Stephen Goldsmith is the former mayor of Indianapolis and former Deputy Mayor of New York City for Operations. He sat down with NationSwell and shared his thoughts on how government can work more effectively with data, unions and the private sector.
Tag: government
The City of Los Angeles Could Fund Your Big Idea
Because they’re frustrated with their jobs, cities’ employees are brimming with ideas. And as more cities are embracing civic innovation, Los Angeles is creating an in-house venture capital fund to do something about it.
Mayor Eric Garcetti recently announced the creation of a $1 million Innovation Fund for the city to invest in ideas hatched by city workers. The fund, backed by City Administrative Officer (CAO) Miguel Santana and the Innovation and Performance Commission (IPC), will be open throughout the year to city employees, who can submit ideas through the website innovate.lacity.org.
“We don’t think innovation should live in just one office,” says Abhi Nemani, the city’s chief data officer. “It should be democratized across the organization, across the city, and we should empower everybody to be able to say, ‘This doesn’t make sense, let me change this.’ And this is our big push in making that happen.”
The idea stems from several ongoing city projects that Mayor Garcetti liked, including an initiative to update paper maps to tablets in the sanitation department as well as a recreation and parks employee who designed a red button to turn off air conditioning systems at the end of the day, according to Nemani.
The city council, general managers, CAO and IPC will all be involved in reviewing submitted ideas, and criteria will be based on originality, potential for execution and enhancing efficiency and improving quality of life, Government Technology reports. The website will also feature selected projects and the status of each. There is no deadline and no maximum amount of projects the Innovation Fund will invest in, which leaves the door open to incredible opportunity.
Los Angeles’ fund follows the launch of GovTech Fund, a $23 million venture capital fund aimed at investing in companies that improve government technology, as well as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ recent “Shark Tank” model competition to spark ideas among its employees.
MORE: Have an Idea About What Your City Needs? This Organization Wants to Hear It
The Bay City’s Latest Plan to Combat Homelessness
San Francisco is a city of paradoxes. Walking around, you can see evidence of the booming tech scene and expensively-clad citizens, yet it also has a chronic homelessness problem. But the City by the Bay finally thinks it may have a solution by combining the needs of both the homeless and corporations: tax breaks for community projects.
With 6,436 homeless people and 3,401 living on its streets, according to the Human Services Agency, San Francisco has to be inventive. And that’s where this new initiative comes in. As more and more tech companies, (like Twitter) move to the area, San Francisco is hoping that its new “community benefit agreement” will encourage these businesses to stay and improve the city.
Through the initiative, tech companies will receive multi-million dollar tax breaks if they set up residence in a troubled neighborhood and invest a portion of those tax breaks into improving it.
While some remain skeptical about the amount of money that a company will actually put towards a neighborhood, this program offers unique possibilities for great change. For instance, many tech companies will set up micro-apartment communities for their employees; if created for homeless people, there’s the potential to drastically reduce the problem.
Salt Lake City is a model for this type of project. Ten years ago, the Utah city started a program to combat homelessness through these micro-apartments communities. Apartments were set up outside of troubled neighborhoods, and residents were quickly placed into them, removing them from the negative influences.
In each housing complex, on-site counseling was available. These counselors helped residents beat drug addictions, find jobs and diagnose and treat mental diseases. The result? Salt Lake City now only has about 400 homeless persons.
Although there are differences in cost of living and other factors between Salt Lake City and San Francisco, there is possibility for replication and improvement.
For Matt Minkevitch, who runs Road Home, the main nonprofit homeless agency in Utah, these houses serve as a stepping stone.
“The idea is, we don’t want people to just live in this shelter,” Minkevitch tells San Francisco Gate. “We want to make it as comfortable as possible, but we want them to move on to housing — on to better lives.”
DON’T MISS: Ever Wondered What To Say To A Homeless Person? Here Are 5 Things to Say And 5 Things Not to Say
Think That Casting a Ballot Isn’t Worth Your Time? Here’s Why You Must Make a Trip to the Voting Booth
Despite the pre-election tsunami of pandering political ads, canvassers and online banter about the candidates and initiatives on your local ballots, only about 40 percent of all eligible voters in the United States submit their ballots during the midterms (down from about 60 percent during presidential elections, according to the United States Elections Project).
Since every seat in the U.S. House of Representatives is up for grabs — along with approximately one-third of all Senate seats, dozens of governorships, and countless state and local legislative positions — it’s critical that you cast your vote for the most qualified individuals to serve in those posts. Here’s why.
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Chicago’s Plan to Democratize Taxi Technology
The “Uber effect” has reverberated throughout the world across a number of industries, creating marketplaces and leveling competition. But rather than conceding to Uber’s dominance in the taxi business, Chicago is taking the reigns in deciding who will lead the city in taxi and ride-sharing services.
The Chicago Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection will begin accepting bids from companies to design a universal app for city dwellers to use to hail a cab, the Chicago Tribune reports. The city is looking for an all-in-one app that can let users look for the nearest service, rather than using individual apps like Uber or Lyft or calling one of the city’s numerous taxi services.
The government-sponsored project is similar to the Department of Transportation partnering with Alta Bicycle Share to develop the city’s bike-sharing program, Divvy.
The city wants an app that “riders find it easy enough to use, and, most importantly, are protected,” and “wants to ensure that a competitive procurement process is followed and respected,” says Mika Stambaugh, spokeswoman for the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection. A proposal to create the app has been submitted to the City Council, as a part of a series of changes with the goal of increasing taxi driver income without changing the taxi fare infrastructure.
But the concern lies with the potential of a company like Uber winning the bid and ultimately taking control of the industry in Chicago. Uber, which began as an alternative to taxis by connecting off-duty black car drivers with riders, has now launched a series of services that has created backlash among the taxi industry.
“Government is essentially endorsing one app as the centralized dispatch,” says George Lutfallah, publisher of Chicago Dispatcher, a taxi trade publication. “My concern is that it limits choice, and that whoever wins the contract won’t have as strong of an incentive to serve the drivers and the customers.”
While the city does not maintain data on how many rides are through taxicabs, private black cars or limousines and ride-sharing operations, there are almost 7,000 licensed taxicabs and 15,327 taxicab and livery drivers throughout Chicago, according to the Tribune. Transportation experts estimate around 60 to 70 percent of the market belong to taxis, limousines making up around 20 percent and ride-sharing services taking up the remaining 10 percent.
But with the potential of the growing ride-sharing industry, those estimates could soon change. Which is why it’s important that the company selected to design the app is truly leveling the playing field.
MORE: The Start-Up That’s Recruiting 50,000 Military and Veteran Drivers
For Immigrants Waiting on Paper Bureaucracy, This Online System Could Be the Answer
One of the problems stemming from the recent surge of child refugees into the U.S. from Central America? Each applicant could wait years before their immigration cases are processed, thanks to our backlogged system (the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service, or USCIS, receives millions of paper applications each year).
The people behind a San Francisco-based company, FileRight, think they have the solution: an online system for filing immigrant claims, which will allow individuals to fill out their own forms without hiring expensive lawyers — similar to the way that the software TurboTax enables citizens to complete their own taxes online. These forms can then be digitally processed, potentially speeding up the process.
Now, FileRight just has to convince the government to allow online applications.
According to Megan R. Wilson of The Hill, FileRight hired lobbyists in January and has been meeting with Obama administration officials.
Cesare Alessandrini, founder and chief executive of FileRight, is the son of Italian immigrants who got the idea for the program when he was trying to help his soon-to-be Argentinian wife apply for citizenship. “I had two options: I could have hired a lawyer for $5,000 — which I didn’t have — or I could do it myself,” he tells Wilson. “How hard could it be?”
Alessandrini found the application process confusing and complicated — even for a native English speaker. So he began designing FileRight, a system that could help some applicants avoid denials for small errors such as spelling mistakes or writing on the wrong line, which are routine with the current, paper-based system.
FileRight isn’t the first company to attempt to digitize the immigration process. As we reported in February, Clearpath Inc. is also developing software to streamline the visa application process.
Regardless of which company’s software proves the most effective, it seems likely that digitizing the process will certainly help relieve some of the immigration backlog.
MORE: Meet the Entrepreneur Creating a ‘TurboTax for Immigration’
Have an Idea About What Your City Needs? This Organization Wants to Hear It
An estimated 80 percent of citizens in the United States live in urban areas, prompting civic planners to get creative as more Americans return to the city.
That creativity is no longer confined to municipal governments as more cities embrace technology, entrepreneurship and social innovation. A great idea can be hatched anywhere, which is why the Knight Foundation is offering to foster any number of them through its Cities Challenge.
Armed with $15 million to spend over the next three years, the Knight Foundation announced an open call to fund grants for ideas that make cities function better in one of its 26 communities, where the Knight brothers own newspapers. The invitation is extended to anyone — including local governments, nonprofit groups, students, startups and teachers.
“One of our real objectives here is to surface new people who have good ideas and ought to get a hearing,” says Carol Coletta, vice president of community and national initiatives for the foundation.
The preliminary process involves only two questions: What’s your idea? And what do you hope to learn from the work? The foundation has not decided how many grants it will award the first year, but expects to invest $5 million in one or more of the 26 cities this year.
While the idea may seem simple vague, Coletta tells Governing that by opening up the process, the foundation is aiming to attract new talent and new individuals outside the nonprofit circle.
“We’re really trying to make it very open so we’ll surface some new people, people we don’t know. That’s why we’ve made the bar to enter so low,” she says.
“Because we’re a mobile society, there’s a sense that cities today are offering what the most mobile Americans want in a lifestyle. Cities are the greenest way to live and they can also offer a more efficient and productive lifestyle,” she says. “For a lot of reasons, people are focused on cities today and that’s a very good thing.”
The application process began Oct. 1 and runs through Nov. 14.
MORE: America’s Three Largest Cities Band Together to Promote U.S. Citizenship
The Big Easy Has a Bright Idea to Curb Violence
In a seemingly miraculous feat, New Orleans has managed to drop its notorious murder rate by 20 percent this year — to 155 deaths — the lowest number the city has seen in almost 30 years. Interestingly, however, it wasn’t because police got tougher on the streets, but because city officials got organized.
Under Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s NOLA for Life program, launched in 2012 to rethink the city’s murder reduction strategy, New Orleans’ Innovation Delivery Team led the charge in finding new approaches to curb violence.
New Orleans was one of five cities selected for the pilot program, which was funded with a $4.2 million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies in 2011. The team was comprised of eight people using the nonprofit’s innovation delivery method, which helps mayors create and implement big solutions to local problems. The team serves as an in-house consultant firm for City Hall while tapping into global resources and experts provided through Bloomberg Philanthropies.
The team worked with the New Orleans’ police department to analyze data relating to murders, while also looking to strategies from other cities such as Memphis, Chicago and New York. It also met with academics to help comb through the data more deeply while hosting focus groups with at-risk young men, providing a new path for a better murder reduction strategy, according to Fast Company.
“The biggest thing that went against common belief is that a lot of our violence was related to groups and gangs,” says Charles West, who lead the innovation delivery team. “We were always told that we didn’t have a gang problem. But we had gangs of significant size, and people just weren’t talking about it. More than anything, there wasn’t a specific form of policing strategy for groups and gangs.”
The team came up with 130 different initiatives to approach the violence problem according to West. NOLA for Life now operates a multi-agency gang unit which has helped the city ramp up prosecution of gangs.
Other initiatives involved agencies such as the Department of Sanitation, which can train and hire ex-prisoners to receive a commercial driver’s license in an effort to prevent recidivism and find a job.
“Everyone has found a place in it … and everyone is accountable,” West says.
But what made it work was the amount of coordination and organized approach in which city officials tackled the problem. If the city continues on this track for reducing its murder rate, it would be the first four years in a row that murders have dropped.
The Big Easy is currently making room so it can continue to fund the program with tax dollars, which will include more initiatives to step up economic opportunities for African-American men. Meanwhile, Bloomberg Philanthropies is expanding the program with $45 million and has called for more than 80 American cities to apply for funding.
MORE: Can $45 Million Worth of Data and Technology Improve U.S. Cities?
How Can an Old Smartphone Be Used to Make a City Better?
Have you ever been annoyed by the amount of people fighting for position on a city sidewalk only to turn the corner and find the next block over all but deserted? Ever thought that your old smartphone could be used in some other capacity? These may seem like totally separate problems, but Alex Winter has one unique solution to solve both.
His new startup, Placemeter, has found a unique yet incredibly simple way to monitor street activity and turn it into data that cities and businesses can use — all the while putting discarded smartphones to use.
Here’s what happens: City dwellers send Placemeter information about where they live and what their view consists of. The company sends back a window mounting smartphone kit, which will allow them to use its camera to monitor street activity. The movement is then quantified using a computer program that identifies individual bodies and tracks their actions, as shown in this video. Even better? In exchange, folks providing a view get up to $50 per month for an asset that previously paid nothing, according to City Lab.
As great as Placemeter is for those with a good street view, it is even better for an urban area as a whole. That’s because the images captured through the smartphones, over time, yields valuable data for city officials. Foot and vehicle traffic patterns, as well as the use of benches and other public amenities, can all be tracked through Placemeter and used to improve everyday life.
“Measuring data about how the city moves in real time, being able to make predictions on that, is definitely a good way to help cities work better,” Winter told City Lab.
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The data is also very valuable to retailers, helping them assess what might be the best spot for a new store. Such data has been long sought after, but until now, there had not been a simple, widespread way to collect it.
For many, with this advancement comes the concern of privacy — both for those being observed on the street and those with a smartphone. Placemeter has emphasized its commitment to privacy, though, and says the device’s camera doesn’t monitor anything inside a host’s home. Additionally, a computer, not a human, analyzes all the images of the street, and once the useful data is captured, the footage is erased.
Although it’s only in New York for now, the company wants to expand to other U.S. cities.
Thanks to Placemeter, says Winter, “cities and citizens [can] collaborate to make the city better.”And who wouldn’t want that?
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Looking for Work That Has Meaning? Fuse Corps Can Help.
More than any other generation, the millennial generation is looking for “meaningful” work. What they mean by that, as the New York Times has noted, is working in the service of others. Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 find meaning through giving.
But millennials often struggle to find jobs that fulfill them in this way. As NationSwell reported, the bad job market for young Americans is “a serious economic issue — and it’s not improving.” Even those who do find work are often forced to compromise, taking a job that might not serve others.
In a recent Medium post called “My Job Lacks Meaning, What Can I Do?” Peter Sims said, “The sex appeal of a job at Goldman Sachs or Wall Street has virtually vanished and shifted to Silicon Valley, entrepreneurship, and social entrepreneurship.”
MORE: Washington Needs to Be Fixed. These Innovators Aren’t Waiting for Congress to Do It.
Sims co-founded an organization called Fuse Corps in response to the emergence of talented millennials who want to make a difference. Every year, the nonprofit pairs ten to 20 mid-career private sector professionals with a forward-thinking elected official. By working in government, Fuse Corps fellows can find a way to make the change that some find harder to achieve in the private sector.
So far, the program has attracted professionals from finance, journalism, law, and design. You can meet some of them in this video.
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One fellow helped San Francisco, California launch its entrepreneur-in-residence program. Another helped Richmond, Virginia, embrace civic technology and make its public data available to constituents.
Fuse Corps just opened four new San Francisco fellowships aimed at solving problems like pedestrian safety and outdated technology in schools. You can find more information on how to apply here, or share the page with anyone you’d think would be interested.