 Hi, everyone. I'm Anne Marie Slaughter, the CEO of New America and I'm delighted to welcome all of you this afternoon to what will be a wonderful conversation about Bill Eggers new book and we'll introduce that in just a few minutes. But first, I do want to just tell those of you who may be new to our events. Just a word about New America. We're a think and action tank dedicated to renewing the promise of America. And we mean that the promise of America with a small P as in renewing and unlocking the potential of all our people. And also the promise with a capital P the promise of the Declaration of Independence of being created equal of equal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and to a government dedicated to the safety and welfare of its people. At the moment, there's plenty of work to do where we are becoming a new America a plurality nation with that is powered by new technology and taking a new role in the world. One of the first orders of business is renewing our democracy. And there are many ways to do that but one of them is to ensure that government works, which brings us to our topic for today. We are going to be talking about Bill Eggers and Don Kettles new book bridge builders, how government can transcend boundaries to solve big problems and I will just there is a link to buy it and I recommend it but just to show it to you. I'm going to ask Bill and then I might his fellow panelists to introduce themselves. It's a real pleasure to introduce Bill I. One of the reasons I like this book so much is it is certainly very congruent with my own thinking. And I went back to check in 2004 I published my first book on trans governmental networks. I relied then on bill, I don't know if it was your first book but it was one of the first of the 30 that you and Don Kettles have read. I've written governing by network, the new shape of the public sector and it was by Bill Eggers and Stephen Goldsmith who was the mayor of Indianapolis. Back in 2004, it was about the shift from hierarchies or what they call the in this book the vending machine model of government to networks to cross boundary governance so bills been doing this for a long time and like most important and big ideas they take a long time to seed and then to take hold. But bill let me let me ask you to introduce yourself more personally and then we'll come to I use she and Jim and kick off at a conversation. Great thanks so much and Marie. I'm the executive director of Deloitte Center for government insights and I consider myself like tri sector athlete because I've worked in both the public sector private sector nonprofit sector. I've worked over the years and have been credibly passionate about networks and public private partnerships and I'm so happy to be here today and Ann Marie your book. Your book looking at this from a foreign policies perspective chessboard and the web is one of the one of the major books that we learned from in the book and it's been, it was so revolutionary in so many ways so thank you for your contributions to this field. Thank you. And you can now tell that this is a mutual admiration society. I usually let me turn to you and let you introduce yourself. Thank you and Marie, really happy to be here and discuss your book. Hi, I am I usually boy, I am at New America, I serve as the deputy director of the new practice lab. And as the name implies we are working on this sort of new practice of connecting various players across the policy and implementation arms across government and digital bodies. Prior to my time at New America I also served as a product manager and spent time similar to you bill on the private public nonprofit side connecting a lot of different players focused specifically on service delivery of government services. And I teach even today about digital governance and partnership models at Harvard Kennedy. So it's a pleasure to be here. I will pass it over back to Ann Marie. I thank you for having me. Jim Thompson, I'm with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. I have been in federal government now for the last 30, well 30 plus years spent over 20 of those now in public partnerships. I was lucky enough to work with Ann Marie at the Department of State, where I was Chris Baldurston's deputy. And we launched the global partnership initiative at, at state and built a number of great public private partnerships that still exist and they're still going strong. Big fan Bill Eggers, he's written the book, he's written many books on the importance of this topic and really excited to be joining all of you today to talk about the role of the bridge builder in the federal government. Perfect. Jim, I remember well Secretary Clinton always talked about the three legged stool, the public, private and civic sectors and that you needed all three to make things work but at the time, when you and I were in government from 2009 to 2011. It was new at the State Department to have an office to reach out specifically exactly the work that you and Chris Baldurston did. So Bill, we're going to start with you and ask you just to introduce the main themes of the book and then we'll, we'll dive into a discussion, and then all of you will have time at the end we'll save 15 to 20 minutes from four questions from the audience. Great. Thank you so much, Ann Marie and what an amazing group we have here today. So why don't we, why don't we move on to the next slide. And I'll start off with, so my co-author Don Kettle and I, we've been in the business of improving government for over 75 years between us and we published close to 35 books on public management. With a real focus on implementation and area where within the think tank world and media in general and even sometimes within legislators there's really been a dearth of focus compared to policy with the very notable exception of New America, which I think does more work on implementation and policy through the new practice lab and other labs that they have than just about any other think tank in the country and which is why I love it so much. And one thing our experiences really taught us is that we need a new approach to solving big problems and new way of thinking about government, a new mental model really to help people expand their vision of what government can and should do to be effective and so we really try to provide a fresh comprehensive approach to thinking about public management in the 21st century. Next slide please. Now, Ann Marie mentioned the vending machine model and really for the problem is for decades we've largely had a mental model as government as a kind of vending machine you have a problem you pass a law you build an organization to deal with it you put money in the slot. And you expect it to yield results. Then when the results don't meet the expectations we look for someone to blame. And this mental model is largely obsolete. It doesn't at all reflect how most government actually operates today, which is often horizontally through these complex public private networks so effective implementation. And effective public management requires expertly integrating and managing these networks, and that's what this book is all about. Next slide please. So here's the crux of our argument, no problem that matters can be solved anymore by a single organization. And I want you all to like do a little think about this for a minute. Can you think of any problem that matters that can be solved by a single organization and think of one please put it in the chat. We ask this to audiences all the time. Very, very difficult to find one. Next slide please. Most societal problems extend far beyond the boundaries we've set for them. Take homelessness. Is there an economics problem a jobs problem a mental health problem a drug problem a family problem. A criminal justice problem or is it a problem for government, nonprofit organizations individuals local government states federal government, the private sector and the answer to all these questions is yes. And think about some of the other really tough problems we're facing today, whether the train derailment in Ohio housing migrants at the border. A shortage of cancer drugs, each of these issues pops up as a flair, a brilliant light that flames out and then we move on to the next crisis what we don't realize is that they are all the same problem. They are all different clothes their cases where the only solution is weaving together people and organizations to provide solutions. Next slide please. This is very big implications for how we get things done in government today. We need a symphony approach. Think about an orchestra. Experts and violin that cello the flute, and they all need to come together to play from the same music for great performance and the same idea in government, but in this case it's for better social outcomes. So how do you do this is really what our book is all about. Next slide please. Now at the core of blended government are the orchestra conductors. We call them bridge builders. They do the hard work of convening and aligning all the different players. They can see beyond organizational boundaries they break down silos to improve outcomes they seek mutual advantage across sectors and then line incentives to achieve shared goals and bridge building we believe is probably the most essential skill set leaders and leaders at all levels of government vitally need today and so the kind of work that Jim has been doing around national security and I actually has been doing and we just need a lot more people with those sort of skills inside and outside government today. Next slide please. So in the book we lay out 10 core bridge building strategies and don't have time to go through them today but to learn all about them you're just going to have to buy the book. Next slide please. So the problems governments face and the solutions governments need today and evidently build on blended government and governing the system requires bridge builders and not dozens more not hundreds not thousands but millions of bridge builders. And I really hope that all of you who are listening today are going to be inspired to be a bridge builder and I want to thank you for those of you in public service for your commitment to this. And with that, Ann Marie I'll turn it back to you. So Bill thank you and I'll just say I love this idea of leading as bridge building right we we think about bridge builders and we think of them you know as people who are conflict resolvers. They're they're people who bring to opposing sides together, but this concept really has bridging and building together as as two activities that are essential for leaders who must cross sectors because we must cross sectors to get things done. And there are all sorts of implications there about, you know, leading from the center, not from the front, sort of sublimating ego there, but it's the concept is new in the context of leading and that's really one of the things that this this book does so well. But I usually let me turn to you and ask you to sort of reflect on this approach in the context of the new practice lab and the new practice of public problem solving that you've been engaged in which is very much both bringing working across government but also working from with government and other actors as well. Absolutely. You know, I'll take us back to a pretty key moment in the loss of trust in government. We're talking about healthcare.gov. And this was a really big moment, particularly in the delivery of a service that had been promised for a long time. The site went live. It was so much excitement and the site served six people, six Americans before it crashed. And in the aftermath of the experience which involved all sorts of policy folks technologists, other sorts of agencies outside of government organizations. In that sort of retrospective experience what we realized was, we hadn't had all the right people in the same room. And that sounds simple but it actually is a, it's a big deal right to make sure the right players are at the table. And that's sort of where the, the birth of the new practice lab came about was from that experience and thinking about how can we make sure to not replicate that experience and other sorts of service delivery contexts, whether it's unemployment insurance whether it's paid family leave, whether it's the earned income tax credit or the child tax credit. The practice lab works to center families and the experience of families while bridging policy design folks and policy implementation folks. And when I say those terms, I'm not just looking at policymakers sitting within government, I'm looking at the world of people that are talking about implementation and design within adjacent to talking about vendors talking about nonprofits advocacy groups. So on so forth, as, as Bill mentions in his book so that's a little bit about the new practice lab and I think we were trying to practice a lot of what is described in your writing. So one of the things that is most interesting about this is, you know, you think about Hamilton in the room where it happens and indeed our own Peter Bergen now has a new audible podcast called in the room right and we're all in Washington, whether physically here or virtually here in Washington and it's all about in the room when it where it happens and wanting to be there but the assumption is that that should be the smallest group of people possible right that's what makes it so important about being in that meeting is it's the key decision makers, and this whole approach says no no no no right you have to get more people in that room and you have to get them in at the beginning so Todd Park of course it was he had helped save health care dot gov he came in and at first for for health and human services and then became the chief technology officer for the whole government. He always says that had he been in the room where the decision to build health care dot gov was made, there would never have been a health care dot gov it's not just that whatever was built would have worked, it was that it was crazy to design one website for you know the the tens of millions of Americans who are going to need health care. So that idea of getting technologists at the table but also getting the people who are going to sign up for that technology at the table and all the other people you need across government and others. It leads me to turn to you about the specific networks you're building in in the national security arena where if we think that group should be closed in domestic policy we want to get it ever more closed in national security right by an ideal meeting is three or four right the head of head of the intelligence community the head of the Pentagon maybe state maybe the national secure and the president the national security advisors so talk a little bit about how you're approaching this. So, we definitely want to blow up that model. We need to actually be more expansive and bring more people into the conversation when it we're in regards to national security it's really important for us to be talking with our private sector. Be sharing information with our private sector for the intelligence community to be protecting our private sector. We are under threat as well as we are under threat from our adversaries around the world. I think back to the partnerships that we launched at the State Department, and, and, you know, so many of them jump to mind that really are national security related. We talked about the US water partnership that we launched with Secretary Clinton. That one we used information from Coca Cola. There were wide strategy to water races around the world and stresses on water we use their information to inform our national strategy, as it related to water during the Obama administration. I'm not going to talk about the alliance for clean cook stoves, because that's all we talked about for a long time, but one of since it's pride month. I will just say, you know, the global equality fund is something else that we launched and as we look at places like Uganda right now that have cracked down on the LGBT community. Sadly have, you know, joined 11 other countries that punish and sex relations by death. I mean 69 other countries that criminalize homosexuality. There's a lot of work still to be done but by bringing corporations together with countries. We are really trying to address the root causes of the problems as it relates to people targeting human rights abroad which is again another national security. And that partnership is really incredible to me and we've had over 15 partner countries join it. This platform that we created where they're waiting checks to the State Department to do this incredible work abroad. We're expecting $24 million this year in funding. We have over 20 corporations and foundations that have signed up and have been partners and are contributing to the fund. You know, it's it's it's operating in over 100 countries. And, you know, sometimes without the knowledge of those countries that were that we're in. It's an important it's an important platform but it again it really brings the private sector together, their technology, their networks, their funds to work with the government to improve the plight of human rights around the world. You know, as I'm listening to you I'm thinking about how different that work is than the formal work of diplomacy and the formal work of diplomacy is not really much different than it was in the 19th century. Right, I mean all the protocols around the visits and the formal dinners and the speeches and it's this highly scripted elaborate dance between nations, and it's it requires a great deal of work to carry it out and there are all these things that you complain to governments when you're unhappy with them, but it's very different than this kind of work where you are, you're identifying corporations, civic groups, maybe universities maybe faith groups, all the different things that can be involved in a fight for equality or climate change or pandemics and food security, and you're reaching out to them you need diplomatic skills because you're bringing people together and organizations together that don't always fit, but it's often done exactly as some diplomacy is as well, and you have to, you have to have a kind of cultural competence to know how to engage with all those actors just as much as you would need to know how to speak another language or you would study, you know the culture of another country when when you're going to visit done to understand it. So Bill I want to come back to you because you write about cultural competence and I'd love to hear you, you talk a little about that. And also, you have those 10 strategies and we can't go through all of them but they really are terrific I would love to teach this book and you know structure a week on on each one. So specifically about a kind of pursuit of shared advantage, and a focus on common outcomes those are just just two. So if you could sort of elaborate more on what's different, you know when when you sit when you start out, either in government or again in a think tank, trying to solve problems from this perspective. Absolutely. And by the way, for teaching the book there is a in the appendix there's a whole section on how do you teach this book because we truly hope that it's going to be used in lots of schools of public policy and public administration. And Donald courses is this textbook has been kind of the main textbook used for public administration for many years. So I think we profile a lot of individuals in the book, who are really, really fantastic at in terms of the cross cultural context one of the ones I'm going to mention right now is John Hickenlooper, the first mayor of Denver, Governor Colorado and what Hickenlooper did has done he really made public private partnerships at the very center of his governing authority. And over time over the time is Denver mayor, he cobbled together partnerships to raise $295 million for efforts ranging from homelessness prevention to workforce development. And he had really an unwavering determination to work across the sectors find points of mutual advantage for all of his major policy initiatives go beyond partisanship, and he made it at the core and he came out of the private sector he owned a he owned a bar. He was a very successful small business owner when he came into government so he really understood that side of things. And one of the quotes we use from Senator Hickenlooper he talks about a government is very different than the private sector but in both cases people generally start with a narrow self interest starting with what they think they really need to get out of each association but when you get different voices at the table. It's not that difficult to show people that they can benefit from a broader variety of outcomes. And once you get alignment on the self interest you start to see overlaps and that's where these transactions happen in the private sector, and where you can create real change and progress he actually looked at diversity, diversity of thought and the diversity of kind of even goals and everything as an opportunity to craft something more powerfully. And a lot of the bridge builders we we profile in the book, whether it's from James Webb who really was instrumental in putting a man on the moon, or even all the way back to Claire Barton, the founder of the Red Cross. This is something that they all had in common was this really, really terrific ability to understand the different sectors. And then to find out a way of weaving together I'll say one last thing during the Obama administration towards the end of the administration they had a whole initiative on cross boundary leadership. And it was all about bringing people together to say how can we create more of these tri sector athletes. How do we get more and more people who have an expertise in doing this you can move between the sectors seamlessly. And understanding of the sectors then allows them to create that mutual advantage and to leverage all of the skills and capabilities and investments from each of the sectors. Great. So I usually I know this is at the heart of the new practice method, maybe you can talk a little bit about some of the specific projects where, you know, we get the people who are at the supposedly at the receiving end of the benefits the government is supposed to be providing, actually talking about what it's like to access them, and engaging directly with government officials. Absolutely. Yeah, as you were speaking Bill and I had the opportunity to read your book it. There are so many moments I'm just kind of nodding along as I'm going through the pages of, you know, particularly some of the Claire Burton some of the folks you mentioned, Hickenlooper of course and I'll give you an example, you know, during COVID in particular I think something that you spoke of in your book resonates deeply which is, you know, there was a story that you mentioned about the in during 911. Half a million New Yorkers evacuated by the US Coast Guard organizing so many other in creating a flotilla out of, you know, yachts and tort boats and other sorts of vessels. And, you know, all I bring that story up just because I think the role of coordination is so key in being able to the code switching the coordination is really key and one of the things that he said and that you wrote about in the book is, I think I broke more rules that day than I've enforced my entire life, or my entire career and that quote really stood out to me because I'll say we saw that at the new practice lab quite a bit during COVID-19 governments all of a sudden needed to be able to deliver services overnight to constituents who needed paychecks who couldn't make ends meet with lost their jobs, and the real work of implementing and reaching putting dollars in pockets meant that you had to reach across aisles and silos and you had to develop a cultural competence that maybe there wasn't need for before. The new practice lab worked on a unemployment insurance playbook. And I'll do a quick plug for those that are maybe listening and work on UI. It's called improve unemployment.org it's it's you don't find it there's a whole thing we go through line by line everything from identity management digital identity and creating just a UI account to all to provide the very end of the cycle and one thing that we found is, you cannot go through the constituent journey, the experience of a claimant, without touching every single one of these three sectors, and more. To begin, you need to submit the application, you're going through, most likely a government run application that was built with a private vendor. You're being screened after you've applied you're being screened for whether you are eligible or not, and to what level you are eligible for a certain amount of dollars. That is going through yet another back end system with another database and other set of players. You probably even got to the application the first place through the support of a nonprofit navigator who pointed you towards the UI system in the first place. At the very end of the chain, in order for you to receive your payment, there had to be coordination between private sector finance players, government players and government vendors to be able to initiate and then for you to receive that payment. Maybe in your bank, if you are a banked constituent, and if you're unbanked, then the step goes even further deep into private sector players to make that possible with prepaid cards or what have you. And as a result, you just kind of painting the chain here, because that's what we found at the lab right as you really needed it emphasized especially doing COVID-19 as unemployment insurance websites were crashing. The value of government players, creating a larger, creating a big tent approach, and creating a human centered a claimant centered north star that multiple players could really get behind. But as you're talking, I'm thinking about that vending machine and I'm thinking what's at the back end of it all this tangle of different actors as you kick it mightily to get it to either give you whatever it was you wanted or your money back, neither which is often forthcoming. But absolutely that tangle of different entities and what it takes to work across them and to align it. Jim, one thing I know that we encountered at state and I'd be interested to hear from your work now as well. You know, government isn't set up really to address entities that are motivated by profit, right. I mean the whole point of government is that you're there for public service it's not you use taxpayer dollars. Often there's more alignment with nonprofits, although they're very, very different. But what do you do when you encounter, you know, entities that have to be motivated by profit because I remember talking to CEOs when I was in government and they were like yes we're we're all for corporate social responsibility we're all for doing good work but you know in the way that we answer to our shareholders and we have that obligation, and we can't just deviate from that because you want us to do something with public purpose so talk about that, that clash between public purpose and private profit. Great question, and it's one I've been wrestling with for 20 years. So I'll take us back 20 years ago, the US Agency for International Development launched the Global Development Alliance, and it was a first time that they turned an idea of public private partnerships into a business model for how the agency would engage with the private sector and further in some development. And to your cultural question that upset a lot of the foreign service officers at USAID at the time that I've heard multiple from multiple times multiple people coming to me and saying look if I, I joined the Foreign Service I joined the civil service at USAID to help other people if I wanted to work with the private sector, I would have gone into the private sector. And telling me I have to work with the private sector to accomplish what we want to do and I said yes actually you do because they're the ones that are going to be on the ground in developing countries, making a difference they're the ones who are working with the private sector. I mean USAID does employ people but it you know and a mission that big, you really want to talk to companies about their employment practices what they need to expand what their opportunities are on the ground to maybe go into a new country that creates more economic opportunities for people to find employment to get health care to educate their children it really helps to grow that pie. That more people are brought into the system. And that's why we talked to our Foreign Service officers about the idea of this importance of working closely with the private sector and making them profitable, actually making them succeed in business because it's actually good for people. And I'll stop and just say this is really important for all of us, not just in development but across our national security work. And I was very excited to see OPM this past spring call for stakeholder engagement as part of its future of the workforce. And I looked at that and I was like that's awesome. They're actually calling us to do stakeholder engagement, but who's going to do that. Who went within the federal agencies is going to do this important work of stakeholder engagement. And you have a few offices of public private partnerships and it stayed at USAID, Millennium Challenge Corporation and several others. But, you know, you look across the breadth of the federal government and most agencies still haven't quite gotten there. There's a person or two, they've been thinking about it but there's no policies the procedures there's no roadmap for how do you engage with the private sector. And it's important. I mean, even for those of us who are working in this space right now, we are either management analysts, program analysts, foreign service officers, business analysts. There's no job series. There's no job series that says private partnerships or stakeholder engagement. I've been advocating now for a while about the need for a partnership officer job series. It is the future of the bill has identified this for us. And I am a believer in it obviously I'm a practitioner of this, but it really takes a type of person that brings a unique skill set and the job series that I listed previously, don't have the skill sets Those skills include things like the ability to communicate, do strategic planning, ideation, a huge piece of it, networking, marketing. I mean, I go out and I sell the US government. How many people are in government who are thinking of themselves as market specialists going out and selling, come work with us with the opportunities that we present in the US government to come and play with us. So you need collaboration, innovation, negotiation, acquisition and empathy, you actually for the marketing piece you need to be empathetic, you need to understand what's in it for them. So when you were actually talking to them, you're speaking why it's important for them and what they're going to see in the end bring it back to your question. It's about profitability. So, yeah, that's, that's why I've been calling for a partnership officer series. And, you know, I've been. Oh, sorry. You know, we have examples of agencies, federal agencies that are really good at this. And DARPA is is one certainly and NASA. I mean, NASA and DARPA what we call catalyst by design agencies. We're all throughout the organization, not just within public private partnership office that there's a culture of forming these partnerships and engaging with the private sector and acting as a catalyst for wider societal innovation. NASA utilizes public procurement grants contract prizes and challenges and many other tools to stimulate the commercial space economy, encouraging entrepreneurial ventures technological advancements. They have people who specialize in market sensing over looking at the different technologies, they have other people are specializing in engagement. And if you look at the growth of the space industry, most of that would not have been possible without NASA, and NASA's really has a commitment to nurturing talent and creating incentives for commercial partnerships to drive innovation. And so there's a lot we can learn from agencies like NASA DARPA, and then some local governments which have been really, really strong in this area. But I was, I was just laughing thinking about marketing, I mean that you go to public policy school. So, you know, your private sector colleagues go to business school, and if you're interested in the public sector, or then the nonprofit sector you go to public policy school and you learn a very different set of skills but actually those skills are increasingly overlapping. And, but I love the idea of having partnership officers or Matt Barzun when he was ambassador to the United Kingdom, he created an office of network and he was way ahead of the curve but he was also he came out of technology and he thought in network terms and he immediately thought about all the folks that the US needed to engage in the UK and how to build networks not just to engage them individually or to engage or to connect to existing networks. And I thought, you know, if we could just replicate that that would that would be wonderful. So, Bill, I just have to come back to you for a second to ask you to elaborate on that because one of the things you say in the book is that you talk about catalytic government, and you describe the role of government, not as managing or delivering solutions, which is definitely what many of us think of when we think of government, but rather shaping and integrating solutions so I wanted to ask you to expound a little on that and then I'm going to turn to to talk about data. Well, absolutely. If you look at the three major pieces of legislation passed over the last 16 months. And we're talking about the Infrastructure Act to IAJA the Inflation Reduction Act IRA which really focused on climate and the competes act focused on semiconductors and competitiveness put them all together it's a $2 trillion investment in American competitiveness and you add them up and probably the biggest thing that we've seen it in decades. And yet when you actually unpack where all that money has gone, the vast majority of it is through indirect tools of government such as tax credits competitive grants contracts and so on. So understanding say climate is a great example of this where the private sector is going to have to do the majority of the funding in this so there we're using these indirect tools in regulation is another one to actually spur innovation and clean energy infrastructure sustainability practices and being able to use those tools in a very depth way is really important another example we write a lot about homelessness in the book and hopefully I can talk a little bit about what Houston has done which has been amazing but in Washington State in California, in order to ease the affordable housing crisis, what we've seen is this explosion in accessory dwelling units or ad user, sometimes called granny flats to create more affordable housing. And as a result, one in five housing units now built in California is an ad you. So how did they do that. They did it through regulatory changes and through tax credits and some grants so they use these other tools as opposed to direct government funding. So the depth use of those tools as a government as a catalyst is really one of the most important roles that government can play whether it's in public health innovation, whether it's a climate solutions whether it's encouraging the commercial space industry your workforce development. And, and that's something you just don't hear enough about, but it's absolutely critical. So I usually we often, you know, the standard line is what what gets measured gets managed. And one of the things that Bill says is that make data the language, the language of this cross boundary government public private work. Because data not only creates the information, but I love this the shared grammar for acting on it. And you spent your life, or a lot of your your career working with data and thinking about how to use data so I wanted to want to ask you about that. So, you know, we have a sort of quip here you get what you measure, and you don't get what you don't measure right and I think that's sort of the flip side of the story is data practices good data practices, data cleanliness, or data communication really varies widely across agencies, and widely across programs forms of service delivery and, and fortunately, something that you know Jim was mentioning earlier is is it replicates a lot of the demographic income race, gender, sexuality and other politicized identities across the US in this context replicates them in our databases as well. And so filling that sort of gap in data, and making sure that services are being delivered for the folks that need it most. And when I say delivered I'm not looking just to government parties I'm looking to all the folks we've been discussing right who are at the table and this proverbial dinner party right you have all three sectors what what does that look like right how are we connecting with an eye to those gaps. I'll point to some of the work of an organization called the gov lab started formerly by Beth Novak and run by Stefan Brohost and they've been doing some really phenomenal work, trying to connect. And effectively I'll call it data exhaust between private company data and government or governmental and other nonprofit bodies civil sector players that could benefit from that kind of information so thinking about even the impact of telecoms data so mobile data on combining transit systems that are gender inclusive in countries where women feel less safe traveling at certain hours of the day, right, and using their phone patterns to understand where they need to go and how to build systems for that sort of as opposed to maybe the sort of gendered transportation need of going just to your office and back to your house in recurring patterns and said having to go to childcare having to go to school sites to grocery stores and so on so forth. And so I think that's really fascinating is thinking about the role of data and the role of data owned by different sorts of players to create a different kind of landscape and different kind of field. And I'll add to sort of legislative numbers beyond the legislation that bill named in the last 16 months that have also been really critical on this front. The state and local fiscal recovery fund. The CARES Act, and the inflation reduction act are we're talking 350 billion for state and local fiscal recovery, we're talking 500 billion for the inflation reduction act and 2.2 trillion for the CARES act. So that kind of money, right, over $3 trillion focused on implementation for low income folks alone. What we really need is information on low and middle income families across the US and where the gaps are. And I think this is 100% of a cross sector solution space. Great. Thanks. Yes, data and dollars and putting them together but again, it comes to thinking about, you know, how we educate people how we train people and there's a question about that we've got about 14 minutes and a number of questions you all have have sparked lively discussion. So James, Jim, the first one is for you. And I also invite you to comment on anything you just heard. Have you explored federal land and resource management, federal land and resource management agencies, use of stakeholder collaboration so like the Forest Service and how they work. And that's a question from Karen Bradshaw. Oh, thank you. And that's a great question. Yes. So Forest Service actually is probably one of the most forward leaning of the domestic agencies working partnerships. And, you know, it's funny that they sit at the US Department of Agriculture because the Department of Agriculture itself doesn't have a partnership unit. And every few years they come back to me and they say, you know, we're interested in setting up a public-private partnership office. And I'm like, you realize you have the crown jewel sitting in your crown right now. It's the Forest Service. They're the ones without doing this. They have training. They have officers that work on this. It is, they're out in front. And frankly, I'm going to say, you know, one of the things I did want to mention as you talked about other pieces, data is important. We're in an AI. I think we're all playing with it. We're all trying it out. We're putting together invitations using it. We're having conversations with it. It is a little scary from a national security perspective too because the data sets that's pulling from contains some biases. And that's something that we all need to be concerned about is what are those biases? Where is the information coming from? And then what can be manipulated? What can those data sets, how can those data sets be manipulated by our adversaries in the future? And those are all things that we're looking at in the national security space and the intelligence space. Those are things that we are taking very seriously over. So that absolutely keys up the T's up the next question. Before I get to it, I also wanted to note on this idea of data exhaust, which itself is so interesting. New America's future of land and housing has been working on a model for how you could determine property rights in Ukraine and other destroyed places from conflict or natural disaster. That the deed to your house may be washed away, but your cell phone will show that you were there, that you were there overnight, that you were there so that you could use electronic signals, data exhaust to prove things like ownership and thereby speed reconstruction, which is often tremendously impeded in all sorts of circumstances by the need to provide documents. But on this national security point, there is a question from Eduardo Maschia-Paredes. Hello, Eduardo. I haven't seen you for a long time. So Bill, I'm going to turn this to you, but Jim will also have probably some reflections. How much has Silicon Valley, the West's competitive advantage been part of the problem of a sort of broader problem of undermining democracy and the flip of how can tech focus its strength to strengthen democracy. So I think, Bill, I'm going to turn this to you with sort of the double-sided perception here of how technology is used. Well, I actually, I think I'll let Jim take that one on since that's more of his expertise here. But before I did that, just getting back on the data side of it, I did want to just give a great example. We've talked so much about data and I wrote a lot about it in my book, Delivering on Digital. And the key thing now is we really do need systems that are cross-sector data sharing systems because if you're operating these systems that involve many different providers, kind of a government-only approach is not going to work. And one of the great examples of this that we talked about in the book is Houston, where they were able to reduce homelessness over the last decade by 63% while it was going up everywhere else. If the rest of the country had been able to replicate Houston's success, we'd have 200,000 less unhoused people in the country today. And one of the key elements of weaving together the more than 100 partners that Houston had working with the Houston Coalition for the Homelessness was the coalition's data system. And it really helped each provider understand each homeless person's individual needs and concerns and share that information with others in the system before they couldn't see what anyone else was doing. So there was a lot of duplication and replication. And then so in Houston, data doesn't just function as a deliverable, but as we leave the map that gives providers a fuller view of the actual individuals behind the data and what their needs are. They can house 25,000 people, and this system is really, really important to that. And I think you go across many different human services in other areas, and the need for these kinds of systems can really have a transformative impact. And with that, Jim, I'll turn it over to you with that at the Silicon Valley question. Yeah, that's a fantastic question. And I love the Houston example too. I think that's really important for us domestically to be thinking about how do we work better with our people across this, across all sectors to improve lives of American citizens and I will come back at 2009. And Marie, we were at state. I held the first head at state was was kind of a seminal moment where we brought together sort of the best of Ted 800 people piled into the auditorium. It was an awesome experience. But the biggest thing that came out of that was Clay Shurkey, Professor from NYU, talked about the next revolution is coming via Twitter. And at the time, there were about three of us at the Department of State that were on Twitter in 2009. It was such a new platform. Yeah, so so many of us weren't on it, but I got because I knew the TED folks were on it and I wanted to be one of the cool kids. Shurkey said the next revolution is coming via Twitter. And I was like, All right, what does that mean 10 days later, the Iranian protests broke out. And we saw them using Twitter as the platform where they were organizing themselves. We realized quickly technology was playing a role that hadn't played before that people were using these platforms to engage with one another to coordinate with one another. And, and frankly, that has only grown significantly over time, more and more platforms across the world. We actually need to have robust partnerships with Silicon Valley and with tech companies around the world, so that we're able to talk with them about concerns in society and ensuring that people are getting good information that they're not being manipulated that fake videos can be identified easily. If you look at the example of President Putin who was spoofed on on Twitter television channels where he was, you know, his image was used his voice was used by AI, talking about, you know, the situation in Ukraine. Those are real issues that we are all going to face moving forward. So I come back to the idea of the partnership officer. You need someone in government who can build trust, build trust with Silicon Valley. That person needs to be around for a while. Which means you need to find a way to progress someone in their career in that partnership officer series because you need that person to be there for five, 10, 15 years to help build that relationship because relationships are not institution to corporation their people to people. And that takes takes acquired skills but it takes required people to be in the institutions and they need a career trajectory to do that. It also means a change in government hiring practices, particularly into state or USA because you need folks who can come those tri sector athletes have to be able to move from the private sector to the public sector to the civic sector. And of course, the Foreign Service rules make that almost impossible. And so I usually you said you mentioned that you, you teach at the Kennedy School and even as the former dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs we recognize that school up to the north and and Florini who I happen to know is yet another Princeton graduate but she she says rightly that public policy schools and even business schools rarely teach these skills and and Bill already mentioned there's an appendix in this book to teach it and it's got case studies and it's really a wonderful blueprint. But I wonder, you know what you're teaching and from your perspective how we would need to overhaul the curricula of these schools to educate a whole generation of bridge builders to go into multiple sectors. So it's such a good question I know, you know, I have a lot of respect for the people who have to put together the curriculum for such a large program and so many students from different backgrounds and I will not admit to knowing anything about developing curriculum at such a scale but as a, you know, member of the faculty in a small way. I'll say, it's, it's really I open it's been I opening for me, I teach about digital government, I teach about building software and products in a publicly managed space, right, as opposed to products for Silicon Valley companies. And what's been fascinating for me as an educator in that context is students. This is their first time engaging with conversations around iterative development around product management practices around waterfall versus agile about the implications of waterfall development on the way that budgeting is done in the public context right we're talking about the difference between capital and operating expenditures that has different implications for how you build products in the public context. And for the public good, and that to me has been eye opening that these conversations are actually the first time they're hearing about it, especially when if they are to move into the deloids of the world or state agencies or community benefits organizations even adjacent and nonprofits, they're that kind of familiarity will go a long way as they're literally working to deliver public goods and services with whatever hat on so I think that's the one piece I will name is the value of an education for public policy students and public policy schools that doesn't just focus on landing their students jobs within the government context, but in the larger world of delivery, and what that means for, you know, teaching practices outside of this traditional job descriptions and government. Absolutely. And I always I say as a former dean of a school of public and international affairs that you would never let anybody graduate from a school like that without a basic more than a basic knowledge of economics you have to micro and micro and basic statistics and you have to understand how the economy works, and you have to understand how the political system works, when you need at least that level of knowledge about how technology works, and you don't have to be a technologist but if you don't have to be an economist but you have to know how to engage the economy. All right, Bill we've got two minutes, sadly, and I'm going to give you a final question. And there are a number I apologize to those of you we didn't get to your questions. But you, this is I think an interesting you say, what's your definition of the private sector, which I think is important here, and where you do you see the role of philanthropy so that's the question. And also though, to just close us out by talking about what image should we take away that is not the vending machine, right that that that is such a clear. Here's the old view of government, what should be the new view of government in a world of bridge Well, I'll take the last question first and I think, I think you actually and Marie, you illustrated that it's it's a web, right. It's a it's a web and governments not always going to be this at the center of these ecosystems or webs, it's going to play different roles and that's the way to look at it it's complex a lot more complex to do this but you're going to end up with better results. And lastly, the role of foundations is so critical, wrote a lot about this in my book solution revolution 10 years ago. And that's something where the US is really blessed our foundation sector is probably like 10x 20x 100x any other country in the world we have largest civic society, and those foundations are really key part of this notion of bridge building and blended government that we that we talked to and they're providing a lot of public value. I believe in the other thing we haven't talked about is the rise of social enterprise. We have 10s of millions of social enterprises. The last thing I'll say is, when I've spoken solution revolution over 20 different business schools and sometimes with the public policy school, almost every one of those schools, the most popular club in those schools was the social enterprise social entrepreneurs club. And so we see a rise in purpose in the private sector and the rise of that and I think that's all for the good and really government needs to really understand that purpose landscape so they can leverage it effectively well thank you and we could have gone on easily for another half hour so I'm going to remind you again that the book is bridge builders it's really about how we all come together to address the public problems that require private civic and public actors to address with very specific techniques and approaches and examples of the ways this is these problems are being solved and the leaders the bridge builders who are solving them. So, Jim and bill and I use she thank you all thank you to the new America staff who allowed us to do this, and thank you to the audience. Have a great afternoon.