He’s mobilized youth to previously unprecedented levels, shattered fund-raising records with an Internet-enabled army of small-dollar donors, and made many impassioned calls for sweeping changes in Washington. But can Obama really transform the cynical, self-interested, and frequently factious nature of politics, while bringing new levels of transparency and participation to the process?
Three recent articles [...]

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I’ve written a fair amount about Intellipedia on this blog (see here for example). Many people see it as one of the premier examples of enterprise 2.0 innovation. Not many people realize, however, that Intellipedia is not just the CIA’s wiki.
What makes Intellipedia interesting and important is the fact that it takes a dysfunctional [...]

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How will policy-makers keep pace with today’s rapidly changing world and bring greater agility and dynamism to public responses to monumental challenges like climate change, food scarcity and the spread of infectious disease? How can citizens and others stakeholders feed their knowledge and experience into the policy cycle and how can policy-makers tap the collective [...]

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Google Earth has become a platform for revealing atrocities in Dafur, tracking the spread of the avian flu, and analyzing the effect of climate change on sea levels, among dozens of other great applications. Recently the State of Alabama’s Homeland Security department opted to use Google Earth as a platform for emergency management.
The site threads [...]

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Some time ago I was asked by the U.S. General Services Administration to write an article describing how I envision the role of public sector CIOs. The article has now been published (Role of the Public Sector CIO) along side articles by Karen Evans, John Suffolk, Bill Vajda, Teri Takai, P.K. Agarwal, Jerry Mechling, [...]

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New Paradigm collaborator and avid Intellipedian Chris Rasmussen has a good article in FedTech magazine imploring governments to adopt a 2.0 strategy. It won’t be headline news for advanced users, but Rasmussen lays out a number of pretty simple Wikinomics ground rules for government agencies that are just getting started with web 2.0:

First, you need [...]

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President Bush recently called for the US administration to dramatically curtail earmarks (essentially pet spending projects that members of Congress insert into the federal budget), saying he will veto any appropriations bills that don’t cut the number of earmarks in half when they come to him during the remainder of his days in the White [...]

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Written petitions have long been an important means by which citizens can bring their concerns to public officials. Petitioning was common in 18th and 19th century England and is thought to have played an important role in enabling working class movements to force significant social and political reforms, and eventually universal suffrage. The tradition was [...]

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Further to my earlier post, there is a nice article in FCW written by our friends at the National Academy of Public Administration. It lays out the benefits of collaboration in the public sector and references one of my favorite government 2.0 examples: the Transportation Security Administration’s Ideafactory - an idea marketplace for transportation security [...]

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It’s easy to berate government agencies for being slow to use popular web 2.0 platforms like YouTube and Second Life to deliver public services or engage citizens in dialogue — I certainly have. I have little doubt that governments must establish a genuine presence in these participatory online communities as they struggle to maintain relevancy [...]

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