Center for Public Administrators
A civil society organization that strengthens democratic checks and balances .
If you will be teaching Innovation, Open Government, or Civic Activism in the fall, consider our teaching case on Independent Demonstration Projects, published in JPAE at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15236803.2023.2188150?journalCode=upae20
It’s serious and also fun, featuring the “passive-aggressive sheet cake” pictured here. We also have free class slides—just ask.
I am pleased to announce that I have been appointed an Associate Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Public Integrity. I look forward to helping to maintain the high quality of this journal. https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=editorialBoard&journalCode=mpin20
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 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
I’m pleased my work was cited in this very interesting article by Stephen Osborne, Tie Cui, Katharine Aulton and Joanne Macfarlane published in Administrative Theory and Praxis. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10841806.2022.2158638
I am grateful to have received a grant from the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County. The grant supports our ongoing research, writing and teaching to strengthen the role of public sector workers in democratic checks and balances.
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
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/
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/
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/
Center for Public Administrators 