Weekly Round-up: May 13, 2011

Gadi Ben-Yehuda

• Who writes at Who Runs Gov? Josh Shpayher, who runs GovSM, now writes for BeltWiki, the blog of Who Runs Gov. His articles appear on Fridays (too late for WRU), but his post from last week is so good, it crossed the Weekend Barrier: “Measuring Social Media influence on Capitol Hill.” Looking forward to more insights from this column.
• Open Government Tries to Eschew “57 Channels” Future. Nextgov quotes GSA’s Sheila Campbell saying that the federal government currently operates 24,000 .gov Web sites, including couldihavelupus.gov and deserttortoise.gov. Campbell tells the publication, “Oftentimes on a website, you have all this extraneous, irrelevant information. . . . it’s not helping people accomplish what they need.” Related: RegBlog poses (and then tries to answer) the question: “What does open government mean, and what is its impact?” (Perhaps they should look at the results of some participatory budgeting in Chicago’s 49th ward? Dog owners needed only 8 more votes!)
• Open Government is also about maps showing excess government properties, search engines indexing SEC data, FEMA and DHS using social media.

John Kamensky

• Senate Hearing on GPRA Modernization Act. Senator Tom Carper held a hearing on the progress toward the implementation of the recently-signed GPRA Modernization Act. IBM Center Executive Director Jonathan Breul testified. The Senate has held two hearings so far, and OMB is still working on guidance to agencies for implementation. Is Congress anxious to get going?
• Senators Introduce Bill to Cut Duplicative Programs. Senators Tom Coburn and Mark Warner jointly introduced legislation that would cut about $5 billion in duplicative and overlapping programs, reports Federal News Radio. How? By setting a dollar amount in law and telling Obama to go do it.
• House Bill Targets Mission Support Costs. Cong. Gerald Connolly introduced legislation which seems to take a number of Administration initiatives and put a legislative push behind them, by consolidating data centers, cutting energy costs, reducing printing, supporting the OMB SAVE employee suggestion program, cutting printing, etc. This bill is an interesting contract to the Senate bill mentioned above. It targets specific things where savings are possible, vs. the Senate bill which targets a dollar amount and leaves the details to the White House!
• Visualizing Data, the Tufte Way! The Washington Monthly has a great article, “The Information Sage,” that describes how Edward Tufte, the statistician/graphics design theorist provided advice in the design of the Recovery.Gov website’s display of information. If you’ve not visited the site, it’s really an amazing display of hundreds of thousands of bits of information in easily digestible form. It has evolved greatly since its debut in 2009, and Tufte helped!

Dan Chenok

• Online privacy bills are again quite active in Congress, including “Do Not Track.”
• Administration’s Innovation Agenda moves to a repeatability phase.
• Interesting new measure of cybersecurity risk.

The Business of Government Radio Show: General Anthony Zinni (Ret.)

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. Past government executives include Administrators, Chief Financial Officers, Chief Information Officers, Chief Operating Officers, Commissioners, Controllers, Directors, and Undersecretaries.

General Anthony Zinni addresses questions like “For the United States to be an effective world leader, how must it strategically balance all three aspects of its power – defense, diplomacy, and development? What are the strategic threats facing the U.S. today? How can the use of smart power address some of these complex and perplexing global problems?” on this week’s Radio Show.

Each week, The Business of Government Hour interviews government executive who are changing the way government does business. The show airs four times a week on two radio stations in the DC Metro Area. If you can’t wait, though, we also put it online. You can also search our audio archives for your favorite interview.