Blog
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Sixteen years ago in the heyday of reinventing government, if the White House wanted good ideas, it had to go look for them. The reinvention team had a team of 250 career civil servants and a network of teams in each agency that did the looking. But...
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
There’s a great lead article by Elise Castelli in this week’s Federal Times, “Feds to Empower ‘Citizen IGs’ to Watch Stimulus Spending.” This is a real experiment in the ultimate use of crowdsourcing – providing the data on spending via recovery.gov...
Friday, September 18, 2009
One of the things I learned working on the Reinventing Government initiative in the 1990s for Vice President Gore was that civil servants do some pretty amazing things. And they get little recognition for it. But now it's time to make government cool...
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Optimists believe that two data points constitute a trend. So here’s a trend. Ask employees why things don’t work and how to fix them! TSA Idea Factory. A couple years ago, the Transportation Security Administration asked its employees how to make...
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
For years, democracy advocates have promoted the notion of engaging citizens in their government. There are different ways of doing this (public hearings, debates, dialogue panels, etc), and at different points in the policy cycle (proposing, debating,..
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Increasing participation in government by citizens is a key element of President Obama’s Transparency and Open Government initiative. He signed a directive his first full day in office to create guidance for agencies on how they should go about implement
Friday, September 11, 2009
The media, and some members of Congress, continue to focus on President Obama’s use of “czars.” An article today by the Wall Street Journal’s Neil King examines how this dust-up highlights the ongoing challenge of how government is increasingly facing...
Monday, September 7, 2009
Sixteen years ago today Vice President Gore presented the first report of the National Performance Review to President Clinton in a ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House. At the time, I was on the NPR staff and thought that the six-month review..
Friday, September 4, 2009
The Obama Administration’s data.gov website now has 110,000 government data sets that you can access and download. So what do you do with this stuff? Well, Sunlight Labs, an open government advocacy group, is sponsoring a contest encouraging citizens...
Thursday, September 3, 2009
The Washington Post reports that the Partnership for Public Service released a study this morning describing the hiring needs of the federal government. The study, "Where the Jobs Are 2009: Mission Critical Opportunities for America," says that the...