GovLaunch: Government Gets Its First Fleet of Electric Cars

On Tuesday, the General Services Administration purchased the federal government’s first fleet of electric cars. The purchase coincides with the release of a new White House memo requiring all new federal vehicles to utilize alternative energy. The 116 new cars are a mix of Chevrolet Volts, Nissan Leafs and Think Cities and will be usedRead… Read more »

The digital engagement game

At the introduction to digital engagement workshop we ran this week, I debuted the digital engagement game. It’s a workshop exercise that’s an expansion of my version of David Wilcox‘s social media game, which in turn has been developed into the Social by Social game. The original game featured a pack of cards detailing variousRead… Read more »

A Good Day’s (Two Years’) Work at the DOE

$30 billion in financing for 28 projects that create or save 61,000 jobs. Those are the three most striking numbers reported by the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office recently. Of course, the numbers only tell one type of story. The ‘meat’ of this program is in what these projects will leave behind: the greenRead… Read more »

Is there a better way of doing milestone reviews?

Here are some of the issues with traditional milestone reviews (especially in Acquisitions) as I have experienced them in the past: They are very hard to schedule for in-person meetings Engineers and other involved parties rarely review the documents ahead of time Decision makers never review the documents, always relying on the engineers or involvedRead… Read more »

Research and Best Practices eNewsletter

Research NIST cloud computing guide (05/2011) – NIST’s Cloud Computing Synopsis and Recommendations provides cloud computing technology in plain terms for Information Technology (IT) decision makers interested in cloud services. The publication presents information on the relative opportunities and risks of cloud computing. http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/drafts/800-146/Draft-NIST-SP800-146.pdf Engaging the public in a wired world (05/16/2011) – The newRead… Read more »

Can 50 hackers save the world?

Hack for Change will bring together 50 engineers and designers for 24 hours to build applications to generate positive change. Change.org is sponsoring the June 18-19 hackathon in partnership with Mashable and Code for America. “The smartest people in the world are focused on problems that don’t really matter,” said Change.org founder Ben Rattray. “WhatRead… Read more »