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© 2008 Wi ley Per iodicals , Inc .Publ ished onl ine in Wi ley InterScience (www.interscience.wi ley.com)Nat ional Civ ic Review • DOI : 10.1002/ncr.197 • Spr ing 2008

During the past two decades, local government has started toundergo a dramatic change in its relationship to the public.Many city officials, both elected and appointed, have movedaway from the old model of government by expert and man-date to explore the less familiar terrain of active partnershipsand two-way civic conversation. One of the most substantivechanges is in the area of local government performance mea-surement and reporting, the exclusive focus of this specialissue of the National Civic Review.

“Over the past thirteen years, much has been learned, tried,and set into motion,” writes guest editor Barbara J. CohnBerman, a vice president of the Fund for the City of New York(FCNY), in her introduction to the issue. “Although not yet thenorm, a movement and increased willingness on the part ofgovernments to consider new ways to listen to and communi-cate with the public seem to be afoot, along with new interestfrom nonprofit organizations to engage in performance meas-urement and reporting about local government activities.”

As a former deputy rent commissioner and deputy personneldirector for the City of New York, later a private managementconsultant, and now the founding director of FCNY’s Center onGovernment Performance, Berman witnessed this evolution froma number of vantage points. Working with public employees, shebegan to perceive a disconnect between how they viewed theirperformance and the perceptions of everyday citizens.

With support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, FCNYorganized a series of focus groups to see if her suspicion wastrue. Eventually, the findings were published in her bookListening to the Public: Adding the Voices of the People to Government Performance Measurement and Reporting.Based on years of focus groups with people from numerousneighborhoods, income levels, ethnicities, and generations,the book delves into the citizen perspective on performance intwenty-one service areas.

Take the challenge of homelessness, for example. Most citi-zens judged the question of how well the city was dealing withthis difficult challenge by how many homeless people they

saw on the street. Seems obvious enough, but city officialswere surprised. They didn’t have much control over how manypeople slept on the street, so they judged their own work by how well they were monitoring conditions in homeless shelters—which most members of the public never saw.

The importance to citizens of the appearance of city streetswas another revelation. She found that local transportationofficials were surprised at how much people cared. This dis-covery led the Center on Government Performance to developComNET, an innovative tool that enables citizens to use hand-held computers (PDAs) with digital cameras in surveying theconditions of their neighborhoods and report problems to the city departments or others responsible for fixing them.

The ComNET program, which has been used in more thaneighty neighborhoods in seven cities, seems a practical way ofbridging the perception gap between citizens and government.In her contribution to this issue, Roberta Schaefer, executivedirector of the Worcester (Massachusetts) Regional ResearchBureau, describes how ComNET has worked in her city. Otherarticles in this issue describe methods for engaging citizens ingovernment performance measurement and reporting at thelocal level. We hope the sum of these articles will serve as avaluable resource for our readership of civic activists, localgovernment officials, academics, and nonprofit groups.

This special issue was made possible with the support of theAlfred P. Sloan Foundation, a pioneering force in the field ofperformance measurement and reporting. We would like tothank the foundation and its program director Ted Greenwood,who contributed valuable guidance—and two articles—to thisspecial issue.

Michael McGrathEditor

Editor’s note: In the article “Twenty Years of CommunityService,” published in National Civic Review, Volume 96,Issue 4, the name of former Colorado Governor Richard Lammwas misspelled. I deeply regret the error.

Note from the Editor