Tech

The Dinner Party Analogy

The Dinner Party Analogy Have you ever thrown a dinner party? It seems easy, right? Buy some food, invite some people, and it will be a huge success. But it never is. You need to send invites early, find out if people are allergic to anything, follow-up individuals to remind people to come, stage theRead… Read more »

Member of the Week: Nancy Heltman

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead As human beings continue to have significant impacts on the environment and its resources, education is the perfect tool to inform individuals of how their behaviors and patterns are having negativeRead… Read more »

Government Transparency Ain’t All It’s Cracked Up To Be — Yet

By Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for “open government.” But there are problems inherent to real-world democracy that can’t be automatically solved by making the workings of government more visible to the public. This is especially true about the reporting by government of data collected from large and complex populationsRead… Read more »

Status of the gov blogosphere

I wrote on my personal blog about the state of blogging in public services in the UK. “I think we need a strong, vibrant blogging community in and around government providing some real analysis of what is happening, and some real thought-leadership in terms of what should be happening.” What is the state of theRead… Read more »

Working next to Eeyore

I’ve had the very good fortune of working for some really good “emerging behavior” kind of leaders. You know the kind: those rare and wonderful people who seem to fundamentally believe that people wake up in the morning – they want to do the right thing; who don’t fancy themselves as the center of theRead… Read more »

FTC’s Stanley Lowe Builds 21st Century Data Center in Historic Building

Federal agency managers routinely talk about transformation and improving their infrastructures. For Federal Trade Commission (FTC) CIO Stanley Lowe, transformation of the infrastructure meant the infrastructure. In a building first occupied in 1938, that meant reinforcing floors and ceilings, adding new conduit, boosting power and putting in new racks, all without disturbing the appearance ofRead… Read more »

Better Buy Project Moves Forward

From The Acquisition Corner As collaboration tools, Gov 2.0, and other initiatives to encourage transparency and solicit input from stakeholders move forward, a pilot on this front met today to discuss implementing these ideas and creating further momentum via proof of concept. The Better Buy Project, as I discussed in a previous post, is aRead… Read more »

The Accessibility Verdict: DC.gov

This is a crosspost of http://dotgov.com. Author: Jim Thatcher. Jim Thatcher, one of the godfathers of Section 508, reviews Government websites on Web Accessibility. In this article, Jim verdicts on the website of Washington DC, the seat of President Obama’s Open Government. Sometimes technologies like Flash or JavaScript complicate the job of making web sitesRead… Read more »

Building a Wiki Community: Partnerships Anyone?

When Whorunsgov.com first launched in January 2009, we had very little partnership help. In the year since our launch, that has changed with brands like Foreign Policy teaming up with us during our Who Runs the War Project, which created thousands of extra page views. Main Justice, Medill Journalism School and Govloop are other partnersRead… Read more »