FastGov: Where Government is Going

Port of Seattle readies Charging Stations for Electric Cars

2008-12-01T17:01:23Z

A coming soon banner obscures most of a new sign that greets drivers entering the seven story parking structure at Seattle Tacoma (SeaTac) International Airport but it is still enough to make an internal combustion engine stutter. Accompanied by a stylized graphic of a car, electric cable and lightning bolt, the sign announces that electric car charging stations are being installed on Level 5.

The move comes as MINI has just begun electric car trials in select markets on the east coast and California and two years before Chevy is slated to roll out the Volt, the plug-in hybrid on which GM appears to betting the company.

The executives of GM and the other Detroit-based auto makers are due back in Washington, DC for a second shot at extracting at least $25 billion in bridge loans from Congress by presenting more detailed plans for how they will use the money. It seems that, in the "other Washington," other public officials are presuming on the what those plans contain.

Mumbai Aftermath: A Failure of Government and Web 2.0?

2008-12-01T02:42:23Z

"Our Politicians Fiddle as Innocents Die," blared the Times of India newspaper on Sunday as the political recriminations began in the wake of last week's terrorist attacks in Mumbai. The headline coincided with the resignation of India's highest-ranking internal security official, who said he was taking "moral" responsibility for the tragedy.

While the country's black-cat commandos have been largely commended for their work in the street-to-street (and sometimes room-to-room) combat with the assailants, the Indian intelligence, counter terrorism and surveillance services faced almost immediate criticism for allowing the attacks to happen in the first place. There are even reports that the government had advance warning.

All of this sounds eerily reminiscent. The early reporting from India suggests that national governments have not learned the lessons from the failures of earlier targets of terrorism.

It is worth saying out loud that the strengths and weaknesses of the evolving media landscape were also on full public view during this latest tragedy, marking an evolution that can be traced back to natural disasters (hurricanes on the gulf coast of this country or the Asian tsnami) if not before.

Consider stories that were published and posted while Mumbai was still under siege. NPR introduced its listeners to Sreenath Sreenivasan, a journalist who also serves as dean of student affairs at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Within in an hour of learning of the Mumbai attacks, Sreenivasan "was hosting a Web radio call-in show with other Indian journalists relaying what they knew." It was the meeting of old and media, with the conventions of journalism tempering the noise that inevitably follows shocking developments.

Elsewhere, a Reuters dispatch reported, "Bloggers across Mumbai fed live updates ... [on the] ...attacks in the heart of India's financial capital, highlighting the social media's new expanding role in news coverage." It pointed to photos of the attacks on Flikr, frequent updates of an entry on Wikipedia, a steady stream of updates and comments on twitter and myriad bloggers doing what they could to help. Clearly, these Web 2.0 technologies are as effective as anything we have seen in terms of immediacy -- a particularly powerful attribute when they are in the hands of those on the ground with unique, authoratative information.

But, and there is are two big buts here: (a) precious few bloggers and even microbloggers are that close and that relevant, prefering instead the comfort of home half way around the world (present company included); and, (b) something disturbing happened to embedded links as they aged. Dina Mehta blogged furiously from Mumbai during the siege, originally describing herself as "upset and angry and bereft." But by Sunday night, visitors to her blog were greeted by a corrupted headline, "Why I am deleting comments Error 404 - Not Found." Another blogger, Gaurav Mishra, explained why in -- ironically enough -- one of the remaining comments on Mehta's blog. In short, some of the comments were deemed extremest and even "evil". Citizen journalism has no conventions to guide it, and those that comment are prepared to say almost anything under the veil of anonymity.

[As if to remind us of those things at which Web 2.0 is particularly good, Mishra provides links to events or movements spontaneously conceived on or through the Web to benefits of victims of the 11/26 terrorist attacks -- some local, others global -- Nov 30 Tweetup at Leopold Cafe, Facebook Wear White Event, Facebook Support 11/26 Fighters Event.]

At the risk of making a snap judgment even as the events of last week are still unwinding, the response and the reportage were both only partial successes. Honoring those who served well is important but taking a hard look at what failed may be where the greatest value lies. It is the only way to perfect or reform institutions about which we care -- government, media and that still amorphous thing called Web 2.0.

A final note. There is another post about Mumbai that I struggled to write over the long Thanksgiving weekend. I couldn't get it right. Thankfully, CBC essayist Rex Murphy did:

We should not see what happened ... in India - what is happening - as something in a distant country, but as a chilling and depraved assault on on what all decent people share in common.

Terrorism is the murder of innocents as a tactic in the service of fanaticism. It is the anti-politics of our time. It is a threat to us all. The blast was in Mumbai, but its vibrations are meant for every civilized city of the planet.
... It is merely right therefore that we give our thoughts to their particular plight - and offer - to these, our fellow citizens - our alert and full sympathy.

Thanksgiving Taboos: Politics, Religion and Infrastructure

2008-11-26T06:20:39Z

The server logs at the Merriam-Webster online dictionary have spoken -- "bailout" is the word of the year as much for how often it was looked up than how many industries wanted one. The arbiters of the English language say the trillion dollar word eclipsed favorites from the campaign trail, "maverick" and "vet." (The list comes out just in time for the much anticipated holiday's slow news days.)

But this year's finalists hold the promise of being red meat -- "bailout" for conservatives, "maverick" for liberals -- at the extended-family Thanksgiving Day feast, which just isn't right because the day is supposed to be about turkey (the original white meat).

Of course, if you received an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner this year, you have probably figured out the wisdom behind the prohibition on talking politics and religion in such settings.

But there is an occupational hazard that could send your tryptophan-saturated hearers face down into the jellied salad. Infrastructure.

It is an easy shorthand in the private vocabulary of information technology but both high- and low- culture word watchers don't think much of it.

According to no less an authority than Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Director of the Annenberg School of Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania in comments at the fall NASCIO conference, IT's coupling of infrastructure and architecture has little meaning outside of the technology community and is confusing to the very people with whom CIOs and their kin seek to communicate.

MSNBC commentator Chris Mathews agrees. "Infrastructure is an awful word," he gurgled during an early on-air dissertation on the merits of the depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA) and how it may be time to try such a scheme again.

But his cable news colleague Rachel Maddow opened her show early on Monday by enthusing about the opening of the federal spigot under the new administration:

President-elect Obama's ... big plan? He's rolling out what amounts to a new "New Deal" to invest in infrastructure. Yes. I've wanted infrastructure to be a sexy political issue for so long now that when I say the word, I can almost hear wakachicka-wakachicka background music in my head - infrastructure, yessss.

That last little wakachicka-wakachicka bit has morphed into a downloadable ring tone under the heading of what Maddow calls infrastructure porn.

Even with infrastructure worth about 115,000,000 returns on Google, when and if real people think about it, they think about roads, bridges and schools. They don't readily think about the Internet and digital infrastructures. We run the risk of thinking we are part of this new national conversation when we are not. We don't share a common definition of the word, a word it should be noted that nobody really uses in casual conversation anyway.

The final caution can be ripped out of context from The Princess Bride, the 1987 Rob Reiner film that has become a perennial favorite rental on Thanksgiving long weekends. In a recurring exchange with Vizzini, Inigo Montoya calmly intones, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Inconceivable! No, infrastructure.

Little Hoover to Schwarzenegger and Legislature: Give CIO the Authority to Act

2008-11-21T20:04:24Z

A bipartisan and independent California state agency is recommending further consolidation of the state's information technology infrastructure, assets and staff under the state CIO. The Little Hoover Commission, in an ironically-named report called A New Legacy System: Using Technology to Drive Performance, recommends:

Empower the state chief information officer with tools and resources to oversee a generational transformation of information technology in state government. The state must consolidate resources under the Office of the State Chief Information Officer, including the Department of Technology Services, the Office of Systems Integration, geospatial information functions and the information security functions of the Office of Information Security and Privacy Protection.

Use public money for technology projects responsibly and with transparency.
To rebuild the confidence of the Legislature and the public, the process through which California's technology projects are governed must be open and transparent. The Information Technology Council should expand to include legislative members as well as members from existing technology councils, and it should be empowered to prioritize overall technology projects for the state and aggressively monitor their implementation. The state chief information officer should regularly report on the progress of the state's information technology projects through a more robust Web site.

Use technology to track, measure and improve performance.
The state should encourage and foster the burgeoning development of performance measurement projects throughout state departments and agencies by re-establishing the technology innovation fund and creating opportunities to regularly integrate performance data into the state's management and budgeting strategy. The governor should hold regular public meetings with agency heads to evaluate performance data.

Even while tacitly recognizing that these changes will be difficult and take time, the Commission points to a new model for IT governance as key to a more effective fiscal management in the long run.

In the name of full disclosure, I was one of many who provided testimony to the Commission and worked with its staff in the preparation of the report. To read the full text of the report, download it here -- LittleHoover.pdf .

Georgia signs $1.2 Billion IT Outsourcing Contracts with Last Vendors Standing

2008-11-21T16:41:42Z

I substituted for Georgia Technology Authority Director Patrick Moore at the state's Digital Government Summit yesterday because Moore had 1.2 billion reasons not to be there at the appointed hour.

He was alongside Governor Sonny Perdue to announce the signing of a pair of contracts intended to consolidate and outsource the state government's IT operations. The larger of the two, worth $873 million over eight years, was awarded to IBM to take over infrastructure -- from the raised floor data centers, mainframes, services and disaster recovery to PC and laptops. The other will pay AT&T $346 million over 5 years to manage network services for the state. Both contracts have two one-year renewal options.

The state estimates that it will save an estimated $180 million over the term of the contracts but it comes at a cost to state employees, 92 of whom will lose their jobs in May 2009 and 322 others will be offered jobs with IBM and AT&T.

IBM and AT&T were effectively sole bidders after two other companies withdrew their bids before the apparently successful vendors were announced.

The award comes on the heels of a decision late last month by the state of Texas to suspend an $863 million outsourcing project with IBM to transfer state records to a centralized computer system. In a letter to state IT officials, Governor Rick Perry said the company had failed to backup the data of more than 20 state agencies.

As for my presentation, you can download it here [11-08CDGStealThisIdea1.6.pdf].

Unified Communications: My Personal Problem with Presence

2008-11-20T16:34:25Z

"My plans require time and distance." That's the quote carved in stone below a statue of Pacific Northwest pioneer Marcus Whitman inside the entrance to the Washington State Legislature. Of course, the commodity Internet has been collapsing time and distance for more than a decade. Still the technology juggernaut's time efficiencies have been frustrated -- by the deliberate process and pacing of legislatures at the institutional level, for example, and by you and me.

There is a name for this neo-Luddism that lurks just below the surface of even the most enthusiastic technology booster: latency. We carbon-based life forms are the prime source of latency in semiautomated processes. Without us there would be no "semi" in semiautomated. (Read: We are the problem.)

This isn't a new problem. Latency has a language of its own in communications media -- mail (Return to sender), broadcast (One moment please), over-the-counter (Back in five minutes), phone (Leave a message), e-mail (This is an auto reply) and mobile, instant messages and short message service (Subscriber could not be found. Message may not be delivered.)

Unified communications (UC), the latest evolution in converged networking, promises to remove these excuses by making the underlying problem -- humans -- more available. Enter "presence" -- described by its supporters as "the dial tone of the future" because it keeps real-time tabs on the availability, ability and preferred mode of communicating. Presence is also the component of UC that's aimed at reducing or eliminating human latency; it's also the key differentiator between UC and previous iterations of any-to-any networks that combine multimedia communications, such as voice, data and video; call control; instant messaging; conferencing like audio, video, tele, Web; and mobility.

Are UCs a sleeper issue? Perhaps. In a recent survey of 82 self-selected public agencies conducted by the Center for Digital Government, 22 percent of respondents reported that presence was the highest funding priority in their communications strategy. That's well behind voice (60 percent) and video (38 percent), in line with data (26 percent) and e-mail (26 percent), and ahead of instant messaging (16 percent) and mobility (11 percent).

Presence is a compelling idea for institutional improvisation and productivity. But presence is also a very personal matter. It's about my presence and yours -- when and how to reach us, especially when we're away.

It reminds me of the first time I was issued a cell phone in 1988 -- convenient yes, but maybe too convenient. Cell phones began to blur the lines between work hours and personal hours, professional spheres and personal space. Two decades later, we have become accustomed to how cell phones have reordered our lives -- call it accidental technological determinism. Presence is smarter than cell phones by themselves -- our planning for presence and response to it needs to be more deliberate because we could use a little time and distance.

This post originated in the pages of GT but this forum creates the opportunity for conversation about it. What say you? Am I overstating the creepiness factor here or is it just good thinking?

Google Chief hopeful on mashup of infrastructure, openness and government

2008-11-18T23:45:40Z

Disavowing that he was speaking in his role as a member of President-Elect Barack Obama's Transition Economic Advisory Board, and disavowing interest in serving as the new administration's chief technology officer, Google CEO Eric Schmidt did provide a hopeful view of the potential synergies among public policy, technology and economic renewal.

Schmidt is also the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the New America Foundation, the organization that hosted the speech and live webcast from Washington, DC on Tuesday.

Echoing incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuel's rejoinder not to let any crisis pass without taking advantage of it, Schmidt told his audience in the Ronald Reagan Building, "The country has faced many, many more significant challenges. ... Let's take the crisis ... and let's deal with it as an opportunity to get the structure right."

"If you're going to spur economic growth you've got to focus on infrastructure research and development and energy. These are jobs programs," he said, pointing out that the historical record was on his side of the argument, "Infrastructure is the foundation upon which wealth is created"

Even as the heads of the American auto makers and their unions lobbied for loans in front of a lame duck Congress just down the street, Schmidt said that there was a better way to go than invest in past failures, "Let's not just have bailout programs. Why don't we use the stimulus money to get infrastructure built?"

The strongest parts of the speech were those that were within Google's wheelhouse - the democratization of information. "In our life time, almost all people will have access to almost all the world's information. That is a remarkable achievement."

What's more important, said Schmidt, was having systems as open as the information that they surface and exploit, ""Open systems have this clear promise of innovation and greater choice.... It is that openness, the ability that [allows] anyone can play ... that drives the modern economy.... You never know where innovation's going to come from, but with an open platform, you welcome it,"

Aware of his audience and the location of his speech, the Google chief closed by noting that, in his view, the public sector has been a laggard in adopting new platforms for governing -- including but not limited to blogs and social network, "Government has not embraced generally the tools we use every day.... It's time to do it and do it right."

The 'Other' People's Choice Awards: Apps for Democracy

2008-11-17T22:57:21Z

A pair of Bronze Medal Award Winners from Washington, DC's Apps for Democracy competition picked up additional honors on Friday night by picking up the People's Choice awards.

The District's new Car Pool Mashup attracted 22 percent of the 3,320 votes and DC Bikes took another 13 percent.

It could be that all of this only matters to a small band of Birkenstock-wearing, open source-coding, Obama-voting, Inconvenient Truth-watching, Latte-drinking residents in Washington, DC or it could foreshadow the democratization of government-held data and the applications that make them useful. Nothing against the former, but I'm betting on the latter.

The Question of Privilege: Public Disclosure

2008-11-17T22:20:32Z

In the shadow of the budget preparations by governors across the nation that mark the start the negotiations with their respective legislatures, there is considerable activity to position bills on a wide range of issues.

In Washington state, the 2009 legislature will be asked to act on the recommendations of the state Sunshine Committee to narrow the circumstances under which public agencies can cite attorney-client privilege to prevent disclosure of certain public records.

The original standard in the state's Open Records Act had been that there had to be an authentic threat of litigation against a public agency had to exist. Two state Supreme Court decisions in particular -- Hangartner v. City of Seattle (2004) and Soter v. Cowles Publishing (2007) -- had a broadening effect on the exemption by upholding claims of attorney-client privilege. The state's daily newspapers -- individually and through their lobbying association -- claim the result has been the loss of public accountability.

As worrying for the daily newspapers is what they perceive as a proliferation of exemptions, which started at only 10 in the original 1971 law and have grown to over 300 today, and were a catalyst to the creation of the Public Records Exemption Accountability Committee in mid-2007.

By a 7-3 vote last Wednesday, the so-called Sunshine Committee voted to recommend new legislation that force a tightening of the privilege definitions under the act, and push back against the Supreme Court. The no votes included a state senator and a pair of public sector attorneys who provide advice to public officials on legal matters. One of the no votes belonged to an attorney who was enormously helpful to me in the early days of the e-government movement.

The state's largest newspaper has called the trio out by name, and not in a complimentary way, as part of its campaign to have the legislature codify the committee's recommendation.

We are entering the fourth decade of America's citizen-led experiment with open records laws. They were created around broad principles but refined, as the 300 exemptions attest, incrementally with scalpel-like incisions. Considering the source of the minority opinion in the privilege recommendation, the legislature would be well advised to avoid replacing the scalpel with the blunt force of a hammer.

Briefly Noted: Mississippi's Karen Newman Retires

2008-11-14T11:49:10Z

After only 29.5 years in Mississippi state service, Karen Newman has retired from the Department of Information Technology Services. Apparently a change is still as good as a rest - she joined The Clay Firm last week.

Apps for Democracy Winners: A Good Day to be a DC Resident

2008-11-14T01:37:45Z

The answer is in: what do you get from 260 data feeds and $20,000 in prize money? The District of Columbia says you get 30 days of frenetic activity and 47 applications that mash up public data in ways that government itself may never had the time, inclination and impulse to develop themselves. Such are the results of an aptly named competition, Apps for Democracy, which all but wrapped up round one today.

The winners range from the useful to the quirky and all point to the potential of democratizing data. They all put the individual at the center of the transaction, which may be progress enough in rethinking the relationship between citizens and their government.

Here is a briefly annotated tour of the top two tiers of award winners:

Gold (Independent)
iLive.at - Doing errands in DC will never be the same.
Gold (Agency)
DC Historic Tours -- A walking tour planner, powered by a Google Maps-Flikr-Wikipedia mashup, minimizes steps and maximizes experience
Silver (Independent)
Park It DC -- fighting the constant circling, the unnecessary meter plugging and even expensive tickets that come with finding a parking spot in DC.
Where's My Money? DC -- The buck stops at a Facebook Forum on public expenditures, procurement and accountability.
DC Crime Finder -- Ripped from the databases, not the headlines -- a customizable look at crime in the neighborhood.
Silver (Agency)
Stumble Safely -- Making the streets of DC safe for pub crawls.
PointAbout Alerts -- an iPhone app makes crime reports, building permits and other civic data location-aware in that you see the stuff that is closest to you first
We the People Wiki -- An editable Vox populi for our Web 2.0 times, embedding the voice (or keystrokes) of the people through an editable, peer-led community reference website based on Washington, D.C. public data.

The full list of winners is available at the Apps for Democracy Medal Winner page, which comes complete with the opportunity to vote on the People's Choice award -- and the polls for which remain open until Friday, November 14 at 7PM EST.

The medal winners and the honorable mentions (which are all other entrants for their willingness to innovate, compete and collaborate) are all open source and all are offered to others for refinement and reuse. Perhaps more importantly, they keep hope alive for redeeming the reputation of a discredited phrase, your tax dollars at work.

Watch This Place: Apps for Democracy Winners announced Thursday

2008-11-13T14:50:22Z

The judges are sequestered in an undisclosed location with an array of laptops, iPhones and other devices to decide who has done the best job mashing up the District of Columbia's data.

The Apps for Democracy program is detailed in previous posts on internal catalysts and the use of cash incentives.

The results will be summarized here in an updated post as the results are known, with the details available at Apps for Democracy as soon as the $20,000 in award money is allocated.

change.gov: A Web 2.0 Political Transition

2008-11-13T12:30:00Z

The Office of the President-elect has launched change.gov to be the public face of a much watched and anticipated political transition. Like its content, the web address -- "change" being the watch word of the Obama campaign coupled with the exclusive dot-gov top level domain -- blurs the once bright line of distinction between campaigning and governing.

National Public Radio ran a good piece on how the web tools that served the campaign so well can be applied to advancing the new administration's objective. NPR correspondent Mara Liasson points out that one of the effects may well be to disintermediate the media by creating citizen activists who advocate directly with congress on the administration's behalf. It is worth noting here that the conventional media is not the only institutional interest at risk of disintermendiation -- you can and should add entrenched bureaucracies to the list. For them, this is a change that they can believe will happen to them, whether they like it or not.

It is followed by an clever little essay by comedian and NPR regular Paula Poundstone on what she is willing to do to breath life into the promise of change ... at least for now.

Internal Catalysts for Community Collaboration in Public Sector Renewal

2008-11-12T06:25:22Z

The answer is in the room. The room, in this case, was a discussion of changing the way government works at the conclusion of re:public VII: a gathering of those who choose to lead, an invitation-only event convened in Tucson, AZ by e.Republic's Center of Digital Government.

The answer is in the room, taken more broadly, recognizes the power and potential of internal initiative in changing the way organizations work.

As a case in point, Veterans Day came with a pair of announcements that new veterans-only social networks were launching, not by upstart newcomers but by incumbents that have been protecting and promoting the interests of veterans -- Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, working with the Ad Council, launched CommunityofVeterans.org on Tuesday and the Veterans of Foreign Wars brought www.myvetworks.com online this week too.

But that may be just scratching the surface. Back in the room in Tucson, the assembled panel had all gone deeper in their respective jurisdictions. Here are brief summaries of their case stories:

On the Spot: Open Source and Authority to Change

Vivek Kundra, CTO for the District of Columbia, says formal cross-agency agreements to surface and share data has made it possible to democratize DC's data -- for the good of the District and democracy itself.

It has resulted in the surfacing of 260 data feeds across DC government and a 30 percent reduction in requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

As noted in an earlier post, the internal initiative to create the 260 feeds was a necessary precondition to creating Apps for Democracy, the $20,000 competition to mashup the District's data.

This final judging is slated for this Thursday but the contest has attracted a steady stream (with at least one developed every day) of open source apps for platforms from Facebook to iPhones Apps -- including ones that let you know when the next metro train is coming, give you real time notification of crimes and disturbances in progress or allow you to customize tour routes in the DC based on your interests.

Kundra says the Apps for Democracy is part of a deliberate process to rethink the way government is done and in which "citizens and NGOs co-create" the future with and for government.

Kundra says that a future of that time involves confronting entrenched bureaucracies. He asked for and received the authority to make hiring offers on the spot -- successfully attracting 100 new people into public service that would have otherwise been snapped up by the private sector before government-as-usual could act. A more startling HR move is a parallel mechanism for showing others to the door. The district has also implemented daily performance reviews to identify people who are simply not working (out) and get them off the public payroll. The daily performance checks enforce expectations that everybody gets something done everyday. If you are not getting it done, you have until tomorrow or the next day to start. And if you never start, your employment ends.

Building an Arc

The City of Sacramento, CA, is partnering with Westinghouse to vaporize and monetize trash. So says Sacramento City Manager Ray Kerridge who, upon first meeting, appears to be the kind of guy who has a well thumbed first edition of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Listen a little longer and it becomes clear that he could write Zen and the Art of Repairing Government.

Kerridge enthusiastically detailed joint plans between the city (with a 5% percent ownership stake) and Westinghouse (the majority owner at 95%) to build earth's largest Plasma arc gasification plant. Riiight, as in Bill Cosby's Noah.

Wikipedia helpfully describes Plasma arc gasification as "a waste treatment technology that uses high electrical energy and high temperature created by an electrical arc gasifier. This arc breaks down waste primarily into elemental gas and solid waste slag, in a device called a plasma converter. The process has been intended to be a net generator of electricity, depending upon the composition of input wastes, and to reduce the volumes of waste being sent to landfill sites." Right.

That is exactly what Kerridge says the sacred northern California city will do. Gone will be the expense of trucking Sacramento's garbage to far away landfills. What's more, the scheme will redeem slag's good name because in this new brownish green economy, slag has economic value and a new name -- feed stock.

And Sacramento produces 5,000 tons of feed stock every day, which they will be able to sell as the raw resource for the gasifier. The stuff that comes out of the gasifier has added value in the making of green products. Under the agreement, Sacramento will get a cut of that too. If that wasn't enough, Kerridge says the city is also looking at the possibility at taking garbage off of other cities (for a fee), provide it as feeder stock (for a fee) and take a third fee for its share of the value-added products.

Amid looks of disbelief and furious note taking in the room, Kerridge -- whose voice still carries a residual British accent -- reminded the audience of an old saying from his native England, "Where there is muck there is money." The new world translation will be worth watching.

The Education Dividend

The Commonwealth of Virginia's strategic partnerships on infrastructure (Northrop Grumman) and enterprise applications (CGI) are credited for bringing hope to hard scrabble southwest Virginia. The collaborations are on track to help create 700 jobs. But the opportunities surface problems of their own -- what if the jobs go begging for want of workers with the needed education and skills?

For all his work on creating and sheparding the partnerships, Virginia Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra loves the challenge that comes with these more complex, stickier questions. The first part of the state's response is called plugGED In (notice how GED is imbedded in the name) which combines adult literacy, skills assessment, and workforce development.

Thanks to internal initiative, the commonwealth was able to stand the program up in only 6 months. But they did not do it alone, particularly in the area of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) where the education gap was particularly pronounced.

Virginia reached out to a non-profit "open course" start-up, the CK Foundation, which describes itslef this way on its website:

Our mission is to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the US and worldwide, but also to empower teacher practitioners by generating or adapting content relevant to their local context. Using a collaborative and web-based compilation model that can manifest open resource content as an adaptive textbook, termed the "FlexBook", CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality, locally and temporally relevant, educational web texts. The content generated by CK-12 and the CK-12 community will serve both as source material for a student's learning and provide an adaptive environment that scaffolds the learner's journey as he or she masters a standards-based body of knowledge, while allowing for passion-based learning.

Generating and adapting content relevant to a local context was exactly what is plugGED In needed. Chopra says they issued an open call for contributors and collaborators for their own untextbook that focused on the skills the commonwealth sought to develop. They received responses from over the country, with would-be collaborators ranging from an 11th grader to major research universities. The result: a custom open source physics flex book that will be available in February 2009, which Chopra proudly points out is the speed that the market needs and puts the conventional textbook industry to shame.

On the exit question, the panel offered a few random elements on the secrets to change that you can believe in -- and get done:

Be bold enough to take on entrenched bureaucracies (and have the necessary air cover from your appointing authority in place before you hit the streets);
Convince your people that their lives will be better;
Remember that attorneys answer the questions that they are asked -- "what are the barriers to doing this?" gets a very different answer than "how can we do this?";
Push innovation down as far as it can go in the organization. Innovation is embraced downstream when the people in the trenches believe its theirs;
Create a war room to prosecute the change with military-style discipline -- but only build a war room if you are relentless about it and willing to stake your career on it; and,
Remember that innovation cannot come at the cost of consistent and reliable service delivery -- blocking and tackling on the front lines buys permission to keep working on the next new thing just behind the curtain.

There is a lot here to digest, and this summary may not have done their cases justice. Expect a return to some of these ideas in subsequent posts. And your thoughts are welcome and encouraged by adding your comments below.

Disney on Management and Other Books Never Written

2008-11-11T00:52:04Z

It may have been an unfair request but biographer Neal Gabler's task was to divine leadership lessons from the life and work of Walt Disney. The night before his talk, when I met him in Tucson on the eve of a leadership retreat -- called re:public VII; a gathering of those who choose to lead, convened by e.Republic's Center for Digital Government -- Gabler said he was debuting a short list on the subject.

The short list was extracted from a long book -- Gabler's 633-page biography Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. The next morning, in front of group of public officials and employees, he debuted what might be called 'Disney on Management' with the caveat that he did not want it to devolve into the stuff of greeting cards or motivational posters. The talk did not. With apologies to Gabler, the following summary may.

Here is the short list of what Disney did, for good or for ill, in creating an industry and sheparding the company that bears (and bought) his name:

Infallibility Helps. Disney failed early and often, but never considered himself a failure. He was driven to be the best at something -- he set out to define the then new craft of animation and it defined him.
Business Plan Optional. He insisted that high quality was enough of a business plan. Disney also had the curious practice of repeatedly hiring efficiency consultants to study the studio's practices only to toss their reports and recommendations when it became clear that acting on them would put unneeded (or at least unwanted) constraints on the studio -- and the man who reigned over it.
Not Just an Organization. Disney was all about creating community -- a community that was intensely loyal to him -- but it foreshaddowed by decades all that Web 2.0 social network talk.
Inspire, Inspire, Inspire. Disappointing Disney was a terrible thing to do, and the people around him knew it, and did everything in their power not to do it. Inspiring his artists was the key to transcend simple cartooning and make animated features in which audiences believe the characters are alive, and have a heart and soul.
Trust Yourself. Disney did not collaborate, he directed. It was his vision, and those around him were charged with making it real. It made him a micro manager of the first order, and not necessarily a good thing for the organization. When Disney stopped trusting himself, the studio started using focus groups, which were no substitute for his iconoclastic leadership.
Take the Long View. In 1935, Disney pioneered the production of color animated films because he believed that, decades later, there would be color television and black and white films would not hold their value.
Maintain Control. Disney did, it made him indispendable and the company knew it -- so much so that life insurance was taken out to pay back share holders in case of his death.
Reinvent Regularly. There were a number of Walt Disneys over the years, each adapting to or anticipating the next opportunity.

In the end, Disney was better than anyone else than imagining the future, and then building it. Gabler would quickly add that was true insofar as brother Roy O. Disney was around to check Walt's unbridled enthusiasm and find ways to pay for it all.

In the discussion that followed, Gabler reflected on this future of biography. Biographers rely on the written record, from the first postcard Disney received to his death certificate -- to all of which Gabler had unprecedented access. Documents were also central to his biography of Walter Winchell and a history of Hollywood studio chiefs. He worries that the craft and its products will suffer, or perhaps disappear, as the written record becomes less complete. The worry was shared by many in the room but others protested that the nature of the record will change but will still be available to future biographers. The optimists drew analogies between postcards and instant messages and pointed out that proper archives would embrace more than just physical artifacts.

In discussions after the session, some attendees swooned over the reminder to wish on a star while others concluded that the words and Disney and leadership should never be used in the same sentence. "What was the lesson I took away from it?" asked one attendee who was quick to answer his own question, "He was a lot of things but not a manager ... and he may have just been crazy."