Mayor Kerry Thomson

Page last updated on September 6, 2021 at 11:48 am

Background

The Innovation Task Force was a group comprised of folks in City government, local stakeholders, and representatives from the City Council. The task force's mission was to identify steps the city could take to make city government more efficient, tackle innovative projects, and improve public engagement.

    Conclusions and Recommendations

    The ideas presented by The Task Force were narrowed to eleven priorities for the 2017 City of Bloomington budget year. After completing a ranking process it was clear there were two tiers of recommendations with five ideas identified as priorities:

    1. Create a Department / Director of Innovation
    2. Run a 2017 Budget Participatory Budgeting Pilot
    3. Define, Measure, and Publish Metrics
    4. Create a Public Engagement Officer and / or Office
    5. Create an Ombudsman Position
       

    The next six recommendations (to give the top eleven recommendations voted upon by the Task Force) are as follows.

    1. Develop UReport 360
    2. Create a Universal Community Calendar
    3. Staff development and education to facilitate better customer service (know where to send people) both within the city and without (country, state, etc.)
    4. Web and mobile messaging service: leverage a platform, like Intercom or Peoplocity, to provide real-time online messaging assistance and guidance to citizens
    5. City-run invasive control days. Bring volunteers to Cascades/other areas to pull invasives by hand. Once/twice per month
    6. Community Innovation Fund ( or CoB Innovation Fund). Seed $ for innovative projects from public, private, NFP sectors that produce community value
       

    Innovation Task Force Members

    After presenting their final report in August of 2016, this board was retired. 

    • Daniel Bingham, Software Engineer, co-chair

    • Darryl Neher, Kelley School of Business, co-chair

    • Claudia Avellaneda, SPEA

    • John Barnes, City of Bloomington

    • Alex Crowley, Excello Solutions

    • Christian Freitag, Sycamore Land Trust

    • Kathy Gutowsky, Center for Disaster Philanthropy

    • Lucy Schaich, City of Bloomington

    • Robert Shrake, City of Bloomington

    • Mike Trotzke, Sproutbox

    • Sue Wanzer, City of Bloomington (retired)

    • Matthew Wolf, SPEA/City of Bloomington

    City of Bloomington's Deputy Mayor Mick Renneisen and Director of Information Technology Services Rick Dietz provided staff support.