Citizen participation

Why?  Because prizes are effective.  Under the right circumstances, they can be more effective than traditional investments in research and development.

Lowery says: “After falling out of favor for decades, such high-publicity, fat-reward contest came into vogue again in the aughts in the wake of the 1996 Ansari X Prize for advances in commercial spaceflight” which Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne won in 2004.

We were here for the reawakening of the Administrative Conference of the U.S. and it felt like a scene out of “National Treasure.”  In fact, I keep looking around for Nicholas Cage.  Here I was, at a reception in the Great Hall of the National Archives, able to look at the originals of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights without standing in a line and having to continually shuffle forward under the mutterings of “please keep moving” by impatient guards.

In the 1990s, the Clinton-Gore Reinventing Government effort thought the answer was “yes.”  President Clinton issued a customer service executive order in 1993 followed up in 1995 with a memo to institutionalize the initiative.

The Federal Records Act of 1950 creates a framework to manage agency records.  It puts the National Archives and Records Administration in charge of oversight of the system and NARA determines the historical value of federal records and operates Federal Records Centers around the country.

A new IBM Center report, Strategies for Supporting Front Line Collaboration: Lessons from Stewardship Contracting, by the University of Oregon’s Cassandra Moseley, describes how the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S.

The Obama Administration announced today a scorecard of the quality of the plans submitted earlier this month by 29 major agencies. Using a checklist of 30 criteria, the scorecards show all agencies rating either a “yellow” or a “green” on their scorecards. These plans are being referred to as “version 1.0.”

Earlier this week, the Pew Center’s survey on citizen trust in government shows trust in government has plummeted to record lows. As if to support these findings, there were “gun rallies” in support of Second Amendment rights a few days ago. And last week, there was a Tea Party rally demanding a smaller government.

Federal agencies recently released their Open Government Plans on how they will actively engage citizens in agency decision-making efforts.  None, that I’ve seen in what I’ve read so far, are taking advantage of a growing trend to use geographic information systems (GIS) to increase citizen engagement.