50,000 Strong

Today we as a community are hitting an awesome milestone.

50,000 members. That’s pretty crazy.

I vividly remember the day in my cubicle at DHS talking to my colleagues about how there should be an online community to meet other government employees and share best practices. They thought I was crazy and it would never happened.

The push to start GovLoop happened after my 10th straight project where I was tasked with and I had already known it had been done in government before – and I knew there had to be an easier way to leverage what others had already done.

GovLoop is not about me. It’s not about the full-time team working hard day-to-day at GovLoop (mad shout-out to Andy, Megan, Doug, Stephen, Jeff, Shannon, Pat, Lauren, and the fellows).

It’s about you. It’s about the community.

It’s about members like #50,000 – Melanie Schoeppe, a Master’s of Public Policy student at UC-Berkeley.

It’s about the stories I hear every day. About a retired Fed and a new acquisition professional meeting in our GovLoop mentors program and building a lifelong bond. It’s about a local government leader looking for advice on pitching a new innovation program to their boss and getting 20 comments on GovLoop from their peers and then successfully getting their boss’s buy-in. It’s about 100+ comments on a threads on improving USPS and another 100+ comments on improving USAJOBS and then senior management at both places asking for summaries of how to improve based on the conversations. It’s about the GovLoop community coming together and raising $10,000 for a family with cancer and $20,000+ for Kiva micro-lending.

It’s about real impact and change.

In a couple weeks (in early December), we as a community will celebrate our awesome 50,000 member achievement together. We have some pretty cool events planned in DC where we are based. We have some great events outside of the beltway where most of our members live. We look forward to celebrating together as a community and having a blast.

Together we are just at the very beginning of an important journey. Every day, budgets are getting cut deeper. Public employees continue to be vilified in the media. Baby boomers are itching towards retirement.

Government needs to be smart and more collaborative and innovative.

I’m blessed to be able to spend time with the smart, passionate public servants on GovLoop. And I’m optimistic about the future of government because of it.

Let’s go create more awesomeness.

Our Google+ Hangout celebration….