OpenTrails Season Begins

2014 Code for America Fellow (and once and future Portland resident) Lyzi Diamond hikes with the Code for Portland Brigade. On June 1st, in over one hundred different cities across the United States, hackers and designers stood side by side with policy makers and advocates, showing off apps and projects they worked together to hatchRead… Read more »

A Call to Action: Supporting the Collaborative Governance Movement

There is an incredible movement happening right now in civic engagement. Digital platforms are transforming the relationship between citizens and their governments. To borrow an analogy from former Minneapolis mayor, R. T. Rybak, digital technology is shifting the role of government in citizens’ lives from a one-way broadcast experience to that of government as aRead… Read more »

10 Myths About Change Management

As an Organizational Development (OD) and Change Management practitioner, I often find myself having conversations with leaders where I need to address change management myths. Many leadership concerns regarding change management are common issues, though, many are perpetuated by myths. So what are some of the biggest myths about change management? Change is easy –Read… Read more »

Does Transparency Lead to Legitimacy and Trust?

Does greater transparency in government translate into greater citizen legitimacy and trust for government action? It depends, concludes a new study by a Swedish scholar. The Open Government movement has captured the imagination of many around the world as a way of increasing transparency, participation, and accountability. In the US, many of the federal, state,Read… Read more »

Social Media Metrics for Government: A New Manager’s Handbook

One of the most important questions to ask during a job interview or when preparing for an annual review is: “What constitutes success” or “what does success look like.” For private sector organizations, there are often very easily quantifiable metrics: number and size of sales, or year-to-year growth. Even in the nonprofit sector, there canRead… Read more »

It’s Nice to See Government Agencies Share With Each Other

One of the most frustrating and, I think, silliest things I found when working in Australian government agencies was how almost every department, agency and statutory body developed almost all of its own policies, procedures, software and tools. There was often ‘undercover’ sharing – where people in agencies would ask their colleagues in others forRead… Read more »

Let’s Respectfully Redesign Government

Democracy is a design problem. –Dana Chisnell On May 27th I received an absentee ballot in the mail, my first as a California voter. As excited as I was to perform my civic duty, I had a busy week traveling to Long Beach to meet with our fellowship project stakeholders. Sunday afternoon I finally satRead… Read more »

Between Disruption and Incrementalism

This post originally appeared on cpsrenewal.ca. In Tragedy in the Commons, Alison Loat and Michael MacMillan quote columnist Andrew Coyne: “People often ask: how can we reform politics? And the answer is: we can’t. There are very few institutional changes that would do any good, and whatever would has no chance of being enacted.” I’dRead… Read more »