Independent Demonstration Projects: A Teaching Case on Innovation

Independent Demonstration Projects is a strategy to innovate in government without first getting support from officials. My new teaching case in Journal of Public Affairs Education explains the strategy and illustrates it with a real-life case of making Virginia’s records of who owns business entities available to the public.
The case is at https://doi.org/10.1080/15236803.2023.2188150.
If you hit a paywall, you can use this free link for friends of Center for Public Administrators https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YDJE8ZZKS9MM2XTSQFKX/full?target=10.1080/15236803.2023.2188150

My review of The Ethics of Dissent just published

My review of The Ethics of Dissent by Rosemary O’Leary shows that this classic about guerrilla government is not just for ethics courses.

(If you hit a paywall, use this free link for friends of Center for Public Administrators https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/TEXWXUR9UYAWMVET5XGH/full?target=10.1080/15236803.2023.2182170 )

UPDATE: The friends link has been used up, so if you hit a paywall you can send me your email address and I’ll send you a pdf.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15236803.2023.2182170

Independent Demonstration Projects presentation at National Academy of Public Administration, Social Equity Leadership Conference

I presented a teaching case on Independent Demonstration Projects at the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) Social Equity Leadership Conference on June 10, 2022. NAPA will post a video of the presentation, but in the meantime my slides are at social-equity-leadership-conference-.pdf

OECD Observatory for Public Sector Innovation covers our research on Independent Demonstration Projects

Thank you to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for publishing a blog post about our research on Independent Demonstration Projects. https://oecd-opsi.org/blog/independent-demonstration-projects-a-bottom-up-strategy-for-innovation/

Practitioners: Present at the Northeast Conference on Public Administration

If you’re a Public Administration practitioner, consider presenting at NECOPA 2022. Have a case from your work that others could learn from? Technique you developed or tried out? I’m available to bounce ideas off. I’ve presented at NECOPA. The call for proposals is at https://northeastpublicadmin.org/

Teaching the Role of Public Sector Workers in Democratic Checks and Balances

Public sector workers are part of the web of checks and balances in democracy. Public administration schools are already teaching the ethics of whether and when public sector workers should act as checks and balances, but very little about how to fulfill this role. Case studies and several streams of public administration research provide a basis for teaching future public sector workers how to be effective as democratic checks and balances.

Our new working paper about this is on SocArXiv at https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/hy32x/

Independent Demonstration Projects: A Teaching Case on Government Innovation

I have developed a teaching case about Independent Demonstration Projects, which is a successful strategy to implement innovations in government without prior approval of agency officials. The case is currently pending peer review for publication. I would be pleased to send a copy of the draft case materials to any faculty member who wants to examine it for possible use in their teaching. I can be reached at David.Reed@PubAdmin.org