By Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D. The Obama Administration has made it official: spending Federal stimulus money is being scrutinized and reported on very carefully and in great detail. This is called “oversight.” The organizational and publishing infrastructure for doing this are evolving rapidly. At the Federal level the public web portal is Recovery.org. Experienced no-nonsenseRead… Read more »
By Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D. Vivek Kundra, Washington DC’s own CIO, has been appointed Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO). According to a Washington Technology article, Kundra “… plans to make the massive volumes of government data that isn’t sensitive available to the public through a new Web site, www.data.gov. With more data available to theRead… Read more »
I thought I’d share a quick story about my company’s first foray into Government 2.0. I’d love feedback or tips especially from government folks after you read our story. In November, we were approached by a City agency to bid on a contract to help them modernize their Internet Marketing efforts. The contract was forRead… Read more »
A whole cadre of folks inside and outside government are awash with figuring out how to address the government transparency question brought on by the President’s Transparency and Open Government memo. At the end of last weekend’s TransparencyCamp, Clay Johnson, Director of Sunlight Labs, brought up the issue of bringing open source developers into theRead… Read more »
The man singled out during Wednesday’s White House press briefing as the beneficiary of a now-terminated contract with the Agriculture Department today disputed any suggestion that he was awarded the contract because of connections to the Bush administration, and cited his decades-long career as an agricultural economist as the main reason he earned a six-figureRead… Read more »
House Democrats will unveil a measure Tuesday that splits the U.S. Census Bureau from the Commerce Department and makes it an independent government agency similar in design to the National Institutes of Health or NASA. The proposal comes in the wake of Republican allegations that the Obama administration is attempting to politicize the census byRead… Read more »
I couldn’t make it to TransparencyCamp, but it sounded fabulous. I did wade through 100 pages of Twitter Search history (as much as it keeps). Here’s what I came up with, for what it’s worth. Unlike my other summaries, while this is in chronological order, more or less, the fact that there were a lotRead… Read more »
By Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D. Author’s note: this is a republication from the author’s web site located here. The report Six Practical Steps to Improve Contracting by Dr. Allan V. Burman, Adjunct Professor, George Mason University, is based on a series of discussions co-sponsored by The IBM Center for the Business of Government and GeorgeRead… Read more »
Contracting issues will be on the front burner of the Obama administration, and the stakes are large. With the passage of the Stimulus Bill, having an effective federal contracting function will be critical to the success of the Bill. While many observers see the current federal contracting system as broken, the seminar participants identified aRead… Read more »
Iowa lawmaker wants one school superintendent per county DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — An Iowa lawmaker wants to limit the state to one school superintendent in each county. Sen. Matt McCoy, D-Des Moines, says the administrative costs being carried by school districts is too high. He says there are nine superintendents in Polk County andRead… Read more »