As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been fascinated with what came before the “final result”. For instance, I was much more interested in HOW and WHY my toys worked than the fact that they did work. Over the years, my curious nature led to many a toy, including sophisticated toys, real automobiles,Read… Read more »
Our staff are incredibly grateful for the warm welcome extended by the cities, state, and territory partners to the 2014 Fellows. For the month of February they were off living in and learning about their partner cities and communities. (We’re glad they’re back.) Those familiar with our Fellowship program know that, in order to developRead… Read more »
This is a topic quite close to my heart at present, as I’m running a Kickstarter crowdfunding project myself – at www.kickstarter.com/projects/socialmediaplanner/social-media-planner (please check it out!) It’s teaching me a great deal about the challenges involved, and I’ll be reporting back on this at the end of the process. A broader question is whether governmentsRead… Read more »
Have you watched somewhat helplessly these past few months as your Facebook interactions dropped rapidly? Has the “reach” of your posts dipped as low as you’ve ever seen it, no matter how great your content is? It’s not your fault. It’s Facebook’s fault. And they’re doing it on purpose. Here are just a few recentRead… Read more »
During the UK riots in 2011, the UK Prime Minister suggested shutting down social networks in future riots to prevent information sharing amongst rioters. Now Turkey has blocked access to Twitter, stating the service was ‘biased’ and did nothing to stop the ‘character assassination’ of politicians in the current ruling party accused of bribery. LikeRead… Read more »
When innovating in government, the technology’s the easy part. Innovative efforts often do one of two things: They take long-established technology from the private sector and inject it into an agency, or They reimagine long-assumed processes from the citizen’s perspective. The ultimate meta yak shave If you want to innovate government, 90-day, 120-day, or six-monthRead… Read more »
Socrata has released an interesting benchmark study on open government data, which looks at the state of open data from the perspectives of citizens, developers and government. It is interesting to compare which data government stakeholders consider important to publish, compared to what citizens feel is important. Looking at Very Important from the tables (below)Read… Read more »
We saw an intriguing article last month over at the PewResearch Internet Project that we thought might interest some of our social media- and tech-oriented members. Pew has compiled some very impressive amounts of data on the patterns that we can find in political conversation on Twitter that may hold insights for us as practitioners.Read… Read more »
Is the crowdfunding of public projects really all that new? As a Co-founder of Citizinvestor – a crowdfunding and civic engagement platform for local government projects – my team would love to take credit for this “new” form of civic engagement; but the truth is that citizens have been crowdfunding public projects since the StatueRead… Read more »
Today, I was fortunate to attend the GovDelivery annual conference “The Power of Message.” There were a ton of great speakers from the author Paul Smith on his book Lead with a Story to panelists from DHS, SBA, and Education. Here’s nine lessons and tips I learned: 1) “Key success for government communication – BeRead… Read more »