By Joseph Semsar, Associate Consultant Five months ago, Associate Consultant Sam Williford and I began working on a study, funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, to identify truly effective employer-driven job training programs. Yesterday, June 18th — after consulting over 450 reports, articles, and case studies, interviewing over 20 workforce development experts, and, lastly,Read… Read more »
The greatest source of potential use cases for technology is the user community. This is a great reason to attend events where customers are at the center of focus. This was what last month’s Splunk Live DC was like. Splunk is a very user-focused capability and when you create a venue where users can exchangeRead… Read more »
NOT certain I could say it any better myself…. From the Chris Hoff”s blog The “Cloud Security, Meh!” crowd are an interesting bunch. They don’t seem to like change much. To be fair, they’re not incentivized to. However, while difficult, change is good…it just takes a lot to understand that some times. It occurs toRead… Read more »
It may seem hard to believe, but the Federal Fiscal Year 2013 is a mere 3 months away. Lots will happen between now and October 1, but it’s important that government employees in all different functional areas (not just budget officials) begin to think about what they want to accomplish in FY14 / FY15. AskRead… Read more »
Last week we launched official Oakland Brigade: OpenOakland. If you’re new to Code for America then you’ve been missing out. If you know them, you may not yet know about the Brigade. Open:Oakland is the start of a new Brigade to create and redeploy civic innovations, liberate public data, spur innovation within government, and bringRead… Read more »
The Public Conversations Project — a founding member of NCDD — has produced a must-see 6-minute video overviewing their work over the past 20 years, with a particular emphasis on their groundbreaking pro-life / pro-choice dialogue in Boston. Also be sure to check out NCDD’s video playlists on YouTube, where we’ve been keeping track ofRead… Read more »
One of the core ideas behind almost everything we do at Code for America is this – governments that face common challenges are uniquely positioned to collaborate and share both ideas and solutions. Nowhere is this potential for collaboration more immediate and more valuable than in the way governments make use of technology. Governments areRead… Read more »
Here is today’s federal cybersecurity and information technology news: The Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Science and Engineering Laboratories has found widespread software flaws in medical devices which could cause patient harm or death. More here. The Transportation Security Administration is looking for software to monitor employee online activity including emails and keystrokes forRead… Read more »
Summer months bring with them the start of vacation season, which means lots of people will be out of the office. Here’s one thing you can do right now to improve service quality. Update out of office messages on the phone and set up the auto-reply on email. It continues to surprise me how oftenRead… Read more »
It rained all the day of my neighbourhood garage sale, so we decided to hold over our sale a couple of weeks until this past Saturday. It was a beautiful day and my old man hauled a truckload of stuff from his place in the east end to my place in the west end andRead… Read more »