My teaching concept for digital transformation seminars at the University of Konstanz

Transfer Lehre_DigitalTransformation_Mergel

Special issue “The Public Manager” on ‘Government Embraces New Social Media Tools’

“The Public Manager” has just published its Winter 2012 edition. The whole issue focuses on how government embraces new social media tools. Contributors are among others: Andrew Krzmarzick, who talks about how government embraces social media as new communication tools; Scott Horvath (USGS), who presents an overview of the past, present and future of social media

New article “The social media innovation challenge in the public sector”, in: Information Polity

Albert Meijer, Frank Bannister and Marcel Thaens edited a special issue of “Information Polity” with the topic “ICT, Public Administration and Democracy in the Coming Decade”. They put together a tremendous group of international e-Government researchers and today the special issue was posted online. The articles included in the special issue include: ICT, Public Administration and Democracy

New book: “Social media in the public sector field guide”

Today, my co-author Bill Greeves and I received our first copies of the “Social media in the public sector field guide” we wrote for all newcomers to the productive and professional use of social media in government. We started to work on this project in 2011 to capture the legal, procedural, and contextual challenges that

Answers via GovFresh: What happened to Manor?

Luke Fretwell over at GovFresh has picked up the question I asked in my recent blog post about the disappearing social media presence of the City of Manor, TX. He has allowed me to repost here on my blog. Thank you, Luke! What happened to Manor? Luke Fretwell · Bio · RSS May 30, 2012, 10:21 am Ines Mergel

Government 2.0 class – students commenting on their own learning process

I am teaching PPA730 Government 2.0 for the fourth year with the challenge that the topic is truly a moving target. The course schedule organically evolves each semester – basically in parallel to the developments in the public sector. Four or five times throughout the semester guest speakers from government organizations join us to talk about their experiences either

Presidential Memo: Managing online records beyond paper and filing cabinets

Today, President Obama published a new presidential memo building on the efforts of the Open Government Directive he encourages departments and agencies to save money by providing government records in digital format – instead of “paper and filing cabinets”. From the White House blog: The new effort calls for reports, by each agency head, describing their

National Archives & FourSquare use: Walk in the Footsteps of the Presidents

I recently attended a webinar hosted by GSA’s Web Manager University who is hosting a series of New Media Talks. I attended a talk by Charles Birnbaum, who is responsible for Business Development and Partnerships at FourSquare.com. on the use of FourSquare in government. He was accompanied by Jill James, social media lead at the

Presidential Twitter Townhall @townhall

Yesterday, President Obama sent out his first publicly observable tweet starting off a new form of online Town Hall meeting, a Twitter town hall: http://twitter.com/#!/whitehouse/status/88670359720697856 The Twitter Town Hall meeting was the second large-scale social media event sponsored by one of the most influential social media companies in the U.S.: About three months ago, Mark

Social media network panel at #pmrc2011

On June 2-4, 2011, the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University has hosted the biannual Public Management Research Conference. You can find full papers on the conference program page. I was part of Panel 20 “Social Media Networks” together with Professors Jane Fountain (UMass Amherst) and David Landsbergen (Ohio State). Jane