WHEREAS, the Sacramento region employs nearly double the share of public sector employees per capita relative to the state average;
WHEREAS, the expectations of citizens are changing due to modern affordances of digital technologies;
WHEREAS, local public agencies in the Sacramento region spend a combined $XX million annually on information technology needs;
WHEREAS, the Sacramento region is in close proximity to Silicon Valley and has a growing entrepreneurship community;
WHEREAS, public agencies collaborating together on large projects can yield significant cost savings and efficiencies;
WHEREAS, a regional approach to civic technology development will increase the replicability and scalability of projects, and yield nontrivial cost savings;
WHEREAS, the City of West Sacramento and County of Sacramento adopted open data policies, and the City of Sacramento ranked Number Two in the U.S. City Open Data Census in 2014;
WHEREAS, Code for Sacramento is an active Code for America Brigade that brings together civic technologists who work to improve their communities on a weekly basis;
WHEREAS, entrepreneurial civic innovation requires the ability to experiment and to occasionally fail;
WHEREAS, many cities are embracing entrepreneurial approaches to help them address and solve civic problems and issues;
WHEREAS, the Sacramento region is working to reinvent public-private partnerships by creating new models for collaboration and providing platforms for knowledge transfer to take place;
NOW, THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the (City/County) endorses the Regional Civic Innovation and Entrepreneurship Agenda and authorizes the (City Manager/County Executive) to actively engage in shaping and implementing the plan and to integrate it into the (City/County) administrative activities.
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the (City/County) endorses the establishment of a multi-sector stakeholder advisory body to advise the region’s local, state, and federal agencies on open data and civic innovation. The advisory body should:
a. Consist of local government staff, leaders of civic organizations, representatives from academia, and members of the entrepreneurship community;
b. Be charged with coordinating open data initiatives and developing civic data standards to support interoperability across all levels of government;
c. Develop and adopt a one-year action plan for the purposes of achieving quick and early wins;
d. Identify areas in which state statute or regulations inhibit civic innovation; and,
e. Identify ways in which civic startups and social enterprises can more easily do business with government through procurement reform.
PASSED AND ADOPTED on this XX day of MMMM 2014, by the following roll-call vote: