Show Notes

• Host: Dan Hugo
• Summary: Municipal and Community Communication, those words sound so similar, could there be a reason why? Yes, but our Smart City does not do this well. Let´s change that.

Communication, Discovery, Elevation

• Knowing what is happening and how each item might relate to any other, and to you, is critical in a noise-filled era where social media has taken over with their own profit motives, not yours.
• Old ways are great, especially when they are the basis of learning and innovation moving forward.
• Email is always going to be around, that is not as bad as you think. Print-style news reporting is also going to be around for a long time, that is as bad as you think.

But Likes and Shares are all we need!

• To paraphrase a quote about heroes, If Everything is Liked and Shared, Nothing is.
• The noise is leading to invisibility, not aided by algorithms driven by profit motive rather than consumer utility
• In the end, brands are handed over to bad stewards and the fight is always on to keep up with the latest algorithmic changes and trends (and billionaire whim?)

Case Study

• The Greater Vegas area fancies itself an Innovation Hub, relying heavily on social media and print-media-style news platforms, and then commercial social media silos, to communicate.
• We are participating this year in the Largest Hackathon in The World, the NASA International Space Apps Challenge. How to get that information to potential participants?
• Answer: we hope that people will share on their social media, and watch our event slip away due to lack of interest, or maybe lack of awareness.

Smarter Smart City

• Elevate the Entrepreneurial Innovation Ecosystem
• Make use of Open Data, and add more to the datasets!
• Reduce insulation, avoid Conway´s Law, not everything is a Wordpress site!
• Innovate Locally, involve people on the ground who know where the gaps are and have ideas to close them
• As a Destination City hosting some 40M visitors each year (according to LVCVA), make use of that opportunity to learn from many people, many cultures, many norms.
• Talking the Talk is a Vegas thing, Walking the Walk is something new, the time is now.