Can public servants change the face of local government?

“Government is made up of people”,  says Dave Seliger, a civil servant in New York City.  So, what might public servants do to change the face of local government? This is the 6th podcast from Civic Radio. In it Dave Seliger talks to Jo Barratt about the role of civil servants and local government officers in developing a new local government.  Dave is the co-founder of Civic Service at Parsons DESIS Lab and a public servant in the NYC Mayor’s Office. There are 300,000 civil servants in New York, and Dave says it is important to involve all of them, not just the Mayor and City Hall, in rethinking local government.  So he trains and connects civil servants, bringing together Heads of Local Government Innovation, getting them to meet activists and community advocates,  and helping them understand the role and potential of civic tech. He also asks how we might get people involved in public service, and particularly looks at why tech savvy people rarely join government – why do they opt for working with Google instead, when the problems they’d have to grapple with in government are so much more challenging…….