I’m jazzed to announce “the new new govloop”…. We’ve been spending the last few months working behind on the scenes on a number of items designed to be make govloop more useful to you, the community. 1 – Homepage redesign – As you see, we’ve streamlined the home page to make it much cleaner andRead… Read more »
Who Are Your Peers? GovLoop is all about connecting the government community. Federal, state, local Govies. Public policy students/profs. Good contractors and good government non-profits. So I think of those in government as my peers. But I wonder what others do. Who do you think our your peers? Government folks in your agency? Gov’t typesRead… Read more »
I just finished reading an article called “Active lurkers – the hidden asset in online communities.” Here’s an excerpt: “Most communities have 90% of users who are lurkers – people who may consume things from the community, but who don’t contribute…While it is inevitable that larger communities will end up with 1% of their membersRead… Read more »
I asked the awesome opengovtracker.com team if there were any lessons learned from their experience building a cool from gov’t data. Things agencies and developers should be watching. 4 Lessons: 1 – Use platforms that have APIs – We used the Ideascale API (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface). Really the major lesson is for government to use platforms whichRead… Read more »
This will be my shortest blog post ever. Because it’s about Twitter. And you don’t have much space to say something important. So here’s a quick tip that I believe is the foundation for re-tweetification: Structure tweets in such a way that you leave at least 10-15 characters for an RT, HT or “via” plusRead… Read more »
“Bottom Line: No state in the nation is better at developing and sharing information than Washington.” – Governing Magazine, “Grading the States,” 2008 As government at every level is releasing raw datasets as part of the Open Government Initiative, one of the key questions being asked is, “So what do we do with all thisRead… Read more »
I’ve always been a fan of my name. To me it sounds cool. Stephen Anthony Ressler. Stephen A. Ressler. Steve Ressler. Crisp. Somewhat unique. Not too old-fashioned. Not too hipsterish. To me it’s like being from Ohio. My name is a good middle-ground. Gives a slightly positive general vibe but is somewhat neutral. And basedRead… Read more »
I used to say “If I” a lot… If I was the boss. If I had a million dollars. If I was the president. If I was the head coach of the team. As I get older, I keep on thinking it’s easy to criticize those with “If I” Now I’m focused more on gettingRead… Read more »
Yesterday, I spoke to Lisa Schlosser, EPA Director of Information Collection, on the recently epa.gov/open and their request for input in their open government plan What excites you most about Open Government? Having the opportunity to reach out to so many members of the environmental community of interest is extremely exciting – we need engagementRead… Read more »
A couple months ago, we launched a forum asking: “Should OpenGov Spark OpenGovLoop?”. We presented several reasons – to make it easier to find in search engines and enable more people to benefit from it – and offered several options along a continuum of being totally closed to wide open. I give much more detailRead… Read more »