By Jim Welfley
June 29, 2009

Mayors and City Chief Information Officers (CIOs) from around the nation met in Providence as part of the 77th Annual Conference of Mayors to discuss the Federal Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) and its role in funding both new and pending broadband projects in underserved areas of U.S. cities. The CIOs also met in a closed session to discuss the 4G national broadband network for public safety as well as innovative strategies for communicating with the public using next generation — or Web 2.0 — tools. The closed session was sponsored by Motorola.

Tallahassee Mayor John Marks, Vice Chair for Communications in the Standing Committee on Transportation and Communications, presided over the Mayors and City CIO discussion, which featured presentations by Bill Schrier, Chief Technology Officer of Seattle who also moderated both sessions, Chris Vein, CIO of the city and county of San Francisco, and Bill Oates, Chief Information Officer of Boston. Each presenter detailed their city's initiative to bring broadband access to areas of their city where Internet access is either unaffordable, unavailable or underutilized. "Of course, if it's unaffordable, it is unavailable," said Oates.

The CIOs are working with their mayors to develop strategies to have BTOP, the $4.7 billion broadband stimulus portion of President Barack Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, help fund its varied initiatives. Boston's Technology Goes Home plan, for example, is an established initiative, which has already served 3,500 inner city families in its nine year existence by educating its participants about computers, software and the internet though the Boston public schools. Meanwhile, Seattle's SmartGrid plan will attempt to run fiber to every home, business, school and medical facility in underserved areas.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors intends to work closely with the mayors and CIOs as they work to help fund these initiatives through BTOP. For details about BTOP and how it can help fund broadband opportunities in your city, go to the website http://www.usmayors.org/77thAnnualMeeting/documents/broadband.ppt.

Jessica Pourciau, Market Solution Specialist from Motorola, led a discussion about the 4G 700 MHz national broadband network for public safety. The discussion focused on the current status and the approach that both public safety agencies and commercial carriers around the nation are taking to access the faster spectrum. Thus far, the San Francisco-Bay Area, New York City, Boston and New Jersey — among others — have filed waiver requests to use the 700 MHz spectrum to build out wireless broadband networks for public safety.

Meanwhile, Pourciau recommends that the FCC "hardens" the new network to a public safety standard as opposed to the present system that is built for commercial use and only secure to "carrier" standards. The network needs to be secure in terms of it being impervious to hacks, self-healing, and have the ability to inhibit devices not in use for public safety.

Public safety agencies also need access to affordable handheld devices to access the new network. Seattle, for example, has thousands of wireless devices in the field that will need modified or replaced to access the network.

The CIOs then heard presentations from Vein and Schrier, who detailed how the new generation of web tools, such as Facebook and Twitter, is helping their cities communicate with the public. In San Francisco, Vein said that all services that can be found on the San Francisco web site can also be found on Facebook. He added that the city's Facebook site — which has over 230,000 "fans" — sponsored a "Treasure Hunt" where citizens were asked to seek out landmarks around the city, take a picture and post to the Facebook site. He said San Francisco has integrated Twitter with its 311 system, allowing "Tweets" from its citizens to serve as notifications to the city's 311 system.

Many of the CIOs reported that the methods for communicating with its citizens through digital medium is trending toward third party software and providers such as Facebook and Twitter, although legal issues are always a concern. The session then concluded with a discussion of the IT department's role in the day-to-day operation of the city web site as well as the role of open source software in developing and maintaining the site.

For more information about the CIO group, contact Jim Welfley of the Conference staff at jwelfley@usmayors.org