Paul Adamson and I'm in conversation with Ashana Vemola Pali.

Ashana is the CTO, the chief technology officer of the city of Washington DC.

Ashana, we're going to talk about this new council of global city CIOs.

Maybe it's not so new from your point of view,

but what is this council and what are its key objectives?

I think the idea of a council and the idea of getting cities together,

it started with the fact that when I came into my role,

I realized I had a certain set of issues, priorities,

and challenges that I wanted to address.

And almost every other city CIO that I reached out to was one not just not only very helpful,

had almost the same set of issues, just different priorities.

And so, you know, a few of us got talking and said we really needed to start collaborating more at the working level

to get our teams together so that

we can really build sort of strength in numbers as we're looking at things like building

you know a model for smart cities or if we're looking at how we want to do more open source

work or if you want to look at how we can leverage maybe capabilities we've already

built out or some research we've already done if I've already done my homework on a specific

technology I can share that with another city. How do we start doing that, you know, and just

leveraging our strengths and maybe also becoming a voice for how we interact with the federal

government, right, on what our needs are and what our challenges are and maybe what we need

from them from policy and legislation? And so that was sort of the crux of it.

And then, you know, San Francisco was a great collaborator on that, and they got on board

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