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GovLoop – A Year in Review, A Look Ahead

GovLoop – Year in Review, A Look Ahead

I love the end of the year as it’s a great time to reflect on the year that has been and plan for the year ahead.

2011 Review
2011 was an awesome year here in the Govloop community.

This last week, as a community, we’ve done a number of end of year lists (from Top 5 blog posts, members, etc) – and looking at the lists I’m amazed at the awesome conversations and content that occur every day on GovLoop from amazing people across all disciplines (HR to Tech to Acquisition), all levels of government (federal to state to local and international) and all locations (DC to Alaska to New Zealand).

Our impact continues to grow. Our community of government innovators continues to grow with an important milestone of over 50,000 members reached in November which we celebrated with food trucks to online scavenger hunts. On important topics from USAJOBS redesign to government shutdown to future of civic apps, GovLoop became the go-to hub for conversations on the topic and our ideas were used by senior leaders on how to make better decisions. Further, the idea of GovLoop continues to spread globally as a community we’ve been featured in reports from the OECD to World Economic Forumand books such as NY Times-bestsellers Macrowikinomics & Wikibrands as a highlight of government innovation and presented the story from France to Germany.

Our annual Next Generation of Government Summit (co-hosted with Young Government Leaders) brought together over 500 government innovators from across the U.S. to help solve problems like acquisition innovation and hear from experts from the White House to Zappos.

In 2011, we launched a number of new concepts based on feedback from the community. We expanded our online training series where we provide real knowledge training on topics from social media to knowledge management each month with hundreds of attendees from across the world attending. We took the community’s feedback of the need for more packaged knowledge products and launched GovLoop guides and infographs synthesizing the best of GovLoop conversations on topics from customer service, Twitter, PMF, among others.

Further, we hopped on the open data movement by launching three new products built on open data – from our per diem calculator to our jobs.govloop.com where we curate weekly the top 10 jobs per category from USAJOBS and provide social context from LinkedIn related contacts at the job and Glassdoor user reviews. We also launched a vendor directory, where we are building the Yelp/Amazon.com to help program managers and contract specialists get information to help their buying decisions. Finally, we have started curating the top news in government with our insights.govloop.com and launched an awesome weekly podcast with the legendary Chris Dorobek (check itout).

In all these activities, we have to thank our great 2011 partners – Adobe, Aetna, Century Link, Deloitte, ESRI, FCG, Geico, Google, HP, IBM, Management Concepts, Microsoft, RightNow , SAP– for providing the support to grow and engage this amazing community. They’ve helped us bring what I think is the future of advertising – not pop-up banner ads or blinking banners- but true connection and engagement adding value and knowledge to the community.

So what does 2012 bring?

I’m excited for 2012 as we focus deeper on being the knowledge network for government.

In our conversations and surveys with members, we’ve been hearing a need for more focus (with over 1,000 groups and 20,000 blogs and discussions it can be hard to find what you want) and more modern, clean design. So in early January, we’ll be launching a new home page redesign with a focused structure on seven key sub-communities. The goal with the design is really to provide focused attention to the major topical areas on GovLoop and ensure with our expert facilitators that there is consistent conversations and information on the top topics that GovLoop members care about.

Look in early Q1 for updates to our mobile products as well as new tools like our per diem calculator. Further, we’ll continue to build upon the successes of last year in terms of great regular online trainings, guides, infographs while building upon our beta products around jobs, directory, and podcast.

Help us make GovLoop better – This is really about you – the community. What do you want us to see from us as a community in 2012? What would make GovLoop more useful to you in helping you do your job every day?

Every day I’m truly blessed that I get to do what I love with an awesome team and an awesome community and spend my day trying to connect government to improve government.

It’s been amazing to see how far as a community we’ve come from an idea to over 50,000 members across the globe and we are only at the beginning. In 2012, let’s continue to create the next generation of government that we all want to see….

To more awesomeness,

Steve

P.S. We are always looking for community leaders who want to help participate in this vision. Interested in helping out – send me a note at [email protected]

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GovLoop

Hey Robert – That’s one of our goals next year and doing with our redesign and focus on sub-communities. What I’ve heard from a number of people it can be so overwhelming that they don’t know where to dive in and they are shy. So focusing more and making clearer calls to action.

Plus just generally what we’ve found as well is that lots of folks are lurkers and that’s perfectly fine. They come to listen & learn and want other experiences such as our online trainings where they ask more questions & our online mentors program where they ask more ?s since 1 on 1

Ray Lewis

I think a couple of “big picture” themes for 2012 will be the public’s understanding of how politics impact government, and whether innovation and redesign can show a measurable impact on how selected priorities are implemented. I’m glad to have found GovLoop in 2011 and best wishes for next year; connecting people, best practices and resources is awesome!

Sue Webster

Thanks for giving us this networking tool. I believe it may be up to many of us to get in here and better use what is available to us. I know I resolve to make better use of the the groups and networks available through GovLoop this coming year!

GovLoop

7 sub-communities will be acquisition, communication, project management, technology, leadership, careers, and human resources.

Redesign will focus on couple key themes – #1 – Simplify – streamlining the user experience so less clutter on each page and more intuitive #2 – Sub-communities -provide key go to hubs on GovLoop for day to day on key themes – so acquisition people know where to go outside of the home page for example