 Hei, wedi tyfu, tyfnwch. Rwy'n meddwl yn cullwch ar gyfer y ddangos cyno'r ddau tych-tych. Ac rwy'n fyddech chi'n gweld i'r godi wrth gydig, ac i'r meddwl yn y sefysgol ysgrifennu. Byddwn i'n ddiddordeb gweithio ddim yn cael ei ddangos cymaint am ei ddau. Felly, mae'n rhoi'n ddysgu'r oedd ysgrifennu gyda James Anderson James Anderson, dwy'n gweld yng Nghymru. Mae eau James yw gan gweithio'n meddwl, ac yn ddweud yma'r event OECD. Mae'n ddweud yma ychydig y gallan ei tympai y fwyaf y dyma'n gwybod i'r rhagleniol ac i'r cyfrifio'r tympai. Mae'n credu'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio a'r ddweud yma. y James' yw'r ysgawd y Blwmbaig Fflantrypae'r amser phobl yw'n golygu'r ffordd ymlaen yng ngyd, oherwydd mae'r gwaith gweithio'r defnyddio'r arbennig, ac mae'r gwaith ei bod yn dweud o'r gwahau ar hynny ymddianneid yma yng Nghymru yw'r ymddiannau'r ymddianneid yng nghymru yma ymddianneid ymddianneid ymlaen o'r i'ch gyda ni'r gweithio ac yn fath am y ddechrau. Bydd am bwysig ddod di'n ddweud ar y sgol ac rwy'n ddweud o'i bod yn ddigiddio cyfanol yn esbryd o'r ddod o bobl iawn i'r ddod am ffocl i ddim ni'n holl i'r cyfaniadau a'r holl i'r rhan o bwysig cellio ar unlock i'r cyfnodiwyr i'r cyfaniadau yn risu i'r gwneud ac yn rhan o'r adnod o'r hefyd y gwaith. So Bloomberg is, I'm sure James will explain the support work in 250 cities around the world. You're helping build capacity and capability within the mayors and their teams and so on. So as before, James will talk for a period and then we'll have a chance for 10 or 15 minutes of questions at the end. So I do have a good thought about questions to ask. So it's a great pleasure to hand over to James Anderson from Bloomberg for Anthropies. Good afternoon. It's awesome to be here and I really want to thank my society for the invitation and mark particularly because I'm not really a civic tech person but come to this from the perspective of public innovation and working to help local governments beef up their capacity and be platforms for innovation and enable civil society and businesses and entrepreneurs to come forward and help cities solve all of the problems that we need them to solve. As I came down I saw the banners tech for trust. I don't know if that's the theme for the conference this year but it feels so right on time. This truly is a moment where of great uncertainty a time when public institutions everywhere face a crisis of legitimacy. I was just in Greece two days ago meeting with mayors from across Europe and civil society experts and literally every leader I spoke to started by talking about the crisis of legitimacy and the way that it's seeping into local conversations and changing the dynamics on the ground between Brexit, the protests here. I think the upcoming European elections you really feel it in the air like we do back home in the United States you feel it in the air in a way that I think is really unprecedented in our generation. So that trust gap comes from a lot of places globalization mass migration income inequality automation and a public discourse that has been completely transformed and deeply divided by the platforms that we're supposed to bring us together and promote a better more robust public conversation in the face of these challenges. Our public institutions too often seem small struggling uncertain behind the curve. Meanwhile the advent of new technologies that holds so much problems are promised to improve services improve communities promote sustainability the promise of smart cities has elevated expectations but largely under delivered on public value. Richard Florida estimates that over the past two years urban tech investment totaled more than $75 billion 17% of global venture capital investment. It's a staggering amount more than 16 billion of that went to Uber. Uber now more than 10 years in illustrates the complexity of new technologies entering cities where issues of trust globalization and automation are at play. The company's rapid expansion as we all know was accompanied by widespread pushback from various regulators and public stakeholders. Uber received its first cease and desist letter from a metropolitan authority within its first year of operation followed by price surge complaints class action lawsuits crackdowns in cities around the globe. The case of Uber also highlights the challenge cities face when confronting new technologies. They often have neither the tools to assess and manage and size up the disruption nor the gravitas or the public's confidence to pull people together to move through it. And as we've all become more aware of the internet of things of everything connected to everything of the privatization of personal data. I think there's a creeping sense in all of our cities that the risks are unmapped that the implications for how we live work play love are uncertain and that our cities will change in ways that we don't participate and frankly don't want. So I view the intersection of technology and public policy and the current smart cities conversation as another huge test of the legitimacy of our public institutions. The way our cities act represent a huge chance to get it all wrong deepening citizen alienation yet it's also an opportunity to get it powerfully and excitingly right. And that's what I want to talk about today because I believe it is local governments that can help us find our way through. So we should start. Sorry I'm not make sure I've got my missed my oversight already so. So I think the first place we have to start is looking at the capacity of the public sector and strengthening it. In community after community on just about every continent our crisis in confidence is made worse because local government has been weakened by budget cuts austerity fragmentation unfunded mandates and a decades long mantra that it says innovation is best left to the private sector. I fundamentally believe we have to be going in the other direction specifically there's an urgent critical need to bolster the creative generative capacity within our public institutions and in local governments in particular to open the doors to new ways of solving problems. What do I mean by creative capacity? I'm talking about experimentation and iteration curiosity and collaboration the imaginative use of data and perhaps most importantly to the question of public trust co creation and ambitious routine engagement with citizens. These are the basic problem solving skills that any effective organization needs in this day and age. Why should the public sector be any different yet more often than not we've under invested we've we've outsourced that work to consultants relied on labs external to city government and that has left the talented passionate people that are working in our public institutions ill equipped to deeply understand and therefore meet citizens needs. For nearly a decade Bloomberg philanthropies has worked with hundreds of cities supporting leaders at every single level from mayors and chiefs of staff to data officers innovation officers budget chiefs procurement personnel to reverse that trend. I think we're running the world's largest upskilling effort to spread these creative capacities through local governments and to make them the new normal and the good news is I think the wind is now at our back demand and ambition from cities themselves is growing faster than we can keep up. For example the incoming class of the Bloomberg Harvard city leadership initiative which is our flagship development program for mayors ranked citizen engagement as the second highest thing they wanted to do better this year. I'm hearing that more and more in my own conversations with mayors they they've experienced the protests the public unrest. They recognize the tensions from our hyper polarized national discussions in their local community town halls and they're doubting that their civic infrastructure is strong enough and resilient enough they want to know how to beef it up. Fortunately local governments really do have the power to turn up the dial here the root of city city legitimacy especially in the tech context is the ability to do what technology companies cannot and that's to be transparent and publicly accountable that is in cities DNA. This isn't about gotcha politics are pointing fingers but a way to bolster legitimacy engaging residents isn't opportunity a source of credibility mark more at the Harvard Kennedy school puts it this way he talks about the strategic triangle for creating public value and he says we always need three things good ideas that produce pop positive public value implementation capacity to bring them to life and to sustain them and legitimacy and support without legitimacy public innovation always falters now cities do not always get their relationships with residents right. We all know that but co creation and resident engagement is one of the most powerful tools cities are using to build up legitimacy through and around the adoption of new technologies to improve life back home. We're seeing this in our work around the world take the city of Athens in the aftermath of the Greek financial crisis Athens experienced financial and social pressure at levels few western cities have seen in recent decades. Mayor Caminas said a new he needed to build local government capacity and to do it in a way that also strengthened public confidence which had been so shattered. We were excited to partner with him on a bunch of different fronts. We helped with the creation of a digital platform called Sinathina which aims to support and encourage diverse organic civic activity and engagement. Our consulting team Bloomberg associates helped the mayor develop the Athens partnership which is a platform that allows philanthropy and businesses to co produce solutions to the city's challenges and the Athens digital lab which is connecting digital entrepreneurs with civil servants to come up with digital solutions that can help solve pressing problems. Not only of these platforms enabled more social innovation in the city they've also landed the city of Athens the 2018 European capital of innovation award something I think few would have predicted at the height of the crisis a few years back. And then there's Barcelona a city with a very clear powerful vision for how technology can help improve residents lives. Barcelona came to us with an idea to combat isolation amongst the city's elders something that's a growing crisis for cities all over the globe. We partnered with them to create a digital platform that is paired with supports to help seniors connect with others and become active members of their communities. Importantly Athens embraced a bottoms up strategy where they paid incredible attention to understanding residents needs to the barriers to participation and to designing with rather than for residents. That's how they turned what could have become a really cool Facebook for seniors project into a beloved social program with vibrant on and offline offerings. Last month I was with Mayor Callow and she announced the expansion of this program city wide. Getting these programs to scale I think is one of the most important reasons we want to work and engage with the public sector. And she did it based on great data. The evaluation is showing the program boost participants self esteem improves their state of mind creates social connections between seniors who might otherwise be sitting at home alone. Resident engagement is also a growing focus for cities in the United States. Last summer we worked with 35 cities across the country to test and refine ideas that were submitted as part of our innovation competition the mayor's challenge. They did so by using a tool that's so routine in the private sector but still highly underutilized in government that's prototyping city and staff city staff in their community partners sketched out how their ideals would ideas would work bill models and even play acted providing services getting feedback from residents to refine and strengthen their ideas. This is the coastal city of Charleston South Carolina. They started out with an interesting idea due to sea level rise caused by climate change. Charleston expects to see flooding go from 50 days a year to 180 days a year in the next 20 years. Their initial strategy was to build an app that would alert that would use real time alerts to help residents steer clear of flooded roadways. A test with residents showed yes in fact there was huge demand not only from car drivers but also from small business owners but it also showed that their initial strategy was off track. They didn't actually want video footage people were much more interested in road drivability and so the city realized that sensors rather than cameras could be installed much cheaper and providing actually the right level of information that the citizens were requesting. I think it's a perfect example of how cities can come to much better solutions by engaging residents early and robustly. I'm also excited about the work in another small American city that's Durham North Carolina. It may be a little lower attack but it's a great example of how resident engagement can rebuild trust between governments and marginalized communities. We've helped local leaders there deep in their ability to experiment, test new ideas. We've funded an innovation team in Durham City Hall to use data, design, employ behavioral science and develop ideas with residents. These skills help the mayor's office zero in on a huge issue faced by 20% of the population of Durham who have a criminal record which in many cases keeps them from getting driver's licenses and then participating fully in the local economy. Through a series of co-creation sessions, the city developed a text message campaign to streamline the record expungement process which historically had been so time intensive, so fraught with turns and twists that many citizens didn't bother with at all. A text campaign led to 100 times more residents applying 2500 as compared to a couple dozen when the city hosted in person amnesty days. Across all of these examples, you see how civil servants are using resident engagement to build support for, build and ultimately scale up better technological solutions that meet resident needs. Now, I've been talking mostly about the skills and techniques that city officials are using to improve problem solving and strengthen confidence from residents in the process. The mayors who are most successful, the city leaders are those that are bringing these tactics up to the values level and mapping them across everything that they do, including their conversations with partners and including their partnerships with technology firms. Every time cities come to the partnership table, they have a huge and vital role to play. And that's first and foremost to assert the civic interests, boldly and with confidence, to articulate the values and conditions that must define and set boundaries around the work ahead and to focus partnerships on the most urgent challenges the city is trying to tackle. Now, you all know last year more than 200 cities through everything they had, tax incentives, preferred zoning treatment, future infrastructure plans to compete for Amazon's second headquarters. You all know how that story ended, not so super positively for most of the players, but did you hear about San Antonio? So that's Ron Nuremberg, the mayor of San Antonio. Now, he's a mayor who really takes seriously his role of articulating and driving a vision of inclusive growth in his city. His team thought about the future. They sized up the city's current economic development strategy, his positional strengths and weaknesses, and they penned a letter explaining their thinking about the HQ2 competition. He wrote, sure, we have a competitive toolkit of incentives, but blindly giving away the farm isn't our style. San Antonio has a long history of successfully attracting and retaining global companies, but we always think, is it the right fit, not just for the company, but for our entire community? Does it create good jobs? Does it offer good benefits for employees? Are there opportunities for small business? Is the company a good corporate citizen? In coming to answers to all of these questions, his city declined to compete for the Amazon competition. They saw it as being out of strategy. I just love the confidence that a smaller city has, the willingness to measure the Amazon competition, which, you know, people were dying for, against civic values and an existing strategy. The fact that San Antonio was such an exception is inspiring, but also shows, I think, how long we have to go with so many of our other cities. Many of you are undoubtedly following what's unfolding in Toronto around Quaside. And as I read about the back and forth there, and around any of these big smart city projects, I'm reminded always of the vital role our public institutions have to play to articulate civic values, to engage residents around their shared vision for the future, and to keep engaging and engaging over time to maintain that legitimacy. If we want to do big things, and it's important for cities to do big things, we need public institutions that are equipped and prepared to fulfill that role. So, public institutions have a vital role to play. We need to invest in people, and within public institutions, ensuring they have the data literacy, the collaborative engagement skills needed for today's complex public work. And as we consider the intersection of technology and public policy, I think we can also get cities working together in far more ambitious ways. So stop for a minute and think about why cities join networks. They do it because they typically don't have the power and the resources they need to solve the problems their citizens want them to solve today. As someone who has worked with and around mayors for 15 years, I love to the book if mayors rule the world, but the reality is so far from it. Cities are under resourced, under equipped, and under consulted routinely by national and international bodies. Cities are responsible for delivering an estimated 65% of the SDGs. Yet cities rarely have the voice they need to inform and influence what's going on by higher levels of government or in deliberations with the United Nations. Our own research has found incredible growth in the diversity of city networks over the past 20 years, whereas 20th century city networks focused overwhelmingly on geography. Think about the local governments association in the UK. 21st century city networks are mainly defined by issues and areas of mutual interest, whether that's combating global climate change or addressing the migrant crisis. There is a critical and urgent rationale for cities to work and collaborate today around these emerging technologies around data and privacy standards and the path forward. In 2017, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Aspen Institute partnered and spent a year working with 10 cities focused on autonomous vehicles. It included leading cities like Helsinki, Los Angeles, and it included cities that were brand new to thinking about this technology, Sao Paulo and Nashville. As part of that effort, we surveyed cities globally about AV pilots and literally found 50 pilots underway or in planning, but few of these pilots were designed around existing civic challenges. Often cities were mainly used as the backdrop, as the places where these tests needed to happen because companies were needed to collect performance data in an urban environment. And it really got us thinking could there be a better way for cities to act together, voice their collective interests and solutions that dealt with specific, widely shared problems that every city has like helping disabled people experience everything that city life has to offer. The power to shape those markets if cities acted together would be significant. Today there are almost no cities, very few that can on their own influence what technology companies produce, but cities acting together an unstoppable force and undoubtedly an irresistible market. City governments could work together in a number of different ways, perhaps to articulate a view for appropriate and acceptable uses of connected digital technology in public spaces. For instance, they could rally around a Mozilla project, the trustable technology mark, which is created for companies or city vendors who lead the way in data privacy and user rights. Our partners at the Aspen Institute are actually trying to advance that goal. Or they could unite around shared data standards and goals for technology like a lead standard. There's a shared streets program that's spun off from the World Bank that is doing some really important early work in this area. Or they could let go of some of their bespoke requests to mobility companies and instead, in favor of a standard ask, while at the same time, requiring much more demanding standards in terms of data privacy, transparency and data sharing. The sky is the limit. Imagine if a network of cities issued an RFP for capacity building around artificial intelligence, encouraging the world's best minds in institutions and universities around the globe to collaborate to deliver the knowledge and training to skill up city leaders. Or they could take a page from the Gates Foundation and its advanced market commitment strategy for developing vaccines in poor countries. Is it a stretch to imagine a group of cities guaranteeing public funds for not yet to market products that significantly improve urban emergency response? I don't think so. We need to think imaginatively about how to harness the collective capacity across cities, the collective power of city economies to shape the future that will make our residents proud and create the cities that we all want to live in. I think there's some incredible early interest in this from cities like Barcelona, Amsterdam and New York. But I think, again, this is an area where we can all support cities to do much, much more. By the way, we've now mapped more than 120 global pilots in our AV Atlas. And one very interesting thing is that we're seeing so much more focus now. Cities are now articulating the civic challenges. And many, many more of those pilots are now actually being crafted by technology companies to address the challenges that those civic leaders face. I'll give you a really great example. The mayor of San Jose, California, very close to Silicon Valley, all of the technology companies, of course, wanted to test their AV products in his backyard. And he said, you know what? I want you to test on my backyard. But you know what else I want? I want to help economically disenfranchised people get to jobs. And so if you bring forward a pilot that speaks to that issue that helps my city crack that nut open, test away, the streets are yours. It's a really exciting way of how cities can, I think, get much more strategic about the way that these new technologies are coming on board. So you know, one of the most important things that I have worked for Mike Bloomberg for 12 years or something. And one of the things that I learned from him in city government is there's this incredible power when you sort of point to a status quo that isn't producing the results you want to see in the world and you name it. He famously tried to do that around big sodas and that one didn't work out so well. But there's huge power in calling out a status quo that isn't giving us the results that we want. I think the status quo today is this idea that innovation is considered the province of the private sector and the public sector is sort of relegated to the stands. The status quo today is that smartness is a means is often confused for an end, something we need to get really, really clear about. And where we're downloading new technologies onto our urban platforms without taking a full measure of how they will transform our lives and the way that we interact with one another in our communities. I think we all want tomorrow's cities to unleash the human potential within all of us to bring us closer together to respect our agency and our privacy because that is what makes our cities work. And I'm a huge believer that technology can help us get there. But we have to be willing to pause to draw lines to articulate the sandbox that is defined by our civic values. And in order to get there, we have to be investing in the public sector and in our public sector leaders and giving them the strength and the confidence, the skills they need to do that important work. Kind of like Mayor Ada Collau or Mayor Ron Nirenberg who now are sort of making great names for themselves by drawing lines and really questioning whether these technologies are going to help us create better versions of ourselves and better versions of our cities. As Collau says, will it actually make us more human? So with that, we have a long way to go, but I think there's incredible potential. The cities need your partnership. More and more they're wanting your partnership and I think we're really going to rely on them to exercise their collective strength and muscle to move us through all of the challenging issues and questions of public legitimacy that we have today. That's it. I'm very happy to be here and I'd be very happy to take a few questions. Thank you. Any questions? Yes, sir. Hi. Josh Martin from ideas42. I'm really interested in your take on what is the best way to stimulate that innovation because you guys have funded a number of different initiatives at a number of different levels. So you talked a little bit about the Harvard Leadership Initiative with mayors and so that's very much about capacity building for top level politicians. You guys are funding a bunch of innovation teams that use different methods from tech to pay for science to other things within U.S. cities and also abroad. So that's very much at the bureaucratic level, implementation level. What do you think are the best ways? Is it simply just a question of hitting on all cylinders, operating on all fronts, whatever the right metaphor is to just hit everyone simultaneously? Or is there a certain level or a certain set of tools that's perhaps more effective or better investment for a foundation like Bloomberg or other funders to focus on? Thanks. It's a great question. So we've learned a lot over the last eight years of doing this work and as the gentlemen said, we have funded at every level. We started with innovation teams. We started with data skills and capabilities. We have a huge initiative in the United States called What Works Cities that is working to grow data literacy in civil servants in 100 cities across the States. We now work at the mayoral level. And I guess what I would say it's interesting. It does actually require multiple touch points. On the one hand, the mayoral leadership is just critical. We actually added the Harvard program just two years ago. What a difference it's made in all of our other programs, all of our other programs that are investing in civil servants, investing in innovation programs, all of a sudden the mayors are read in to the power of innovation and the kind of support that they need to give to allow innovation efforts to really take hold in bureaucracies and become a part of the DNA. That is very hard to happen without executive leadership support. And so number one, I think the mayoral piece is really big. At the same time, this year we're dramatically beefing up our capacity to reach thousands and thousands more managers and frontline civil servants in the cities that we work, particularly through a new civil servant training initiative that we're funding through Johns Hopkins University at the Center for Government Excellence. You should check them out because we've realized that too often if you bet simply on one innovation champion or one data champion in city government, the prospects for innovation rise and fall with that person's status within the administration. We need there to be a shared language that is broadly understood amongst many people within local government and a commitment from a number of people at different levels in the agents in the organization to those skills and that different way of thinking. So it's not easy at the same time. We kind of now know what to do. You got to kind of hit it at multiple levels at the same time and that's where we're now seeing the greatest take up in progress. Yes, thank you. Hi, Sarah Shaw from Smarter Civic. You spoke earlier about Smarter Civic, Smart Cities initiatives with Bloomberg and I think that there's been some critique about Smart Cities sort of enabling surveillance cities. Matt Mitchell of Tactical Tech in Crypto Harlem has spoken at length about this and I'm wondering if you could give a window into Bloomberg's approach to Smart Cities and concerns around citizen privacy and right to know when they're being surveilled. Yeah, you know, so Bloomberg is mainly focused on investing in the creative capacity of city governments and helping city decision makers navigate these incredibly complex issues in a way that aligns with their civic values. I think this gets to the point that I spoke at at the very end which is cities acting together is the way that we could flip the switch on what some people are calling surveillance capitalism. You see more and more cities that are feeling uncomfortable with that business model. Very few cities have the power on their own to sort of usher in some other financing strategy that allows these technologies to come and benefit for their citizens but I think cities acting together could really be the answer to that issue. In the back over there. Hi, thank you so much. This was fantastic and I think gives us all good food for thought. I'm Eliza Keller. I'm with J-PAL. We are a research center at MIT doing impact evaluation research. So I have questions about evaluation but I won't ask you those right now. My question is about how civic technology organizations can be good partners for cities. That's a great question and by the way I'm such a big fan of J-PAL's work and would love to talk with you about evaluation. We're very committed to doing that in better ways all the time. You know, it's really interesting. I think coming to city government early is one really important thing. I, you know, a lot of times I think really well meaning social entrepreneurs, civic technologists come to city government with a fully baked concept, a fully baked product and they say, God, we can help you. We can solve all of the problems in this particular way. And a lot of times it doesn't really line up with how the city is already spending its scarce resources, its scarce political capital and the energy of its leadership. And so I think one of the most important things I always say to social entrepreneurs is go in early and start first with the question of like, what do you need help with? I guarantee you will get a radically different answer. And so, you know, going in early I think is probably the the single thing I would suggest the most and asking how you can help them. Gentleman next? Yes. Somebody had a hand over there. I had my hand up but also just to speak on behalf of J-PAL, ask another question. My question has to do with, can you speak a bit more about the work you do in developing context and then lower in middle income countries and, you know, whether or not the dynamics of really wanting to innovate a city and bring these innovations to a city are different in those contexts than in developed contexts? You know, we don't have a great deal of experience working in in developing contexts. Our work is overwhelmingly the footprint is North America, probably secondarily in Europe. We have done an innovation program in Latin America where I believe 390 municipalities participated in a civic engagement competition. And yes, the issues there were really different. On the one hand I have to say I was blown away by the degree to which these cities led with citizen engagement in a way that I think U.S. and European cities have struggled to sort of catch up with. So in that way I think they're very much advanced. On the other hand, I think the questions of transparency loom large for many of these civic leaders and their constituencies and I think present a different set of challenges to public innovation, particularly because, you know, when you're trying new things, the questions of trust, legitimacy, corruption, et cetera, I think are more significant. We also did a little bit of work with the country of India around their smart cities program. And that was a really interesting process for us. The Prime Minister requested the support. They were attracted to the competitive model that we had been using. And what we quickly recognized is that municipalities in India just really lack capacity at a level that I haven't seen in any other place in the world in which we've worked. And so the supports around ideation, around project planning, around consulting with citizens had to be much, much more robust to support the cities in that process. Over here. Hi, I'm Lina Gwytter from Cities in the West. And thank you for your keynote and also the good question about how social entrepreneurs like us can take part in the work. My question is, I guess, more of, can you like analyze? I've also lived in Toronto and I know about the problems there sort of. Is there like a wave of innovation? Can you say that in some sense the whole process has sort of gotten a new spin on it? Let's say in the last few years or five years I know that maybe in Toronto especially, they waited for innovation because of new technologies just emerging and maybe not being sure about what exactly to do or how to implement it. And now it's kind of like to, now a lot of cities I think are in a big hurry. So do you think that there was like a point of turn at some point where you could really feel that everyone was looking for your help or in general? It's interesting. I think those numbers I shared at the outset from Richard Florida around the level of urban investment, and tech investment over the last couple of years, I'm sorry I don't have comparison figures, but my memory from reading that article is that it's dramatically higher than it's been. So I think, yes, that market is exploding and this I think gets to the heart of what we're trying to be all about, which is how do we equip the public sector to have the capacity to stand up to articulate civic values, to legitimately reflect the civic values that are coming from their own communities, to define that sandbox and say this is the, these are the boundaries in which we will operate and that are acceptable to us in our city. And then to be good partners, good strategic partners that can lead on citizen engagement. I don't think that's the job of the private sector. I think that's the job of public institutions. And I think we have certainly in the States, certainly in the UK, we have so disinvested in our public institutions and we have pushed them to the sidelines. And they have a first front and center role to play today in helping our cities manage this intersection where the promise of these technologies is exciting. It can help drive our sustainability goals and our climate change reductions. We need that, but we also need to do it in a way that meshes with our civic values. So I look at so many cities around the globe and I think people like you don't always have somebody to turn to on the inside of government that speaks your language, that can keep up with you on data literacy, that can pass off a civic app that you've piloted in a small neighbourhood but that has potential to go to scale. How many times have we seen that transfer sort of not happen where it doesn't sort of go to scale? And part of that is because we aren't investing in the data skills in those core problem-solving competencies that every government needs in this day and age. So I think there's a real throughline between the work that you're doing and sort of how do we upskill the public sector? How do we give them the sense that they are on the front lines of innovation and have a trusted, critical role to play here? I think that's where we have to go because otherwise we'll not end up with the technologies and the interactions that we want to have in our communities. Yes ma'am. Thank you. Many thanks for a very inspiring presentation. My name is Amina Saluho. I work with the MacArthur Foundation based in Apogea. A throwback to a question I was asked earlier about developing world versus developed world. Is Blomberg considering a possibility of encouraging collaboration and twinning, for example, across cities that can learn from each other? The Global North has its strengths, the South has its strengths and weaknesses. How do we collaborate? It's a bit more difficult but that is what philanthropy does. Look at all the difficult questions and try to see how it can help. So my second question quickly is in terms of the fact that you're focused on cities which is a very important thing to do. But there are communities that live in peri-oban areas around the cities. They're lives intersect with the cities. They work in the cities in the daytime but they do not live in the cities. It seems to me that's the forgotten category that maybe we need to look at. Thank you. So on your first question, I think a number of the networks that we support work with cities all over the globe. And whether that's C40, I was just meeting yesterday in Greece in Athens with UCLG. We have a healthy partnership city network where we work with cities around the globe, including many in the developing south around strategies that improve wellbeing for residents. So I think yes and there's just probably so much more that we can and should be doing given the challenges that cities face, particularly around core capacities. We actually have the mayor of Sierra Leone is participating in our Bloomberg-Harvard City leadership initiative. And it was, to be honest, a little bit of a trial for us because the curriculum is about running a per... How do you manage a more effective collaborative organization? And originally, the curriculum was a little bit designed towards sort of what we know best, which is cities across North America. And we invited her in to, in part, she was interested and in part we wanted to understand the degree to which the curriculum would be relevant and useful and the feedback is awesome. And so we'll be expanding that program accordingly, which is exciting. Your other question. Oh, yes. Yes. Thank you. Yes, thank you. So we're a strategic foundation, and we choose... We have a target, which is municipal governments. And that is by design. And we believe that that is a very high impact way to leverage our finite resources. We can strengthen the decision-making, the problem-solving capacity, the innovation capabilities of local government that has a rippling-out effect. That does affect many of the people in the suburban, ex-urban and immediate rural areas because local economies, of course, extend beyond the administrative barriers of our local governments. But our decision, which came after a lot of hard work, was that we can have the biggest impact by focusing on the municipality. Is there one more question? Yes. Hi, there. Thanks for that. My name is Panthea Lee, and I'm with Reboot. I was really excited to hear you talk about co-design and co-creation. It's something that I and my work spend a lot of time thinking about. And I think that one of the challenges that I'm hearing around sort of co-creation, co-design, is that it's often misunderstood as, you know, putting just citizens and government in a room together, you know, or putting the right stakeholders in a room, and then magic will happen. And the solution will just come out. And there's a lot of instances where it's actually really, you know, processes that don't account for power dynamics, account for sequencing when the process is. So I'm curious if you all have, you know, if you all have a specific philosophy approach, what not, when you think about co-design and also how that has evolved. Yeah, sure. We absolutely do. And I love that point. I think a little bit of the nomenclature around citizen engagement is problematic for that same reason. I think we need to engage residents in very specific, differentiated, varied ways in our cities, sometimes around policy decision-making, sometimes around program design, sometimes around improving, supporting their self-organization at the local level around community improvement. So I think number one, we need to have a really broad toolkit of citizen engagement strategies much broader than I think exists for local government decisions, for local governments today. And that's actually an area where I'm excited to help build that out with people. But yes, no, I think the co-design work that we do is it's human-centered design. It's focused on design cycles, creating those right-sized opportunities for people who will be benefiting from these services to help imagine them. And a series of iterative steps in that process to bring people's insights along and to improve the product. You should take a look. There's a report we just put out called The Creative City, which follows the experience that 35 cities had most recently with us. And I think it speaks to that philosophy and lays it out a little bit more. Can we do one more question? Hi, my name is Mauricio, and I work here in Paris, the French Parliament. And my question is a little bit more political because whenever I hear what you're saying, I feel it's investing more in the public and the public bringing the innovation inside and building civic infrastructures and data infrastructure. It sounds a little bit more left for me, which I'm perfectly fine with it. My first question is, do you feel, because you are interacting with lots of mayors from different cities, so first of all, do you feel that philosophy you're sharing with us today belongs to any of an ideological side more than other, or do you feel it's kind of spreading to the spectrum and if it's the case, how do you work if it becomes political? Do you get involved in a more political question or you stay like a technical? Thank you. It's interesting. I appreciate what you're saying and recognize that whenever anybody in this day and age talks about strengthening public institutions, you can read that in a very particular political way. I think, look, I work for a funder who has made a lifelong habit out of sort of following the facts and following the data and supporting strategies that work. And so I think we come to it from a more pragmatic perspective, which is there is no way, shape and form, city governments can rise to the challenge that their citizens are throwing at them or that all of us are throwing at them as national governments falter without investing in their problem-solving capacity. It is the only possible answer. And so I don't come at it from a partisan perspective, but rather from a more Bloomberg practical perspective. I guess my answer. And we stay out of politics in my area. And what I mean by that I think is sort of like democratic politics, we want to be supportive of whomever the citizens put into their city halls. We believe that, you know, we want to make that, we want to help government do a better job in every instance, so we tend to stay away from endorsing particular candidates and that sort of stuff, plus we're a non-profit, so, you know, you're not supposed to do that. I'll take, I think maybe we're out of time. One more question. She's had her hand up in the back for a while. Hi, my name is Kasia Drozeg. I want to work for Matala Foundation. Thank you for this very inspiring talk. I wanted to ask you a question you said in the beginning that we need to stop with the belief that innovation is only a matter of a private sector and we need to start innovating in the public sector because there is so much creative capacity. So I'm wondering, given that the cities and governments make the money, get the money out of taxes and not of ads, how will we enable the public sector to compete for the best talent out there if they're not able to pay the same salaries as Google, Facebook, and so on? You know, I think it's the, so first of all, did you guys see that there was a remarkable announcement made by the Ford Foundation and others around public interest tech last week where a number of foundations have come together with 20 leading universities around the globe to try and consolidate the sort of notion of public interest tech. And if you think about that, it's so exciting. In the States there was this concept of public interest law that took form in the 1960s where foundations started creating on-roads, on-ramps for young spirited lawyers that wanted to save the world that didn't want to go into corporate law but there wasn't kind of a place for them to go. So they created public interest tech and they're trying to do that now with public interest tech. They created public interest law and now they're doing it with public interest tech. I think that's very exciting. But you know, here's the thing. People come into government to save the world oftentimes. I mean people that I meet in government, they, you know, they want to make a difference. The bureaucracies run them down over time. You know, it's hard to do that work. It's hard to be super optimistic when you're in a machine that is sort of anti-creative. And so I think one of the things that we need to do is we need to cherish our public servants more. We need to elevate and celebrate the people that are overcoming the everyday sort of bureaucratic hurdles that they face. And I think organizations like mine can reconnect, can give them the tools and the skills building and the resources that they need to reconnect with that desire to save the world and put new muscle behind them so that they can get there. I think it's a big effort that we're talking about here. We need a lot of people involved in it. I would urge all of you. I think sometimes the rhetoric of social entrepreneurs and even in civic technology is sometimes like anti-government. And I think I would just challenge all of you on that. I'm not saying that we should be blind to where government falls short. We need to call that out and we have to be activist around that. But I think also being supportive of that career choice and helping the people in those places be their best and do more for us is really, I think, vitally important. So with that, I think my time is out. It's such a pleasure. I'm happy to chat more afterwards. Thank you very much.