Participatory Budgeting: Ten Actions to Engage Citizens via Social Media

It has since spread to 1,000 other cities worldwide and is gaining interest in U.S. cities as well.

Dr. Gordon’s report offers an overview of the state of participatory budgeting, and the potential value of integrating the use of social media into the participatory process design. Her report details three case studies of U.S. communities that have undertaken participatory budgeting initiatives.  While these cases are relatively small in scope, they provide insights into what potential users need to consider if they wanted to develop their own initiatives.

Call for Research Report Proposals

Since the creation of the IBM Center for The Business of Government over 16 years ago, it has been our goal to help public sector leaders and managers address real-world problems by sponsoring independent, third-party research from top minds in academe and the nonprofit sector. We aim to produce research and analysis that helps government leaders respond more effectively to their mission and management challenges.

Strategies to Manage Well Given Scarce Resources

The Center has published a variety of reports and related materials that provide ways for government to succeed in the face of constraints. Accordingly, we have brought key findings on this topic together in this compilation, found in the upper left-hand portion of the page, or as individual articles:

Spring 2014 Edition

Best Practices for Succession Planning in Federal Government STEMM Positions

In fact, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology estimates that, given present trends, there will be one million fewer STEMM graduates over the next decade than the nation is expected to need.

Adapting the Incident Command Model for Knowledge-Based Crises: The Case of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The federal government has developed increasingly sophisticated approaches to addressing emergencies and crises. One successful management model is the incident command system (ICS), which was initially developed in the 1970s as a command-and-control approach for fighting forest fires, but has since been adapted to other policy domains. The Department of Homeland Security adopted the ICS model—which it renamed the National Incident Management System (NIMS)—and required its use at all levels of government in emergency and crisis situations.

The Persistence of Innovation in Government: A Guide for Innovative Public Servants

With this report, Professor Borins continues two decades of research analyzing winners of and applicants to the Harvard University Kennedy School’s Innovations in American Government Awards. This report presents a comparison of the applications received by the program in the 1990s (1990 to 1994) with those received in 2010.

Managing Budgets During Fiscal Stress: Lessons for Local Government Officials

Like many local governments across the nation, cities and counties in California were impacted heavily by recent economic problems. This report examines what happened to local California government revenues during this period, which services have been adjusted, how employee benefits have been treated, and what innovations have been introduced.

Pages