Communications

Howto.Gov Does It Again.

Howto.Gov hosted their 5th webinar on APIs (of their 8 part installment) this past Thursday. This time, they went over a bit more of the technical roadblocks. More specifically, how to go about realeasing data for consumption and different API formats, keys, and analytics. (If lost already, refer to API evangelist. They do a greatRead… Read more »

Hollywood’s Big Bad Bureaucracy – Avatar, Dark Knight, Jaws, Ghostbusters — Plus Your Weekend Reads

Welcome to GovLoop Insights Issue of the Week with Chris Dorobek where each week, our goal is to find an issue — a person — an idea — then helped define the past 7-days and we work to find an issue that will also will have an impact on the days, weeks and months ahead.Read… Read more »

The Most Important Skill: Writing?

From The Atlantic: New Dorp’s Writing Revolution, which placed an intense focus, across nearly every academic subject, on teaching the skills that underlie good analytical writing, was a dramatic departure from what most American students—especially low performers—are taught in high school. The program challenged long-held assumptions about the students and bitterly divided the staff. ItRead… Read more »

Organisations need to learn how to party: why digital engagement needs to be more social

I work in digital communications. In the public sector. If there’s one obsession both disciplines share, it’s the quest for ‘engagement’. It’s often said about digital engagement that ‘we’ (organisations) need to go where people go. What that actually means to me isn’t ‘the people use Facebook so we’ll use Facebook and build a pageRead… Read more »

The Power of We and Civic Engagement

Recently for Blog Action Day, the topic revolved around the Power of We and how the continued interaction and connectivity between hundreds and thousands of people can change the world. Not surprisingly, one re-occurring theme that kept surfacing was how Civic Engagement is needed in order to facilitate that change and bring together people toRead… Read more »

Start Your Community With Role Models, Not Influencers

I just finished reading this article in last month’s Fast Company where the CEO of Pinterest, Ben Silbermann, discusses how Pinterest got started, where it’s at today, and what its future may hold. In it, they highlight some of the ways in which Pinterest defied best practices when they first started – they didn’t includeRead… Read more »

Dealing with social media mishaps

When you tweet something about work that you shouldn’t have, or from the wrong account and it gets picked up, you want the ground to swallow you up. It’s awful, and the chronicles of social media crises are full of heads on pikestaffs. But what feels like a full-on social media crisis at the time,Read… Read more »

Race for Reuse: Shareabouts

“Put it on a map.” So often I hear this request when someone encounters an interesting set of civic data. Fortunately, that process has become fairly doable thanks to tools such as Google Fusion Tables, TileMill, and Esri. What about when you don’t have the data? How do you collect it and then map it?Read… Read more »

Doing Government Websites Right

Today, I have a piece over on Tech President about how the new UK government website – Gov.uk – does a lot of things right. I’d love to see more governments invest two of the key ingredients that made the website work – good design and better analytics. Sadly, on the design front many politiciansRead… Read more »

Identifying the Promise of GIS for Government: Citizen Engagement

Post Highlights GovLoop releases new report: Identifying the Promise of GIS for Government Citizen Engagement has been transformed by GIS technology Post identifies six steps in the citizen engagement loop Highlights case study for citizen engagement using GIS technology The GovLoop report, Identifying the Promise of GIS for Government, focuses on best practices, case studiesRead… Read more »