Managing Crowd Innovation in Public Administration

Collm, Alexandra, and Kuno Schedler. "Managing Crowd Innovation in Public Administration." International Public Management Review 13 (2012): 1-18. 

From the report: "Governments all over the world have discovered the world of social media, for better or for worse. Whereas some of them are making every effort to prevent the unhierarchical and therefore uncontrollable (dissident) opinion-forming process in Web 2.0, others are looking for ways of putting the potentialities of this new opening-up of communication to use. One approach that is increasingly being tried out is opening up innovation processes in government. However, this opening-up of innovation processes is anything but trivial. It requires a thoroughly thought-out strategy and thus confronts government systems with extensive challenges if it is not to suffer the same fate as other unsuccessful attempts at reform in the past. In our essay, we reflect on the consequences of these challenges for public managers." Read more

The Benefits of a Big Tent: Opening Up Government in Developing Countries

Weinstein, Jeremy and Joshua Goldstein. "The Benefits of a Big Tent: Opening Up Government in Developing Countries." UCLA Law Review Discourse 38 (2012).

From the report: "Bringing open data and open government under a single banner, Yu and Robinson argue, leads to conceptual muddling that ultimately impedes progress for both projects. They express a concern that superficial commitments to open data “can placate the public’s appetite for transparency.” Drawing on our experiences with the Kenya Open Data Initiative and the Open Government Partnership, we argue that this need not be the case for three reasons." Read more

U.S. Terrorism Agency to Tap a Vast Database of Citizens

Angwin, Julia. "U.S. Terrorism Agency to Tap a Vast Database of Citizens." The Wall Street Journal, December 12, 2012. 

From the article: "The rules now allow the little-known National Counterterrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them. That is a departure from past practice, which barred the agency from storing information about ordinary Americans unless a person was a terror suspect or related to an investigation.

Now, NCTC can copy entire government databases—flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others. The agency has new authority to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years, and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. Previously, both were prohibited. Data about Americans "reasonably believed to constitute terrorism information" may be." Read more