Open Government Links of the Week – June 10, 2011

New Reports

New Report: Information Needs of Communities (by the FCC)

• “The FCC Working Group on the Information Needs of Communities today delivered an in-depth analysis of the current state of the media landscape along with a broad range of recommendations. The staff-level report, titled “Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age” [full PDF here or read by chapter here] was delivered to the FCC at an open commission meeting.” (source)

New Report on Reviving Civic Communication

• “The paper—“Civic Engagement and Community Information: Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication” by Peter Levine—proposes practical strategies to strengthen civic communication and citizen engagement with an emphasis on a civic information corps and the role of youth and digital communications.”

News

“GSA: More social media apps free for the taking”

• “The General Services Administration has added 13 free social media applications for federal agencies on its Apps.gov website since spring 2010, bringing the total to 51.”

• See what some of them are in the article…

Opinion/Interviews

Here’s an Interesting Take on Municipalities’ Use of Social Media

• “‘This is about policy, performance appraisal, making every employee more productive. Most of the focus is on social media policies, how to stop or prevent people from doing stupid things, rather than encouraging people to do the right things.’”

“Digital Media and Youth Civic Engagement”

“Maryland’s New Chief Innovation Officer Speaks Out”

• “Bryan Sivak speaks about why failure is a necessary part of innovation.”

• One of the questions in the interview: “I read an article where you said one of your biggest challenges will be trying to show people that there are different ways of doing things, that failure’s OK and it’s not going to get them fired. Can you explain why that’s so important?”

A similar version of this was originally posted at the company that I work for’s product blog (Disclosure: the product deals w/ transparency, gov’t, & technology)