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Stephen Goldsmith

Contributor

Stephen Goldsmith is the Derek Bok Professor of the Practice of Urban Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and director of Data-Smart City Solutions at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. The former deputy mayor for operations for New York City, he previously served two terms as mayor of Indianapolis.

Goldsmith served as the chief domestic policy advisor to the George W. Bush campaign in 2000, as chair of the Corporation for National and Community Service, and, from 1979 to 1990, as the district attorney for Marion County, Ind.

His most recent book is Growing Fairly: How to Build Opportunity and Equity in Workforce Development, co-authored with Kate Markin Coleman.  He also is the author or co-author of A New City O/S: The Power of Open, Collaborative, and Distributed Governance; The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance; The Power of Social Innovation; Governing by Network: the New Shape of the Public Sector; Putting Faith in Neighborhoods: Making Cities Work through Grassroots Citizenship; and The Twenty-First Century City: Resurrecting Urban America.

Goldsmith can be reached at stephen_goldsmith@harvard.edu.

Officials predict city budgets will be cut anywhere from 15 to 40 percent in the next year. The best way to do more with less is to use data as a tool to find out what works and where there’s opportunity to save.
It shouldn't be about Republicans favoring suburbs or Democrats favoring cities. Cities and their suburbs will succeed or fail together. We need reforms and dialogue that benefit both.
A collaborative of civil rights organizations is using geospatial data to help in the effort to improve response rates among the populations that are hard to count.
Jurisdictions across the country are facing a shortage of poll workers for the November election. Local government workers should be deployed to augment the volunteers who do show up.
The emergency has underlined outdated procedures and rules that hamper effective, efficient public purchasing. There are principles for creating better systems that can outlast the current crisis.
Designed around the user and not the bureaucracy, an innovative Philadelphia program uses data-matching so applicants won't have to fill out multiple forms for different assistance programs.
The coronavirus pandemic is forcing local governments to find new ways to cut costs. It's an opportunity to build effective financial practices into their cultures, not just for now but for the long term.
When the coronavirus pandemic begins to subside, communities should use a nuanced, calibrated approach to allowing businesses to reopen and residents to return to work and school.
Yesterday's reporting and compliance mechanisms aren't dynamic enough. Today's evolving transportation marketplace calls for nuanced, citizen-centric control driven by actionable real-time data.
As they deal with an emergency like the novel coronavirus, mayors and county executives need to be ready to ask their residents to sacrifice, break bureaucratic rules, and move quickly and decisively.