Weekly Round-up – September 16, 2011

Gadi Ben-Yehuda

This week, it’s all about you. Citizen participation in its many and varied forms seemed to pop up wherever we looked this week, for example:

• Participatory Budgeting Comes to New York, NY. Between October 2011 and April 2012, four New York City Council Members will invite residents to directly decide how to spend at least $1 million of their discretionary capital funds in each of the four districts – a total of around $6 million.
• In Boston, the Problem Is Too Much Input. Somewhat to New York’s north, people are all too eager to govern themselves, The Neiman Journalism Lab reports, which is why the Boston Public Schools is adopting Community PlanIt, a web-based social network that turns planning — in this case, designing standards for gauging school performance — into a big game.
• In Washington, DC, Seeking Your Input on Mobile Gov. A Google Moderator group has been formed to solicit citizens’ opinions on what they’d like to see as the government moves into the mobile Web. As of 9/15, 396 people have submitted 180 suggestions and cast 2,640 votes. Read more about the Making Mobile Gov project.
• Bonus! Aol.gov has an infographic on the government’s use of social media

Dan Chenok

• DOD looks to innovate to save on IT expenses
• Calling all potential Federal tech workers — a new program makes it easier to join up.
• Two for the cloud:

1. Contracting for cloud computing needs gets a boost.
2. NIST issues new roadmap for cloud computing.

John Kamensky

Nothing Is Official Without a Website. The Deficit Reduction Super-committee has opened a website, so the committee must be official. A quick visit invites your input and allows you to stay connected via an RSS feed. . . .

Is Anyone Home? NextGov reports that an unofficial survey by a grad student found that a quarter of the top 1,800 federal web addresses don’t work. Is this a result of the governmentwide effort to inventory and close half of federal websites, or was this their status beforehand? Only true conspiracy theorists know for sure.

GAO website redesign – it works! I needed to browse the GAO website for some thematic topics this past week and found the redesign works! It’s no long just a bunch of reports indexed by obscure tag terms, they have finally made the site serve as a web-based research tool. Here’s a great landing page to get started if you care to browse (plus they are now doing podcasts and videos. . . . maybe they are finally appealing to a Millennial generation Hill staff!).

The Business of Government Radio Show: Kathleen Merrigan

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.

Kathleen Merrigan, Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, works alongside Secretary Tom Vilsack, overseeing the day-to-day operation of USDA’s many programs and spearheads the $149 billion USDA budget process.

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.