Tag Archives: Government

The Telework Genie is Free. Now What?

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In regards to remote working, the general consensus seems to be, "you can't put the genie back in the bottle."

A good portion of the government workforce has been working from home for the past year, and the world has continued turning. In fact, some agencies report productivity is up since teleworking became the norm. While people will return to the office, it will look different with many alternating office days with days they work from home. The past year has shown us that working arrangements do not necessarily need to be confined to an office. And, when we also remove the stress of students learning from home, caring for homebound elderly parents, and a pandemic in general, employees may realize a new level of balance and job satisfaction.

To support the continued success of remote work, agencies need to shore up the IT that was put in place to simply keep the trains running on time. Some technology was implemented quickly to meet the immediate need, and now is the time to take a hard look at all of those solutions to see if they will scale to meet the long-term reality of a dispersed workforce.

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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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GovTech Intelligence Platform, The Atlas for Cities, bought by Government Executive Media Group

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From time to time GovEvents will come across information we feel our members and audience would benefit from. Here's something we wanted to share that was originally posted on TechCrunch.

The Atlas for Cities, the 500 Startups-backed market intelligence platform connecting tech companies with state and local governments, has been acquired by the Growth Catalyst Partners-backed publishing and market intelligence company Government Executive Media Group.

The San Diego-based company will become the latest addition to a stable of publications and services that include the "Route Fifty," a publication for local government and the defense-oriented intelligence service, DefenseOne.

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How To Maximize Your Public Sector Events: A Q & A With Kerry Rea Of GovEvents

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Recently Katie Hanusik with SpeakerBox Communications interviewed GovEvents President, Kerry Rea. Here's the article we wanted to share:

I recently had a chance to catch up with Kerry Rea, President of GovEvents, who shared her thoughts on the changing government events landscape. In the following Q&A, she discusses how topics have changed over time, how event planners can ensure success for their public sector events, and how to avoid common event planning mistakes.

Q: Can you give us a quick overview of GovEvents?

GovEvents was created as a complimentary service to government and military personnel, contractors, vendors, and event organizers to provide one place on the web to find and post government-related events. Without GovEvents, government personnel looking for professional development and networking opportunities would have to search numerous sites and monitor dozens of email newsletters to get a look at options open to them. Industry had the same challenge in developing their event plans each year - determining which events to attend, exhibit, and sponsor.

The site provides in-depth information on hundreds of events, from major industry tradeshows and government conferences, to agency-sponsored roundtables, government job fairs, training events, webinars, and on-demand webcasts.

The site has grown to more than 80,000 members. On average, 90% of the events on GovEvents are posted by members. Continue reading →

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.