Weekly Round-up: February 10, 2012

Gadi Ben-Yehuda

Gov in (cyber)space! edition.

• From Cables to Wireless. Three senior State Department officials will sit down with Alex Howard to talk about the evolution of 21st Century Statecraft: what it means, how it is progressing, and what the future holds. Alex writes about how you can submit a question, attend the panel, or watch it virtually.
• In Our Mailboxes and Inboxes? This time of year, everyone is finding tax documents in their mailboxes. But this year, the IRS has released an updated version of IRS2Go, which can help make sense of the plethora of forms we need to complete and submit within a few months.
• Now on Your XBox? Mark Drapeau writes about the State Department’s Tag Challenge. Similar to DARPA’s Balloon Challenge, the Tag Challenge uses video-game incentives and virtual-world activities to drive real-world problem solving that results in tangible results.
• Space Pioneers. NASA literally rockets toward the horizon, but it was recently recognized for pushing into new heights in cyberspace outreach. The agency’s social media team won the Douglas S. Morrow award for Public Outreach this year. Congrats! I imagine their party will feature freeze dried ice cream.

Dan Chenok

• Commerce Recommends Industry Lead Internet ID Board.
• GSA open to outsourcing federal PKI operation.
• FedRAMP eases vendors’ path to offer secure cloud services.
• Outgoing federal CTO talks transparency, bottom-up change.

John Kamensky

• A New Public Administration Blog. Here’s a new video blog, inspired by the APPAM meeting this past Fall, and curated by Andy Feldman at the University of Wisconsin .It offers a series of brief interviews with public executives and academics about public administration challenges they face and how they address them. Recent interviews include Beth Blauer, director of Maryland’s StateStat, and Carolyn Heinrich, professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas.
• Chopra’s Legacy Systems. On his last day in office, the federal government’s first chief technology officer, Aneesh Chopra, unveiled an “open innovator’s toolkit” with 20 different new or revised policies and case studies that are intended to inspire greater use of “open system” approaches to getting things done.
• Improper Payment Scorecard. In testimony covering the status of improper payments in FY 2011, Danny Werfel, who is the OMB controller, offers some encouraging news – that the Administration is on track to meeting its goal of cutting improper payments by $50 billion by the end of FY 2012. OMB is working with the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to deploy new analytic tools to make greater progress, notes Federal News Radio.

The Business of Government Radio Show

Federal News Radio 1500-AM
Mondays at 11 a.m., Wednesdays at 12 p.m., Fridays at 2 p.m.

The Business of Government Hour features a conversation about management with a government executive who is changing the way government does business. The executives discuss their careers and the management challenges facing their organizations.

Broadcast Schedule: The show airs Monday, February 13, at 11 a.m., Wednesday, February 15, at noon, and Friday, February 17, at 2:00 PM on Federal News Radio 1500AM WFED

If you can’t wait, though, you can listen to (or download) this week’s program and all our previous interviews at businessofgovernment.org and by searching our audio archives.