Communications

E-document and Records Management Course Notes

The note for the course “Electronic Document and Records Management” are available. This was first run as COMP7420 an online course the Australian National University, in the Graduate Studies Select Program in February 2011. My intention is to revise the material and expand it from a six to a twelve week full semester course concentratingRead… Read more »

March 26

The London Metropolitan Police are finally learning how to play chess. After the students made them sacrifice their Queen and forced their hand enough to resort to tactics which were perhaps not appropriate for young people (kettling) it seems someone has realised that anger, frustration and unrest are unlikely to go away but only toRead… Read more »

Le Métayer et al. on Liability Issues in Software Engineering: Case Study of eSignatures

Daniel Le Métayer of INRIA Grenoble – Rhône-Alpes, and colleagues, have published Liability Issues in Software Engineering: The Use of Formal Methods to Reduce Legal Uncertainties, Communications of the ACM, 54(4), 99-106 (April 2010). Here is the abstract: This paper reports on the results of a multidisciplinary project involving lawyers and computer scientists with theRead… Read more »

Lessons from Internal Social Media at Department of State

Tiffany Smith from the Department of State recently spoke with Professor Ines Mergel’s Government 2.0 course at Maxwell about Diplopedia and other internal social media tools within the agency. Below, I summarize 5 key lessons from the lecture that may be applicable to internal social media use at other government agencies. 1. Internal social mediaRead… Read more »

Friday Fab Five: TSP, NGG11, ROFL, and Other Acronyms You Probably Don’t Know

Yep. You guess it. It’s the… Friday Fab Five! Time to take a look back at the past week and highlight some of the best of the best. The Most Commented Blog of the Week goes to none other than Rebecca Schreiber‘s blog post Investing TSP Money and Other Retirement Tricks. Whether you are aRead… Read more »

New resource comparing ten online idea-generation tools

This week, the National Academy of Public Administration’s Collaboration Project released a resource on stakeholder engagement that I hope will be useful to Govloopers. Tools for Online Idea Generation: A Comparison of Technology Platforms for Public Managers compares ten web-based idea-generation platforms, many of which we have used for various projects, with the intent toRead… Read more »

#DonationFAIL! Why Bing Got Blasted and What Gov Can Learn

In the wake of the recent disasters in Japan, many organizations used Twitter to raise donations for the relief effort overseas. However, Microsoft’s Bing pledged $100,000 and received a lot of criticism for their generous pledge. On March 12, Bing tweeted “How can you #SupportJapan? For every retweet, @bing will give $1 to Japan quakeRead… Read more »

Thinking like a hacker – ways to find quick solutions to complex issues

Steve Ressler, Founder and President of GovLoop, presented an interesting perspective recently in his monthly Government Technology column. Quoting Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who defines “hacking” as “an approach to find a shortcut to solve a complex problem,” Ressler noted that he “encourages city and state officials to think about how to hack their cityRead… Read more »

Putting the “Gov” in Web Content Governance

From a small local business to a government agency with international reach, to succeed online, every organization needs a solid plan to create, deliver, and govern its content. Government agencies are some of the largest and highest-profile organizations out there, and have a wealth of content—so having a strategy for getting the most out ofRead… Read more »