Somerville: the Model City

[schpahky.livejournal.com]

This was in yesterday's Boston Globe Magazine:

"The Model City"

It's worth reading, as it covers various city initiatives which sound great but which I didn't even know about, such as the 311 hotline. I also like that it has the word "Slumerville" in the headline.

Comments

Why isn't there more of that?

[mjperson.livejournal.com]

From that article:

"In fall 2004, Somerville's newly elected mayor, Joe Curtatone, showed up at Linda Bilmes's public finance course at Harvard's Kennedy School and wowed grad students with talk of reform. He asked for help, and 60 of the 97 students signed up, turning Somerville into their class project. Free of charge, they put in place a radically new budgeting system..."

I have often wondered why that sort of resource doesn't get used more often.

Even *within* a university. OK, the MIT campus dining system seems to suck? Take a bunch of people at the "World-Renowned" Sloan School of Management, and give them a semester to design a better one, taking everything into account for their grade. The card locks outside a particular building keep failing? Put some course 6 (Elec. Eng.) students on it and make it stop doing that. While they are at it, design a better mechanism and sell it to a few companies to fund the upgrade of all the locks on campus.

It's totally the sort of thing I've thought the "vast intellectual resources" of our country are being totally wasted on not doing. The fact that the mayor did things that way wins him my vote next election.