On our site, Brian Platt, Director of the Office of Innovation for Jersey City, NJ, chronicled Jersey City’s two-year journey to the new open data portal launched last week. Without access to coders on staff or a large budget, the City was able to move from handwritten data in notebooks to a fully-featured portal.

The White House released a new Strategy for American Innovation. The strategy features a chapter on increasing the innovation capacity of government through mechanisms like challenge competitions, Digital Service teams, and innovation labs. The White House is also developing an Innovation Toolkit to help federal employees employ innovative practices in their work.

The Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center launched as a collaborative effort of the University of Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, and the City of Pittsburgh. The Data Center is managed by the University of Pittsburgh and was created with support from the Richard King Mellon Foundation. The collaboration between different levels of government as well as university and other partners is an important model for the future of rich open data.

In London, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Aspen Institute, and The Atlantic hosted CityLab: Urban Solutions to Global Challenges. This annual conference brings together mayors and civic leaders from around the world to discuss the latest innovative ideas for the future of cities. Learn more about the many topics discussed on Twitter and on The Atlantic’s CityLab website.

Based on the work of Living Cities’ The Integration Initiative, Jeff Raderstrong reflected on four ways that data can build and strengthen cross-sector relationships, including telling stories with qualitative data, using asset-based frames, agreeing on accountability, and leveraging relationships to access data.

The Multi-City Innovation Campaign (MCIC), an effort started by Nashville, Raleigh, Boston, and Palo Alto and expanded to 25 cities in partnership with the National League of Cities, announced that two companies have been selected for pilot funding in participating cities. The cities voted for BlueLight, which enables location sharing with emergency responders, and Ride Report, which enables data collection for biking infrastructure planning. In the MCIC model, cities pool resources below procurement thresholds to enable them to collectively do business with new companies with innovative solutions to urban challenges.

In Dallas, the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership convened civic data intermediaries from across the country to discuss important issues including data in policing and health. Follow the conversation on Twitter and check back on the NNIP website for materials from the conference.

Stephen Goldsmith wrote about the critical moment for many government innovations: a change in administration. Providence’s Mayors Challenge-winning program to close the word gap for low-income children, Providence Talks, was able to survive and succeed through a new mayoral administration this year through a combination of good management and accountability.