DC and SF want to get all the city CIOs together

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee announced on Monday that the two cities are collaborating to launch something they’re calling the Council of Global City CIOs.
Just as the name sounds, the Council of Global City CIOs is a group of city chief information officers (or that city’s equivalent title) that will meet periodically to work and collaborate on three civic tech initiatives: “developing a Smart Cities model, bringing broadband connectivity to everyone and accelerating the digitization of government through open source code-sharing.”

SF @MayorEdLee and I launch new tech partnership w/ cities to go bigger, faster for residents: https://t.co/JNhhY59FD9 #globalcityCIOs

— Mayor Muriel Bowser (@MayorBowser) September 12, 2016

D.C. and San Francisco are the two cities leading the charge on the creation of this council, and as such the group will be co-led by San Francisco CIO Miguel A Gamiño Jr. and relatively new Washington, D.C. CTO Archana Vemulapalli. It’s cool to see Vemulapalli, and D.C., take the lead on an initiative like this.
“We realize though, that in order to go bigger, faster, and safer the mayors of the world’s cities cannot do it alone,” Bowser and Lee write, in an announcement post on Medium. “The solution will be a collective one, and it will be a global one. We must work together.”
Founding cities in the Council include D.C. and SF as well as New York City, The Hague, Chicago, Austin, Dubai, Seattle and Boston. The group will meet for the first time in D.C. “in the next few weeks,” and plans to convene a summit in spring 2017.
Wanna learn more about the Council? Read on in the mayors’ joint Medium post for more.