Finally a Rap About an Aging Water System

Andy Hohensee, 6th grader at Rosement Ridge Middle School and future Public Works director, includes the aging West Linn water system into what is sure to be the hit of the summer (on the Billboard chart for songs about municipal services.) He performed this breakout tune before City officials at a “Water Summit” this week.Read… Read more »

Stick-to-itiveness

The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are: Hard work, Stick-to-itiveness, and Common sense.1 What was I thinking creating that mission for myself and adopting the title Strategic Change Agent?2 It’s rough in the arena; the crowd cheers for your failure – to see your body marred and bloody. I’m thankful I work inRead… Read more »

GigaOm Webinar: Countering targeted attacks with active defense strategies

By Bob Gourley Countering targeted attacks with active defense strategies Firewalls block basic attacks on your network, antivirus scanners filter known offenders, and no enterprise should operate without them. Still, focused attackers and zero-day exploits make short work of entrenched perimeter defenses, and every business should expect to be breached. To cope with these attacks,Read… Read more »

How will you avoid the FDCCI Squeeze?

More than halfway to the 2015 FDCCI deadline, agencies are facing major consolidation challenges – uncertainty about their ability to meet the deadline, finding budget for consolidation, and shutting down or consolidating applications. Without mission owner support, consolidation stalls and agencies miss out on opportunities to save money, boost efficiencies, and free up dollars thatRead… Read more »

Aphorism 85

A stupid decision that works out well becomes a brilliant decision in hindsight. Daniel Kahneman, quoted by David McRaney Original post

The Requirements & Solutions of the Hadoop Data Reservoir

By Bob Gourley This event should be of interest to any enterprise that uses Hadoop and wants to empower analysts directly with new analytical power over their Hadoop clusters. Date: Tuesday, June 18, 2013 Time: 11am Eastern; 8am Pacific Duration: 1 Hour The success of Hadoop has led many enterprises to the same common vision:Read… Read more »

Deep De-Bureaucratization Case

Every single one of us who is a government employee feels the pain of government bureaucracy! The deep disconnects that drive us crazy. How can we reconnect the programs and technology and people and politics, etc? How can we anticipate and influence the growth in people and our organizations’ capabilities? These are the questions thatRead… Read more »

GovCamp 2013 — Where and how does government innovation happen?

At GovCamp Australia 2013 this week, there were two identifiable two groups of people who presented and talked about the topics of inspiring government innovation, empowering people and liberating capability. There were the service designers who spoke about the specifics of design and presented case studies, and the managers, public servants and academics who talkedRead… Read more »

Shaking Up City Hall!

Bill Schrier served for 30 years as an employee for the city of Seattle. For the past ten years until his recent retirement Mr. Schrier served as the Chief Technology Officer for Seattle. As part of a Seattle newspaper series, Schrier was asked if he were Mayor of Seattle, what three actions would he takeRead… Read more »

#debrief: NDoCH

More than 11,000 individuals were engaged in National Day of Civic Hacking through 95 events held in 83 cities. The stories are still coming in but we wanted to debrief and highlight some great stories that happened across the Code for America network last weekend. 34 of the 95 NDoCH events were organized by CodeRead… Read more »