Yearly Archives: 2012

Behind the Scenes: The Moving of a Sculpture

John Scott’s Thornbush Blues Totem Thornbush Blues Totem by John Scott will be featured in our upcoming exhibition, African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond. In preparation, museum conservators and art handlers moved the eight-foot tall sculpture up to the conservation labs for examination and treatment. Staffer Mary Tait described the experience:Read… Read more »

Pentagon Social Media Secrets Revealed

(Original Image: The Pentagon, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) David B. Gleason) Secrets and the Pentagon go hand in hand, right? So when the Pentagon decided to host an event for Social Media Week at the fabled five-walled Department of Defense headquarters called “Military & Government Use of Social Media: What Works,” we were doubtfulRead… Read more »

Water Efficiency Goes High-Tech, Sleek

This isn’t your father’s water meter. This is a lean, mean, water-saving machine. Unfortunately it isn’t available for purchase yet, (at least we can’t find it) but the water meter shown below, designed by Marc Schomann, would integrate easily into existing systems, power itself and send water use data directly to wireless devices. Of course,Read… Read more »

Changing the government IT landscape with CloudStore

On Sunday, February 19, the Government Procurement Service officially launched CloudStore for UK central government and local authorities. The UK government first proposed the G-Cloud initiative over two years ago with the goal of bringing a wider range of cloud suppliers to the public sector while increasing the flexibility of procurement contracts. The programme wantedRead… Read more »

Resolving Community Conflicts and Problems: Public Deliberation and Sustained Dialogue

This 2011 book, edited by Roger A. Lohmann and Jon Van Til, focuses on how public deliberation and group discussion can strengthen the foundations of civil society, even when the groups engaged in debate share a history of animosity. Scholars have begun to study the dialogue sustaining these conversations, especially its power to unite andRead… Read more »

Time to stop making so many Android Devices

Incremental upgrades are Apple’s thing…c’mon guys! There are a couple things that Apple does better than anyone else in the commercial market. One thing they do is keep it simple. Some would say they keep it too simple (myself included), but simple + marketing sells, people think they know what they are getting, and thusRead… Read more »

The Regulations.gov Relaunch

By Alex Moll, Communications Officer, eRulemaking Program Management Office Yesterday, the White House announced the relaunch of Regulations.gov in a post on remaking public participation by Cass Sunstein, the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA): “In response to the President’s direction, Regulations.gov has launched a major redesign, including innovative new searchRead… Read more »

Getting community conversations going

Over the last year, one of the toughest but most rewarding areas of work I’ve been doing is training, mainly with central government communications staff, and often through the Government Communications Network. Our team of Simon Booth-Lucking, Dave Briggs and Giles Field, with occasional invited guests such as Dan Slee or Tim Lloyd, run soup-to-nutsRead… Read more »

It’s Easy to Find Government Information

Like it or not, government is a big presence in the United States. The considerable number of bureaus, departments, and offices has always made it difficult for citizens to find their way around. And then the Internet arrived. Today, the United States government has just about the largest internet presence on earth. And it’s allRead… Read more »