"Smarter Government: Governing for Results in the Information Age is about a more effective way to lead that is emerging, enabled by the Information Age. It provides real solutions to real problems using GIS technology and helps develop a management strategy using data that will profoundly change an organization, as successfully implemented by Gov. Martin O'Malley in the state of Maryland"--

One of the biggest problems with modern democracy is that most of the public is usually ignorant of politics and government. Often, many people understand that their votes are unlikely to change the outcome of an election and don't see the point in learning much about politics. This may be rational, but it creates a nation of people with little political knowledge and little ability to objectively evaluate what they do know. In Democracy and Political Ignorance, Ilya Somin mines the depths of ignorance in America and reveals the extent to which it is a major problem for democracy. Somin weighs various options for solving this problem, arguing that political ignorance is best mitigated and its effects lessened by decentralizing and limiting government. Somin provocatively argues that people make better decisions when they choose what to purchase in the market or which state or local government to live under, than when they vote at the ballot box, because they have stronger incentives to acquire relevant information and to use it wisely.

This book investigates the role of smart cities in the broader context of urban innovation and e-government, identifies what a smart city is in practice and highlights their importance to the welfare of society. The book offers specific, measurable, and action-oriented public sector planning and management principles and ideas for smart governance in the era of global urbanization and innovation to help with the challenges in maintaining the democratic system of checks and balances as well as the division of powers in a highly interconnected world. The book will be of interest researchers, practitioners, students, and public sector IT professionals that work within innovation management, public administration, urban technologies and urban innovation, and public local administration studies.

Smarter Government Workbook: A 14-Week Implementation Guide to Governing for Results distills the lessons from Smarter Government into a 14-week plan to achieve strategic performance management.

Governments make too little use of the skills and experience of citizens. New tools—what Beth Simone Noveck calls technologies of expertise—are making it possible to match citizen expertise to the demand for it in government. She offers a vision of participatory democracy rooted not in voting or crowdsourcing but in people’s knowledge and know-how.

Collaborative democracy—government with the people—is a new vision of governance in the digital age. Wiki Government explains how to translate the vision into reality. Beth Simone Noveck draws on her experience in creating Peer-to-Patent, the federal government's first social networking initiative, to show how technology can connect the expertise of the many to the power of the few. In the process, she reveals what it takes to innovate in government. Launched in 2007, Peer-to-Patent connects patent examiners to volunteer scientists and technologists via the web. These dedicated but overtaxed officials decide which of the million-plus patent applications currently in the pipeline to approve. Their decisions help determine which start-up pioneers a new industry and which disappears without a trace. Patent examiners have traditionally worked in secret, cut off from essential information and racing against the clock to rule on lengthy, technical claims. Peer-to-Patent broke this mold by creating online networks of self-selecting citizen experts and channeling their knowledge and enthusiasm into forms that patent examiners can easily use. Peer-to-Patent shows how policymakers can improve decisionmaking by harnessing networks to public institutions. By encouraging, coordinating, and structuring citizen participation, technology can make government both more open and more effective at solving today's complex social and economic problems. Wiki Government describes how this model can be applied in a wide variety of settings and offers a fundamental rethinking of effective governance and democratic legitimacy for the twenty-first century.

In this IBM® Redbooks® publication we describe a centralized reporting and alerting system for governmental social service organizations. We include information about how to integrate key IBM building blocks to bring social services data sources together into an effective structure that allows for reporting on key metrics required by higher levels of government to help secure funding for reporting on the effectiveness of the various social service programs, and to give case workers and care providers quick and easy access to all the services ever provided to a person and their family, which can aid in the reduction of duplicate persons, and therefore, payments, in addition to reducing fraud and abuse of social services funds. The target customers for this solution are state or county social service organizations responsible for services, such as these: Caring for the welfare of children Caring for the adult and aging Getting people back to work who have fallen on hard times The intent of this book is to provide information to help with building your own similar system. We have also included an appendix containing information about the IBM Government Industry Framework and services for additional guidance and use.