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Recovery Act: Watching the Watchers
Monday, August 10th, 2009 - 16:44
The Recovery Act created a huge oversight mechanism and provided more than $350 million for audits and investigations to ensure the $787 billion in the Act would not be wasted. For example, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board released a checklist for how to look for waste, fraud and abuse in Recovery Act grants (e.g., “Was the award announced on FBO?
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Retooling Democracy
Thursday, July 30th, 2009 - 13:28
Today's blog post is by a guest, Matt Leighninger, executive director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium. Matt snapshots the state of play in the field of participatory democracy, an underpinning element of President Obama's soon-to-be released Open Government Directive.
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Carmen Sirianni
My book, mentioned in Matt's blog, Investing in Democracy: Engaging Citizens in Collaborative Governance (Brookings Press, 2009), is available from Amazon as well (see link below). The one in the blog did not bring up the Brookings page.
Carmen Sirianni, Investing in Democracy: Engaging Citizens in Collaborative Governance (Brookings Institution Press, 2009): to order from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Investing-Democracy-Engaging-Collaborative-Governa...
Carmen Sirianni
Another great resource is Xavier de Sousa Briggs, Democracy as Problem Solving: Civic Capacity in Communities Across the Globe (MIT Press 2008), available at:
http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Problem-Solving-Capacity-Communities/dp/...
John Kamensky
Hi Carmen -- Let me fix the links on this. Thanks for the added resources!
Norman M. Macdonald
The ideas are noble and they remind me of many of the ideas that were floating around during the reinventing government effort. A key element has been overlooked how do we get the rank and file Federal Civil Service to buy into the new effort. For eight years they have been starved for people and money while many of the innovative thinkers have been forced out. Now the future is bright and morale is on the rise this is a good time for the Federal Civil Service to a 360 degree evaluation on where it stands and what are the ground level needs. This would be an evaluation where everyone has a place at the table - this will gather interesting information and would be the buy in for the rank and file.
Ed
It is nice that they are trying, but there is an implicit fail in the government *giving* participatory government to us. Democracy is not a top-down thing, and it cannot be brought about this way.
Instead, I would invite readers to look at the many emerging bottom-up approaches involved in the Metagovernment project:
http://metagovernment.org/
and/or the many other similar projects:
http://metagovernment.org/wiki/Related_projects
As long as we have to wait around hoping that democracy will be granted to us, we will never have it. We must bring it about. And now we have the tools to do so. No presidents required.
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Obama's Contracting Initiatives: An Update
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 - 15:55
President Obama's 2008 election campaign made strong commitments to reduce the government's dependence on the use of contractors. Now come the implementation details:
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507 recommendations
The $100 Million Challenge
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 - 13:59
President Obama challenged his cabinet at its first meeting on April 20th to collectively cut $100 million from their current administrative budgets. Today, the Office of Management and Budget announced that that goal has been exceeded: $102 million in savings. . . . with additional savings promised for next year of $140 million!
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350 recommendations
Fact-Based Governing
Monday, July 27th, 2009 - 16:40
Maryland's State-Stat. Last week I took a field trip to Annapolis to visit Governor Martin O’Malley’s much ballyhooed State-Stat management system. It is a variation of Baltimore’s Citi-Stat, which O’Malley created in 2001 when he became mayor. It could serve as an inspiration for what the federal government might do to track the implementation of the various agency-level goals to be submitted to OMB by the end of the week, as well as to coordinate the work of t
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Ellen P. Embrey interview
Friday, July 24th, 2009 - 20:00
Phrase:
"Force Health Protection addresses three areas - improve existing health, proactively addressing threats, and finally, assuring that we have the capacity to take care of injuries and illness acutely."
Radio show date:
Sat, 07/25/2009
Intro text:
In this interview, Embrey discusses the: Mission and scope of the Office of Force Protection and Readiness; DoD's Force Health Protection and Readiness assessment process; Improving the medical readiness of the total force; The Deployment Health and Family...
In this interview, Embrey discusses the: Mission and scope of the Office of Force Protection and Readiness; DoD's Force Health Protection and Readiness assessment process; Improving the medical readiness of the total force; The Deployment Health and Family Readiness Library; Upgrades to the military electronic health record; and Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE).
Audio segments:
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892 recommendations
Will UK Government Reforms Inspire Obama?
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 - 13:46
Some of the initiatives undertaken in the early days of the Clinton-Gore reinventing government initiative were inspired by reforms underway in Britain. This included customer service standards, performance contracts, audited financial statements. That might well happen again!
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Berry Vision: Aligning the Stars
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 - 12:50
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Norman M. Macdonald
After 47.5 years of Federal service my only comment is "I've heard this song before" What is needed is a ground level 360 degree assessment involving everyone down to the janitors and tree markers on the status of The Federal Civil Service. The troops are good and they know what needs to be done
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Real-Time Results Reporting
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 - 17:15
The Obama Administration is actively promoting transparency of program data via data.gov. But what about transparency of program results?
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347 recommendations
Productivity vs. Performance Measures
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 - 17:31
I went to a high-powered panel presentation last week sponsored by the Center for American Progress on “Government’s Productivity Imperative” and it left me a bit nervous. It was inspired by a McKinsey article on productivity and it urges the Obama Administration to adopt productivity improvement approaches that could save $45 billion to $134 billion a year, noting “. . .
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