Baltimore is Hiring a Chief Digital Officer

Back in August of this year I put out a request on the fairly active Baltimore Tech Facebook Group for Baltimore City to hire a Chief Digital Officer:

Up until now, all technology requests from both outside the city government and within have been directed to the city’s CIO Rico Singleton. This new position will free up Rico’s time to deal with the city’s own infrastructure demands and allow someone else to be an active spokesperson for the city’s open-government and technology initiatives that benefit our community.
In fact, it was Rico who was listening to our requests and in October created a Baltimore City CDO position as part of his efforts to create an IT dream team.
Baltimore will be the second city government (that I know of) to establish this position, following in the footsteps of New York City which created and filled the position earlier this year. NYC hired 27-year-old Rachel Sterne, a young and vibrant digital consultant and entrepreneur that started an international news website when she was 22. Her job is to basically interface between the technology demands of the public and the sometimes slower-moving government. NYC’s tech community is booming right now and the city government has realized that they can play an active role growing that community by almost effortlessly attending their events and regularly congratulating their efforts. In fact, Mayor Bloomberg, an entrepreneur in his own right, is a regular at the monthly NY Tech Meetup.

It’s Down to 3 Candidates

The city has narrowed down its list of prospective candidates to three people who will all be taking part in an online candidate discussion. The one-hour discussion will be broadcast using CoverItLive which will allow the general public to interact in this discussion by tweeting, emailing, and using a chatroom to ask questions of the candidates. Since citizen engagement is a core part of the job of CDO, Rico and his team thought it would be fitting to do a bit of a trial run before making their selection. Names and identities of the 3 candidates will remain anonymous however each candidate will have a unique ID, ie. Candidate 1, Candidate 2, etc.
The candidate discussion will be taking place tomorrow, Dec 2nd, from 12pm – 1pm.
You are invited to participate by using the chatroom below or sending tweets to @BaltimoreCDO and using hashtag #BmoreCDOInterview. You can also send thoughts and feedback to baltimoreCDO@baltimorecity.gov.