New Policies, Partners, and Tools for a New Age

Urban Policy Advisory Group | July 2830, 2011

To: From: Date: Re: Members of the Urban Policy Advisory Group Anthony Williams, William H. Bloomberg Lecturer in Public Management, Harvard Kennedy School July 25, 2011 Welcome, agenda, and resource materials

We are delighted that you can join us for the sixth meeting of the Urban Policy Advisory Group. The teams at the Ash Center, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Living Cities are particularly proud of the lineup of experts and resources we have brought together for this session. As our members and mayors know all too well, new economic and political realities are forcing us to think creatively about how we can develop partnerships and more generally change how government works to enhance and preserve the common good. An increasingly networked, urbanized, and globalized society requires a government designed to meet both the challenges and possibilities of this new era. New approaches to policymaking, budgeting, and public management will be built. New ways of partnering withand thinking about the relationships betweengovernment and other institutions will be carved out. New technologies will be deployed to recalibrate the relationship between City Hall and citizens. Our first session focuses on the opportunity to ignite democratic and civic engagement with new social networking tools: how can cities amplify the successes of systems like 311 to transform city government in the ways that Amazon.com has reinvented commerce and Facebook has changed our social lives? Though there is much promise in the utilization of these new tools, mayors face complex questions regarding privacy, public safety, liability, and ensuring that the benefits of such tools improve quality of life and civic participation for rich and poor citizens alike. Our second session will cover different ways that state and city governments can work together in a time of decreasing resources and increasing demand for public services. Though this relationship is often strainedand though it may be easier at times to work around difficult political and policy discussions a number of states are finding creative ways to improve bureaucratic processes, increase accountability, incentivize reform of local budgeting processes, and encourage long-term budget solutions . This should prove to be a very thought-provoking discussion as well.

This is an exciting time for innovative leaders in urban government. We have a once-in-a-generation chance to create new kinds of partnerships, develop new platforms for policy development, and reinvent the way citizens and public institutions interact. These kinds of changes can unlock incredible amounts of unrealized public value and keep our cities places of opportunity and progress. I look forward to an outstanding exchange of ideas in Cambridge later this week.

____________________________________________ Anthony Williams William H. Bloomberg Lecturer in Public Management Harvard Kennedy School