setting priorities

For billions of people around the globe, cities are vital support systems for daily living. They are platforms for economic activity. They both embody and energize cultures. They often produce the new ideas, products, and services that can spread across societies and help them to advance.

The Internet can be a wonderful tool to improve the quality of decisions made in cities ... and about life in cities. It can speed up the pace of innovation, helping people to learn more quickly from each other's successes and failures. It is a dynamic marketplace. It is a source of basic information and data.

At the same time, finding exactly the right information for decision-making on the Internet can seem a long or even a hopeless quest. Finding information in the right form to be used quickly and easily by mayors, city councils and committees is almost impossible. Few people writing for the Internet focus on what leaders in cities really want to know. They most often think about what they want to tell leaders.

For example, writers for the Internet do not often say: "My product is only useful in the following circumstances..." or "Do not buy my product if your city is looking for a long-term solution." They usually say: "Please buy my product." In the same vein, researchers usually say: "Look at what interesting results I have for you!", not "My research is only useful if you have $30 million to spend in adapting the results to your city." Similarly institutions like international aid agencies most often say: "Look at what wonderful work we are doing to help cities.", not "Look at how difficult it is for us to cooperate with others in the same field."

These are all natural messages for writers, and the organizations that pay them or the reasons that motivate them, to do. It still does not solve your problem as an urban leader trying to reach decisions. In fact, usually these kinds of information will make your situation somewhat worse... you know more about what you could have, but it seems just beyond your reach.

The most vital task of urban leaders is to make choices when time and resources are scarce, and distractions are many. This demands serious effort to set priorities. What is the biggest problem among the five within my areas of responsibility? Who is the most important person to have on my side in a coming battle for funds and public support? What are the best solutions that others have applied in circumstances like mine? What is the most logical and successful line-up of actions when everything seems disorderly? City Solutions Network cannot set your priorities for you. No mass medium can do that. However, it can offer time-tested ways of organizing knowledge, information, and data so that priorities become clearer. It can offer quick formats to organize the information others provide so that you can use it more readily for your own purposes.

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