Editor’s note: TL;DR: please vote for our SXSW panel! Here’s why.

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There’s a new kid coming to next year’s South by Southwest conference (SXSW). In March 2018, everyone at SXSW—whether they’re holding an Interactive, Music, or Film badge—is invited to join a convening focused on cities and the innovative ways they’re solving complex societal challenges. Our partners in the City of Austin are helping organize this Cities Summit, led by Mayor Steve Adler. As our national politics flounders, this is an important opportunity to use the convening power of SXSW to draw attention to some of the unsung heroes of city innovation.  

“Cities are not bubbles where we preserve the past. Cities are incubators of the future.”
–City of Austin Mayor Steve Adler

City-level innovation is a core focus here at Reboot. From our work with the OGP Subnational Pilot (where we first partnered with the City of Austin) to acting locally on global issues like criminal justice reform and open data here in our hometown New York City, we know that cities are often where the social contract is most tangible. Cities have the power and proximity to design (and redesign) services in close collaboration with the people who live there. Everyone should be paying attention to how cities are working to solve challenges we face worldwide.   

So today, we want to highlight a couple of the groups who have proposed panels for the Summit. For those who aren’t familiar with SXSW’s “PanelPicker®,” it’s a quick process, but it means a lot—the public online voting counts for about 30% of how each panel is evaluated for eventual selection. Once you register, you can vote for as many panels as you want, so please take one minute to help bring these visionaries to Austin next March before the deadline of Friday, August 25:  

• From URLs to IRL: People-Centered Civic Engagement.  “Civic tech and social entrepreneurs must harness viral moments, converting them to real life activism. Politicians and city managers too must innovate by replacing standing in line with clicking online.”
• Using Tech to Improve Police-Community Relations. A conversation about how technology can help law enforcement agencies serve their residents “as if they were customers,” with the co-founders of two police technology companies and two officers.  
• Hacking the Beach: Co-creating Local Government. How the City of Santa Monica brought city staff and startups together in a functional collaboration, and how their work led to greater transparency and better services.

We hope to meet all of these people at SXSW in March 2018.

And to that end—we hope you’ll vote for our panel, From Publishing Data to Solving Problems, too. Reboot has gathered an amazing group of New York City leaders for a conversation about how New Yorkers can use city data in their lives. Our co-founder Zack Brisson will join Adrienne Schmoeker of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Data and Analytics; Mary Tobin of the Brownsville Partnership; and Hadassah Damien of the Participatory Budgeting Project and Femmetech. We’ll discuss new user research and share tales from the trenches on how real people are using the City’s wealth of free official data to shape their city.

See you in Austin!

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Tweet this: How is open data changing lives in New York City? Vote for @theReboot’s #SXSW2018 panel to find out: http://bit.ly/2iqHpje

Tweet this: These #SXSW2018 panels on #cityinnovation deserve your support. Register and vote today http://bit.ly/2iqHpje