You can’t learn all there is to know about social media through slides, however for many the reliability of presenting off a loaded deck is too comfortable. Most can’t step away and leave it behind. I recently had the opportunity to join a group of Federal social media experts who dared to take hundreds of participants through the wilds of the the most popular social media tools in action. And [...]
Recently, the White House launched another in a series of public participation activities around the US National Action Plan for Open Government. This time, they’re focusing on developing best practices and metrics for public participation. This is an intriguing question, and there is certainly no shortage of expertise and research around the subject. While the definition of open government, embodied in the Open Government Directive, is focused on transparency, participation, [...]
Innovative Public Engagement Helped Fuel EPA GreenApps Success It’s not every day you get to help an agency solve a unique challenge that reaches fully across the strategic engagement spectrum, and yet the opportunity arose recently to support the Environmental Protection Agency’s Apps for the Environment competition. Six months later Apps for the Environment, EPA’s first mobile app competition, is one of the most popular challenges ever hosted on Challenge.gov [...]
If digital channels – web, social media, mobile, apps – are really essential, high-priority tools for government, then developing strategy for how to use them effectively needs to be the assigned duty.
Innovators—including government innovators—should be paying attention to prizes because they work, because they add another tool to their innovation tool belt, and because they are already being used by a typical late adopter—the government. I’ve been a student of prizes and competitions in government for several years now—there is always something to learn: a new success story, an understanding of new enabling legislation, a new prize structure you’ve never seen [...]
Policy and process are essential for opening up compliance, enforcement data Aneesh Chopra and Cass Sunstein posed three questions last month intended to generate ideas on how to more effectively manage public resources and increase corporate accountability. One question asked for existing tools that can help government create a platform to make compliance and enforcement data available and searchable online, and to generate and share this information across the Government [...]
USFS Program Selected by Presidents Council on Environmental Quality as a Pilot Program to Help Modernize and Reinvigorate NEPA The President’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) announced August 31st that the Electronic Management of NEPA (eMNEPA) program at the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) has been selected for the NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) Pilot Program, an initiative launched in March of this year to identify and deploy innovative approaches to [...]
This is the second post in a four-part series that discusses strategies and tactics for overcoming resistance to organizational change in the public sector. The third installment will be posted in the coming weeks. Presented below is an analysis of initiative success criteria and metrics; specifically, how these success metrics and criteria can be a useful tool for overcoming organizational resistance to change. Read the first installment here: Gauging, Steering [...]
The White House Recently asked citizens to post suggestions on how to improve regulations.gov, data.gov, and the Federal web strategy. This is part two of a multi-part series on how to and more importantly, why we should consider changing the way these, (potentially) game-changing efforts could be improved. Here, we present some comments for regulations.gov and some suggestions on how changes could help improve the federal rulemaking process. Regulations.gov is [...]
On August 8, Aneesh Chopra and Cass Sunstein called upon the public to share their ideas for the United States Open Government National Plan. In their call to action, they asked three key questions: How can regulations.gov, one of the primary mechanisms for government transparency and public participation, be made more useful to the public rulemaking process? OMB is beginning the process of reviewing and potentially updating its Federal Web [...]
