Building Digital Equity Beyond Federal Funding

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Fractional executive hiring is growing as organizations look for senior expertise without adding another full-time position. Demand for fractional leaders grew 149% year over year, and an estimated 150,000 professionals now work in fractional roles in the US. The model is most established in functions such as finance, marketing, and engineering, but the same structure can apply to public-sector technology leadership.

For smaller cities and counties, roles such as CIO, CISO, and Chief AI Officer can be difficult to fill. Some agencies do not have enough work or budget to support a full-time executive, while others need experienced leadership during a system replacement, cybersecurity program, AI rollout, procurement, or organizational transition. A fractional hire allows an agency to bring in that expertise for a defined period or workload.

The economy is also improving. A recent survey of 1,733 fractional professionals found that 98% said AI tools had made them more efficient, while 30% said those gains allowed them to serve more clients. That can make senior expertise available across several organizations rather than being tied to a single employer.

For local governments, this creates a middle option between leaving a senior technology role vacant and hiring a permanent executive. Agencies can use fractional leaders for specific projects, interim coverage, or functions that require senior oversight without a full-time position.

Columbus has spent the past decade building a reputation as one of the country's steadiest laboratories for civic technology, and much of that trajectory traces back to Mayor Andrew Ginther. Ginther was born and raised in Columbus, the son of a social worker and an attorney who specialized in adoption and foster law. He attended Columbus City Schools before earning a degree in political science at Earlham College, where he studied abroad in Northern Ireland and later taught in Belfast and Derry. He began his public service career on the Columbus Board of Education in 2001, then served on Columbus City Council from 2007 to 2015, including five years as council president. He was first elected mayor in 2015 and took office in January 2016.

Under his leadership, Columbus won the United States Department of Transportation's Smart City Challenge grant in his first year in office, a designation that positioned the city as a national test case for connected transportation and digital infrastructure. That early grant seeded what became Smart Columbus, a regional innovation lab built through a partnership between the city and the Columbus Partnership business coalition. The lab now serves as a permanent hub for coordinating public, private, and nonprofit efforts on technology and community outcomes.

Ginther has also reorganized city government around this focus. In his first year, he created the Department of Neighborhoods, consolidating neighborhood liaisons, the Community Relations Commission, Neighborhood Pride, and 311 services into a single point of access for residents. He also established the position of Chief Diversity Officer to guide hiring and contracting practices across city departments. He was reelected in 2019 and again in 2023 and served as president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors from 2024 to 2025.

The initiative drawing the most attention from Columbus right now is ConnectUS, a digital equity program addressing the estimated 80,000 households in Franklin County without home internet access. ConnectUS coordinates more than 60 organizations working on device distribution, affordable internet access, and digital skills training. A companion effort, the ConnectUS Device Donation Program, collects retired laptops and tablets from local organizations and redistributes refurbished devices to Franklin County nonprofits at no cost. One recent donation from a local partner produced no-cost devices for refugee and immigrant families served by Community Refugee and Immigration Services.

Alongside the device program, the city's Digital Skills Hub has become a central piece of the digital equity effort. The program pairs residents with digital coaches to build computer literacy and pairs completion with a free device. Smart Columbus reported more than 2,500 graduates from the program by the close of 2025, with a partner organization presenting the Central Ohio model at a national conference on aging services.

Columbus has paired this digital access work with efforts to modernize resident-facing services. The city has pursued the digitization of the record-sealing process in partnership with the Columbus City Council, aiming to reduce the administrative burden on residents seeking to clear eligible criminal records. The city has also worked with the Mid Ohio Food Collective to expand digital access to social services and upskilling resources.

The mobility side of Smart Columbus has continued as well, even after the original federal grant period ended in 2021. The city has kept investing in electric vehicle infrastructure and shared mobility programs, building on the more than 3,300 electric vehicle purchases made by Columbus residents during the initial grant window. Delegations from roughly 80 cities and 20 countries have visited Columbus to study its approach to combining mobility, sustainability, and digital inclusion within a single civic framework.

Ginther has framed this combination of programs as evidence that a mid-sized Midwestern city can sustain technology-forward governance without depending on a single federal grant cycle. The structure Columbus built during the Smart City Challenge, an innovation lab with permanent staff and cross-sector partnerships, has outlasted the funding and continues to generate new projects addressing digital access, housing and public service delivery.

This session is on how leadership turnover among governors, mayors, and legislators reshapes state and local government technology demand before new officials take office. Chief Innovation Officer Joe Morris and Market Intelligence Director Rachel Eckert at e.Republic will walk through how its Industry Navigator platform tracks jurisdiction profiles, budgets, verified contacts, and buyer intent to flag developing opportunities before formal RFPs surface. Attendees will also learn how to distinguish real market signals from the noise of scraped public data and align sales and marketing teams around shared account intelligence. Details →

This summit opens with a keynote from Rachel Wilson, a former NSA senior executive who now serves as Chief Data Officer for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. The event includes a cyber hackathon that runs throughout, alongside concurrent sessions on AI governance, audit preparation, vulnerability remediation, and identity security. Massachusetts Secretary of Technology Jason Snyder opens the summit, and Detective Lieutenant Edward Keefe of the Commonwealth Fusion Center closes it with a statewide threat briefing. Details →

This guide argues that permitting and licensing delays cost cities housing supply, tax revenue and business investment, and lays out how embedded AI can automate completeness checks, plan reviews and routine approvals while keeping staff responsible for complex judgment calls. Oracle executives Simon Threlfall, John Sasson and Eric Gsellmeier describe moving agencies away from legacy, code-dependent systems toward a unified cloud platform with chatbots for self-service and role-based security. A case study focuses on Miami, which plans to consolidate eight separate permitting tools into a single AI-powered suite under Mayor Eileen Higgins. Read →

Governments are building comprehensive resilience plans that go beyond traditional hazard mitigation, according to a new analysis from the Pew Charitable Trusts. Hazard mitigation planning has functioned for two decades as a compliance exercise tied to federal funding, but researchers say it does not address how disasters compound across sectors or account for long-term vulnerabilities. Alabama's April legislation creating a chief resilience officer position is an example of states building broader coordination across agencies, funding streams and priorities before disasters strike.

GovTech entrepreneur and civic innovator Evan Meyer joins Brian Chidester to examine public trust, civic engagement, bureaucratic inefficiency, and the role of technology and AI in local government. The episode looks beyond the technology to the incentives and communication failures that shape how the government operates. It explains why successful civic technology must connect technical change with trust, transparency, and stronger community participation.

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