The Federal Times posted an article online yesterday about the emerging trend of ‘tightsizing’ in the federal government. Agencies are looking to reduce the office space of employees to accommodate more feds. The idea is that by fitting more workers into an already existing work space it prevents an agency form leasing additional real estateRead… Read more »
Finally, the Office of Management and Budget has released the 2011 Circular A-133 audit guidance document. As usual, new programs have been added, other programs have been deleted, and individual program descriptions have been updated. In addition, OMB has added guidance and references relating to Transparency Act reporting, and clarified reporting requirements and auditors’ responsibilitiesRead… Read more »
Talk of government departments as ‘brands’ makes many civil servants uneasy. If they wanted that sort of talk, they’d go to Hoxton, not Whitehall. Yet when the concept of, for example, the FCO as a brand comes under some threat, then there’s a different kind of uneasiness. That uneasiness includes me – earlier this week,Read… Read more »
The regular reader of these chunterings will have noticed a pattern. How you decipher that pattern is up to you. Where I see the ‘dissemination of relevant content through all available channels to established audiences across the digital sphere’, you might see ‘obsessive bandwagon jumping, ticking off social media trying to look trendy’. Either way,Read… Read more »
I’ve burbled on this point before, but more and more, the point of what the Foreign and Commonwealth Office tries and do in digital (or what we ought to be trying to do) is to concentrate not so much on creating a destination website, but to work on setting up the mechanics to deliver ourRead… Read more »
I wrote about some of my favorite around the office acronyms for ClearanceJobs.com – but I figure the folks in this community could probably teach me a few new ones! I’d love to hear your favorite around-the-office acronyms. Funny anecdotes also appreciated! Military acronyms – love ‘em or hate ‘em if you work in defenseRead… Read more »
One of the joys of sudden web trends is the speed at which the too-cool-for-school types start to affect disdain and boredom for something that’s been popular for all of a week or so.Take Quora.com– a US-based site which styles itself as ‘a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized byRead… Read more »
Digital diplomacy is a two-way street – once an organisation like the Foreign Office is publishing news, comment, and policy information on the internet , then it needs to learn how to listen and respond too.At ministerial level, this is a problem of opportunity and timetabling more than anything. Opportunities for participation on television andRead… Read more »
You’ll have noticed the drift towards freeing up the information of the UK’s Foreign Office for others to use – the feeds, the API, the social media, and so on. Getting our travel advice especially into the sites, widgets, pages, applications that others are using is hugely important. We have to take this stuff toRead… Read more »
Quite possibly, if left unchecked this may become the focal point of workplace complaints, grievances and charges! I’m talking about Bedbugs. Employers and their HR teams now have to worry about their responsibilities to maintain a bedbug-free workplace. While there are no regulatory provisions to provide a bedbug-free workplace, Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s statutoryRead… Read more »