Tune in to hear from Dr Jennifer Robinson from the Utah University’s Center for Public Policy and Administration and Rich Olsen from Utah Interactive talk about the findings from the report, and the importance of  measuring the impact of online service delivery.

When we go to agencies, it’s really a great story to be able to say “We know times are tough, we know budgets are down, we know things are getting slashed – and it might sound a little counter-intuitive but maybe you should invest in an online service.”  The fact of the matter is, it saves money and in the long run it saves a lot of money.

About Dr. Jennifer Robinson

Jennifer Robinson serves as the Director for the Center for Public Policy & Administration at The University of Utah.  With a solid commitment to both scholarship and practice, Dr. Robinson works to ensure that research contributes to sound policy making, implementation, and administration.

Dr. Robinson is held in high regard in both the business and government communities for her work as well.  She is a member of the Salt Lake Chamber’s Capitol Club, the Utah League of Cities and Towns’ Policy Advisory Board, and the University of Utah’s Veterans Day Committee.  In the past several years, Dr. Robinson has done extensive research on elections, political participation, and governance. Dr. Robinson’s current projects include a number of research projects for local and state governments, co-editing a book with Dr. Patton on policies in the western United States, and developing a book on American Indian political behavior based upon the research completed for her dissertation.

About Rich Olsen

Rich Olsen is the General Manager of Utah Interactive, a subsidiary of NIC., the leading provider of e-government services in the USA.  He has more than 13 years of experience leading a wide-range of online service deployments on behalf of public sector entities. In his current role, Mr. Olsen leads NIC’s management of Utah.gov, including the ongoing development of Web 2.0, e-commerce and other digital solutions delivered by the State through Utah.gov.

Based in Salt Lake City, Mr. Olsen leads NIC’s team of software engineers, designers, project managers and marketing executives working solely on Internet initiatives that bring government closer to citizens. During his tenure in Utah, Utah.gov has placed first in the Center for Digital Government’s “Best of the Web” rankings, which honor outstanding government portals and Web sites based on their innovations, functionality and efficiencies, in both 2007 and 2009.

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Episode links and resources

• Utah.gov
• University of Utah’s Center for Public Policy and Administration
• Report on Financial Benefits of Online e-Government Services in Utah (pdf)
• Blog post from Utah CIO Dave Fletcher on the report: The efficiency of E-Government
• Utah Interactive

60-second snapshots

On why measuring online service delivery is important:

On lessons learned building Utah.gov:

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Jake Dunagan, IFTF’s Research Director talks about the Connected Citizens program, and why this is an important theme to explore.

This idea of civic technologies and Government 2.0 and new models of citizen engagement using networked technologies filters through a lot of the work we’ve done at the Institute, because it’s such an important thing that’s happening – this moment of change when a new level of citizen and government relations is happening.

Given the range of ways that citizens can now participate to shape the public sphere – hackathons, city camps, policy camps, etc – Jake sees gamification as being part of this “ecology of invention” and that the idea of using a game-based approach is becoming less of an inhibitor for governments.

I think that minds are changing on that – I think the word ‘game’ doesn’t scare as many people as it once did… game is really just a proxy word for engagement.

About Jake Dunagan

Jake Dunagan is the Research Director for the Institute For the Future, with a particular focus on the accelerating transformations of individuals, culture, and governance. In his research, Jake explores how societies are adapting to the Neurocentric age, a time of unprecedented ability to view and modify the mind. Recently, he has written and lectured on comprehensive cognitive design, judicial foresight, kids’ technologies, neuroscience and the ocean, alternative energy futures, social media, and the future of work.

Jake also designs artifacts, games, immersive experiences of future worlds, and produces guerilla public engagement projects that inject the future into the mental ecology of the present.

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Episode links and resources

• Institute For The Future
• Connected Citizens game

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Damian Thorman, National Program Director, shares some insights from the KF Tech for Engagement initiative so far, and highlights some of the key focus areas for collaboration in the future.

In the beginning…there was a sense of experimenting – throw anything out there and see what sticks.  I think today we’re facing a different question.  We’ve got a lot of tools…the question today is how do you take these tools and get them adopted, and how do we articulate the value?

About Damian Thorman

Damian Thorman joined Knight Foundation in 2007 as National Program Director. The National Program supports innovative ideas and leadership with the potential to drive transformative change nationally and in Knight’s resident communities. He helps develop new grant opportunities at a national level that target systemic change within the framework of informed, engaged communities.

Thorman most recently served as assistant prosecuting attorney of the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office in Kansas City, Mo. He founded and ran the Thorman Strategy Group, a consulting practice that assisted foundations, nonprofits and for-profit organizations from 2002 to 2005. He served as adjunct political science professor at Avila College in Kansas City, Mo. Thorman was the director of public affairs and policy at the Ewing Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City from 1994 to 2002. In Washington, D.C., he served as assistant director at the American Academy of Pediatrics, professional staff member of the House Education and Labor Committee, and congressional aide to then-U.S. Rep. Bill Richardson. He also served a brief stint as a reporter for the National Catholic Reporter in Los Angeles.

He has a law degree from the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a MBA from Rockhurst University.

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Episode links and resources

• Knight Foundation
• Tech for Engagement initiative
• Tech for Engagement summit
• Report: Digital Citizenship: Exploring the Field of Tech for Engagement
• Technology for Engagement Manifesto
• Code for America
• Change by us

Accelerating Democracy: Tech for Engagement from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

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David Ferriero is the 10^th Archivist of the United States and Head of the National Archives and Record Administration, including the Presidential Libraries.  The collection includes some 12 billion pages and 40 million photos and now holds all Federal Government tweets.  We explore the linkages between open government and record-keeping public data as well as how social media is challenging the notions of what defines a ‘record’.

Our mantra has been from the very beginning that you can’t have open government without good records management.

This interview comes a day after the opening of the National Archive’s first Office of Innovation.  The Archivist – or “Collector-in-Chief” – discusses large-scale public record-keeping in the digital era and offers advice for smaller libraries and public collections.  Mr Ferriero also declares his well-known enthusiasm for using social online channels to push archived content and digital assets to ‘where the people are’, including his Wikipedian-in-residence initiative.

About David Ferriero

David S Ferriero is a librarian, library administrator, and the 10th Archivist of the United States. He was Director of the New York Public Library; and before that, he was the University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs at Duke University. Prior to his Duke position, he worked for 31 years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology library. Ferriero is the first librarian to serve as Archivist of the United States.

National Archives and Records Administration

On July 28, 2009, President Obama nominated David Ferreiro to be 10th Archivist of the United States. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on November 6, 2009; and he was sworn in to his new office on November 13, 2009.

Ferriero used the public occasion to express his view that the National Archives is at a “defining moment with regard to our existing electronic records, social media communications, and emerging technologies being used throughout government offices.” He also noted “issues of collection security, the future of the Presidential Library system, backlogs in processing, staff job satisfaction, stakeholder relationships, preservation and storage needs.”

President Obama appointed Ferriero to simultaneously head the new National Declassification Center, which “has been given four years to go through 400 million pages of federal documents that remain top secret. They date to World War I.”

Other career highlights:

• MIT Libraries: Ferriero was Associate Director of Public Services at MIT Libraries. His MIT library career spanned 31 years.
• Duke University Library: Ferriero was the Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs at Duke University from 1996 through 2004. Ferriero was the first Duke university librarian to address the members of the university’s Board of Trustees in person. He was actively involved in the evolution of North Carolina’s Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN).
• New York Public Library: Ferriero was the Andrew W. Mellon Director and Chief Executive of the Research Libraries at the New York Public Library (NYPL) from 2004. In 2007 his role expanded with additional responsibilities as director of New York Public Library’s (NYPL) Branch Libraries. He was responsible for the management and operations of NYPL’s Research Libraries since 2005 and the Branch Libraries since 2007. He presided over a major restructuring, which was accompanied by elimination of some positions and the creation of new ones.
• Cataloging: Ferriero was the NYPL’s Partner Representative in OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), which with its member libraries co-operatively produces and maintains WorldCat—the OCLC Online Union Catalog. During Ferriero’s tenure, the library stopped using the unique “Billings classification system” for its reference books in the Rose Reading Room (main reading room).
• Google digitization partnership: The NYPL joined the Google Books Library Project during Ferriero’s tenure. Google and major international libraries have agreed to making collections of public domain books available for scanning to be offered to the public online, without charge.
• Relationship with Wikipedia: As part of his tenure at the National Archives, Ferriero has taken an active interest in working with Wikipedia, of which he has called himself “a huge fan”. When questioned about the National Archives’s engagement with Wikipedia, his response was “The Archives is involved with Wikipedia because that’s where the people are.” Under Ferriero’s aegis, the National Archives has worked with the Wikimedia Foundation since 2009, having had a Wikipedian in Residence as well as uploaded thousands of images to Wikimedia Commons. He has quoted a blogger in saying: “If Wikipedia is good enough for the Archivist of the United States, maybe it should be good enough for you.”

Mr Ferriero is a Co-Chair and speaker at the  ICEGOV 2012 conference – hear his sneak preview (5 mins) of the conference here.

Biography source: Wikipedia
Feature images courtesy David Ferriero

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Episode links and resources

• The Archivist’s blog:   AOTUS: Collector in Chief at http://blogs.archives.gov/aotus
• Favorite Records of the Archivist of the United States (AOTUS)
• David S Ferriero: Speeches and Writings
• US National Archives
• US National Archives and Open Government
• US National Archives wiki
• US National Archives blogs
• US National Archives on Facebook
• US National Archives on Flickr
• US National Archives on You Tube

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Theresa Pardo is well known for her work leading the Center for Technology in Government (CTG). This discussion looks at public value and taking a portfolio approach to open government, as articulated through the CTG’s Public Value Assessment Tool.

In this interview, Theresa explores several dimensions of what it means for governments to authentically deliver public value. Her position that “engagement is not either/or… we need a more nuanced understanding of what we mean by engagement” makes great sense when we think about harnessing diverse perspectives and disciplines to better understand the value that open government can add. The Public Value Assessment Tool asks the questions that practitioners can use to create value-based portfolios of open government initiatives.

We think not so much in terms of measures… but helping government management and government leadership think about value in a way that is more broadly based than the bottom-line return-on-investment models… in government, we need to think beyond the bottom-line.

Theresa also discusses her belief that the next generation of open data will be more about creating community-oriented data resources – creating and presenting data in ways that are of use to specific communities.

The Center for Technology in Government at the University of Albany at the State University of New York are hosts of the 2012 ICEGOV international conference.

About Theresa Pardo

Theresa Pardo is the Director of the Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany at the State University of New York.

Theresa’s current portfolio includes the development of a public value assessment framework for U.S. federal government open government initiatives funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and the development of models of social and technical interactions in cross-boundary information sharing and integration as well as information technology enterprise governance. In addition to funding from NSF, Theresa’s research at CTG has been funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Library of Congress, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, the United Nations and New York State and local government agencies, among others.

Theresa is a Research Associate Professor at the Rockefeller College of Public Administration and Policy and an affiliated faculty member of the College of Computing and Information at the University at Albany. She is one of the founding developers of the highly ranked Government Information Strategy and Management curriculum at Rockefeller College. The academic program focuses on the policy, management and technology dimensions of information and technology use in the design and delivery of government programs. In 2008, Theresa received the University at Albany’s Excellence in Teaching Award.

Theresa is also the co-chair of the ICEGOV 2012 conference – hear her sneak preview (5 mins) of the conference here.

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Episode links and resources

• Center for Technology in Government (CTG)
• CTG projects
  • A Public Value Analysis Tool for Open Government Planning
  • Opening Government: Modeling the Informational Relationships between Government and Society
  • Moldova – social media and open government
• Philly Rising Collaborative

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The US Data.Gov platform now features more than 470,000 datasets from 172 agencies, as well as thematic communities representing such diverse interests as health and education through to developers and consumers.  Jeanne Holm shares some of the lessons learned over the last 12 months of escalating the platform, reinforcing the importance of a focus on people rather than the data itself.

I think the most important aspect of Data.gov is not necessarily the data it provides but the voice that it gives to people across the country.

Jeanne also discusses the collaboration between the US Data.gov and Indian data.gov.in teams to develop the open source Open Government Platform, and give us an update on the activities of the W3C e-Government interest group.

About Jeanne Holm

Jeanne Holm is the Chief Knowledge Architect at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, CalTech. She chairs NASA’s Knowledge Management Team, which facilitates access to and reuse of the knowledge to support future missions and drive innovation. Her team’s solutions help people manage space missions, learn virtually, and share lessons learned by transforming NASA into a learning organization through innovative techniques in developing communities of practice, harnessing the power of social media, and ensuring lessons are shared and embedded across the organization.

Jeanne was the manager for the award-winning NASA public and internal portals. She supports several DoD organizations in multi-generational learning, utilizing social media, creating collaborative structures, and identifying emergent technologies. Her activities range from social media, virtual worlds, gaming, ontologies, to collaborative systems. As a Fellow of the United Nations International Academy of Astronautics, she leads teams that set standards for how space missions should manage knowledge and share data in the future. She is the former chair of the Federal KM Working Group with 700 members across government, and serves on international standards and conference boards.

Jeanne is also a speaker at the ICEGOV 2012 conference – hear her sneak preview (5 mins) of the conference here.

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Episode links and resources

• Data.gov
• Data.gov communities
• Data.gov blog
• Open Government Platform
• Data.gov.in beta site
• Open Government platform on Facebook
• W3C eGov interest group
• W3C eGov LinkedIn group

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In 2001 Professor Jim Hendler jointly conceptualised the semantic web along with Tim Berners-Lee and Ora Lassila. When he invented the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee always envisaged it as highly linked, and the idea of the semantic web – a web of linked data with meaning – is now emerging as a reality.

Data is most interesting when you add it to other data.

Jim Hendler takes us on a journey into this semantic web, unpacking related terms such as Web 3.0, and exploring its potential for government. He emphasises the importance of linked open government data, and points to some useful tools and demos of how linked data can be used to create new insights.

The excitement of the data web is better understanding of the world we live in through what’s being collected about it in the information space.

About Professor Jim Hendler

Jim Hendler is the Tetherless World Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science, and the Head of the Computer Science Deparment at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). He is also a faculty affiliate of the Experimental Multimedia Performing Arts Center serves as a Director and Trustee of the UK charity Web Science Trust and is a visiting Professor at DeMontfort University in Leicester, UK. Hendler has authored over 200 technical papers in the areas of Semantic Web, artificial intelligence, agent-based computing and high performance processing.

One of the inventors of the Semantic web, Hendler was the recipient of a 1995 Fulbright Foundation Fellowship, is a former member of the US Air Force Science Advisory Board, and is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the British Computer Society, the IEEE and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is also the former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and was awarded a US Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal in 2002. He is the Editor-in-Chief emeritus of IEEE Intelligent Systems and is the first computer scientist to serve on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science, and also serves as an “Internet Web Expert” for the U.S. government, providing guidance to the Data.gov project.

Prof. Hendler is also a speaker at the ICEGOV 2012 conference – hear his sneak preview (5 mins) of the conference here.

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Episode links and resources

• Linked Open Government Data project
• Linked Open Government Data project demos and datasets
• Jim Hendler’s blog and articles on SciLogs
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 
• Semantic Web on Wikipedia

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Building a culture of collaboration and participation is a key ingredient to making innovative programs work in cities.

Mark Headd talks about his time with Code for America as their Head of Government Relations, and shares some of the emergent learnings from the intersection between the various elements of CfA’s program – the cities, the fellows, the brigade, the commons and now the start-ups.

“The most important thing that cities can do to keep pushing innovation in their cities is to bring in those people closest to them that are products of their own innovation.”

About Mark Headd

Mark has been the Director of Government Relations for Code for America since April 2012, as well as being a writer, speaker and thought leader on communication technologies and open government. He is a civic hacking veteran and a keen builder of civic software.

Mark has also just been appointed the City of Philadelphia’s first Chief Data Officer.

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Episode links and resources

• • Code for America
    • Brigade
    • Commons
    • Engagement Commons
    • Accelerator
    • Fellows
    • Cities
  • Young Rewired State
  • Sheltr

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In this special 2-part interview with Zachary Tumin from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Centre, we look at how all parts of society can collaborate to innovate.

Zach also previews his new book ‘Collaborate or Perish’ where he and co-author William J. Bratton have developed an 8-phase collaboration lifecycle to help anyone with an idea to more successfully collaborate.

“Gov 2.0, as a proxy for increased engagement and involvement of citizens with government, is mighty and a force to be reckoned with… Whether or not government gets the idea of collaboration, it’s constantly going on all around us and the best thing that government can do is tap into it.”

About Zachary Tumin

Zachary Tumin is Special Assistant to Director and Faculty Chair, Science, Technology and Public Policy Program, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Over his career, Zach has served at the Kennedy School in research and staff positions, and in the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors as chief executive, staff, and consultant to leaders in industry and government.

Zach leads research initiatives, teaches senior executives in closed door sessions and addresses organizations in keynote and panels around the world. He is the author of numerous teaching cases, working papers, reports and essays.

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Part 1 – Gov 2.0

Part 2  – Collaboration

Episode links and resources

• Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government
• Report – From Government 2.0 to Society 2.0: Pathways to Engagement, Collaboration and Transformation
• Zach Tumin’s personal website

Collaborate or Perish!

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Mack Kolarich, co-organizer of the DC Gov 2.0 Startup Weekend, talks about how he and his team are adapting the highly-successful international Startup Weekend format to focus on innovation and entrepreneurship in the public sector.  This pilot event in Washington DC on 15-17 June 2012 will kick off with scene-setting talks from US Government CTO Todd Park and Deloitte’s Bill Eggers, and offer a place in Code for America’s Civic Accelerator to the winning team.

About Mack Kolarich

Mack began his entrepreneurial-addiction through StartupWeekends. When not organizing events or visiting other startup hubs, he builds products for the events industry as co-founder and CEO of Spontaneous Labs.

About Startup Weekend

Startup Weekends are weekend-long, hands-on experiences where entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs can find out if startup ideas are viable.  Beginning with open mic pitches on a Friday, attendees bring their best ideas and inspire others to join their team. Over Saturday and Sunday teams focus on customer development, validating their ideas, practicing LEAN Startup Methodologies and building a minimal viable product. On Sunday evening teams demo their prototypes and receive valuable feedback from a panel of experts.

There have been 587 Startup Weekends in 312 cities across 93 countries with more than 56,000 participants.

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Episode links and resources

• DC Gov 2.0 Startup Weekend website, on Facebook and Twitter
• International Startup Weekend website

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