City Manager Innovation Summit 2026

Governing in collaboration with the Center for Digital Government is hosting our first City Manager Innovation Summit in Pasadena, California. The Summit will bring together a group of city managers and members of their executive leadership teams—including deputy and assistant City Managers, CFOs, CTOs, chief innovation and performance officers, and other trusted C-suite advisors. The Summit is designed to foster candid dialogue, practical exchange, and peer-to-peer collaboration among leaders who are driving modernization efforts in their cities. City managers are operating at a pace of change unlike anything in the past. Tight budgets, workforce constraints, and rising constituent expectations are forcing cities to do more with less—while maintaining trust and delivering high-quality services. To meet these demands, city leaders must strengthen policy decisions and operational performance and find new efficiencies to modernize long-standing processes. Technology—including AI, data-driven systems, and decision-support tools—can play a critical role in enabling that progress. City managers may not be technology experts, yet they are accountable for aligning policy, operations, and technology to move their cities forward. The goal of the Summit is to help shape actionable strategies, inform best practices, and support smarter, more secure technology decisions across cities nationwide.