Career

OGI Conference – Internal Customer Engagement

As many of you know, I was asked by the folks at GovLoop and 1105 to moderate a session at the OGI conference earlier this week. I hope that you guys appreciate it if I share the results of that session with the rest of the GovLoop community who wasn’t able to make it toRead… Read more »

Citizens ‘wish list’ and frustrations with local government websites (Part 2)

This user insight comes from the user research conducted for London Borough of Camden in the UK. You can visit the website redesign project development site here. Click here to go back to Part 1 View full post here. Wanted to order lid for bin online but there wasn’t any for lids – User’s binRead… Read more »

A Necessary Contradiction: Merit-Based Systems and Diversity

Merit-based systems have dominated the federal, state and local human resources landscape for decades with the purpose of creating a process of employee advancement and job-seeker selection that is based on individual skills and abilities. The current issue of PA Times includes a press release related to a report (.pdf) published in December of 2009Read… Read more »

The Federal Coach: Housing and Urban Development’s ‘malignant optimist’

This week I interviewed Shaun Donovan, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, who – through leading with ‘malignant optimism’ – tries to instill a culture at HUD that encourages creativity and risk-taking. Q: How can federal employees be better leaders? A: My sister, a psychiatrist, once jokingly diagnosed me as a malignant optimist, completely incurable,Read… Read more »

Lessons for Driving the President’s Innovation Agenda through Prizes and Competitions

On April 30, 2010, over 200 public and private sector participants convened at the Department of Housing and Urban Development to think big about how the Government can learn from the emerging trend to use prizes and competitions to solve some of the grand challenges of our time. This event, led by Robynn Sturm fromRead… Read more »

What Drives You?

[Note: cross-posted from cpsrenewal.ca] [Photo: my father Rick and my son Kohl, taken back in June 2008] At the last #w2p mixer (an unofficial social event in Ottawa for Government of Canada Web 2.0 Practitioners) a colleague asked me “What drives you?”. I replied that I cared in the movement in a general sense; thatRead… Read more »

GovReads! The First 90-Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels

If you’ve started a new position, transitioned into a new role, or planning on making a move in the near future, I’d recommend reading , “The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at all Levels” by Michael Watkins. Michael Watkins is an Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. ThisRead… Read more »

My Vision for FedSpace (even though nobody asked me)

For the past few days I’ve been mulling over the announcement of a new social networking system for Federal employess. According to an April 27 article in the Federal Times, it will be unveiled later this year. At first I had a cynical reaction along the lines of, “Oh great. Just what we need. AnotherRead… Read more »

Kinnaird, Romero, & Abowd on Connect 2 Congress: Visual Analytics for Civic Oversight

Peter Kinnaird (a member of our community), Mario Romero, and Professor Gregory Abowd, all of the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, have posted Connect 2 Congress: Visual Analytics for Civic Oversight, a paper presented at CHI 2010: The 28th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, held 10-15 April 2010, in Atlanta,Read… Read more »