Weekly Round-up October 7, 2011

Gadi Ben-Yehuda

• Good-bye, Steve Jobs. His products are in the pockets and on the desks of countless Americans, both within and beyond the government. When he died, his customers, colleagues, competitors, compatriots, and admirers from across the globe poured out their hearts in a torrent of tweets. One artist captured them in this visualization.
• Planning a Social Media Campaign? This should be hanging in your war room.
• Rules of Engagement. Ines Mergel has compiled a list of federal agencies’ social media policies/guidelines. Each one dictates the terms of that agency’s online behavior.
• Regulations.gov’s Uphill Facebook Battle. Alex Howard has an increidbly instructuve, important article that presents the dialogue about how Regulations.gov is using (or misusing Facebook. The converstaion includes members of the Gov 2.0 community both from within and outside the government (not least, Alex, Jeff Levy, Mike Rupert, Kristy Fifelski, Daniel Morgan, and Regulations.gov’s Alex Moll) and includes tweets, quotes from Facebook, an embedded PDF document, and original journalism. Titled “How Should Regulations.Gov Be Using Social Media,” the peice could also be taught as “How to Write about Ongoing Debates surrounding and Taking Place on Numerous Social Media.”

Dr. John Bordeaux

• Steve Jobs’ legacy for the public sector is yet to be written, as the acceleration of consumer-based technology in the workplace – fueled in large part by his innovations – brings effects that we are only now beginning to appreciate. Here is a link to his 2005 Stanford commencement address. Stay hungry, stay foolish.
• Why focus on cities? Researchers find as skilled workers cluster in cities, the rate of innovation is positive and non-linear. Additionally, social skills are correlated with higher innovation and economic productivity.

Dan Chenok

• GAO finds that Cybersecurity threats grow for Federal agencies:
• We the People are a lot of people! White House petition site receives an abundance of submissions:
• What government can learn from industry about the need for speed in mobile apps:

John Kamensky

• How does New York City Mayor Bloomberg encourage innovation? Here’s a good piece highlighting five keys to public innovation, by the Center for American Progress’s Vicki Sellick, in its ongoing series of blogs on innovation in government.
• White House Flooded with e-Petitions. The White House recently launched a new citizen engagement approach – the use of e-petitions – which is dubbed “We the People.” According to InformationWeek, it may be more successful than anticipated — in the first two weeks, about 8,000 petitions were created on-line with more than 600,000 signers.
• They are interesting to scroll through. They are organized by topic. For example, under “Government Reform,” petitions include “Make bribing politicians illegal,” and “Allow BASE jumping in national parks.” It seems the top-ranking petition is to legalize marijuana, with more than 50,000 signers, and “forgive student loan debts” as a distant second, at 27,000 signers.
• Reforming the Budget Decision-Making Process. With the beginning of the new fiscal year, again without a budget in place, the Senate Budget Committee held a hearing on ways to reform the budget process to make it more functional. Government Executive’s story on the hearing notes: “In fiscal 2011, Congress passed 8 stopgap funding measures. Congress last passed all the appropriations bills on time in 1994.”
• Interestingly, the House Budget Committee held a similar hearing a couple weeks ago. Since there’s not much the House and Senate (Republicans and Democrats) agree on lately, this is actually big news! But the prospects of a biennial budget, which is one of the key recommendations, may still be a futuristic vision!

The Business of Government Radio Show: David T. Matsuda, Maritime Administrator

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.

The show airs fives times a week on two radio stations in the DC Metro Area

Broadcast Schedule: Saturday, October 8 at 9:00 a.m & Friday, October 7 at 2:00 p.m on CBS Radio 1580AM on For those outside of the Washington, D.C. area, you can listen to our live webstream on CBS Radio 1580AM. Monday, October 10 at 11 a.m., Wednesday, October 12 at Noon, and Thursday, October 13 at Noon on Federal News Radio 1500AM WFED

If you can’t wait, though, you can listen to it or download our interview with Beth and all our interviews at businessofgovernment.org and by searching our audio archives.