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Federal Agility: A Cultural Solution to a Technical Problem
Editor’s note: In our recently posted transitional brief, Too Big to Succeed, we called attention to agile development as an opportunity for cost savings and improved outcomes. This week, we dive...
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GovLoop Interview with Zack Bastian on IT Reform
As the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee starts looking at federal IT reform, please take a few minutes to check out the Commons Lab’s recent work on the issue. Chris Dorobek of...
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The Specter of “Preemptive Government”
Last week, reporter Alex Howard published an interview on O’Reilly’s Strata blog that discusses a new use of Big Data in the form of “preemptive government.” This concept refers to emerging...
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Visualizing Sequestration with Collaborative Tools and Open Data
Mapbox Visualization of Sequestration Cuts Faced with deep spending cuts due to sequestration, the White House recently released documents detailing state by state expenditure reductions. However, they...
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The Future of Foresight
The Government in the Lab blog has an interesting April 8 post looking at current government foresight efforts, including initiatives at the Coast Guard, Marine Corps, Air Force and Department of...
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NEW REPORT: Privacy and Missing Persons after Natural Disasters
Several recent natural disasters have illustrated the need for humanitarian groups, volunteers and policymakers to understand privacy issues when searching for missing persons in the aftermath of these...
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New Open Data Rules Continue Push for Government Innovation
FCC Visualization of Low Power FM Availability, built on open data and explained on GitHub. Today, the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy jointly released...
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Project Open Data: Interview with Ben Balter
In our recent post on the Open Data Policy, we mentioned Project Open Data as an exciting manifestation of collaborative government concepts put into practice. To learn more, we reached out to...
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Collaborating With an Invisible Team: Lessons from Online Ideation
As of this afternoon, we have 79 conflicting opinions about the best way for citizen science to support environmental research. It’s entirely our fault—we asked. As an AAAS fellow with EPA’s Office of...
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Citizen Science Profile: SeaSketch
A demo of the SeaSketch platform being used to combat whale strikes in the Santa Barbara Channel. As part of the Commons Lab’s ongoing initiative to highlight the intersection of emerging technologies...
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The Power of Hackathons
The Commons Lab of the Science and Technology Innovation Program is proud to announce the release of The Power of Hackathons: A Roadmap for Sustainable Open Innovation. Hackathons are collaborative...
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NEW REPORT: Connecting Grassroots to Government for Disaster Management
The growing use of social media and other mass collaboration technologies is opening up new opportunities in disaster management efforts, but is also creating new challenges for policymakers looking...
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Ten of the Best City-Oriented Innovation Tools
Editor’s note: In this guest post, Ian Kalin, currently the director of open data for software company Socrata and former Presidential Innovation Fellow, shares his thoughts about the tools that are...
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Connecting Grassroots to Government Podcast #3: Aiden Riley Eller
Editor’s note: In September 2012, the Commons Lab hosted the Connecting Grassroots to Government for Disaster Management workshop. Over two days, we spoke with a number of event participants for a...
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Connecting Grassroots and Government through the 2013 Open Government...
Have you ever wondered what the weather is like on Mars? Now you can find out — Sol, the galaxy’s first interplanetary weather application, integrates weather data collected by the Curiosity Rover on...
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House Bill Raises Questions about Crowdsourcing
source: Wikimedia Commons A new bill in the House is raising some key questions about how crowdsourcing is understood by scientists, government agencies, policymakers and the public at large. Robin...
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Deadline Nears for Presidential Innovation Fellows Program
Photo credit: http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows The deadline is looming for the third round of Presidential Innovation Fellows! The third round of the program is focused on addressing three...
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Digital Humanitarian Technology and Knowledge Politics
Technologies are usually developed to accomplish a handful of tasks, while mapping technologies are usually made to represent only a limited number of things. While they are being developed, and...
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‘Let Me Google That For You’ Bill Seeks to Abolish the National Technical...
A Google search for the short title of the act, “Let Me Google That For You Act” found 440,000,000 results in 0.75 seconds. Internet search engines have replaced the need for the National Technical...
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BirdReturns: Citizen Science Data Prioritizes Conservation of Bird Migration...
Waterfowl arriving in California’s Central Valley in the fall. Source: Wikimedia Commons. The dry Central Valley of California seems like the last place that would be rich in wetland bird habitat,...
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