Bringing Our Human(ity) to Work: 5 Ingredients for a Delightful Town Hall
How to design impactful and engaging Town Hall or large group meetings.
Ashley Wichman
Ashley Wichman is a Program Analyst in the Technology Transformation Services (TTS) at the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) and is enthusiastic about helping teams work better together.
News and Events
Go Beyond Coaching and Mentorship and Get Started as a Sponsor
One step beyond mentorship is another practice called sponsorship: action-orientated, deeply invested support that helps others in their long-term professional advancement.
Collaboration and Innovation, Beyond Government Borders
How to start an innovation movement: Connect innovators with fellow innovators, and find more innovators to collaborate with.
Storytelling in a Digital World
The art of storytelling has been around since the dawn of mankind. Storytelling remains relevant today, and a recent effort by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows how agencies can use storytelling to showcase great projects while also teaching employees new communication strategies. Over the past year, Chris Reed, an environmental protection specialist in EPA’s
How Gamification Can Break Down Bureaucracy and Address Real World Problems
The world’s toughest challenges require out-of-the-box thinking. But how can agencies facilitate intentional, structured collaboration that leads to this thinking? Gamification. To address issues ranging from maritime piracy to Naval energy use to 3D printing, the Navy uses gamification via MMOWGLI, the Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet. MMOWGLI is an online gaming platform that
DigitalGov Podcast: Behind the Scenes of the Social and Behavioral Science Team
The Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST) uses theories, research, and methods from the social and behavioral sciences to address and solve challenges faced by the public.
The Benefits of Being Push-y: Reaching Your Audience Through Push Notifications
Need to get in touch with your audience? Give them a little push. Push notifications allow agencies to connect with their audiences for immediate communication. The Office of Personnel Management’s OPM Alert app provides a real time look at the current operating status for federal offices in the Washington, DC, area and uses push technology
Making Your Agency Apps Secure
Security and privacy are part of the six Mobile User Experience Guidelines developed by the MobileGov Community of Practice.
Why People Contribute to Federal Tech Projects (And How You Can Provide a Good Experience)
Author’s note: Anyone can contribute to the development of the Open Opportunities platform via the project’s GitHub repository. The Open Opportunities program itself is only open to federal employees. Open, agile software development projects can improve government initiatives. As discussed in last week’s article on agile projects in government, the Open Opportunities platform has benefited
What Are Your Customers Searching For?
What are your agency’s website visitors looking for? Can they find it easily? How do you know? Search analytics provide valuable data that can positively affect an agency’s Web strategy. This topic was the focus of a recent webinar, Show Me the Data: Leveraging Analytics in DigitalGov Search. Dawn Pointer McCleskey, acting program manager for
How Agile Development Can Benefit Federal Projects
Agile methods help agencies deliver projects and products more efficiently and effectively. The benefits aren’t limited to deliverables: Going agile can break down the silos that exist between and within agencies. And collaboration doesn’t need to end at the federal level—agile projects done in the open provide a way for the public to contribute to
Challenges, Crowdsourcing, Citizen Science: What’s the Dif?
There’s more than one way to harness the wisdom of the crowd. In honor of December’s monthly theme, we’re diving into and defining the various ways that federal agencies use public contributions to meet real needs and fulfill important objectives. Crowdsourcing Two’s company, three’s a crowd—and getting input from many is crowdsourcing. A White House
Trends on Tuesday: Facebook, TV and How to Reach Millennials and Hispanics
How do you capture millennial and Hispanic eyes? Through their hands. (More specifically: their mobile devices, and the social apps within!). AdAge recently analyzed a study from Nielsen’s Homescan panel which found that in a typical month, 12.2% of millennials can only be reached through TV (looking at the top 10 networks only) versus 14.2%
Wherever You Go, There We Are: the Geolocation API
No matter how you go mobile, you can meet your user’s needs. Recommendations based on location are plentiful, particularly on native apps. But don’t fret, agencies with mobile websites: you can also get in the location customization game. Geolocation is a W3C scripting API that can be used with JavaScript in Web browsers. In the
DigitalGov Summit Recap: Innovation Through Customer Experience
A panel discussion at the 2015 DigitalGov Citizen Services Summit delved into customer experience (CX) work at three agencies with diverse missions.
DigitalGov Podcast: Bridging Content and Discovery Through DigitalGov Search
Recently, search analyst Dawn McCleskey sat down with us to discuss the work of DigitalGov Search.
Building the Next Generation of Government Innovators
Innovators are made, not born. This summer, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began cultivating the next generation of federal innovators through a summer incubator boot camp, aimHI. AimHI is a pilot program to get high school students excited about careers in health information technology, medical devices and public service. Instead of traditional internships, which
How Agencies Can Support Employee Professional Development
Providing professional development for over 100,000 employees is no easy task. To build on the existing skills of their workforce, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has piloted AgOpportunity, a program that matches USDA employees with projects that need their skills and interest. The idea for AgOpportunity came from the Partnership for Public Service’s Excellence
Trends on Tuesday: The Rise of Apps, The Decline of TV
Move over, 60 inch widescreens—for the first time ever, U.S. consumers are spending more time in mobile apps than on TV. An article from Flurry Insights, the blog for Yahoo’s mobile analytics service, covered the recent viewing trends. Apps are now the top media channel in the United States: on average, people spend 198 minutes on
How OSTP Crowdsourced A Crowdsourcing Toolkit
To promote crowdsourcing, one effective tool is, well, crowdsourcing. Today, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the Federal Community of Practice for Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science (CCS) unveiled the Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing Toolkit. The toolkit contains information, resources, and best practices federal agencies can use to harness the power
