So, the ACT Government is finally making moves to open up and participate with its community and enacting some open government programs. We’ve already had the first Virtual Community Cabinet, which seemed to go okay (though I remain doubtful that Twitter is the right venue for this kind of thing). And this week, the ChiefRead… Read more »
Cities and states are increasingly turning to the internet to allow citizens to participate in government. While it’s often easier for people to send in a comment online rather than attend a public meeting, local governments are still trying to figure out the best way to engage in crowdsourcing. According to a recent article inRead… Read more »
Yesterday I posted David Shumaker’s article: The Value Proposition of Embedded Librarianship. Today, I want to continue on that theme with this article by Mary Talley, co-author of the SLA Funded Research Project: Models of Embedded Librarianship, 2009 for this article: Rethinking Value: How Embedded Roles Makes Us Valuable. This article was originally published inRead… Read more »
By Abigail Omojola, 2011 Baton Rouge Fellow Unlike Alexander Aldrich, the Executive Director of the Vermont Arts Council, I have not been following the debate which resulted in Kansas becoming the first state to eliminate state appropriations for arts programs. Nonetheless, I am angry. I am angry that for some reason you truly believe thatRead… Read more »
by Dani Fitts, San Francisco ’11 As I approach the final stretch of this year-long Fellowship, I have been confronted with the reality of the public sector job market. Although I will spend the next two to three years sequestered away in the academic world, I fear that when I am re-released into the realRead… Read more »
by Megan Degeneffe, SF2011 Brooke Budner and Caitlyn Galloway are the sort of people who are important to making government work. Brooke and Caitlyn run Little City Gardens, a for-profit experiment to find out if growing food in the city can be profitable. The problem came when Little City Gardens attempted to expand and discoveredRead… Read more »
This post is part 1 of a 3-part series by recently-graduated SF2011 Fellow Marielle Earwood, reflecting on her Fellowship year. The best thing about being a Fellow…. is that you feel like you are VIP wherever you go. During the first three weeks of my Fellowship year, we went all around the city and wereRead… Read more »
by Whitney Ramos, SF2011 When I came across an article about the first University of San Francisco McCarthy Center Bay Area Survey, I immediately found the full report on the USF website. The trigger for my interest was a discussion of how much trust Bay Area residents have for the people who run their cities.Read… Read more »
In recent weeks, the main stream media has questioned whether the Obama administration’s Open Government initiative has lost its steam. But is it really dead? For example, Washington Post columnist Vivek Wadhwa’s article “The Death of Open Government” followed the resignation announcement of the federal government’s chief information officer – and Open Government champion —Read… Read more »
With so much focus these days on optimizing Service Levels to match realistic budgets, here is a series of cautionary tales of regulation run amok. Let’s think about the consequences of over-regulation, not only on expenditures, but also on culture and community values. This excerpt from Mark Steyn’s book on bureaucracy is a “must read”Read… Read more »