Miscellaneous

Civic institutes this summer (via Peter Levine’s blog)

Here’s a great little list straight from Peter Levine’s blog at http://peterlevine.ws/?p=8351… People interested in various aspects of civic education and civic renewal have a whole range of summer institutes to consider in 2012. At Tufts, we offer a Summer Institute of Civic Studies (a seminar with a strong focus on theory) followed by aRead… Read more »

Fluency

I just participated in my first Hackathon – it focused on coding for Google Apps and we developed an automated meeting registration system. A hackathon is the gathering of a group of developers and their computers with a goal of creating something during the session. Jan Kleinert led the session and, as usual, the GoogleRead… Read more »

Soldier’s Killing Spree Likely to Incite Violence

www.homelandsecuritynet.com NATO’s International Security Assistance Force has confirmed that an American soldier recently turned himself in, and admitted to leaving his base in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province and went on a rampage from house to house in villages adjacent to his base, killing 16 Afghan people in their homes. Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai immediately demanded anRead… Read more »

Opening Up Government: Using Data to Stimulate Economic Growth

Recently IBM released a report, Opening Up Government: How to Unleash the Power of Information for New Economic Growth. If you are interested in open government, I highly recommend taking a look at the report. There are many elements that I did not touch upon in this quick summary. One example would be there isRead… Read more »

Cutting off the ends of a Roast

Working with a colleague who recommended a book Whole System Design: An Integrated Approach to Sustainable Engineering, Peter Stasinopoulos. Started skimming the book. A good compilation of materials around design, systems thinking and sustainability. What I found an interesting ah ha moment yesterday was that all this knowledge was known before, initiatives in business wereRead… Read more »

Why ACUS Matters

Chairman Paul R. Verkuil recently published an essay in the inaugural issue of the Michigan Journal of Environmental and Administrative Law. The article describes the Conference’s work, citing currrent empirical studies and how its work directly relates to academic and governmental communities. Read the full article that explains why ACUS matters ().

Sharing ideas about data.gc.ca

As some of you may remember, the other week I suggested that on its one year anniversary we hack data.gc.ca – specifically, that people share what data sets they find most interesting on the website, especially as it is hard to search it. Initially I’d uploaded a list of all the data sets on theRead… Read more »

Fraud of the Day

What would your agency do with $100 million dollars or even tens of thousands more? Agency funds are lost to fraud every day. The Fraud of the Day forum highlights real stories and what you need to know to help fight fraud. Visit the FraudoftheDay.com forum to learn more and sign up to receive dailyRead… Read more »

Should Governments Crowdsource Science Research Funding?

Mark Drapeau (Washington, DC) — Recently, I wrote about the trials and tribulations of social networks focused on scientific researchers. I painted a fairly dim picture. Some people disagreed with me at the Huffington Post and other places. Nevertheless, it is clear that there are those in the scientific community who are interested in disruptiveRead… Read more »