Yearly Archives: 2013

Congressional Staff May Be Losing Their Health Insurance

Here is a recent post from my co-worker, Mark Harkins, that lays out how law was passed that may cause Members of Congress and their staff to absorb the entire cost of their health insurance on January 1, 2014. This amendment started in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee — which wasRead… Read more »

A Turning Point for the Public Engagement Field?

We live in exciting, challenging and, in many ways, unprecedented times for governance in the U.S. With massive public budget cuts, political polarization, and historically low levels trust in government intersecting with high unemployment, shifting demographics, and looming climate challenges, substantively involving the public in governance has rarely ever been more difficult or more necessary.Read… Read more »

The Bazaar World of Fearless Advice 2.0

It’s no surprise that our role as civil servants is changing. One can hardly browse a civil service centric publication from the developed world that doesn’t start by framing drivers of change: big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and technologically driven disruptive innovation in well-established regulatory markets (e.g. AirBNB, Uber, etc) to name but a few.Read… Read more »

Making Maps and Sense

This post was original published at CPSrenewal.ca. I’ve been, perhaps ungracefully, transitioning from a conversation here about facelessness vs. authenticity (see: Embracing Authenticity Means Embracing Complexity) to an exploration of what a new professionalism looks like for the Canadian Public Service (see: Towards a New Professionalism in Government, Parts I and II). I stand byRead… Read more »

How should governments educate agencies about open data?

Australia now has eight whole-of-jurisdiction open data catalogues at state and federal level, alongside agency-based repositories such as at the ABS and Geosciences Australia. There’s now a recommendation, if not a clear mandate, that agencies release data in some kind of open form – although machine-readable data remains limited and some agencies have attempted toRead… Read more »

Ryan Closner: Why I’m Coding for America

The internet is chock-full of cat memes and shopping carts. It is packed to the brim with advertisements and animated GIFs. It has pugs, James Van Der Memes, and a word-for-word remake of Susan Powter’s first workout video…with poodles. Now, I’ll admit: I love cat memes as much as the next guy. I’ll sing alongRead… Read more »

DISA Wants 10 for Cloud Contract, Only 5 Have Passed FedRAMP

The Defense Information Research Agency wants to award 10 positions on a potential $450 million cloud computing products and services contract even as only five companies have gone through the new governmentwide cloud certification process, Federal Times reports. Nicole Blake Johnson writes companies that hold the FedRAMP authority to operate are Amazon Web Services, AutonomicRead… Read more »

Major Challenges Facing OPM’s New Director – Plus the DorobekINSIDER’s 7 Stories

On GovLoop Insights’ DorobekINSIDER: Regardless of your rank, managers are under the microscope, right now. People are constantly evaluating you, judging your actions and behaviors, so what can you do? Insights on creating your own signature leadership voice from PPS’s Tom Fox. Up front: The nominee to be the director of the Office of PersonnelRead… Read more »