e.Republic Labs Initiative Underway

I noted last week that Dustin Haisler has joined e.Republic to lead our new Labs initiative. This is an entirely new endeavor for us and something unique in our industry.  While a new direction, it draws on our 25 years of working on and around public sector innovation. In launching Labs I outlined some of our thinking about what we are doing and why:

An Open Letter from Dennis McKenna, Co-founder & CEO,  e.Republic

I am excited to announce the launch of a major new initiative for our company: e.Republic Labs. This new endeavor provides a fresh set of tools to assist in meeting e.Republic’s mission to foster public sector innovation. It stems from our belief that thinking differently and acting collaboratively is the most powerful way to make permanent, positive change happen.

Under the direction of Dustin Haisler, e.Republic Labs will serve as a catalyst and connector for the development, deployment and scalability of a new generation of government and civic technologies that are redefining what it means to do the public’s business.

e.Republic Labs will do this through a unique combination of collaboration, research, reporting, incubation and advisory support for both public- and private-sector organizations.

Affiliated with e.Republic Labs, we are also launching e.Republic Ventures, an accelerator to assist select early stage companies go to market with their game-changing solutions.

We are launching e.Republic Labs and Ventures because we believe this is a uniquely disruptive moment in the evolution of technology, offering a once-in-a-generation opportunity for governments both small and large to harness powerful new tools that can dramatically improve public sector outcomes, build more livable communities and open a new era of citizen engagement.

e.Republic Labs builds on our company’s deep experience, network and successful track record in catalyzing innovation at the nexus of digital technology and government. Our original media property, Government Technology, was launched to help states and localities take advantage of the microprocessor revolution in the 1980s. A decade later, our Center for Digital Government and its Digital States and Digital Communities programs fostered the growth and maturity of the e-government movement with the rise of the Internet as a platform for governing. A result of our work is a powerful network of government agencies, companies and elected officials that are each moving the needle of public sector innovation.

Now, e.Republic Labs allows us to bring the best of our experience, energy and knowledge to the next era of public sector innovation and the change agents who will drive it. 

Over the last several months, I’ve spoken with individuals throughout the country, from public officials to application developers to tech company executives, investors and civic not-for-profit leaders. To a person there is a growing sense that we, as a society, are at an important juncture and that we must do more with the $3 trillion annual public investment in state and local government.  The public expects it. The future demands it.

Through our media platforms and original research, we have been working hard to help change the conversation about the future of our communities and the relationship between citizens and their government.  With e.Republic Labs and Ventures, we hope to accelerate that change.

Dustin Haisler Joins e.Republic as Chief Innovation Officer & Lead Our New Labs Initiative

Very excited to announce that Dustin Haisler has joined e.Republic as our chief innovation officer and will lead a new iniative we've launched called e.Republic Labs. 

I first ran across Dustin when in 2009, at the age of 22, Government Technology named him one of our Doers, Dreamers and Drivers for the work he was doing as CIO for Manor, a small town near Austin, Texas.

A pioneer in open government innovation, Dustin lead a first-in-nation effort putting QR codes on points of interest in downtown Manor, letting citizens use smartphones to access historical information and data about city services. The QR code initiative drew attention from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and was featured in a 2009 blog post on open government innovation. Later Dustin launched Manor Labs, an early civic crowd sourcing initiative. 

Dustin moved to the private sector in 2010 joining Spigit as director of government innovation. While at Spigit, a company that makes crowd-sourcing and innovation management software, Dustin helped design and deploy innovation programs for New York City; Bogota, Columbia and NASA's Langley Research Center. 

Prior to joining e.Republic Dustin was with the startup KlabLab.

Dustin has great insights and instincts around emerging technologies and how these can be harnessed   to help states and localities build better communities. 

FutureStructure - A New Framework For Communities

This summer we launched a new project at e.Republic called FutureStructure. It's a shared initiative between our Governing, Government Technology and Emergency Management media platforms and is focused on helping public officials and other interested folks drive innovation and better thinking around making great places to live in a true 360% sense. I'll be posting more on our FutureStructure initiative, but for now a short video introducing the project. 

Policies, Politics, and the Human Dynamics of Government & Technology

I was interviewed recently by Alexandra Meis, cofounder of the education startup Kinvolved and a graduate student at the NYU Wagner School of Public Service. I met Alex last year when she and the Kinvolved team won the National Invitational Public Policy Challenge hosted by the Fels Institute of Government and Governing. Both Kinvolved and Alex are doing great work, some of which you can follow here. The interview was for her class Gov 3.0: Rethinking Governance and Re-Imagining Democracy for the 21st Century. Here's an excerpt:

Alexandra Meis: Beth Noveck’s Gov 3.0 class at NYU Wagner is focused on the notion that “technology has the potential to transform governance and produce a more open and participatory political culture with effective institutions that engender trust.” What are your thoughts on this? What, in your opinion, are the biggest changes with technology over the past 3-4 years? What will technology with regard to governance look like over the next 3 years? [In general?]

Dennis McKenna:  Certainly the movement to make government more open and transparent has been important and leaders like Beth (Noveck) and Aneesh (Chopra), have been pioneers in this and have done great work.

You see a great deal of activity today with organizations like Code for America and hackathons hosted by cities like San Francisco, Seattle and Philadelphia that are changing the culture of how governments engage with the public and in their use of technology. This is a significant shift. Certainly many leading political campaigns, whether for candidates or on issues, have become effective in building what might be called a more participatory political culture. Most of this innovation has been around the edges, however, and there remains a long way to go.

I’d like to mention something here. There are of course many factors that influence the current state of our political culture and Americans’ relationship with governments at all levels. One that is critical but overlooked is cultural and has little to do with technology but the two intersect.

Governments, taking a cue from private industry and the consumer movement in general have for decades increasingly approached their populations as “customers” or “clients” of public sector services.  In fact, “customer service” has become as important a term of art for public organizations as for private companies. Admirably, governments are harnessing smart technology to improve the “customer service experience”. Getting people “on line and not in line” as they say.  This is well and good and certainly routine services are a significant part of what governments do and technology innovation can be applied here.

What gets lost, however, is the notion of citizen. I have a colleague that likes to say that government is a barn raising and not a vending machine. Governments struggle with the problem of public engagement. I would argue that this arises, in part, from this diminished idea of “citizen” in our current government/public equation.

This is terribly oversimplified, but for example, in education we know that better outcomes come from ecosystems that engage parents, kids, and the broader community. If parents simply take the view that “I’m a client of a school and my kid is a consumer of the education system,” we can run into problems. A better approach is “I’m a citizen engaged in my child’s schooling and school.”  This is a more fundamental idea: “I participate” vs. “I consume” government services. Surprisingly, back in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy In America called this participation out as a unique strength of the American people.

So social media and related technologies can improve trust issues and open up government data. But through all this it’s important to drive the notion that we’re all in this together.

The Mile Markers Keep Whizzing Past

Those of us in the business don't need reminders, but the disruption of the media industry by digital technology rolls on unabated even after a decade or more of churn. And the rate of change just keeps accelerating as legacy media firms remain in a perpetual struggle to keep their footing.

So just for the record, a couple more mile markers whizzed by this week:

Online streaming will surpass DVD's in movie consumption this year, but like the print vs. web advertising shift, at much smaller revenues.

Bloomberg's BusinessWeek reported on March 21st that Apple's iPad outsold Hewlett-Packard PC's in the fourth quarter of 2011. HP is the world's number one maker of Wintel PCs and BusinessWeek notes that if you consider the iPad a PC subsitute then "Apple...is the biggest PC maker in the world."

And while these latest developments are not immediately related to the graph below, the broader wake of this creative destruction certainly tells stories like those cited by Derek Thompson recently in The Atlantic. (As tough as these revenue numbers are the circulation figures are equally gruesome as Thompson notes.)

The Week: Back to the Future

Amidst the news of the NY Times latest “pay-per-view” scheme the same paper ran a fascinating piece on an upstart newsweekly called The Week that’s meeting surprising, if modest success at a time when periodicals and certainly general newsweeklies are in steep decline.

If you haven’t seen a copy, The Week is a tightly edited digest of what happened in the world the preceding week. It covers hard news, politics, culture and more; mostly by citing, mashing-up, and sometimes excerpting content from other sources. While their model works better in print than online, here’s an example of what they do: What happens if a Japan-sized earthquake hits California?, or this on business news: Is Groupon really worth $25 billion?

Intriguing about The Week is that it is in many ways a reprise of the publishing strategy envisioned by Henry Luce and his original partner Briton Haden for Time magazine in 1923. A story well told in The Publisher by Alan Brinkley.

As access to news and information explode The Week is finding, as Time did in its day, that readers value both the utility and art that sharp editors bring to netting out the stuff they’re interested in.

Governing Magazine Takes 1st at Neal Awards

Was very proud to receive word that Governing magazine took 1st place at the 57^th Annual Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Awards competition, in the “Best Single Article” category.

The article receiving recognition is an excellent feature by Governing senior editor Zach Patton and tells a clear, straightforward story about Colorado Springs, Colorado and what happens to a local government when driven by an ailing economy and tax adverse voters to do “less with less”. Published last September it’s a prescient piece now being played out by increasing numbers of states and localities throughout the country. It’s also a great example of the kind of reporting that Governing’s talented writers and editors consistently turn out.