Seattle, one of the finalists in the Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge, is on the hunt for a smart city coordinator to oversee the city’s strategy and start dialogues between the city and private partners. The coordinator will also be responsible for making sure smart city programs across multiple departments mesh, to reduce inefficiencies and avoid departments tripping over each other. See Also: San Diego gets its smart city on with GE Current hookup “We’re creating the smart cities coordinator role to help drive collaboration across these stakeholders and to make sure we have basic consistency in our smart cities deployment,” said Seattle Chief Technology Officer Michael Mattmiller to Government Technology

For most of our history, regulation has been the cart pulled along behind the technological horse. It was a clear cause-and-effect relationship: New tech was developed and put into broad use, then came the rules about how and when to use (or not use) it. In other words: We have speed limits because of the automobile, not vice versa