Conserving the Future

This site is an example of engaging information sharing and social networking.

http://americaswildlife.org/

Creating Innovation in Government: 3 Lessons from Todd Par

”Creating Innovation in Government”
Todd Park, U.S. Chief Technology Officer

Next generation of Government Summit

Todd Park closed out the opening sessions of the Next Generation of Government Summit, reviewing his fascinating path to government. Todd Park mentioned that the most amazing experience in his career has been working for the federal government. Todd Park’s presentation, as usual, was high energy, motivating and a great way to kick off Next Generation of Government 2012. Todd started off by providing lessons for driving change within government. The theme of the presentation was that change in government is possible, it’s a rewarding experience, and a necessary step to solve the complex challenges government faces.

Lesson 1: Team Up

Todd stated, “Whenever you have an idea, go find the three people who have had the same idea as you, years ago.” Todd advises that these people will have already thought through the idea, challenges, and will give you the opportunity to push your idea. Todd mentions that it is hard to find these people, and the way to find these people is to just network the old fashioned way.  Start talking  to people, and ask “Who are two people I should talk too,” Todd stated that he started doing this when he entered into government, and his network grew exponentially.

Lesson 2: Understand and Employ Principles of Lean Startup

Todd mentioned the book, Lean Startup, by Eric Ries, Lean Startup, as a critical read for anyone in government looking to become an innovator. Todd’s first lesson was to start with a small, interdisciplinary team, operate so that the people on the team aren’t silos and they are all a single integrated team. The job of the team is to understand the problem and develop the best solution. “A single collective brain to solve a problem,” stated Todd. Next, Todd challenges innovators to really think like your consumer, and talk and engage customers to understand real issues and understand what they want. 

The third rule is to follow rapid iteration, Todd advised to iterate super rapidly. This means to iterate from knowledge of the customer, not doing this process in months or years, but to constantly keep learning. Todd states that failure is very important, and while iterating rapidly, risk is low. Todd believes that it is way better to fail early, and then get to the end of the process, and fail after investing a lot of time, money and effort.

To recap, Todd’s tips are:

• Small Agile Teams
• Get to Customers as Soon as You Can
• Rapid Iteration to organically arrive at what customer wants and solution that gives you best results

Lesson 3: Embrace “We Government”

Todd’s next tip was to embrace “We Government,” which Andrew spent some time talking through earlier in the day. “Most of the smartest employees in the world, are employed by other people,” Todd stated. Here, Todd was explaining that it is necessary to engage others, across sectors and around the United States to help solve problems.

Todd continued to explain the hope of liberating government data. Some examples he provided were NOAA and weather data, and how by releasing this data, an industry boomed. Now the hope is that open data will fuel innovation across dozens of sectors, such as health care, education, and transportation.

“It’s incredible what you can make happen in government if you leverage these three lessons,” Todd stated. I really enjoyed Todd’s presentation, his energy and his passion for public service. You can watch his entire presentation over on GovLoop, so be sure to check it out. If you’ve seen Todd present before, he is really challenging to live blog. It’s really easy to get engaged with the presentation, and challenging to keep focused on note taking/writing, so check out the video to get see the full presentation.

New (NY) Parks Conservancy

The Doris Duke Charitable and Tiffany & Co. foundations have announced challenge grants of $1 million each to the City Parks Foundation to launch the New York City Natural Areas Conservancy.

To meet the challenge, the organization, which will work with the city's Department of Parks and Recreation to protect, restore, and manage expansive natural areas already within the city's urban park system, must raise an additional $2 million by the end of 2013. Similar to existing organizations like the Central Park Conservancy and the Prospect Park Alliance, the new public-private partnership will serve as a mechanism to raise additional resources for parklands in the city beyond what city government can provide.

"The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is proud to support this innovative public-private approach to making the most of nature in cities," said DDCF president Ed Henry. "It will serve as a model for how to manage urban wildlife habitat while also highlighting the ability of these areas to serve as 'green infrastructure' that helps alleviate urban environmental problems related to air quality, storm water management, and the heat-island effect."

“Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Tiffany & Co. Foundation Announce Funding to Launch New Parks Conservancy in New York City.” Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Press Release 7/16/12.http://www.ddcf.org/PageFiles/236/DDCF%20Announces%20NAC%20Grant.pdf

Everybody wants to be TED Talks

http://conservationremix.org/talks/indoor-urban-agriculture/

Imperiled Promise

"Where will that conversation unfold? In the wake of the Second Century Commission’s report, which proposed a Center for Innovation “to gather and share lessons learned quickly throughout the organization,” NPS has launched the Network for Innovation and Creativity (a pilot phase now hosted by the Conservation Study Institute in Woodstock, Vermont), a “bold and forward-thinking initiative, with the goal to rapidly share knowledge, new approaches, and insights from practical experience to solve mission-critical problems and advance organizational excellence.”60 “By supporting a higher level of peer-to-peer collaboration across the national park system,” planners hope that the “network will encourage and share innovation and improve performance.” Practitioners will harness an “internet platform of blogs, discussion forums, wikis, and other tools” as well as “video conferencing, telephone, email, and face-to-face meetings” to disseminate new ideas, insights and strategies for success.

"Although not the ambitious Center for Innovation envisioned by the Second Century Commissioners, perhaps this network will flourish and prove a resource for creative practi- tioners across the agency. And the projects featured above might provide some good starting places. To be sure, one’s peers can be a powerful source of inspiration and information, and it is critically important to transfer the knowledge gained by the agency’s most innovative practitioners to their counterparts elsewhere in NPS."

A.M. Mitchell, M.R. Miller, G.B. Nash, D. Thelen. 2011. Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service. Organization of American Historians. page 51

Rockefeller Foundation Announces 2012 New York City Cultural Innovation Fund Winners

Some creative projects here that could offer insights to true community engagement for urban parks.

Selected from a pool of nearly four hundred applicants, the sixteen New York City-based organizations will receive two-year grants ranging from $50,000 to $250,000. The winners of this year's Cultural Innovation Fund competition include Harvestworks, which will partner with the Industrial and Technology Assistance Corporation to turn artists' technological innovations into entrepreneurial ventures; the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, which received a grant to engage traditionally underserved communities by bringing arts programming into public housing; and the Laundromat Project, which will promote civic participation through partnerships with community organizations that organize art workshops in local coin-operated laundromats.

NYC Cultural Innovation Fund

I especially like the definition of innovation:

Innovation is a new product, process or service that is discontinuous from previous practice and yields new pathways for solving acute problems or fulfilling mission. Social innovation is often recombinant: a hybridization of existing elements that are combined across boundaries in new ways to yield better solutions, also leaving healthier social relationships in their wake. *

*This definition has been compiled from different articulations by Richard Evans, Geoff Mulgan and Andrew Hargadon

Changing Education Paradigms

Though two years old, I've just seen this animated talk for the first time. I thought it worth sharing on two levels. First, though directed at educational systems there is a lot here that is relevant to the Collaborative. "Divergent thinking isn't the same thing as creativity." "Most great learning happens in groups, and collaboration is the stuff of growth." "...it is about the habits of our institutions and the habitats they occupy."


Second, the talk is animated in a manner you have probably seen before, similar to Steven's graphic facilitation. According to one source, the animated presentation has been viewed over eight million times, while the original, full-length video presentation has been viewed less than 270,000 times. 

"Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence"

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms.html

Sites we looked at...

http://number27.org/work.html

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/maya_lin_a_memorial_to_a_vanishing_natural_world/2545/

http://www.managementexchange.com/story

http://www.orionmagazine.org/

http://www.orton.org/

http://www.plexusinstitute.org/?

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

http://www.harvard.edu/

http://www.economistconferences.co.uk/video/innovation-summit-2012/6112?video=6113

http://www.ecoliteracy.org/

http://researchblogging.org/

And of course

http://npscollaborative.blogspot.com/

Yammer description (Forrester Research)

Yammer. Yammer’s 5 million total users (1 million paid) have legitimized a freemium approach aimed at driving viral adoption. In order to accelerate viral adoption, Yammer places a huge premium on a simple, intuitive user experience. As the company has grown from a disruptive startup to one focused on becoming a strategic enterprise vendor, it continues to focus on the needs of IT. While this has traditionally meant providing the authentication, security, and administrative controls (not coincidentally, the functionality that required moving from freemium to a paid version), the new direction is more aggressive and far-reaching. For example, Yammer has invested in providing social capabilities to numerous cloud-based enterprise software offerings like Box, NetSuite, and Salesforce CRM. Yammer also recently announced integration with SAP on-premises, based on a connector developed by and licensed from Freeborders. Yammer’s investments point to a social integration strategy that includes a broad array of software solutions, in the cloud or on-premises. As a pure cloud provider, it is important for organizations to evaluate the viability of storing content and communications in a US-based cloud data center.

© 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited                  May 17, 2012

The Forrester WaveTM: Activities streams, Q2 2012            

Innovation PSA

A little more inspiration for this Monday...

The Future is Ours

"Innovating Innovation"

"One thing I’ve noticed is that the people in organizations who are the most responsible for innovation are frequently working alone–and they’re lonely. When you’re the person who walks the tightrope between risk and results day in and day out, you need colleagues to bounce ideas off and peers to give a simple reality check: to tell you whether an idea is awesome–or simply crazy."        - MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito (1 July 2012)
http://blog.media.mit.edu/2012/07/innovating-innovation.html

Socialtext vs. Yammer

Looking into the features of Yammer reminds me why we chose Socialtext for the pilot: the latter is just a bit more feature-rich. That said, none of the missing features are a deal-breaker, and may well be added by Microsoft. (That said, I will miss the customizable dashboard of Socialtext.)

Yammer vs. Socialtext

I had hoped to set the CSI team up for a trial run of the free version of Yammer. Unfortunately, because it is so tied to corporate communications, I cannot add addresses outside of my own (QLF.org) domain. To invite any of you we would have to purchase licenses for the Enterprise version.  I have registered and played around with Yammer a bit, and find it could fit the needs of the Collaborative and the FOS (Friends of Sharepoint). While organized a bit differently, it offers much the same functionality as Socialtext.