cityofboston.gov - Official Web Site of the City of Boston - Thomas M. Menino, Mayor

 Strong Mayor Platform

The City of Boston’s organizational structure is based on a ‘strong-mayor’ model. This arrangement allows the Mayor’s Office and his Cabinet to have enormous control and reach over internal organizational processes and external policies and initiatives for the community.  Boston has made a major commitment demonstrating its belief in the power of technology to help transform and improve City government and service delivery. 

Mayor Menino has positioned the Chief Information Officer as a member of his Cabinet and CIO Bill Oates reports directly to him.  As a result, the CIO is empowered to make decisions city-wide regarding how technology can be used to help improve, integrate, and streamline city functions.  This positioning of the CIO in Boston was essential in bringing together the diverse City functions into an “enterprise” way of thinking and doing business. The CIO’s leadership and effectiveness in managing Boston’s ICT strategy were recently validated when Government Technology Magazine and the Center for Digital Government recognized him as one of the “Top 25 Doers, Dreamers & Drivers” in Public Sector Innovation for 2011.

Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics

Across the country, and the world, governments face daunting challenges: rising health care costs, widening economic inequality; pension obligation shortfalls; and persistent academic achievement gaps. These issues have great financial and social impact and their solutions will inherently be public and political. Yet, by any poll, there is little public trust in transformative public policy proposals. 

This declining trust in government to deal with the big issues comes despite improvements—particularly in local government—over the last few decades. Government, in many ways, has never been as transparent or as efficient as it is today. In fact, the emphasis on metrics and sharing of best practices is transforming many cities into high performing organizations.

Taking on the biggest challenges we face, however, requires more than being transparent and efficient. In Boston, we have developed a strategy to strengthen our citizens’ trust in government. We are forging a new partnership between the public and its government – a “public-public partnership.”

We are driving civic innovation – and re-kindling public service – through an effort we call New Urban Mechanics. It’s a strategy that is carried out by people, meets people where they are, and helps people improve their lives. To advance this agenda, the Mayor formed the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics. The Office is positioned to closely align with the Mayor, and is collaboratively directed by the City CIO and the Mayor’s Chief of Staff. 

The Office of New Urban Mechanics is given wide latitude to pursue projects that engage and empower citizen participation and improve city services.  They are also allowed to be bold enough to fail.  Expectations are publicly set that not all projects or pilots will be successful.  Therefore there’s no fear of failure. 

The New Urban Mechanics strategy involves five components, enabling the Office to explore and build new ways to engage constituents in the design and delivery of services.

1. Source Ideas for Innovation
The Office encourages and cultivates innovators inside and outside of government
2.  Support Pilot Projects
The Office shapes, invests in, and guides pilot projects with these innovators
3. Study Their Impact
The Office analyzes the impact of the pilot projects
4. Share The Results
The Office makes the evaluation available to other cities and the general public
5. Scale The Projects
If appropriate, the Office helps scale the projects within Boston and to other cities

Collaboration and Sharing
Our City CIO is actively collaborating with the CIOs of a half dozen other major cities to share best practices on a regular basis and discuss potential projects.   We are also working with Civic Commons so that it will be able to share software programs it has developed in house with other cities.   Civic Commons is a new, national non-profit that will provide governments with access to open source software to use, enhance and share. The City is building out the New Urban Mechanics Exchange.  This open data platform will be designed to connect community members with technical needs with software developers who can potentially respond to those issues.  Fueling this exchange will be City and other public data sets, as well as additional resources for both community members and developers to leverage.