Yearly Archives: 2012

Reforming an Outmoded Government

Michele Flournoy, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, had an interesting opinion piece in the Washington Post on Reforming an Outmoded Government. Federal agencies typically lack the expertise and experience to transform themselves into more effective and affordable enterprises With rising budgets (like the past decade), the focus tends to be on growth, notRead… Read more »

Dorobek Dose: Meet the NIH scientist helping to end pediatric AIDS — Sammies Finalist

Happy Thursday — Chris Dorobek is off this week. So I will be filling in. We are going to do the show a bit differently. Each day we will feature a Dose of Dorobek — a shorter five minute interview that focuses on helping you do your job better and tips for navigating around GovLoop.Read… Read more »

Federal Government Expanding API’s, FBI Seizes 3 Android App Sites, and More

Here is today’s federal cybersecurity and information technology news: As part of Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel’s digital strategy to make application programming interfaces “the new default in government,” U.S. foreign assistance payments, nuclear reactors’ daily event reports and a national sex offender registry will soon be released with API’s to allow automatically updated streamingRead… Read more »

Presidential Innovation Fellows Announced

Today, Federal CTO Todd Park formally launched the Presidential Innovation Fellows program. Over the next few weeks, the Fellows will be blogging more in-depth about their program here on GovLoop, and working to share their best practices and tell their story how they are working to transform government. The Presidential Innovation Fellows program has fiveRead… Read more »

OPM Director Approves Federal Employees Day Session – as Training at Out & Equal Summit in Baltimore, MD

Out & Equal is hosting a one-day Federal Leadership Seminar on Monday, October 29, at the Baltimore Convention Center in Baltimore, Maryland. The goals of the seminar are to: bring together agencies to share best practices; provide training on how to implement best practices; create an opportunity to learn from government contractors; and incorporate globalRead… Read more »

4 Awesome Government Mobile Use Cases

**We’ll be hosting a session on Mobile Government: Today, Tomorrow, & Beyond featuring government case studies at our Government Innovators Online Summit on September 13.** In 2012, the number of smartphone users will reach 106.7 million with 94% of these users accessing the mobile internet. With citizens and government employees increasingly adopting multiple mobile deviceRead… Read more »

How to build great teams

I gave a brief talk recently on how to effectively build teams. These are the main lessons I shared: 1. Build trust. No one will follow someone they don’t trust. I cited Steven M.R. Covey’s The Speed of Trust as my guidebook for doing so. Covey cites 13 principles for earning and keeping trust. IRead… Read more »

Media Relations: Don’t Comment with “No Comment”

The term “no comment” is conventionally viewed among government communicators and media relations professionals as leaving a negative perception with the interviewer and the audience. This is because “no comment” often implies there’s something sinister going on – whether that’s true or not. Why “No Comment”? “It seems obvious after the fact, but ‘no comment’Read… Read more »

Decline and fall?

Twitter has been taking a bit of a pasting in the technology media world recently. Could this mean it is facing a bleak future, and could become the new MySpace, or Friendster? Or even – the horror! – FriendsReunited? The biggest furore came when they recently changed the terms of use for their API orRead… Read more »

How open are council meetings?

DCLG have today announced that residents, bloggers, tweeters, community activists and hyperlocal sites should have the same access and facilities to council meetings as traditional newspaper journalists. This is important because it means Government recognises the valuable contribute the wider community makes to accountability in local government. It’s a very timely announcement. For a whileRead… Read more »