Rethinking Gov 2.0 – Plus The Seven Gov Stories You Need To Know

On GovLoop Insights’ DorobekINSIDER:

• Between 2009 and 2012, 45 states have made significant changes to their retirement plans. So what changed and how can government workers prepare for retirement most effectively? Insider tips from Elizabeth Kellar and Joshua Franzel.

You can find all of our programs online: DorobekINSIDER.com and GovLoop Insights at http://insights.govloop.com.

But up front: Rethinking Gov 2.0

What is the current status of gov 2.0 — or the use of Web 2.0/social media/collaborative tools in government?

We were scheduled to have this discussion last month but Mother Nature tried to stop us. But we are going to try again — the January AFCEA Bethesda breakfast has been rescheduled for Tuesday, February 11.

I had a past earlier with some of my initial thoughts about topic areas.

But I’ve thought about it more and I’ll add a few other topics for discussion fodder.

One was GovLoop’s DorobekINSIDER LIVE discussion last year about gov 2.0… and I still love this from GSA’s Lena Trudeau:

Trudeau: I too think of Gov 2.0 in very broad terms. We called it the Collaboration Project because we didn’t want it to sound like it was a technology issue we were solving at its heart. Technology is an enabler. And we need a new set of tools to deal with the challenges and demands of the environment we find ourselves in, but it is more than the technology tool set. It’s more about changes to processes systems, structures, policies and upgrade our skills set. It’s a very broad challenge and if we focus solely on the tools themselves, we miss what motivates people in this space to do very challenging things. We see a set of businesses processes and models that we have that are in need of transformation. The organization as a whole is committed to that change. But the way government is built we are really geared towards incremental change, because it is safe. The shift right now for government from being bureaucratic and authoritative to being open and sharing and collaborative. We have to leverage a much broader community. That notion of government as a platform is critical. Sharing information across silos.

My guess is we will discuss the link between open government and gov 2.0/social media.

And can one possibly keep up. This from UK’s Telegraph: Young users see Facebook as ‘dead and buried’

Finally, some interesting data from Pew:

As of Sept ’13:
71% of online adults use Facebook
18% – Twitter
17% – Instagram
21% – Pinterest
22% – LinkedIn

I’m not sure what that data tells us, but… we will probably talk about it.

The SEVEN stories that impact your life

1. Washington Post: HealthCare.gov can’t handle appeals of enrollment errors. “HealthCare.gov can’t handle appeals of enrollment errors- Tens of thousands of people who discovered that HealthCare.gov made mistakes as they were signing up for a health plan are confronting a new roadblock: The government cannot yet fix the errors.”
2. Federal Times: FDA making medication data useful to the public. “Millions of Food and Drug Administration records on problems stemming from medication mistakes and other issues will be more readily available to the public under a recently announced initiative called ‘openFDA.’”
3. Federal Times: Retirement wave gathering force. “The percentage of federal workers eligible to retire will roughly double by 2017, underscoring the need for agencies to prepare for the loss of experienced, high-level staff, Government Accountability Office reviewers conclude in a newly issued report.”
4. Government Executive: Obama Tells Agencies to Give Unemployed Workers a Fair Shot at Federal Jobs. “Federal agencies should not reject applicants for federal jobs on the grounds that they are unemployed, even if an applicant has been unable to find work for an extended period of time, President Obama said in a memo issued Friday.”
5. Federal News Radio: IRS chief: No furloughs this year. “The head of the Internal Revenue Service said the agency isn’t planning employee any furloughs this year, even though Congress decided not to restore funding to the agency that had been lost due to the across-the-board sequestration cuts.”
6. NextGov: House Launches App Challenge for Tech. “The House of Representatives is hoping a new app development competition will spark interest among high school students in science, technology, engineering and math fields.”
7. Federal News Radio: Rocky start to 2014 as TSP returns trend negative. “Returns for nearly all of the funds in the Thrift Savings Plan trended downward in January following a rocky month on Wall Street.”

Before we finish up… a few items from the DorobekINSIDER water-cooler fodder… yes, we’re trying to help you make your water-cooler time better too…

• The New York Times: Obama Is Tackled by O’Reilly in Pre-Game Interview: Some of the hardest hits of Super Bowl Sunday came a couple of hours before kickoff. In keeping with his tradition of appearing on the network broadcasting football’s championship game, President Obama found himself confronting a full-scale blitz by Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. In the interview, conducted live before the game, Mr. Obama was grilled about the botched rollout of the health care law, his discredited assurances that anyone who liked their insurance could keep it, the attack on the American post in Benghazi, Libya, and the Internal Revenue Service scrutiny of conservative groups. His answers shed little if any new light on some of the most controversial moments of Mr. Obama’s presidency, but it was a feisty 10-minute encounter that exposed the different world views of Mr. Obama and some of his sharpest critics.
• Confessions of an Ex-TSA Agent – An ex-TSA agent confirms that everyone’s worst nightmares about airport screening are, in fact, true. Jason Edward Harrington, the author of a controversial, anonymous blog about the TSA, is shedding his cloak of anonymity in his new POLITICO Magazine contribution. http://politi.co/1hWqXfO
• Wall Street Journal column: Irving Wladawsksy-Berger: Why imagination and curiosity (and a little art education) matter more than ever: Learning and working in our fast-changing world requires us to go beyond today’s problems, methods and tools, Wladawsksy-Berger writes. The analytical approach, as practiced in classrooms and in management, falls short when it comes to nurturing an innovative outlook. “We need to keep looking for new problems to solve as well as for novel approaches to existing problems,” he writes. “And doing so effectively requires an open mind, curiosity and imagination.”