UPDATE: Chicagomag.com’s Carol Felsenthal offers a complete rundown on the entire Chicago Ideas Week mayoral discussion.

Tonight I attended one of the first 2011 Chicago Ideas Week events. It was a roundtable Q&A moderated by the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman with mayors from a few of America’s great cities: Mayor Rahm Emanuel from Chicago, Mayor Michael Bloomberg from New York and Mayor Kasim Reed from Atlanta. The following Storify post contains tweets from myself and others who tweeted during the event using the #CIWMayor hashtag. Some of the tweets are slightly out of chronological order to better serve the narrative but I’ve attempted to retain the spirit and meaning of the discussion. Between-tweets commentary is mine.

Overall, I enjoyed the discussion and thought it concluded just as the participants settled into a comfortable groove. Reed came off the best as he was plain-spoken and funny. Bloomberg was his usual sacred-cow slayer. Rahm was in his usual politician mode. I feel like he’s so careful not to play into the HULK RAHM SMASH! storyline that he holds back too much.

Quick postscript: When you sign up for a Chicago Ideas Week session, you’re asked to list three topics that someone can ask you about. On your badge it says “Ask me about…” and then shows your three topics. I was in a hurry to fill out the registration form and just wrote “journalism, comics and scotch.” When I picked up my badge tonight “comics” was changed to “education” and “scotch” was changed to “civic engagement.” Heh.