Tag Archives: Federal

Putting Work into Defining the Government Workforce

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The last year has brought about incredible change in the federal workforce, and it shows no sign of stopping. With a new Director for the Office of Personnel and Management (OPM) confirmed, the next several months will bring new energy and activity to formalizing and standardizing workplace policies, processes, and approaches for the "new normal" of a digital-first government.

The move to telework changed how many people view and even perform their jobs. Before the pandemic, telework was sporadically used throughout government and viewed pretty skeptically. Now that the genie is out of the bottle, it's clear that government can continue to function without people in office buildings from 9am-5pm. As in-person work starts to come back around, the new shift will be in defining and managing a hybrid workforce.

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The Growing Impact of IoT

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The use of Internet of Things (IoT) to manage infrastructure and services is not a new concept, but response to the new normal of pandemic life, natural disasters, and the implementation of 5G networks all could accelerate the implementation of IoT solutions.

Remote Management

Stay-at-home orders, social distancing measures, and backlogged inspection schedules all combine to make a great case for implementing sensors and other IoT devices as part of infrastructure management. With technology providing data on the status of equipment, facilities, and general infrastructure like roads and bridges, the need to deploy inspectors to the field can be minimized. In the short term, this reduces potential points of exposure for inspectors and field staff. Longer term, it adds a new "colleague" to field management teams. IoT can handle routine, low risk monitoring, freeing up humans to focus on more complex or higher priority tasks and activities.

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I See What You’re Saying. Natural Language Processing’s Role in our Digital World

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Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a computer science practice that aims to give computers the ability to understand text and spoken words in the same way humans can. NLP is a key feature of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as understanding the language that we use to "teach" computers is critical to evolving the accuracy of the AI tasks we are asking of them.

The most familiar application of NLP is speech recognition--taking the spoken word and converting it to text. Speech recognition also is part of any application that follows voice commands.To work properly, the technology has to be knowledgeable of accents and frequently understand context (semantics) to differentiate words with a similar sound but have various meanings or spellings. NLP is also closely tied to several tasks that work in the background of applications we use everyday, including spam detection, foreign language translation, virtual assistants, chatbots, social media sentiment analysis, and text summaries/abstracts for long documents.

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Public Service Recognition (PSRW) – Celebration Toolkit

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Each year the President and Congress designate the first full week of May as Public Service Recognition Week in honor of the men and women who serve America as federal, state, county and local government employees. We hope you will join GovEvents in celebrating our civilian and military public servants this year. Public Service Recognition Week highlights the accomplishments of the dedicated public servants who work tirelessly on behalf of all Americans and who rarely get the credit they deserve.

 

The Partnership for Public Service and the Public Employees Roundtable (PER) have developed a guide to help you observe Public Service Recognition Week, taking place May 7-13, 2017, in your communities. GovEvents would like to share that guide with our members and audience:

 

There are many ways to celebrate public servants in your community during Public Service Recognition Week (PSRW). Ideas range from sending letters to public employees to organizing a celebration showcasing the work of government agencies in your local area. To help you get started, we put together our top 10 celebration suggestions. For our full list of suggestions, please download the complete How to Celebrate PSRW Guide.

 

We hope this online toolkit will help you observe PSRW in a simple, fun, low-cost way while honoring public employees that work so diligently on our behalf every day. We've included resources to help facilitate your participation in PSRW whether you are from a government agency, Federal Executive Board (FEB), military base or school. In particular, these are ideas and tools to help you reach out to your community, educators and the media.

 

We invite individuals and organizations alike to participate in our PSRW White Board campaign. Start by downloading the White Board guide from the PSRW Resources in the right-hand column of this page. You can also find examples on our Facebook and Instagram pages.

GEOINT POSTPONED Due to Language in “Pay Our Military Act”

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"We {GEOINT 2013} are one of the few events this year to fill downtown Tampa nearly to capacity. However, new legislation, subsequent legal interpretations, and resultant directives have drastically changed the environment." Keith Masbeck, CEO USGIF

After the October 1 announcement that the GEOINT 2013 Symposium would take place in spite of the government shutdown, USGIF CEO Keith Masbeck announced this week that the symposium will, in fact, be postponed.  Originally scheduled for October 13-16 in Tampa, GEOINT will now be held in the spring of 2014.

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