Public service renewal: the weekly round up

July 25 - 29, 2011

Heya!

Welcome back.

It's summer and with long weekends and plenty of off-screen reading to do, this week, WATCH THIS if nothing else: What motivates us, anyway?

Cuts and criticism:

• In New Brunswick, more than 150 term positions are being cut.
• Apparently, one staffer was disciplined for posting this video criticizing the close of the search and rescue centre in Halifax.
• Feds silence scientist over salmon study.

Cool stuff happening in the U.S.

• The White House continues engaging by trying something new on its social networks. Starting last week, senior staff at the White House will have regular "Office Hours" to answer citizen questions on a host of issues and topics. Interested? Use the hashtag #WHChat, and follow @WhiteHouse for the latest updates.
• Lose lips sink ... organized crime syndicates?? The National Security Agency will use social media and improved data sharing as part of an enhanced strategy to fight organized crime in the United States and abroad.
• Last month, the U.S. General Services Administration completed the transition of its employees to Google’s cloud-based email and collaboration applications

And here at home:

• To mark its 100th anniversary, Parks Canada launched its first mobile phone application, Heritage Gourmet, which offers more than 70 recipes tied to the country’s historical landmarks, some dating back to the 18th century. Yum, there's a recipe for Sourdough Flapjacks!!
• If you want to learn how Canadians are communicating and interacting online, look no further than social networking sites. According to Ipsos’ most recent Canadian Interactive Reid Report special feature on Social Networking, one-half of all Canadians (50%) and the majority of online Canadians (60%) now have a social networking profile.

Misc.:

• Google+ took only 24 days to reach 20 million users but their decision to delete accounts without real names attached has caused anger.
• What is Program Evaluation and Does it Really Matter?
• How to capture Twitter conversations

This post has been a collaborative effort from Lee-Anne Peluk and Nicholas Charney.

You can check out Lee-Anne's blog "In the Shuffle" at www.leeannepeluk.wordpress.com







Originally published by Nick Charney at cpsrenewal.casubscribe/connect

We Lease Our Talents

Apologies for the short (and late) post today, I'm in DC at NextGen and what I planned on running today wasn't up to snuff. That being said I wanted to share something that was said yesterday in one of the sessions that I thought was incredibly pertinent:

We are knowledge workers who lease our talents to others for as long as we are challenged.

Cheers.

Originally published by Nick Charney at cpsrenewal.casubscribe/connect

The Return of the Round-Up

If you've been following this blog for a while you will remember that I used to post weekly round ups. The round up was a mash up of interesting stories, videos, books, and other links that I thought were worth sharing. Over time I started to (and still do) share the majority of those links on Twitter. The simplicity of sharing links on Twitter and constraints on my time meant eventually phasing out the weekly round up post in favour of focusing in on Friday's weekly column.

That being said, traffic to this site comes from primarily two sources: Twitter and people punching in the URL directly. The latter of which may be missing out on some of the great links circulating on Twitter, with this in mind, I've enlisted some help in order to reintroduce the round up.

Allow me to e-troduce you to Lee-Anne [LA], a self-identified "writer, editor and relative newbie to government".


[NC] Lee-Anne why don't you tell people a bit about yourself?

[LA] I've been working as a federal public servant for about 2 and a 1/2 years; I started as a communications advisor working on an external stakeholder engagement, and recently moved into a non-stop corporate role as a digital strategist.


[NC] I've worked in corporate service environments too, caffeine is your friend. Tell me, how did you happen upon cpsrenewal.ca?

[LA] Well, during the writ period, my branch reorganized, and I got this new job. I decided that the best way to figure it out would be to: listen first, try out the tools, participate in the conversations, then see what happens. You were on Peter Smith's blog roll. He thought I might want to include a work-focused blog on my learning plan and he encouraged me to read broadly and take my time. I wound up reading your blog, then starting my own. I love the idea of virtuously scheming.


[NC] Tell me a bit about your own blog.

[LA] It's just a baby; ask me again in a few months. I'm sure things will change. I’ll find my voice over time.


[NC] What do you hope people take away from the round ups?

[LA] I hope it makes it easy for folks catch up on good reading. I hope to bring my own flavour to it -- you and I are interested in some of the same things, but also some different things. I hope to share ideas, collaborate, and to grow my community in Ottawa.

[NC] Well, let's get to it then, shall we...?

[LA] Round-Up For the week of July 18 - 22

Bwah. Out sick yesterday, so the round-up is a day late … but here’s the usual collection of good reads, courtesy of the #w2p community.

More talk on QR codes:

• Love this: Passport Canada has deployed a very ingenious application of QR Codes in their online Adult Passport Application.
• Bizarre but true, QR codes on gravesites

Quickies

• An ethos to replace the current one
• How does Google make the big bucks? An infographic answer

Tools of the trade:

• I love Balsamic for creating wire frames
• Collaboration tools create learning cultures, and are not just collaboration for its own sake
• Death to email

Open up!

• Wikipedia is rolling out an article rating system
• The Provinces rock! B.C. launched an open data portal last week, allowing citizens to access large volumes of government information for free
• Why we should be marketing open data
• Content and analytics are key for fed web reform
• What the interweb is hiding from you

Random thought:

Someday the machines will sound an alarm whenever we even think about typing a cliché. Blah blah blah. Until then, we’ll always have Damn You Auto Correct to insert clichés and the wrong word at just the wrong time.

This post has been a collaborative effort from Lee-Ann Peluk and Nicholas Charney

[image credit dolmansaxlil]

Doing more with less is dead, this is about doing things differently

The old adage of doing more with less is the final vestige of those who fail to understand just how profoundly our society is changing. Someone should put a bullet in it, because quite frankly it needs to die.

Look at what is happening across the pond, the reality is that we can't even afford to do more with less, we have to do things fundamentally differently; and that means re-imagining things from the ground up, and breaking out of old mental models.

Let's start right now

We live and work in a knowledge economy, so let's start acting like it. People entering the workforce today already own enabling technology, they already know how to collaborate with others, and use the social web to their advantage.

So why do we force them into cubicles, Windows 2000, and a heavily filtered internet connection (or worse no internet connection at all) when they've spent the last 4 years honing their skills in coffee shops, with Macbooks and wifi?

I can't possibly be the only person out there who thinks that we are imposing structures on employees that fundamentally undermine their ability to perform; and as any management book will tell you under-performing employees are a burden.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg

Let's stop to consider the money we spend on building the structure that undermines their performance in the first place. We hire ill equipped managers, force staff into cubicles they despise, give them hardline phones they don't use, strap them with mobiles that are contrary to their tastes, and handcuff them to old PCs that take five minutes to boot up in the morning. Wait there's more, consider all the the people we employ to run the processes that hire the terrible managers or configure the cubicles or procure the offensive and outdated technology in the first place.

The overhead of agony alone is incredible

... and the fact that we continue to pay for it when we can no longer afford it tells me that we aren't all that serious about doing things differently.

Someone prove me wrong, please.

Originally published by Nick Charney at cpsrenewal.casubscribe/connect

[image credit: rob_moody]

Office Space / NIN Mashup

I'm really not sure where to put this but I figured I'd blog it. I mashed up scenes from the movie Office Space and the NIN song Everyday is Exactly the Same.

It's something I've been meaning to do for a while now, and as a fan of both the works I'd encourage you to spend your time/money consuming them both in their entirety.

Happy Tuesday

Cheers

Office Space / NIN Remix (Everyday is Exactly the Same) from Nick Charney on Vimeo.

Originally published by Nick Charney at cpsrenewal.casubscribe/connect