In The Premonition, as he tends to do, Michael Lewis turns everyday people willing to tell us what we need to hear at a critical societal moment into a cast of characters we can’t help but cheer on, but also leave wishing the world had more brave voices such as these.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology officially released Open Security Controls Assessment Language 1.0.0, a federal government effort to standardize authorization packages and streamline security reviews using a common machine-readable language.
The U.S. federal government’s user experience community of practice is hosting a three-day virtual UX summit June 22-24.
Cyd Harrell’s “A Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide” is the book we’ve always needed, but wouldn’t have been possible until now thanks in no small part to the unparalleled experience she’s accrued over the years working at Code for America, 18F, California Administrative Office of the Courts, and other service design-focused environments inside and outside of public service.
The U.S. Space Force has outlined its vision for a digital service.
In-Q-Tel, the innovation and venture arm of the U.S. intelligence community, has published several open source themed posts recently, including “Toward Secure Code Reuse” and, most recently, one about GitGeo, a tool it developed that analyzes the geography of developers associated with a GitHub repository.
The DotGov Program, which administers .gov top-level domain assignments to official U.S. government entities, now offers the service for free.
GitHub has a great write-up of how open source community contributions played a key role in helping NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter achieve lift-off on Mars.
President Biden has nominated digital government innovator Robin Carnahan as the next administrator of General Services Administration.
Apparently, in 2021, there are people who still refuse to recognize the holistic, energetic and sustainable impact 18F and the U.S. Digital Services has — and continues to have — on keeping the federal government digital services industry and profession relevant and attractive to highly-qualified designers, developers, product and project managers and anyone generally interested in well-functioning U.S. Government technology.
Nadia Eghbal’s “Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software” is a deep and intellectual dive into the nuances of open source, yet still an excellent resource for government officials to both understand its role and importance in building civic technology, but is also relatable in many ways to the concepts of public service and public goods.
What’s great about about the public roadmap, particularly for large government institutions, is that they show there is a plan, but they are also a powerful demonstration of civic openness.
Virtual queuing and appointment startup Whyline has completed a $1.25 million pre-series A round led by e.Republic Ventures.
The Center for Plain Language published its 2020 federal website plain language report card.
The U.S. General Services Administration’s 18F has a great post on why distributed government is critical to highly-functioning public service teams, emphasizing a ‘distributed first’ approach to work.
Facebook announced that Roy L. Austin, Jr., will join the company as vice president of civil rights and deputy general counsel to establish the company’s new internal civil rights organization.
In the aftermath of the deplatforming of Donald Trump, Mozilla offers concrete advice on how to best deal with bad actors — including heads of states and politicians — on social media platforms, beyond just suspending or permanently removing them.
Twitter announced it has permanently suspended Donald Trump’s Twitter account.
To better demarcate the lines between freedom of speech and censorship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls for social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram to apply a human rights framework to their terms of use.
Canadian Digital Service design research team members Martha Edwards and Anne-Marie Mulumba share great insights into how people in government are making their research more inclusive.
Government Technology released its annual GovTech 100 list for 2021 and, while there are newcomers to the list, there is still a lot of room for new innovation.
I’ve been an advocate of U.S.-based government organizations having .gov domains for quite sometime, so it’s great to see Congress has made this easier and potentially cheaper to achieve.
The Department of the Air Force has directed commanders to conduct a comprehensive review of official and unofficial unit emblems, morale patches, mottos, nicknames, coins and other forms of unit recognition and identity to ensure an inclusive and professional environment within 60 days from Dec. 23, 2020.
The Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation at Georgetown University today announced that Cori Zarek will take over as executive director.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs published what it says is the government’s first-ever employee experience journey map.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office published a report on data governance progress across four federal agencies.
Shari Davis talks with The Government We Need about building a more inclusive, democratic public budgeting process.
The U.S. Department of Defense is publicly sharing its gradual transformation to distributed government teams and said there are more than one million personnel working remotely.
The Government We Need talks with Rick Cole about local government’s role in sustainability.
Liftoff for the much-hyped SpaceX test flight of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program is scheduled for Wednesday, May 27, at 4:33 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.
In their new book “Good Services: How to design services that work,” former UK Government Design Director Lou Downe offers the public sector an invaluable playbook to delivering government services that are in inclusive and intentional.
TED Radio Hour host Manoush Zomorodi’s conversation with The Bail Project’s Robin Steinberg is incredibly insightful and inspiring. Steinberg shares her work supporting those who can’t afford to pay cash bail, which ultimately leads to a downward spiral of injustice.
NASA will host a virtual COVID-19 hackathon May 30 to 31, 2020, in partnership with the European Space Agency and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
The RAND Corporation published Defining Second Generation Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) for the Defense Enterprise, a thoroughly informative report on how the intelligence community can better define and leverage technology to improve its approach to open source intelligence.
The NavalX Centers for Adaptive Warfighting hosted a discussion on design thinking with Office of the Director of National Intelligence Director of Lateral Innovation Katherine Tobin. Tobin shared her design thinking journey and how ODNI incorporates it into its work.
The U.S. Department of Defense has launched an online COVID-19 symptom checker at MySymptoms.mil.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its annual transparency report.
The U.S. General Services Administration published an Evaluation and Buying Guide to “help federal agencies seeking Human-Centered Design (HCD) services to improve Customer Experience (CX).”
The U.S. Agency for International Development is looking for a new chief technology officer.
New America has launched the Pandemic Response Repository that will serve as a centralized location for open source projects aimed at helping governments respond to the coronavirus pandemic.
To support government teams quickly shifting to distributed work during the COVID-19 pandemic, CivicActions will host a free webinar — repeated daily the week of March 16 — to share best practices and answer questions from the government community at large. Topics to be covered include operations, communications, security and productivity in a distributed work environment.
We’re at the point in the organizational and civic evolutionary cycle where distributed teams can and should play a critical role in building highly-effective digital government service teams.
In a post on the GitHub blog, CEO Nat Friedman publicly addressed the company’s business relationship with U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement, its opinion on the current administration’s immigration policy and “the principles by which we make decisions in these areas.”
The U.S. Transportation Security Administration is looking for an executive-level chief innovation officer.
The National Science Foundation announced $120 million in funding for a new organization — the National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes — “that will significantly advance research in AI and accelerate the development of transformational, AI-powered innovation.”
The Government We Need talks with Brian Elms about how government can ask the right questions and find its true public service purpose.
The National Security Agency announced the creation of a new fifth domain-focused internal organization that will “work to prevent and eradicate threats to national security systems and critical infrastructure, with an initial focus on the defense industrial base and the improvement of our weapons’ security.”
Whether it’s online, on land, underwater or in space, CNN national security correspondent Jim Sciutto’s “The Shadow War: Inside Russia’s and China’s Secret Operations to Defeat America” offers ominous insights into how the United States’ key adversaries are changing the dynamics of national security.
The United Kingdom Government announced it will pilot newly-developed artificial intelligence procurement guidelines it co-designed with the World Economic Forum.
The National Security Agency will host a “cyber-challenge similar to those that regularly threaten national security,” open to students at any U.S. based academic institution. The exercise will run from September 20, 2019 to January 10, 2020.
