Cross Collaborate

© Jason Yoder | Dreamstime.com Is diversity necessarily a good thing when it comes to solving problems? We tend to assume that we’ll get better results from groups of people from different backgrounds and possessing a variety of skills than we we would from groups with a single orientation. That means diversity of many types, [...]

Deadlines are fast approaching for federal agencies to complete the initial tasks under the Open Government Directive. Publishing new data sets, opening websites, completing longer-term Open Government Plans, and dozens of others. But notably missing is any deadline or deliverable addressing changes in agency cultures and processes. Yet every day those basic dimensions of government [...]

As a mediator, I have this annoying habit of taking all sides of an issue seriously. Further, as a colleague once put it to me, people in our line of work need to combine optimism about outcomes with cynicism about motives. So I thought I’d offer doses of both in looking at the brighter and [...]

Will federal agencies really become more fully transparent, participatory and collaborative, as the Obama Administration’s Open Government Directive promises? Hopes are high among advocates of the new policies that such practices will become the standard across the government. Turning that hope into the reality of a federal world of collaborative organizations, however, poses a vast [...]