Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter announced this week the Office of New Urban Mechanics, a new branch of city government he hopes will accelerate the implementation of innovative ideas.
It's also the context in which Story Bellows, the Philadelphia New Urban Mechanics co-chair, told Sarah Lai Stirland that Philadelphia's City Hall plans to use its "convening power" to solve problems. Rather than trying to hire a swarm of developers to implement an internal plan or pay a McKinsey or a KPMG hundreds of thousands of dollars to write a report, the New Urban Mechanics model would be to work within a city's own network to find solutions, try them out, and evaluate whether or not they were successful.
Original source: TechPresident
Read the full story
here.