There’s an App for That!

In a call for input on the proposed federal mobility strategy, the government established the “National Dialogue on the Federal Mobility Strategy”, a website to generate ideas and conversation on what to include in its draft strategy.  The format of the website centers around a forum where visitors post suggestions while permitting commentary and rating by others.  Overall, several of the top suggestions focus on accessibility, the development of an app store, and portability.  One top suggestion was the creation of a “government-wide shared services catalog that houses code, application programming interfaces (APIs), and web-services that agencies and the public can easily access and use.” The poster likened the suggested catalog to that currently used by the Department of Defense and its open-source forge.mil site.  The DoD open-source program consists of three different packages, all of which promote the delivery of dependable software, services and systems efficiently.  Overall, the forge.mil looks to provide the necessary technological framework to improve communication and collaboration between teams/individuals working to solve similar issues.

With a federal mobile strategy that looks to capitalize on technology and technological innovations, increased citizen engagement and federal worker productivity, as well as improved delivery of government information/services and reduced operational expenditures are anticipated outcomes.  All in all, the draft strategy and input shows a definite direction for federal agencies; movement towards mobile technology and finding ways to balance the needs of innovation and security.

Streamlining and consolidation of this technology in an ‘app store’ seems like the next big step for the federal government in 2012, as made clear through participation on the web dialogue.  Moreover, the impact of investment in developing reusable assets across the federal agencies will have a definite influence on the larger commercial marketplace, notes Henry Kenyon, ultimately expanding the range of software and engineering opportunities.

Your thoughts? Do you think that an ‘app store’ would increase and improve inter-agency collaboration?  What types of apps do you see being most effective in meeting efficiency and operational goals?  Do you see any major obstacles to mediating issues of accessibility and security when it comes to open data programs for app development?

Policy Informatics Book Chapter: Policy Decisions and Public Deliberations – Ilan Chabay

Ilan Chabay professor of Public Learning and Understanding of Science for Sustainability (hosted jointly at Chalmers University of Technology and Göteborg University), Senior Fellow, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, and Senior Fellow, Helmholtz Alliance on Sustainability and Social Compatibility of Future Energy Infrastructure, University of Stuttgart, will contribute a chapter on Policy Decisions and Public Deliberations – Learning to Cope with Complexity

In every part of the world and at every organizational level of society, rapidly accelerating changes in conditions from the very local to global require us to make urgent personal and public policy decisions about the highly complex coupled social-ecological-economic system in which we live. Due to inherent complexity, models using current knowledge under specific limited assumptions and conditions are essential tools for making decisions to lead us on paths to a sustainable future.

Models are fundamental to human thinking and functioning. They are approximations of the behavior of things and reflect perceptions of patterns and efforts to categorize, explain, and predict future behavior of physical, biological, social, and economic phenomena and systems. Models are essential in organizing and interpreting information, whether implicit and intuitive, or elaborate mathematical constructs, and they serve as engines of simulations and games. In games and simulations, they provide experience in considering and analyzing multiple possible outcomes dependent on input assumptions and knowledge.

Yet models and modeling per se are nearly invisible in most educational curricula from elementary school through university. Consequently, most individuals from young students to government ministers have little experience or understanding of the strengths, limitations, and modes of use of models for gaining insights and making decisions.

How can the capacity to understand and effectively use models to interpret the massive flow of information to guide policy makers and citizens be strengthened? That is the central question of this chapter, which is intended to stimulate thinking and action to build this capacity.

Policy Informatics Book Chapter: Innovation Policy Modeling with SKIN – Petra Ahrweiler, Andreas Pyka, Nigel Gilbert

Petra Ahrweiler (University College Dublin), Andreas Pyka (University of Hohenheim), and Nigel Gilbert (University of Surrey) will contribute a chapter based on their work with agent-based models for innovation policy.

Innovation Policy Modeling with SKIN

This chapter introduces an agent-based model to simulate the effects and impacts of policy making on the structure, composition and outputs of research and innovation networks. The model allows policy makers to examine the contributions of specific research and innovation policies to societal goals. Additionally, by varying the ‘virtual’ policies, policy makers can evaluate the impacts of different policy levers, judge the effects of policy decisions taken, and make ex-ante evaluations of future policies.