Collaboration

Collaboration is one of the key elements of President Obama’s signature Open Government Initiative. However, federal agencies’ Open Government Plans don’t seem to address it very well. But collaboration expert Russ Linden says “collaboration is vital, difficult, and learnable.” And he’s written a book that makes all three of these points.

Earlier this week, the Pew Center’s survey on citizen trust in government shows trust in government has plummeted to record lows. As if to support these findings, there were “gun rallies” in support of Second Amendment rights a few days ago. And last week, there was a Tea Party rally demanding a smaller government.

Federal agencies recently released their Open Government Plans on how they will actively engage citizens in agency decision-making efforts.  None, that I’ve seen in what I’ve read so far, are taking advantage of a growing trend to use geographic information systems (GIS) to increase citizen engagement.

. . . Both the White House and the Open Government advocacy groups plan to assess them. No good deed goes unnoticed!

Eliminating middle managers was the vogue in 1990s-style reforms. Flatten the organization! After all, it was the middle managers who “sucked the life out of an organization” by filtering information, gatekeeping decisions, and smothering innovation.

But today, we’re beginning to hear praise for middle managers as being the connecting glue and the nodes of cross-organizational networks.

What’s going on here??

The Congress has passed and the President has signed the new health care reform legislation. But, will it work?

Government Executive’s Elizabeth Newell writes that a bipartisan congressional Transparency Caucus has been formed. Led by Republican Representative Darrell Issa (CA) and Democratic Representative Michael Quigley (IL), the Caucus will advocate greater government transparency and provide support and oversight of government efforts.

Almost three years ago, I blogged on the need for a Key National Indicator System so we, as a nation, could track our progress using data, not diatribe. It’s happened. A provision buried on page 1,489 of the health insurance reform bill makes it real!

I’ve seen a number of intersting mapping applications being developed “on the ground” that engage citizens in a collaborative efforts to provide details about their communities. The most common of these is OpenStreetMap.org, which advertises itself as an editable map of the world.

Another Harvard Business Review article in the March 2010 issue is worth highlighting. A piece by Richard McDermott and Douglas Archibald examines informal and formal networks in companies, such as Fluor and ConocoPhillips, but their insights are relevant to public agencies as well. And they may be helpful to the Obama Administration’s efforts to create its proposed set of “problem solving networks.”