This past Tuesday, I launched Publicyte, a digital magazine published by Microsoft about the people, places, and technologies driving civic innovation. I’ll be the editor-in-chief of the publication, and we’ll have writers from all kinds of interesting backgrounds, from both inside and outside of Microsoft. It’s part of my work at our new Office ofRead… Read more »
Mark Drapeau (Washington, DC) — Donald Trump is a master of public branding and marketing for himself and his eponymous business interests. While government doesn’t usually consider itself in the business of “marketing” itself, in reality, the Open Government movement is to some degree about publicizing data and information in order to get it toRead… Read more »
Stan Freck (Park City, UT) – The pace of technological change and adoption is increasing rapidly, and even relatively traditional fields like politics and government are not immune from such evolution. Here, I briefly review how the Internet has impacted modern high-profile political campaigns, and take a special look at how in 2010 Rep. JohnRead… Read more »
Katherine Kennedy (Washington, DC) — Brands with a genuine “cool factor” or a hip CEO have no problem drawing fashionable tastemakers to their social events. But other brands, particularly in the public and volunteer sectors, have valid and interesting causes and missions but must work harder to draw an influential crowd to their digital orRead… Read more »
Mark Drapeau (Washington, DC) – The Federal government has made a good deal of progress toward being more transparent, collaborative, and participatory during the two years since President Obama took office. However, despite great strides, government practitioners’ use of social media is not very sophisticated, does not take advantage of the latest tactics and tools,Read… Read more »
Mark Valentine (Chevy Chase, MD) — After a long period of popularity, there has been a recent backlash against the use of PowerPoint for communication within the government, particularly at the Pentagon and within the U.S. national security and intelligence community. However, focusing on the software as the cause of communications breakdown is merely aRead… Read more »
Mark Drapeau (Washington, DC) — More data is being produced, analyzed, shared, and stored than ever before. Scientific research, particularly biological sciences like genomics, is one of the more prominent examples of this, with laboratories producing terabytes of information every minute. There are many challenges moving forward with large-scale computational research in the biosciences andRead… Read more »
Today, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced a massive move of its 120,000 employees to communications technology hosted in “the cloud,” the common term for Web-based services like email, instant messaging, and content management. This new initiative is part of a major consolidation of over 20 different email systems currently in use, andRead… Read more »
Yesterday, I published an article called Networked Nonprofits: The Eva Longoria Case Study on the new SECTOR: PUBLIC blog. The post is about a recent, massive use of social media by celebrities to raise $540,000 for a Haitian orphanage. While certainly “good” was done, there are also questions about how much tweeting about a causeRead… Read more »
Yesterday during the Mashable.com / UN Foundation “Social Good Summit” in New York, I launched something I’ve been working on for a while behind the scenes at Microsoft’s public sector division. It’s a new website (geeks: WordPress running on Windows Server… and eventually Windows Azure cloud) called SECTOR: PUBLIC. (Get it? Like Mission: Impossible? Hey,Read… Read more »