Through its four pillars — Connect, Educate, Catalyze and Promote— The Connective enhances city capacity, enables municipal innovation and facilitates citizen-centric solutions. On one end, this includes connecting cities working on shared challenges and hosting educational workshops that bring government and industry leaders together around emerging technology. More broadly, it means diving into complex challenges at the behest of member cities.
Tapping into Global Resources
As an example, cities in the greater Phoenix region collectively highlighted a decline in citizen engagement. The Connective went to work understanding the underlying cause, which led to the development of Portable Inference.
As cities face declining survey response rates, Portable Inference uses machine learning and behavioral design to capture citizen feedback through simple hand gestures. The technology is now moving into the pilot phase with local cities to determine its efficacy in prompting responses from traditionally underrepresented voices. This form of outsourced innovation allows cities to explore challenges they may not internally have the capacity for while maintaining a focus on clearly identified local needs.
DISCOVER: Start small but dream big when it comes to citizen services.
Similarly, The Connective looks globally for best practices to evaluate locally. Following the success of civic engagement in Nordic countries, the organization connected with cities and partners across Sweden and Norway to initiate the Regional Citizen Experience initiative. The project aims to provide a single point of contact for residents that offers relevant services and information based on their interests geographically. This is in contrast to multiple apps, city websites and social channels that residents may not otherwise use. In this case, The Connective helps cities think regionally while promoting citizen-centric design thinking.
Collaborating Across Jurisdictions for Interoperability
Lastly, The Connective plays an important intermediary role in connecting local cities to create a cohesive region. One noticeable example is a Connective-organized workshop in which city technology leaders will gather to ensure the interoperability of digital twins. Currently, many cities in the greater Phoenix region use similar tools for geographic information systems. This allows cities, counties and the state to share information more readily. As digital twins begin to emerge, we want to ensure they can affect the same regional interoperability.
Without these kinds of conversations, we face the risk of adopting distinct technologies and providers that force us into individual silos and prevent the incredible benefit we could otherwise derive.
DIVE DEEPER: AI is transforming the citizen experience.
We’ve seen examples of cities paying hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to solve the same challenges other cities have already solved. The Connective is about working together and building a better means of serving citizens. There is power in collaboration. Beyond the obvious benefits, such as economies of scale and reduced time to implementation, The Connective also believes that planning regionally creates a better experience for residents.
By sharing and collaborating more meaningfully, cities can solve the pressing challenges that face us today and create better cities and better citizen experiences.
