With $10-thousand prize for a first-place finish, a handful of startup founders pitched a panel of mayors convened by the US Conference of Mayors and the non-profil Civic I/O, a group of self-styled civic innovators bound together by a commitment to solving intractable city problems through applied technology.

This year's pitches covered everything from redressing racism in setting car insurance rates while making city streets safer, using so-called job-killingAI to benefit job seekers, holding landlords to account for keeping the heat on, and providing networked access to psychiatrists to first responders responding to mental health emergencies.

Show Notes:

• Augmented Training Systems
• Cloud9
• Heat Seek
• ODN
• Bloc

This week's release of the 2019 GovTech 100 list, compiled and published by Government Technology, marks the maturation of what began four years ago as a way to recognize companies founded to solve problems unique to the public sector.

Together, GovTech 100 companies represent a growing portfolio of scalable, digital solutions addressing the tough, complicated problems that governments face -- from health care and public finance to urban planning and public safety.

On this episode of "Go Public," we hear from the analysts who developed this year’s list, a pair of founders of GovTech 100 companies, and a venture capitalist about the market's dynamics and what they mean for governments.

Listen below. You can also listen and subscribe on your iPhone (Apple Podcasts) or Android device (Google Podcasts). 

By 2030, as many as 73 million U.S. jobs could be lost to automation, according to global management consultants McKinsey and Company. The prediction has governments, activists and even venture capitalists dusting off an old idea to give cash directly to displaced workers without conditions to meet their basic needs.

This new take on Universal Basic Income (UBI) has garnered support across the political spectrum, from social democrats on the left to libertarian entrepreneurs on the right. The model also has its skeptics.

In this episode of "Go Public," we revisit the argument for and against UBI with a focus on its economic viability and potential community impact. 

The government's struggle to communicate with its constituents has consequences. Public trust in government is at a near historic low. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are trying something new to see if they can at least explain the civic dysfunction -- if not repair it.

The leaders of the effort, Ceasar McDowell and Ayushi Roy, are our guests on this episode of "Go Public." They suggest that citizen engagement has been crippled by trauma on both sides of the conversation -- the public whose trust has been violated by broken promises and government agencies on the receiving end of blowback.

A new generation of state technology leaders is rethinking the conventional wisdom (and FBI's advice) about cybersecurity.

When a government agencies' computers and files are locked by hackers, the FBI advises against giving in to their monetary demands. That's fine as long as back-up files are still available, but ransomware attacks are evolving to go after those, too.

At the same time, many state CIOs are taking a wait-and-see approach to widescale adoption of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence.

On this episode of "Go Public," Government Technology’s Noelle Knell and Lauren Harrison discuss these new challenges and opportunities with the backdrop of midterm elections that have already prompted the departure of some state CIOs.

For many policymakers, troves of data can seem impenetrable. It can be hard to parse the gathered information, and even harder to apply that information to policy problems. Some cities, however, are getting better at using data to fix problems and improve the lives of people in their communities.

A conference in Los Angeles last week -- the Summit on Government Performance and Innovation -- brought together more than 650 city government leaders and employees to discuss the promise and pitfalls of using data in developing policy, delivering services, and monitoring governments' performance in doing so in a fair and equitable way.

The conference was also the backdrop for recognizing high perfoming cities in this year's Equipt to Innovate survey, a key component of which is using data to reach larger policy goals.

On this episode of "Go Public," Governing's Zach Patton and J.B. Wogan talk about where data is being used well, where it shows promise in our civic life, and the privacy risks attendent in its use.

Government gets more feedback than it can handle.

In part, that's because public-sector leaders have asked for it. Public officials want increased citizen engagement.

But part of the overload comes from advocacy groups that have launched campaigns to swamp elected officials with calls and emails. Social media has also made it so much easier for amplifying voices vying for the attention of politicians and public officials.

Enter the OpenGov Foundation, a nonpolitical nonprofit that's working with Congress to explore open-source solutions for getting its arms around overwhelming constituent communication. The answers to date are incomplete and solutions inadequate, but the lessons from the research have implications for state and local legislators.

On this episode of "Go Public," Government Technology's Noelle Knell and Zack Quaintance take stock of public engagement today and the prospects for creating satisfying experiences between citizens and their government.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher so you can take it with you.

During our first half dozen episodes of the Go Public podcast, we have focused in large part on technology-driven startups and entrepreneurs working on solving civic problems.

This time, we take a decidedly low tech turn with a look at a novel campaign to reduce panhandling in Albuquerque, N.M. One panhandler’s cardboard sign that read "Want a job" caught the eye of Richard Berry. The then mayor decided to take the man at his word by finding what the city calls There’s A Better Way by offering panhandlers day jobs and related city services.

There is no app for that. An unused decade-old van in the motor pool was pressed into service to visit popular popular panhandling locations twice a week with offers to work on beautification projects in the city.

In finding a practical way to help the homeless find work and safety, it also provides other cities with an alternative to panhandling bans, which were struck down by a seemingly unrelated Supreme Court decision Reed v. Gilbert.

We look at the story, popularized in a TEDx video, and its track record on this episode of Go Public.

We have been following GovTech startups for more than three years, from their co-working spaces to their meetings with venture capitalists - and tracking their progress as they close funding rounds, pilot and win business in state and local government, and earn placement on the GovTech100, an annual listing of startups active in the government technology market.

We followed a trio of startup founders into the mayor’s lair at South By Southwest (SXSW) earlier this month. When the pitching ended, we looked at what happens when mayors ask the questions rather than investors.

On this episode of our new podcast, Go Public, Government Technology’s Ben Miller and Governing’s J.B. Wogan join hosts Paul Taylor and Dustin Haisler for the anatomy of a GovTech pitch session.

On This Episode: Biobot Analytics www.biobot.io City Mart www.citymart.com Elucd www.elucd.com GovTech100 www.govtech.com/100