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 improve service delivery using technology
  • The types of business cases that can be presented to mayors and city councils to support various changes proposed by innovators in city government

Professor Greenberg identifies a series of trends that drive cities to undertake innovations, such as the increased use of mobile devices by residents. Based on cities’ responses to these trends, she offers a set of findings and specific actions that city officials can act upon to create innovation agendas for their communities. Her report also presents case studies for each of the dozen cities in her review. These cases provide a real-world context, which will allow interested leaders in other cities to see how their own communities might approach similar innovation initiatives.

This report builds on two other IBM Center reports: A Guide for Making Innovation Offices Work, by Rachel Burstein and Alissa Black, and The Persistence of Innovation in Government: A Guide for Public Servants, by Sandford Borins, which examines the use of awards to stimulate innovation in government….(More)”

Mission Control: A History of the Urban Dashboard


Futuristic control rooms have proliferated in dozens of global cities. Baltimore has its CitiStat Room, where department heads stand at a podium before a wall of screens and account for their units’ performance.  The Mayor’s office in London’s City Hall features a 4×3 array of iPads mounted in a wooden panel, which seems an almost parodic, Terry Gilliam-esque take on the Brazilian Ops Center. Meanwhile, British Prime Minister David Cameron commissioned an iPad app – the “No. 10 Dashboard” (a reference to his residence at 10 Downing Street) – which gives him access to financial, housing, employment, and public opinion data. As The Guardian reported, “the prime minister said that he could run government remotely from his smartphone.”

This is the age of Dashboard Governance, heralded by gurus like Stephen Few, founder of the “visual business intelligence” and “sensemaking” consultancy Perceptual Edge, who defines the dashboard as a “visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.” A well-designed dashboard, he says — one that makes proper use of bullet graphs, sparklines, and other visualization techniques informed by the “brain science” of aesthetics and cognition — can afford its users not only a perceptual edge, but a performance edge, too. The ideal display offers a big-picture view of what is happening in real time, along with information on historical trends, so that users can divine the how and why and redirect future action. As David Nettleton emphasizes, the dashboard’s utility extends beyond monitoring “the current situation”; it also “allows a manager to … make provisions, and take appropriate actions.”….

The dashboard market now extends far beyond the corporate world. In 1994, New York City police commissioner William Bratton adapted former officer Jack Maple’s analog crime maps to create the CompStat model of aggregating and mapping crime statistics. Around the same time, the administrators of Charlotte, North Carolina, borrowed a business idea — Robert Kaplan’s and David Norton’s “total quality management” strategy known as the “Balanced Scorecard” — and began tracking performance in five “focus areas” defined by the City Council: housing and neighborhood development, community safety, transportation, economic development, and the environment. Atlanta followed Charlotte’s example in creating its own city dashboard.

In 1999, Baltimore mayor Martin O’Malley, confronting a crippling crime rate and high taxes, designed CitiStat, “an internal process of using metrics to create accountability within his government.” (This rhetoric of data-tested internal “accountability” is prevalent in early dashboard development efforts.) The project turned to face the public in 2003, when Baltimore launched a website of city operational statistics, which inspired DCStat (2005), Maryland’s StateStat (2007), and NYCStat (2008). Since then, myriad other states and metro areas — driven by a “new managerialist” approach to urban governance, committed to “benchmarking” their performance against other regions, and obligated to demonstrate compliance with sustainability agendas — have developed their own dashboards.

The Open Michigan Mi Dashboard is typical of these efforts. The state website presents data on education, health and wellness, infrastructure, “talent” (employment, innovation), public safety, energy and environment, financial health, and seniors. You (or “Mi”) can monitor the state’s performance through a side-by-side comparison of “prior” and “current” data, punctuated with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon indicating the state’s “progress” on each metric. Another click reveals a graph of annual trends and a citation for the data source, but little detail about how the data are actually derived. How the public is supposed to use this information is an open question….(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 Municipal Continuing Disclosure Cooperation Initiative has greatly increased the number of statements on EMMA. Finally, late this year the Census Bureau is expected to begin posting federal single-audit submissions online. These packages include the same basic financial statements typically found in municipal market disclosure.

But the simple publication of thousands of voluminous PDFs does not provide the degree of transparency needed to raise the level of municipal-bond-market financial literacy. The vast majority of investors and analysts lack the patience and/or technical skills needed to extract the valuable needles of insight from this haystack of disclosure.

Investors in corporate securities do not face these difficulties. For the last 20 years, company financial reports have been available in textual form on the SEC’s Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval system. As a result, corporate financial-statement data is freely available in convenient forms around the Internet: Yahoo Finance, MarketWatch, Morningstar and your broker’s website are just a few of the places you can find this data.

So while corporate investors can readily compare the financial statistics of a safe company like Apple to an insolvent one like Radio Shack, municipal investors cannot easily perform the same exercise for Dallas and Detroit.

It wasn’t always this way. Between 1909 and 1931, the Census Bureau published an annual volume entitled “Financial Statistics of Cities Having a Population of Over 30,000.” The final edition — available at the St. Louis Federal Reserve’s website — covered 311 American cities and included hundreds of revenue, expenditure, asset and liability data points for each municipality. Unfortunately, ever since 1931, Census financial data on local governments has become less comprehensive, less timely and less comprehensible to the lay user.

In the years after 1931, we lost the understanding that comparative local-government financial statistics were a public good. While we might look to the federal government to once again offer this this information in today’s era of heightened need, it may be challenged to take on this role in an era of sequesters.

But while we may need the private sector to provide this public good, the federal government can greatly reduce the cost of compiling a local-government financial-statement database. The SEC has required companies to file financial statements in text form — rather than via PDF — since the mid-1990s. In 2008, the SEC further standardized company financial reporting by requiring firms to file their statements in the form of eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), which imposes a consistent format on all filings. To date, neither the SEC nor the MSRB has pursued a similar course with respect to municipal financial disclosure.

Next week, the Data Transparency Coalition, a group that advocates for the use of XBRL, will hold a Financial Regulation Summit featuring numerous congressional representatives and regulators. Perhaps the extension of XBRL to the municipal-bond market can find its way onto the agenda….(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 management. Many applications have already been built using FIWARE – from warnings of earthquakes to preventing food waste to Smartaxi apps. Find a full list of cities in the Background.

The OASC deal will allow cities to share their open data (collected from sensors measuring, for example, traffic flows) so that startups can develop apps and tools that benefit all citizens (for example, an app with traffic information for people on the move). Moreover, these systems will be shared between cities (so, an app with transport information developed in city A can be also adopted by city B, without the latter having to develop it from scratch); FIWARE will also give startups and app developers in these cities access to a global market for smart city services.

Cities from across the globe are trying to make the most of open innovation. This will allow them to include a variety of stakeholders in their activities (services are increasingly connected to other systems and innovative startups are a big part of this trend) and encourage a competitive yet attractive market for developers, thus reducing costs, increasing quality and avoiding vendor lock-in….(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 4) Feedback. We empirically examine this theoretical framework using longitudinal mixed-method analysis of the OGD behavior of 16 US cities for a period of four years, using a large novel corpus of municipal OGD metadata, as well as primary qualitative and secondary quantitative indicators. This methodology allows us to represent, for the first time, the evolving OGD commitment — or “OGD heart beat” — of cities….(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 Fellows to streamline government websites and electronic records—adapting from models in the UK and elsewhere.

“We have many talented people in government, but by and large they have tended to be analysts and strategists, rather than inventors and builders,” says Weiss, who hopes his course can help change that. “One reason we didn’t have them is we weren’t training them. At policy schools we had not been training people to be all that entrepreneurial, and at business schools, we were not prepping or prodding entrepreneurial people to enter the public sector or even just to invent for the public realm.”

“Government should be naturals at crowdsourcing”

Government entrepreneurship takes many forms. There are “public-public entrepreneurs” who work within government agencies, as well as “private-public entrepreneurs” who establish private businesses that sell to government agencies or sometimes to citizens directly.

In Philadelphia, for example, Textizen enables citizens to communicate with city health and human services agencies by text messages, leading to new enforcement on air pollution controls. In California, OpenCounter streamlined registration for small businesses and provided zoning clearances in a fraction of the usual time. In New York, Mark43 is developing software to analyze crime statistics and organize law enforcement records. And in Boston, Bridj developed an on-demand bus service for routes underserved by public transportation.

The innovations are happening at a scale large enough to even attract venture capital investment, despite past VC skepticism about funding public projects.

“There was this paradox—on the one hand, government is the biggest customer in the world; on the other hand, 90 out of 100 VCs would say they don’t back business models that sell to government,” says Weiss. “Though that’s starting to change as startups and government are starting to change.” OpenGov received a $15 million round of funding last spring led by Andreessen Horowitz, and $17 million was pumped into civic social-networking app MindMixer last fall….

Governments could attract even more capital by examining their procurement rules to speed buying, says Weiss, giving them that same sense of urgency and lean startup practices needed to be successful in entrepreneurial projects…(More)”

Budgets for the People


Philadelphia’s Newly Upgraded Open Data Portal


Michael Grass at Government Executive: “If you’re looking for streets where vending is prohibited in the city of Philadelphia, the city’s newly upgraded open data portal has that information. If you’re looking for information on reported bicycle thefts, the city’s open data portal has that information, too. Same goes for the city’s budget.

Philadelphia’s recently relaunched open data portal, Open Data Philly, has 264 data sets, applications and APIs available for the public to access and use. Much of that information comes from municipal sources.

“The redesign of OpenDataPhilly will increase access to available data, thereby enabling our citizens to become more engaged and knowledgeable and our government more accountable,” Mayor Michael Nutter said in a statement last month.

But Philadelphia’s open data portal isn’t just designed to unlock datasets at City Hall.

The city’s universities, cultural and non-profit organizations and commercial entities are part of the portal as well. Portal users interested in historic maps of the city can access the Philadelphia GeoHistory Network, a project of Philadelphia’s Athenaeum Museum, which maintains a tool where layers of historic maps can overlaid on an interactive Google map.

You can even find a list of current happy hour specials, courtesy of DrinkPhilly….(More)”

Citizens Connect


Harvard Business School Case Study by Mitchell Weiss: “Funding to scale Citizens Connect, Boston’s 311 app, is both a blessing and a burden and tests two public entrepreneurs. In 2012, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts provides Boston’s Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics with a grant to scale Citizens Connect across the state. The money gives two co-creators of Citizens Connect, Chris Osgood and Nigel Jacob, a chance to grow their vision for citizen-engaged governance and civic innovation, but it also requires that the two City of Boston leaders sit on a formal selection committee that pits their original partner, Connected Bits, against another player that might meet the specific requirements for delivering a statewide version. The selection and scaling process raise questions beyond just which partner to choose. What would happen to the Citizens Connect brand as Osgood and Jacob’s product spreads across the state? Who could help scale their work best then nationally? Which business models were best positioned to drive that growth? What intellectual property arrangements would best enable it? And what role should the two city employees have, anyway, in scaling Citizens Connect outside of Boston in the first place? These questions hung in the air as they pondered the one big one about passing over Connected Bits for another partner: should they?…(More)”

Action-Packed Signs Could Mean Fewer Pedestrian Accidents


Marielle Mondon at Next City: “Action-packed road signs could mean less unfortunate action for pedestrians. More than a year after New York and San Francisco implemented Vision Zero campaigns to increase pedestrian safety, new research shows that warning signs depicting greater movement — think running stick figures, not walking ones — cause fewer pedestrian accidents.
“A sign that evokes more perceived movement increases the observer’s perception of risk, which in turn brings about earlier attention and earlier stopping,” said Ryan Elder, co-author of the new Journal of Consumer Research report. “If you want to grab attention, you need signs that are more dynamic.”

The real U.S. pedestrian sign on the left represents what almost seems to be a casual stroll, while the example on the far right amps up the speed of the walkers.

The study argues that drivers react faster to signs showing greater movement because the threat of a last-minute accident seems more real — and often, a quicker reaction, even by a few seconds, can make a major difference….
Another important point in a world where pedestrians can play games with walk signals: Elder’s suggestions seem more noteworthy than whimsical — and not necessarily a contribution to urban cutesification that annoys some city-dwellers….(More)”