 We have an obligation to make democracy work better and cities are the places where democracy is still working and Can be made to be improved by the use of technology? so Ultimately this entire book is a kind of people magazine of Heroes throughout city government who are doing their best against almost impossible odds to make life better for citizens To ensure that by doing small things Much better by delivering services more effectively by giving lots of touch points with the government Across the city making the government more visible you thicken the mesh of democratic engagement Which ultimately I believe is going to help us prove the case for democracy around the world that authoritarian nations may be great at building high-speed rail faster than we can and Even putting fiber lines down all over the country But we've got the long rung advantage of engagement and autonomy and agency and all these digital developments feed into that That richness There's a confluence of events some of which Steve has mentioned three big things More handsets in people's hands more fiber with any luck more wireless connectivity So infrastructure getting better cost of communication going down. That's the first big development The second is that processing is getting a lot faster and our ability to Understand data to know what we know Which is really the goal of predictive analytics to take historic information and use it to Assertain the best ways in which to focus city resources. That's just taking off now in cities You know Google and Facebook have been doing it for a while and Amazon and the rest of them But cities are just learning how to do this and learning how to do it much less Expensively than they had in the past So that's the second big development and then the third big development is people people who are finally comfortable with technology coming into city government Both at the leadership level, which is absolutely essential, but also serving in CIO roles CTO roles And generally working as a team across the country. I see tremendous Collaboration among different cities when it comes to their use of technology another great advantage We have when it comes to our the authoritarian nations in the world is that we do collaborate We do have friends and this is a great place for it