ExpeditionWorkshop/OrganizingAroundNetworkedCommunitiesofPractice 2004 0623

The President's Management Agenda (PMA) requires all federal agencies to transform the roles and relationships among people, processes, and technology in order to become a citizen-centered government. The PMA emphasizes bringing value and results to citizens, businesses, and government workers by "reducing the burden" and producing measurable improvement.    (W7)

This workshop will demonstrate an organizing process that can be employed anytime a purpose cuts across organizational boundaries. This is timely for workshop participants who have come to appreciate that building trusted relationships is the essence of eGovernment. How people design the organizing process for potentially “collaborative” settings, existing beyond traditional boundaries, can spell the difference between “multiplicative power” and “no power” arising to achieve high performance results that matter to all.    (W8)

As Communities of Practice form around priorities (Enterprise Architecture, Semantic Interoperability, Intelligent Manufacturing, Community Knowledge Network, Emergency Preparedness, etc.) it is essential to gain experience in designing an organizing process to advance the human relationships that “power” the ultimate success by these endeavors. As Professor David D. Woods states, “In design, we either hobble or support people’s natural ability to express forms of expertise.” Experience gained from the design of this workshop will influence how we design future forums. Individually and as a community, we’ll be better able to appreciate and tap strategic leadership from a wide variety of sources, including local, state and regional settings where quality dialogue yields the “line of sight” connection needed by all stakeholders to engage in joint action toward shared goals.    (W9)

We’ll be joined by a Community of Practice, the Strategic Leadership Network, Wash. DC, whose members have practiced this organizing process for the past year. In addition, to learning from them, they’ll join us as fellow citizens. They share many of the goals we have been practicing:    (WA)

Purpose and Audience: The GSA Office of Intergovernmental Solutions (OIS) leads monthly Collaborative Expedition workshops to advance the quality of citizen-government dialogue and collaborations at the crossroads of intergovernmental initiatives, Communities of Practice, Federal IT research and IT user agencies. The workshops seek to advance collaborative innovations in government and community services such as emergency preparedness, environmental monitoring, healthcare and law enforcement.    (WL)

The workshops serve individuals and policy-makers from government, business, and non-government organizations to practice an emerging societal form, Intergovernmental Communities of Practice (CoPs), in light of the Citizen-Centric Government goal of the President’s Management Agenda and the Public Information Access provisions of the E-government Act of 2002.    (WM)

Each workshop organizes participation around a common purpose, larger than any institution, including government. By learning how to appreciate multiple perspectives around potentials and realities of this larger “purpose”, subsequent actions by individuals representing many forms of expertise, can be better expressed in their home and collaborative settings. By centering around people and the "whole system" challenges they organize around, IT design and development processes can mature with less risk and greater national yield of breakthrough performance.    (WN)

Joint workshop sponsors in addition to GSA, include the Architecture and Infrastructure Committee of the Federal CIO Council and the National Coordination Office of the Interagency Committee on IT R&D, Social, Economic and Workforce Implications of IT and IT Workforce Development Coordinating Group. These organizations value this “frontier outpost” to open up quality conversations, augmented by information technology, to leverage the collaborative capacity of united, but diverse sectors of society, seeking to discover, frame, and act on national potentials.    (WO)