Allow Myself To Introduce Myself

Welcome FedBlog readers! As Alyssa noted in her gracious introduction, I'm Dan Munz, and I'll be your humble blogger for the week while she recharges her batteries and enjoys the waning Euro-to-Dollar exchange rate. (Thanks, global financial meltdown!) Blogging will pick up considerably over the week as we recover from Valentine's Day-Related Program Activities, but I wanted first to elaborate a little bit on Alyssa's introduction, and explain who I am and why I'm here.

As she explained, my day job is at the National Academy of Public Administration, which is essentially a non-profit chartered by Congress to provide expert management advice to government. We were founded by moon-going NASA Administrator Jim Webb (no, not this guy), who noticed that he had the National Academy of Sciences for expert technical advice, but no counterpart for issues of organization, financial management, procurement, human capital, program evaluation, and the like. So, he went and started one.

Over the last year or so, one of the emerging management issues we've identified is the rise of social media, collaborative tools, and "web 2.0" in government -- not just because they're neat, but because they result in more efficient, transparent, participatory, and just plain better government. Now, as luck would have it, we have a President who's made an unprecedented public commitment to thinking along these same lines and, recognizing that federal agencies and departments are the main point of interaction between government and We The People, has ordered those agencies and departments to do likewise.

So, part of my mission for the week will be writing about how the White House, and the sprawling federal apparatus over which it presides, endeavor to fulfill their self-imposed mandate of dragging government into the wired world with minimal kicking and screaming. It's certainly going to be interesting.