Carol Coletta at Knight Foundation: “32 civic innovators receive $5 million in funding in first Knight Cities Challenge… Several themes emerged among the winning applications, which all sought to accelerate talent, opportunity or engagement—the three primary drivers of city success—in some way. “Bringing life back to public and vacant space” was the theme of our largest category of winners, representing almost a third of the group. The second largest category was “changing the stories people tell about their cities” with almost 20 percent. Three more themes each represented 13 percent of the winning ideas: “reimagining the civic commons,” “retaining... (More >)
Can Big Data Measure Livability in Cities?
PlaceILive: “Big data helps us measure and predict consumer behavior, hurricanes and even pregnancies. It has revolutionized the way we access and use information. That being said, so far big data has not been able to tackle bigger issues like urbanization or improve the livability of cities. A new startup, www.placeilive.com thinks big data should and can be used to measure livability. They aggregated open data from government institutions and social media to create a tool that can calculate just that. ….PlaceILive wants to help people and governments better understand their cities, so that they can make smarter decisions.... (More >)
Embracing Crowdsourcing
Paper by Jesse A. Sievers on “A Strategy for State and Local Governments Approaching “Whole Community” Emergency Planning”: “Over the last century, state and local governments have been challenged to keep proactive, emergency planning efforts ahead of the after-the-disaster, response efforts. After moving from decentralized to centralized planning efforts, the most recent policy has returned to the philosophy that a decentralized planning approach is the most effective way to plan for a disaster. In fact, under the Obama administration, a policy of using the “whole community” approach to emergency planning has been adopted. This approach, however, creates an obvious... (More >)
Why Google’s Waze Is Trading User Data With Local Governments
Parmy Olson at Forbes: “In Rio de Janeiro most eyes are on the final, nail-biting matches of the World Cup. Over in the command center of the city’s department of transport though, they’re on a different set of screens altogether. Planners there are watching the aggregated data feeds of thousands of smartphones being walked or driven around a city, thanks to two popular travel apps, Waze and Moovit. The goal is traffic management, and it involves swapping data for data. More cities are lining up to get access, and while the data the apps are sharing is all anonymous... (More >)
Using Innovation and Technology to Improve City Services
New report from the IBM Center for the Business of Government: “In this report, Professor Greenberg examines a dozen cities across the United States that have award-winning reputations for using innovation and technology to improve the services they provide to their residents. She explores a variety of success factors associated with effective service delivery at the local level, including: The policies, platforms, and applications that cities use for different purposes, such as public engagement, streamlining the issuance of permits, and emergency response How cities can successfully partner with third parties, such as nonprofits, foundations, universities, and private businesses to... (More >)
Mission Control: A History of the Urban Dashboard
Shannon Mattern at Places: “We know what rocket science looks like in the movies: a windowless bunker filled with blinking consoles, swivel chairs, and shirt-sleeved men in headsets nonchalantly relaying updates from “Houston” to outer space. Lately, that vision of Mission Control has taken over City Hall. NASA meets Copacabana, proclaimed the New York Times, hailing Rio de Janeiro’s Operations Center as a “potentially lucrative experiment that could shape the future of cities around the world.” The Times photographed an IBM executive in front of a seemingly endless wall of screens integrating data from 30 city agencies, including transit... (More >)
The Missing Information That Municipal-Bond Investors Need
Marc Joffe at Governing: “…There are many reasons why the municipal market lacks sophistication in this area, but a big part of the problem has been a lack of free (or even low-cost) financial-statement data. In this regard, some strides are being made. First, the 2009 launch by the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB) of its Electronic Municipal Market Access (EMMA) system gave investors a one-stop shop for municipal financial disclosure. But as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) observed recently, a large number of municipal-bond issuers have been posting their statements late or not at all. The commission’s... (More >)
31 cities agree to use EU-funded open innovation platform for better smart cities’ services
European Commission Press Release: “At CEBIT, 25 cities from 6 EU countries (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Portugal and Spain) and 6 cities from Brazil will present Open & Agile Smart Cities Task Force (OASC), an initiative making it easier for city councils and startups to improve smart city services (such as transport, energy efficiency, environmental or e-health services). This will be achieved thanks to FIWARE, an EU-funded, open source platform and cloud-based building blocks developed in the EU that can be used to develop a huge range of applications, from Smart Cities to eHealth, and from transport to disaster... (More >)
Cities’ Open Government Data Heart Beat
Paper by Nahon, Karine and Peled, Alon and Shkabatur, Jennifer for The International Conference for E-Democracy & Open Government: “This paper develops and tests a theoretical model, which assesses the commitment of cities to the concept of open government data (OGD), according to three levels. Level 1, ‘Way of life,’ reflects a high commitment to OGD; Level 2, ‘On the Fence,’ represents either a low or erratic commitment to OGD; Level 3, ‘Lip Service,’ refers to either scarce or no commitment to OGD. These levels draw on four key dimensions: 1) Rhythm; 2) Span of Issues; 3) Disclosure; and... (More >)
Why Entrepreneurs Should Go Work for Government
Michael Blanding interviewing Mitchell B. Weiss for HBS Working Knowledge: “…In the past five years, cities around the world have increasingly become laboratories in innovation, producing idea labs that partner with outside businesses and nonprofits to solve thorny public policy problems—and along the way deal with challenges of knowing when to follow the established ways of government and when to break the mold. States and federal government, too, have been reaching out to designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs to help redo their operations. The new US Digital Service, for example, follows other federal efforts like 18F and the Presidential Innovation... (More >)
