Stephen Goldsmith wrote about the need for government to adopt data sharing as its default setting. Too frequently stalled by lengthy legal negotiations, Goldsmith argues that the benefits of data sharing initiatives that open up departmental data far outweigh the risks that come with it.

A new app released by the Sacramento Transit System allows riders to discreetly report suspicious or illegal activity while riding the city’s trains and buses. The app allows users to report incidents directly to police via text, photo, or six-second videos.

Indiana is seeing the benefits of using analytics to tackle the opioid crisis. In an interview with GovTech this week, the state’s CIO Dewand Neely said the state has been able to create a dashboard that creates heat maps tracking opioid abuse in the state, allowing more precise targeting of resources. The analytics work is also linked to the state’s forensic labs, which allows officials to track where on-the-rise drugs like Fentanyl are most prevalent.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan visited Chicago to meet with Mayor Rahm Emmanuel to discuss digital entrepreneurship and sign an alliance to build on data-driven successes in both of the prominent cities. Read press coverage of the meeting and partnership here.

The city of Syracuse is now testing its data analytics project that predicts which water mains will break next. The city averages about one water main break per week and several hundred per year, so the need for predictive analytics is clear. The project began in 2015, when data scientists from the Data Science for Social Good program at the University of Chicago teamed with Syracuse’s i-team. Read about the start of testing on GovTech.

The results of GovTech’s 2016 Digital States Survey shows that state efforts to innovate, collaborate and align their investments with citizens’ concerns and needs are the highest they have ever been. The survey graded the technology portfolio of every state, highlighting accomplishments in public safety by Missouri, health and human services by Virginia, and transportation, civic engagement, transparency, mobile government and social media by Utah, and more.

Despite an immense technological shift in how people interact with politicians, the media and each other, the debate format has remained relatively unchanged. In response to this, Civic Hall published a report identifying emerging digital tools and platforms in the US and abroad that have the potential to restructure debates to elevate political discourse and increase civic engagement. The first part of the report looks at technologies that amplify the public voice in debates around the world, and the second part surveys these global debate innovations as well as explores their potential to boost public involvement. Civic Hall hopes that the growing number of state and local debates offers ample opportunity to experiment with these digital tools.