Does this look like your typical day as a local, state, or Federal worker? 31% of your work day is made up of purely ad-hoc, never happens the same way twice tasks 30% of your work revolves around consistent, defined goals but various ways to achieve those goals 20% of your work involves documented andRead… Read more »
Government In the Lab has a good post on the upcoming Open Government Partnership which is being led by the United States. The kickoff meeting is September 20th with the unveiling of the Open Government Declaration. I am hopeful that this will bring Open Government from being just about Open Data to a more sustainableRead… Read more »
I love the Plain Language Act. Especially the part concerning plain-language websites which gives me plenty of opportunities to advocate the merits of information architecture and user experience (IA and UX). But providing information is only part of what government agencies do. Agencies also provide services. Services such as providing Social Security to licensing vehiclesRead… Read more »
From an early age, I have never liked the observation that something is complex. It usually meant that person is just resigning themselves to never understanding the problem. I couldn’t stand this defeatist attitude and have spent most of my life trying to devise ways to tackle complex problems including the aptly-named “wicked problems.” EvenRead… Read more »
It was in my second year of being a Presidential Management Intern when I was feeling rather cocky after a string of successful projects. So, when I met with my boss for our weekly status meeting, I was casually leaning back in my chair just radiating gloat. That is when he leaned forward and said,Read… Read more »
The three keys to innovation are to seek out new ideas, test these ideas on a scale where failure is survivable, and constantly monitor these trials for feedback. This is according to Tim Hartford’s new book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure. Hartford argues that the world is too complex for top-down “big project”Read… Read more »
It is time to move from creating a more open government to sustaining open government. Yes, there is a lot more work to do in making agencies on all levels of government are releasing their data and becoming transparent. Governments have successfully picked the low-hanging fruit of opening up their datasets. It’s now time toRead… Read more »
Like many of you I spent my evenings over the last week watching the news networks as various experts debated the looming shutdown. I heard the various economic arguments around the budget battles and I was constantly struck by the thought that decisions concerning peoples’ lives and security were being decided by a 19th centuryRead… Read more »
You ever wonder about the first person who bought a fax machine? The first person to buy a cell phone? How about the first person who set up an email account? These early pioneers must have had some difficulty in demonstrating the benefits of these these technologies because of the very small base of users.Read… Read more »
The recent media frenzy over the latest social media offerings introduced at SXSW last week demonstrates that collaboration is one of the app themes for 2011. This isn’t the first time collaboration software has been the “next big thing’” I remember back in the early 90’s when computer-supported work applications were all the rage (rememberRead… Read more »