GovLoop and Moving Forward
A seed of collaborative support—intended to help the U.S. Census Bureau cut through red tape and coordinate with federal, state, and local government partners—has been sewn on GovLoop.At latest count, the Census-managed GovLoop Group has 36 Replica Omega Seamaster Watches members. The intent is to share information, distribute public communication best practices, and encourage participation in the 2010 Census and other projects, GovLoop Founder and President Steve Ressler outlines the intended advantage this way:
Problem: difficult for agencies to collaborate across agencies and especially across federal, state, local, and international.
Typical solutions: hard to build audience; requires substantial time and resources; often quick expense for limited return; hardest part is community building and management
GovLoop groups: quick, easy, secure way to provide collaboration across agencies and levels of government; built-in government audience interested in collaborating with best practices around community building and management
Benefits: quick; beta; works across levels; third parties can help government collaborate more quickly without some of the red tape; expertise is available on community building and management.
Other topics requiring cross-agency and federal, state, and local collaboration that occur to Ressler—a member of the first class of the Department of Homeland Security Graduate Fellowship Program who left DHS in 2009 to run GovLoop full-time—include H1N1, food safety, government recruitment, emergency management, and public transportation.
Some will argue that collaboration is really just about people talking to each other. But it is so much more. Conversation prepares government employees to initiate, co-design, co-manage, and maintain long-term collaboration about as much as having played store as children prepares adults to run a business.
Others will rightly warn us to beware the hype that social media technology is the answer to successful collaboration. As Norm Lorentz, director in the global public sector practice at Grant Thornton and former chief technology officer at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, told Brittany Ballenstedt recently in a Nextgov article, “The government’s problems are inherently not tech problems; they are inherently mission, governance, and alignment problems.”
If human beings can find the capacity within themselves to collaborate when people are suffering terribly, as in the case of the Haiti earthquake, then that proves it can be done. Therefore, if we are really serious about improving government, why not proactively exercise world-class leadership? Why not play in a way that truly matters— Replica Watches by adopting a “default setting” of collaboration, thereby diminishing citizen suffering by delivering more effective and efficient government?
The government community has a choice to make. Although innovative technology use, such as GovLoop, is part of the answer, courageous leadership also will be required. The longer we choose parochial concerns over collaboration, the less latitude we will have to design or influence creative, enduring solutions.
This year, think bold thoughts about leadership development and solutions that can span network and bureaucracy, giving thanks to those who went before and our support to current pioneers.
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