What do policy analysts in government do (besides the cheeky definition above offered by Arnold Meltsner [1976: vii])? And more to the point, what do practicing policy analysts think they do, and what do they think they should be doing? In my recent dissertation research, I came at this question by asking practicing policy analysts to [...]
The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis 2.0 For the past 15 years, the Internet has changed our lives – and changed us. Now the Internet itself is undergoing its own transformation with the accelerating adoption of technologies collectively called Web2.0. This second generation web is characterized by the emergence of the Internet as a [...]
Back in July, I noted on this blog how the Guardian newspaper was using crowdsourcing to analyze the mountain of documents that had been released in relation to the UK House of Commons MPs expense scandal. Since the documents were generally image scans of expense claim forms, with handwritten data and receipts, machine interpretation was [...]
There has been an MPs expense scandal going on in the UK for a while now. Leaked expenses reports were published in daily installments by the Telegraph starting in May 2009. Whoppers have been reveled showing MPs from all parties with their snouts in the trough (“and most of them have got their front trotters [...]
The Sunlight Foundation has launched what it’s calling Transparency Corps. The civic minded policy wonk can devote a couple spare cycles to vetting earmark requests and other tasks that computers still need us humans to tackle. I wasn’t able to copy and paste the text from the pdfs (I had to go through a process [...]
Video Clips from Climate Science, Civil Service and Civic Society: The Long Haul to Low Carbon Societies Rod Dobell’s keynote address to the recent symposium “BC’s Climate Change Agenda: Changing Culture, Sustaining Momentum and Building Careers” (January 21-22 2009, Victoria BC).
The Globe’s Policy Wiki is a nice experiment with a lot of thoughtful features (that trump the Obama “Citizen’s Briefing Book”). Let’s see if we can keep up the civil Canadian tone and also avoid juvenile commentary. Blogged with the Flock Browser
Change.gov has ramped up the crowdsourcing idea a bit more by soliciting policy proposals from the masses to build a “Citizen’s Briefing Book“. This is similar to the Open Questions app the site was running late last year. Once you log in, you can submit your brilliant policy idea and vote up or down on [...]
Andrea Di Maio, VP Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, asks a question that is central to my work at eBriefings.ca – He also raises the point separately about government wikis and their use in policy analysis.
