing for their workflow. The 2013 attempt by the… Read More
Boston New Urban Mechanics Office Leads Civic Tech Implementation
Boston, the “City on a Hill”,  prides itself as a thought leader on topics of philosophy (transcendentalism), political theory (John Adams, Declaration of Independence) and public policy (Boston’s implementation of the 1965 Racial Imbalance Act) for over 300 years.  Clearly the City of Boston hasn’t always got it right. But the City gets big credit for… Read More
Open Governments, Open Data: A New Lever for Transparency
Citizen Engagement, and Economic Growth Posted on June 26, 2014 by Stefaan Verhulst in GovLab Digest Joel Gurin at the SAIS Review of International Affairs: “The international open data movement is beginning to have an impact on government policy, business strategy, and economic development. Roughly sixty countries in the Open Government Partnership have committed to… Read More
National Hackathon Offers New Fixes for Urban Problems
The second annual national “Civic Hacking” event, May 30 – June 1, brings together participants from the fields of software development, design, research, non-profits, local government and more to use their skills to solve civic challenges.  Civic Hacking events are scheduled in over 122 locations across the U.S.  and beyond.  Sponsored by Intel, this is a… Read More