By State House News Service
February 22, 2021
Chris Osgood
As Boston Mayor Marty Walsh prepares to leave City Hall for the labor secretary s post in the Biden administration, Boston City Council President Kim Janey is turning to City Hall veteran Chris Osgoog to help lead her team when she becomes acting mayor.
In anticipation of becoming mayor, Janey on Friday named Osgood, who previously served as Walsh s chief of the streets, transportation and sanitation, as her chief of staff. A graduate of City Year, Haverford College and the Harvard Business School, Osgood co-founded the Mayor s Office of New Urban Mechanics and joined the city in 2006, serving as a mayoral policy advisor.
‘Data Stories’ Track COVID Impact, Inform Policy in Boston
Researchers collected survey and online data to tell the story of how the pandemic affected Boston’s diverse communities and how urban policymakers can use that information to navigate the path forward.
MetroLab Network has partnered with Government Technology to bring its readers a segment called the MetroLab Innovation of the Month Series, which highlights impactful tech, data and innovation projects underway between cities and universities. If you’d like to learn more or contact the project leads, please contact MetroLab at info@metrolabnetwork.org for more information.
In this month’s installment of the Innovation of the Month series, we focus on a combination of efforts happening in Boston to combine existing data about quality of life at the neighborhood level with surveys about residents’ behavior during the pandemic. This data was then distilled into digestible stories that help the researchers bett
Can Public Entrepreneurship Solve Government’s Complex Problems? A new book by a founding member of Boston’s Urban Mechanics calls for changing how government addresses its problems and provides an operating manual for generating new ideas and putting them into practice. Dustin Haisler, Futures and Innovation Editor | January 22, 2021 | Opinion
There were no shortages of complex challenges that public-sector leaders had to navigate in 2020, from a global pandemic to the collateral fiscal constraints that followed. These problems forced agencies to respond rapidly in a new, unfamiliar landscape. After the first wave of the pandemic, the common phrase heard from government leaders was that years’ worth of work and progress had been completed in a matter of months.