Meeting of the Minds brings private, public and hybrid leaders together. Funding comes from grant foundations such as Barr Foundation in Boston, corporate sponsors like Toyota, Verizon, Deloitte, Black & Veatch, and some startups, like Cleverciti, and registration fees from event participants.
Techwire: What is Meeting of the Minds? How did it start?
Feller: In the mid-90s, President Bill Clinton appointed a new president for the World Bank. He brought a team together to help the bank rethink its posture with cities, to look at how cities are governed, how they make decisions about where to invest, what kind of infrastructure to build, how to connect with citizens. When Clinton handed the baton to George W. Bush, this spun off and Urban Age Institute was born, which is the parent nonprofit institution of Meeting of the Minds.
Meeting of the Minds is filling a gap, really since day one, which is to help leaders who are running cities, or hired by those cities to advise, like engineering companies and technology companies, provide solutions to cities or to key providers of cities. And the idea was peer-to-peer learning, city-to-city learning, to enable cities to learn from each other so they don't have to repeat the mistakes and there's a body of knowledge. You could say that Meeting of the Minds is the leading knowledge exchange platform, whether elected or appointed in the public sector, or senior executives in the private sector and the third sector, the independent sector, NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), foundations, or academia.
Those leaders are the ones who use Meeting of the Minds as a critical resource to help them discover the emerging innovations that could be adopted, could be scaled, could be replicated and maybe even transferred back to their city.
Every year we convene these programs and we try to pick a different group of sponsors or partners, to ensure that we're really discovering unique, emerging innovations that might not have otherwise been visible to our leadership network.
TW: Does that start with someone's question?
GF: We go out and survey the landscape; we do three kinds. One is in a workshop, usually one in the Bay Area and one in the area where we are bringing the program for the year. We invited 50 organizations in those workshops. The second is, we do surveys at every webinar and we do the same at our monthly meetups.
We spent a lot of time listening (last year) to how are they framing the problem, because the way you frame the question and the way you describe your problems reveals a lot about what you feeling like you are missing. We're trying to fill the gaps where people say we're missing this or we're missing that. So one that you'll see featured prominently in the program this year is about this whole problem of building partnerships that link the public and the private. We have a solution that is very varied, depending on the local situation. So Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) has a partnership, for instance, as a utility, with a couple of major partners to try and bring clean and green and smart energy to the enterprise user and the retail customer at home. That kind of partnership, which involves the city and involves multiple other jurisdictions, has progressed really well.
TW: How involved is technology in these solutions?
GF: It's a big theme that we hear from the constituency, about the most effective tools they can use that are affordable. It used to be that tech was not affordable and tech required Ph.D.-level data scientists and computer science degree-holding engineers, but increasingly, with the cloud, the technology has become affordable and relatively easy to manage. That is why tech has emerged and that's why we have sponsors like Microsoft, Itron, Deloitte. We have also discovered that there are some non-tech sponsors, like the Federal Reserve Bank, who have seized technology as a primary driver for community investment. And they're looking for how do you bring underinvested communities new opportunities for economic development and technology, that's a key driver.
The throughline is new methods for financing innovation, new ways of adopting those innovations and integrating them, and new kinds of technologies that enable the outcomes. We're not interested for its own sake, we're interested in the technology as the means to some policy end.
TW: What are the next projects to look into?
GF: One of the things we're going to hear are some proposals for joint action. That's a theme we think is going to persist, is where do the partnerships happen. The bottom line is, we're going to look at this regional question quite a bit: How do smart cities and sustainable city initiatives use the region as a primary platform or framework? Increasingly, for instance, Sacramento has to be aligned with West Sacramento and a dozen other jurisdictions.
TW: What trends are you seeing?
GF: The cost of compute, storage and cloud is all heading down toward zero, so that's the great news. The not-so-great news is cities and counties and the executives that run them, they're struggling with "How do I integrate these things into my day-to-day operations? What's the best method for adapting to these innovations and for making sure the innovations adapt to me?" What we're seeing is these hungry leaders in government looking at technology and wanting to give their city an opportunity to experiment at a lower risk.
One of the things that we've discovered in the science of city learning is that it can be an apples-to-apples comparison because the outcomes are where the action is. That's where a lot of the interest in what we're doing is coming from, is these universally applicable outcomes, through partnerships with universities, NGOs, etc.
The group holds a monthly webinar to discuss ways to improve governance.
August's webinar focused on electric vehicle adoption, especially as in Northern California, where Volkswagen has invested in several EV strategies.
In September, mobility as a service was discussed from the Los Angeles perspective. The LA TAP program is working to unify a payment system, based on a contactless, chip-based smart card that works across all mobility options.
