CEOs For Cities

In this Issue: New Years Resolutions: The City Edition • Call for Abstracts: Delft Conference on Using ICT, Social Media and Mobile Technologies to Foster Self-Organisation in Urban and Neighbourhood Governance • Strategies for City Success Webinar: Municipal Leadership for Local Postsecondary Completion Initiatives • Learning and Planning for the Future: The Talent Dividend •Winner Announced!
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New Year Resolutions: The City Edition 

Photo via Sean MacEntee
If your city had a voice, what would it choose as its New Years Resolution?  As we make our way steadily into 2013, we encourage you to explore new ideas for making your city succeed.  We've compiled a few, but would love to hear others on our Facebook or Twitter pages.

• Share more ideas: Pecha Kucha nights have popped up in hundreds of cities around the world.  At these events, local speakers give six-minute-fourty-second presentations about a topic of their choice.  It could be about their work as a National Geographic photographer to their process of creating thousands of paper cranes.  What a better way to know about the talent in your city than to hear about it from the source?  Find out if your city has any upcoming events here. 
• Think outside the bench: Bringing life to public spaces may take more than a bench or a tree.  In 2008, Rebar Group in San Francisco came up with Bushwaffle: modular, inflatable street furniture for creative and comfortable use.  Whether or not these inflatables are a fit for your city, the stories behind them will inspire creative thinking.
• Follow the people: In many cities, getting people to use public transit is an uphill battle.  But what if public transportation offered the same convenience of using your car, but with less traffic and no stopping.  Magic!  This article in The Atlantic Cities talks about the potential of Personal Rapid Transit (PRT).  Heathrow Airport in the U.K. has installed a PRT system, and while it would be unreasonable to install a similar system in a large city, it has great potential in small or medium-sized communities around the world.

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Call for Abstracts: Delft Conference on Using ICT, Social Media and Mobile Technologies to Foster Self-Organisation in Urban and Neighbourhood Governance

Lee Fisher, the President and CEO of CEOs for Cities, will be speaking about Change By Us this May at a conference in the Netherlands.  In addition to showcasing the work of three other keynotes, the conference organizers are looking for paper abstracts from people working to use technology to better connect people within an urban environment.  Find more information about the conference here, and if you would like to submit an abstract, click here.  The deadline for submission is January 29, 2013.

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Strategies for City Success Webinar: Municipal Leadership for Local Postsecondary Completion Initiatives

Hosted by the National League of Cities
February 1, 2013, 2:30pm ET
Assessing starting points and gauging progress regarding postsecondary completion goals entails sharing data. School districts, community colleges, and four-year institutions, and city planning departments charged with digesting census data all bring key data to the table. Sources such as the National Student Clearinghouse, to which districts and colleges may belong, also play important roles. Representatives of Dayton, Ohio and one other CLIP site will describe how they’ve successfully shared data and reflect on data sharing lessons learned.
Register for the Webinar

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Learning and Planning for the Future: The Talent Dividend

If you've been following #talentdividend on Twitter, you know that every day more and more people become convinced of the economic value of higher education. So as more people wake up to the potential of the Talent Dividend, what's next for the project and the competition in 2013? What have we learned so far about what works? And what are the most exciting experiments happening around the country? Mark your calendars and join us for a live chat on the Civic Commons with Talent Dividend National Director Noel Harmon on January 29th from 2-3pm EST, moderated by Dan Moulthrop of The Civic Commons. Visit the Talent Dividend Network for more information. Login instructions will be posted soon!

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Winner Announced! 

Congrats to Twitter User @TweetinTams for winning last week's competition, seeking out great #CityIdeas from around the globe:

As promised, a copy of our City Vitals 2.0 Report will be given to the winner. The rest of the entries will be included in a collection of great ideas, which will be coming soon! We'd like to thank everyone who sent an idea, and hope you all look out for additional contests and opportunities to win prizes in the near future! 

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CEOs for Cities
Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, 1155 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637 - 773.795.1409