As as opener, we talked about how a city near San Diego used a mass notification system similar to one we heard about from our first guest speaker in this class. A living example of how technology can provide better communications in the area of public safety.
We are past the halfway point of our journey, so just a reminder to work on your interview projects and group presentations. Everyone has been doing a great job keeping up on your weekly reflections. As the saying goes, "There is no learning without reflection". The object of reflections is to ponder the big takeaways from each class that have meaning in your work and career. The interview project is your opportunity to meet public sector professionals you'd like to know. Interested in being a city manager? The interview project is your opportunity to contact one (or two).
Our guest tonight was supposed to be a Geographic Information Systems professional from one of our local cities. This person, if they had appeared, would have told you how he had earned a certificate in GIS and was working in supporting GIS for a city. We encountered GIS systems in the Rudy Giuliani book "Leadership" with his Compstat system. Recall that people in New York were saying "the city is ungovernable" due to crime. Giuliani brought in Compstat to bring information and accountability to crime and law enforcement. With such data on exact precincts and who was responsible, they were able to focus on the problem of crime using data from the GIS system to pinpoint clusters of crime activity. We looked at GIS examples in the NASA investigation of the Columbia space shuttle disaster. As the shuttle broke up in the atmosphere, it scattered debris over hundreds of miles and several states. By using GIS to pinpoint what pieces were found and where they landed, NASA was able to reconstruct what happened and the sequence of events of the disaster. ESRI (http://www.esri.com) in Redlands is the world leader in GIS software.
Chapter 6 covered "Public Outreach and Responsiveness" in our Digital Government book. The chapter starts with the wonderful appeal that technology can provide in terms of making government more responsive to the public. However, we also saw how professional and organizational barriers have slowed the progress of digital government and responsiveness. Communications with the public help responsiveness, but what if you are a public official and you receive an e-mail a week from every one of your constituents? The short story is that a lack of political will and vision has been limiting the pace of change to improve the relationship between citizens and leaders. In any technological change, there are winners and there are losers. Those who would stand to lose with a technological change (e.g. someone's job is taken away, political power and influence is lost) is threatened. This opens the door to next weeks class where we will use the Strength Deployment Inventory (SDI) about creating productive working relationships to talk about Conflict...
Until then...
Thomas
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