Mayor Emanuel
Interesting, at first glance, but we’ll see what effective policies come out of the office first. Just saying Chicago is going to focus on social media and transformative technologies is a sound bite, issued daily by hundreds of corporations and entities big and small. I am pleased the Mayor Emanuel is a modern man who at least knows what technology can do, in contrast to1 Mayor Daley. Maybe EveryBlock will get data from City Hall more quickly in the near future…
But this is City Hall and the diagram-filled windows belong to Brett Goldstein, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s chief digital officer. After a single encounter, I’d only partly question his sanity, since he left a nice San Francisco job with OpenTable, an online restaurant reservation service, to become a police officer on the West Side.
But Mr. Goldstein, a Boston native who has degrees in criminal justice and computer science, wound up as a head of the Chicago Police Department’s Predictive Analytics Group. And now the new mayor has teamed him with John Tolva, an I.B.M. refugee and the city’s chief technology officer, and Kevin Hauswirth, its director of social media, to harness technology to make a typically calcified big-city government more transparent, more efficient and a catalyst for economic development.
In a world of Groupon, Foursquare, Facebook, Livestream, Tumblr, Twitter and Shazam, a few municipalities with similar goals, including London, New York and Washington, are exploiting relatively new strategies like social media. But no mayor appears to have created all three such positions, or to be quite so focused, as Mr. Emanuel, the vacationing heat-seeking missile with a bloodlessly pragmatic streak and prodigious Rolodex.
The early results include nearly 200 online “data sets,” like breakdowns of crime, calls to 311, vendors banned from city business, restaurants’ rodent-baiting requests, processing time for building permits and removal of fallen trees after bad weather, response rates to graffiti-removal calls and installation of 96-gallon plastic garbage cans at single-family residences.
My personal favorite is wasmycartowed.com. Is your Honda Civic not where you left it last night? This Web site will tell you if it’s in a city pound, quelling fears of its winding up in a South Side chop shop. Mr. Tolva offers a challenging historical corollary: As a pioneer in meat packing, Chicago prodded innovation in related areas like transportation and cold storage. Why not use “data, knowledge and ideas” as transformative agents. The two coasts need not be the only pacesetters in this regard.
(click here to continue reading 3 of Mayor’s Men Join Forces. Their Goal – Harness Technology to Help the City. – NYTimes.com.)
Footnotes:
- at least in my perception [↩]