CIDA announces Open Data portal: What it means to Canadians

For those who missed it, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has announced it is launching an open data portal. This is exciting news. On Monday I was interviewed about the initiative by Embassy Magazine which published the resulting article (behind their paywall) here. As (I hope) the interview conveys, I’m cautiously optimistic about theRead… Read more »

“Hawo’s Dinner Party” Video

“Hawo’s Dinner Party” is a resource to support conversations and actions around building bridges between refugees from Muslim majority countries and receiving communities in the U.S. in the lead up to the 10th Anniversary of 9/11. This 30-minute DVD will serve as a tool for service providers, grassroots community groups and employers nationwide that areRead… Read more »

Making Mobile Gov: Discuss Mobile Strategy

Time to hear from you on Making Mobile Gov. We are kicking off the discussion of challenges to Mobile Gov talking about strategy. Sound strategy is a necessity for agencies to create efficient, innovative, expectation meeting, transparent, citizen-facing mobile products. The agencies we talked to have experienced different challenges–and we want to surface your experiences,Read… Read more »

The question about WordPress as a Corporate CMS

It has been a couple of weeks since I attended #localgovcamp and it has taken that long for my brain to process all of the ideas and challenges that inevitably come up after spending such intensive time with so many passionate people. One of the sessions I went to was on WordPress and whether orRead… Read more »

What’s the Deal with ‘Tightsizing’?

The Federal Times posted an article online yesterday about the emerging trend of ‘tightsizing’ in the federal government. Agencies are looking to reduce the office space of employees to accommodate more feds. The idea is that by fitting more workers into an already existing work space it prevents an agency form leasing additional real estateRead… Read more »

Assigning Credit

We’re in a startup, which is frequently taking us where no man has gone before. So I asked Jack, “How would you value Zack’s contribution?” Jack said, “Well, it’s different.” I said, “Actually, it’s exactly one third, as there are three of us working.” We are all doing very different tasks to get this beastRead… Read more »

“It Finally Hit Me — I Have to Learn All-New Skills” – Mark Leheney

It was a pleasant lunch. As usual in this business, the conversation was around leadership, organizations and culture. The point was made for the umpteenth time in my life that the federal government often promotes people into supervisory positions who are very skilled technically, but not very good in managing people. I invoked one ofRead… Read more »

Clean Energy Innovation, Analyzed by Google

If you haven’t read Google.org’s Clean Energy Innovation Report, you probably should. Google is well-known for investing heavily in clean energy technology, so when they put together a comprehensive report on the economic potential of clean energy innovation, we take notice. In this report, Google has sought to balance the interests of economic growth, environmentalRead… Read more »