Call for Proposals: Integrating Community Indicators and Performance Measures

The Community Indicators Consortium (CIC), as part of a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is seeking proposals to write "Real Stories" of communities, organizations, and/or jurisdictions that have tried, successfully and not so successfully, to integrate community indicators and organizational performance measures.

The Real Stories project is intended to provide real life examples of the advantages and challenges to both community indicator and organizational performance measurement projects as a result of integrating or linking these two types of efforts. The published Real Stories, from 5-20 pages in length, will be used to advance the knowledge of community indicators-organizational performance measures integration and for training and other outreach material to community leaders as a way to improve or inform decision-making and create measurable, positive change in communities.

We are looking for proposals from individuals and groups who are directly involved in these efforts as well as individuals and organizations that work with community indicator and performance measurement projects. A stipend of $2,000 will be awarded for each Real Stories published.Three-to-five Real Stories will be selected for publication in 2010.

The deadline for submitting proposals for the 2010 Call for Real Stories is June 22, 2010. Notification of selected proposals and guidelines for development will be sent on July 15th. The deadline for the written first draft is September 15, 2010.

Visit the CIC web site for more information about the Real Stories project and the call for proposals. You can also download the Real Stories Proposal submittal form for more details, or contact the Project Steering committee at CIPM@communityindicators.net

Sincerely,

Allen Lomax and Cheryle Broom
Integrating Community Indicators and Performance Measures Co-Chairs

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NAPC Conference, Day One: CI-PM Integration

I'm at the NAPC Conference in Alexandria, Virginia. Our opening pre-conference session features Allen Lomax from the Community Indicators Consortium talking about their project to integrate community indicators and government performance measures. I'll be participating with a NAPC Forward project to increase the use of social media among community planning agencies, so you'll see more if you follow @N_A_P_C on Twitter (you can follow me, too, at @BenWarner.) You'll see more about the conference also on the NAPC blog and the NAPC YouTube channel.

Allen's presentation is now online at www.communityplanning.org -- excellent examples of communities  trying to engage the community and government around data and the policy implications of using good, shared information. The Community Indicators Consortium is about to put out a call for more Real Stories -- case studies of integration efforts, successful or not -- so watch for that.

The conversation got really interesting, as multiple folk shared their initiatives in their local communities -- the topic appeared to strongly resonate with NAPC members who have been trying to bring community indicators together with performance measures and have important lessons to share. This is a critical connection for this conversation, and I hope more NAPC members get involved in helping this project along.

In other news, you can follow live tweeting of the conference through the #NAPC10 hashtag.

Enjoy!

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Free PPMRN/GASB Webinar

Share your comments on the Proposed GASB SEA Guidelines

Tues., Oct. 20 12:30-2:30pm (ET)The Public Performance Measurement and Reporting Network (PPMRN) will host a FREE online webinar / audio-conference featuring members of the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) team who will answer questions about the Proposed Voluntary Service Efforts and Accomplishments Reporting Guidelines.

PPMRN hopes to encourage wide participation and to provide constructive feedback to GASB on the content of this proposal. Please pass this information along - participants do not have to be PPMRN members.We ask that participants read and be familiar with the entire document prior to the webinar.For more information about this webinar, including a link to the document and instructions on how to register for this free event, please visit the PPMRN website at: http://www.ppmrn.net/resources/articles/5749.

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Community Indicators and Performance Measures Update

A number of initiatives are underway in improving government performance measurement systems and linking those systems with community indicators. If you are interested in thinking about how your community measures the effectiveness and efficiency of government services, and would like to bring those trend lines together with trends on civic engagement and community governance, and wrap it all under a picture of how the community is doing in relation to an overall vision of improvement, you need to be aware of several initiatives and opportunities.

First of all, two conferences are coming up that you should seriously think about attending. The Community Indicators Consortium will be meeting September 30 - October 2 at their Seventh Annual Conference in Seattle. The conference will focus on four aspects of effective indicator efforts:

• From Planning to Implementation
• Creating Partnerships and Crossing Boundaries
• Promoting Social Change
• Integrating Indicators & Performance Measures

I'll be providing a half-day workshop on the 30th and will be part of at least one other session during the conference, so if you're planning on attending please look me up and say hello. CIC will be sharing a great deal about its Integrating Community Indicators and Performance Measures initiative, including an awards presentation and discussion of its Real Stories project.

The AGA will be having its 2009 Performance Management conference November 5-6, also in Seattle. Sessions include:

• Lessons Learned about Strategic Planning and Performance Management
  
• Listening to the Numbers: How to Use Performance Data to Improve Service Delivery
  
• Using Performance Measures to Improve Service Delivery
  
• Public Interest in Government Accountability and Performance
  
• What’s New: Toolkit for Preparing an Award-Winning Performance Report
  
• Let’s Take a Look at Performance Based Management Reporting
  
• Integrating Performance Measures and Community Indicators to Enhance Governance, Citizen Engagement and Results
  
• The Chief Executive Officer’s Strategic Partnership: Critical to Driving Transformational Change
  
• Performance 2.0—From Measurement to Management

Evie Barry says "Don’t miss this annual event if you are starting to think about performance reporting for your community or you are a seasoned performance reporter wanting to learn about innovative ideas from other governments."

You'll also want to take some time to provide your input to the GASB SEA effort. Go to GASB's website for more information and instructions on how to comment on their Proposed Suggested Guidelines for Voluntary Reporting, SEA Performance Information. Deadline is October 30, so you need to hurry. More information is available at the AGA blog.

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New Governance Assessment Portal Newsletter Available

I don't know if you've seen the Government Assessment Portal (GAP) Newsletter yet, but I'd like to draw it to your attention because of the creative ways people are measuring government performance.

Articles in the newsletter include:

• Bhutan: Planning for happiness
• Angola: On its way to better local governance
• Chile: Taking stock of democratic progress
• Workshop in Cairo: Assessment Methods and Application of Governance Evidence
• Workshop in Namibia: Call for participants
• Work in the Pipeline

Take a peek, especially on the challenges Bhutan is facing on trying to operationalize its focus on Gross National Happiness and Chile's efforts to "develop a governance assessment in Chile through a multi-stakeholder nationally driven process."

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Award Nominations Sought

Call for Nominations:
Community Indicators & Performance Measures Integration Awards

The Community Indicators Consortium is inviting nominations of efforts to integrate community indicator and performance measurement projects (US or international) that best demonstrate the development and application of integrating these two forms of measurement to advance sustainable change in their communities and the power of this integration to drive that change.

The purpose of the Awards Program is to

• recognize the collaborative efforts among community stakeholders to integrate community indicators-organizational performance measures projects and the people who made it happen and
• add to the public body of knowledge about community indicator-organizational performance measurement integration promising practices.

Nominations are due by midnight, Wednesday, August 26, 2009. For more information about the awards, the awards criteria, and how to apply, please visit the Community Indicators-Performance Measurement section of the Community Indicators Consortium website.

Allen Lomax and Cheryle Broom
CI-PM Steering Committee Co-Chairs
CIPM@communityindicators.net
Community Indicators Consortium

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If It Matters, Measure It!

I wanted to pass along this blog post from Scott Burns highlighting the importance of government performance measurement and pointing to the CDC's metrics page as a best practice example.

Along the same line, I stumbled across this blog called Measures Matter that is focused on government performance measurement.

Of course, i still rely on the resources at the Public Performance Management Reporting Network and the Association of Government Accountants (AGA) Blog.

What other resources do you find helpful for discussing government performance measures?

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Oregon Benchmarks: A Wake-up Call

A well-established, internationally-recognized, model community measurement project could lose funding and go away because the people who should be using the information have been ignoring the data. Today's headline is brought to you from the Statesman Journal reporting on the Oregon Benchmarks project, but the message resonates loudly with other communities who have been through or are potentially facing the same short-sighted decision-making under pressure of tight budget demands.

From the Statesman Journal:

Oregon has been a global leader in measuring its successes and failures. Unfortunately, too few people have been paying attention, especially in state government and the Legislature. Now the state is on the verge of ending its innovative self-grading system, known as the Oregon Benchmarks. Fortunately, there's a proposal to keep the benchmarks alive ...

Take a look at the Oregon Benchmarks here. It's a good report. It ought to be used more. It deserves better.

But if something that's been in place for 20 years is under such budgetary pressure, what level of concern are we facing in our own local communities? How are we insulating ourselves from these kinds of financial threats? What are we doing to establish the ROI of our projects? How are we diversifying our funding streams?

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JCCI Releases Report on City Government Finances

The Jacksonville Community Council Inc. (JCCI) has released a new study called Our Money, Our City: Financing Jacksonville's Future. The report is a result of eight months of work of a volunteer citizen task force exploring local government finances.

I share this with you because one of the conclusions of the report speaks to our ongoing conversations about government performance measures. From the report:

Jacksonville lacks the kind of transparent performance management measurement and benchmarking systems necessary to demonstrate efficiency and effectiveness in
government, and to build confidence in government’s stewardship of taxpayer money. Therefore, many residents of Jacksonville do not trust government to spend their tax
money wisely.

The report recommends that:

Based on a clearly stated set of roles and priorities for City government, the Mayor and City Council should establish and make publicly available explicit financial and operating goals together with appropriate performance standards (i.e. “benchmarks”) for use in evaluating actual performance. This level of accountability is critical for providing citizens with a tool to help determine the effectiveness of local government as well as the efficient use of taxpayer dollars. As part of developing this performance measurement system, the City of Jacksonville should participate in state and national organizations, such as the Florida Benchmarking Consortium, which allow cities to compare performance in key areas with other cities known for delivering high levels of service with high efficiency.

At the study release press conference, attended by over 150 community leaders and interested citizens, study chair J.F. Bryan IV said, "We don’t have the kind of transparent performance management, measurement and benchmarking systems needed to adequately demonstrate efficiency and effectiveness. You can’t manage what you don’t measure."

The early press reports of the study focus on the current financial crisis being experienced by the City and the hard choices between raising revenues and/or cutting services that Jacksonville must make. But central to making those decisions is the need to build public trust, and the development of transparent performance measures is seen as a critical component to developing that trust.

I'll keep you informed as the conversation continues ... this promises to be an interesting opportunity to transform the relationship between the people and government. I thought this group might want to think about the connections between community indicator systems and government performance measures that are designed for public trust, not just internal management efficiencies.

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Audio Conference on Government Performance Measures

The Association of Government Accountants (AGA) is providing an audio conference called Using Performance Measures to Manage Government Services on July 15, 2009. It's a little pricey, but I thought I'd pass it along. From their website:

AGA is pleased to announce its latest audio conference on using performance measures to improve operations.

Accountability. Transparency. Measurement. These are the buzzwords of the day, but the expectations are real that citizens are expecting governments to be efficient and effective. Collecting good data does not improve government operations, however. What improves operations and service delivery systems are the discussions, analyses of the information, and point/counterpoint debates that focus directly on making changes. A new research project, Using Performance Measures to Improve State and Local Governments’ Service Delivery, will determine the extent to which performance measures are being used in government to improve services, regardless of the level of government. The project will follow up with successful practices in applying these techniques to achieve performance goals and provide quantifiable value.

Join Harold (Hal) I. Steinberg, CGFM, CPA, lead researcher and former first Deputy Controller/Acting Controller, Office of Federal Financial Management, Office of Management and Budget, and two government experts who will share their failed attempts and successful experiences.

Please join us for two hours of lively discussion about this important and timely topic. In addition to the speakers’ commentary, 20 minutes will be set aside so participants can ask the speakers questions and share their own experiences.

Date: Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Time: 2 – 3:50 p.m. Eastern Savings Time

Learning Objectives: To learn how the use of performance measures can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of government

Prerequisite: Basic knowledge of performance measures

Advance Prep: None required

CPE: Two credits

Field of Study: Management Advisory Services

Cost: $249 per site (UNLIMITED ATTENDANCE) if you register on or before Friday, July 10, 2009 and $299 thereafter. SPECIAL PROMOTION: Government agencies and CPAG members who register five or more offices will receive a 20 percent discount ($200 per site)

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Open Government Link List from GovLoop

Jeffry Levy shared this list of news and links for increased government transparency and data sharing on GovLoop:

U.S. Government YouTube hub: gives you quick access to all agency channels.

White House blog post re: Gov't 2.0: Bev Godwin highlights social media projects all across government. Features a video with White House New Media Director Macon Phillips giving a guided tour of many gov't 2.0 sites.

Data.gov: the new gov't-wide site designed to give you raw data to play with. Mashups, anyone?

Round 2 of the Open Gov't Initiative: the White House invites all Americans to suggest ideas on how to make the gov't more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. The site features an innovations gallery, showing the best of open gov't.

Those are all from the gov't itself. But also today, the Sunlight Foundation launched Apps for America 2, where people are invited to create good uses for gov't data they find on data.gov.

And here's my bold prediction: in a year, we'll look back on this stuff and laugh at how little we were doing back then.

Just thought you might want to know.

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ABTA Conference, Part II

(You can see my earlier notes on the ABTA Conference here.)

The next panel at the conference was on the Marriage of Planning, Budgeting, and Performance Metrics. The only powerpoint presented was of a logic model based on Mark Friedman's work.

Robert McMillan, founder of ScotCro, LLC (which describes itself as "a driver of government accountability") spoke first. They have been collecting unit cost information nationally. This is different from ranking efforts in that it is not survey-oriented but taken from published reports -- taking the expenditures and activities and developing a unit cost. The goal initially was to develop unit cost information for 10 states, selected because their budget and activity data were presented in proximity to each other. One thing they discovered was that there was little practical application in the way data were submitted to legislatures. Their most important finding was that there was no correlation between activity and cost, no way to match dollars to their activities, and no way to determine either effectiveness or efficiencies. The state of Florida was the only exception.

David Tanner, Division Director responsible for Performance Management in the Georgia Office of Planning and Budget (and a fellow BYU graduate!) spoke of Georgia's experience with results-based budgeting. In 1994, Georgia passed laws to require results-based budgeting. In 2006, the budgeting process moved to program-based rather than line-item based. They are supported by the bi-annual publication of Georgia in Perspective (PDF). They use a logic model to determine inputs, activities, outputs, and short, medium, and long-range outcomes, answering the questions How much did we do? How well did we do it? Who's better off/How are they better off?

Activities-based costing is not an end in itself, but a means to better trending and decision-making. They have to be supported by a series of measures, which require data collection and a series of assumptions about what the data mean. This allows for collaboration with both public and private data reporting and efforts, since many of the intended outcomes are similar and multiple viewpoints can be helpful.

Peter Miller comes from Indiana's Office of Management and Budget in the Government Efficiency & Financial Planning division. They use 2,000 internal performance metrics, as well as aggregate up to a few high-level indicators that can be seen at Results.IN.gov. Miller suggested that creating an index is "interesting, but not actionable," and urged us to stay away from indices as a measurement tool (a position that I wholeheartedly agree with.) The biggest difference, he added, between government and business is politics -- which is why he refers to "performance-informed budgeting" rather than performance-based since, in the political process, politicians can always say they don't care what the data say and want to fund a particular program anyway. He also said, when working with politicians, a few high-level indicators that tell the story in broad terms are much more useful than many detailed indicators -- the details are for management, not for legislators or other elected officials.

The point of high-level indicators (think of a pyramid where many smaller measures support the top measures) is not just to drive costs down. The point is to look at effectiveness. In Indiana, we could see that we weren't achieving the outcomes we wanted in child services and knew where we were falling short, so we hired an additional 800 caseworkers.

Mark Abrahams, of The Abrahams Group, said that activities are the core of a good auditing system. We connect costs to results through the activities. Using a logic model helps us respond intelligently to the reality that outcomes cross departments, so on one page of a logic model we can include multiple departments that are working together towards shared outcomes.

A key first step for governments is to institute timesheets that are activity-based. 75 percent of your expenditures are in salaries, and if you can't connect the salaries to the hours spent per activity you can't manage activity costs. The logic model also helps make sure that the activities are aligned with the mission.

That conversation took us until lunch. I'll continue with my notes in another post.

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Notes on the ABTA Conference

I mentioned earlier that I would be speaking at the ABTA Conference. I took a few notes during the sessions that I'd like to share with you.

The good news is, all the presentations are now online. The videos of each session are said to be coming soon. This means you can skip my comments and go straight to the source, if you'd like.

Still here? All right then. I strongly recommend watching the videos when they are available -- this was a fantastic discussion, and I applaud the organizers for bringing all the pieces together. My notes follow the break:



Our first speaker was Congressman Bill Posey. Until the video of his presentation is available, you can watch his short (one-minute) summary of ABTA instead:



Deborah Carstens, director of ABTA, spoke next. She introduced the ABTA Data Reports website which has information on government expenditures and performance benchmarks for all 50 states and many of the counties within states. She estimated that they have 230,000 tables in their website, and it's still growing (the whole institute is less than a year old). Take a look.

We were next treated to a panel on Policy and Government Accountability, chaired by Gary VanLandingham, Director of the Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability for the Florida Legislature. Gary suggested that talking about using performance data in budgets is not a new idea -- in 1918-19 folks were talking about the same thing -- but that adoption has been slow. Currently, 39 states collect data, and 22 legislatures say they use the data in developing budgets. The problems are twofold: there's a cultural divide between rational data-gathering folks and politicians, and there's a communication problem in sharing that data in useful and meaningful ways. (Gary's powerpoint is available here.)

Judy Zelio, recently retired from the National Conference of State Legislatures, spoke next. She has just published some work on this issue with the IBM Business of Government website. Her powerpoint presentation is also available. Her point was that accountability means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. If you have cooperation between the executive and legislative branches you can move accountability forward much more quickly than if there's discord. In late April, NCSL reported that states are facing a combined $300 billion shortfall, evidence of a crisis in state revenues, and that FY2010 funding looks to be down 18 percent with no expected improvements in FY2011.

Jean Vandal presented without a powerpoint, so you'll have to wait for the video to be put online to get a fuller sense of her remarks. She's a Special Assistant with the Louisiana State University system with a great deal of experience in state government. She's serving on the steering committee of the Comparative Performance Measurement Project, a cooperative effort of the Urban Institute and NCSL. She said that Louisiana's move to performance-based budgeting was "uniquely designed" for Louisiana. She listed three keys to their effort:

1. This is hard work. It takes staff and resources, with an emphasis on good policy wonks. They used agency strategic plans to select the performance measures, which meant that the agencies couldn't attack or disavow the data -- they had already identified the measures as important and were supposedly using the data. The first two years of the project they agreed not to use the performance measures to issue findings against an agency to allow for auditing of processes and improving data collection.

2. The second key is that this work requires a champion. Someone needs to be pushing forward on the issue. It will take time and so needs someone committed to the effort for the long haul.

3. The third key is that the effort must be sustained. While it is hard to start, it is even harder to keep it going. Bureaucrats will try to outlast politicians. We need to have bureaucrats see the effort as positive -- as a way to tell their story and get credit for what they are accomplishing -- not just punitive. The annual budget cycle makes it tough to have broad outcome measures. Some issues cross agency boundaries and shared responsibilities. It's hard to assign some of these (like decreasing poverty) as solely one agency's responsibility.

Even with these three keys in place, prepare for the unexpected. Katrina and Rita destroyed trendlines and targets. Unit costs and comparability are tough, as is capturing all the costs when the efforts cross lines. It takes concentrated effort and care to make sure that the information presented is in a fashion that will inform the public.

The panelists answered questions -- some highlights from their responses follow:

Budget decisions are about values. Performance measures will inform decisions, but never make the decisions -- we aren't the ones who are elected. Good performance measurement systems help the elected officials make the difficult political choices.

Unit costs are only part of a broader picture. They don't say how effective you're performing, just how cheaply. We need both the costs and the outcomes/results.The performance management system has to be part of a long-term issue. You have to link results to costs or else we're left with a race to the bottom. At the same time, we can't define success so narrowly that we guarantee failure.

Florida Performs is a good example of of being general enough to get the broad picture without too high a level of detail. We need to have systems that can paint the big picture and then allow for drilling down to higher levels of detail if necessary. Too much detail up front only muddies the waters.

That got us to 10:30. The rest of my notes will have to follow in another post.

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Call for “Real Stories” proposals

Here's an announcement from the Community Indicators Consortium I need to pass along:

Call for “Real Stories” proposals

The Community Indicators Consortium (CIC), as part of a grant with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is seeking proposals to write “Real Stories” of communities, organizations and/or jurisdictions that have tried—successfully and not-so-successfully—to integrate community indicators and organizational performance measures.

For the purposes of the Real Stories project:

• Community indicators are generally measures of conditions or outcomes important to community residents, such as sustaining the natural environment or maintaining a vital economy or taking part in arts and cultural activities
• Performance measures are generally management results, outputs of services, efficiency, or outcome measures tracked by specific agencies or organizations that provide services or benefits to the public, such as parks and recreation or maintaining roads and sewers or improving public health and safety.

The Real Stories project is intended to provide real life examples of the advantages and challenges to both community indicator and organizational performance measurement projects as a result of integrating these two types of efforts:

• community indicators would have a greater influence on what governments and organizations do to improve a community and
• governments’ and organizations’ performance measures would be more relevant to the community conditions of the greatest concern to citizens and other key community stakeholders.

Although governments and communities may actually have the same desired ultimate outcomes, and while there are hundreds of community indicator projects and as many or more performance measurement programs, there is limited published information of efforts to integrate these two types of projects. Documenting these stories as well as tools and practices that practitioners have used will allow other communities and jurisdictions to learn from and improve on these integration efforts.

Proposals must be submitted as a Microsoft Word format document using the Real Story Proposal Submittal Form provided at the end of this call for proposals. The information required includes:

• a brief description of the community/jurisdiction to be studied,
• why this community/jurisdiction was chosen for study,
• the major topics or concepts to be covered,
• key tools and processes the community/jurisdiction used for integrating community indicators and performance measures successfully, not-so-successfully, or toward creating opportunities for improvements, and
• proposed methodology for developing the Real Story.

In addition, the following information is required for the proposed the author(s)

• Contact information (name, organization, address, phone number and email address)
• A brief bio
• A brief description of author(s) knowledge or experience with community indicators and/or performance measures.

Please include all information in a single MS Word document, using single spacing, Arial font, size 10. The proposals must also follow the length for each section as listed in the Real Story Submittal Form.

Submittals should be sent to CIPM@communityindicators.net with “Real Story Proposal” in the subject line and the proposal form as an attached Word document. Please do not include additional attachments. Proposals are due no later than June 15, 2009. Only proposals submitted electronically will be considered.

The proposals will be reviewed through a peer review process and those selected will be notified by June 30, 2009. The proposal selection criteria broadly include:

1. Relevance to the benefits of integrating community indicator and performance measurement efforts
2. Barriers to such integration and methods used to removing such barriers
3. The stage of development of the effort studied
4. Demonstrated and documented results
5. Methods and techniques that worked and did not work
6. Potential for replication of the individual community efforts

Authors of the selected proposals will be asked to develop their proposals into fully developed Real Stories (from 5-20 pages in length) by the deadlines listed below. Each Real Story selected should include:
• an in-depth discussion (specific community/jurisdiction and why it was chosen, citizen and key stakeholder engagement, resulting community improvements),
• descriptions of the tools and methods used for integration which could be applicable for other communities, and
• a one-page ‘Project Highlights’ that will provide summaries for specific target audiences of practitioners and decision-makers.

Each chosen Real Story will be peered reviewed again before it is recommended for publication. CIC will use an editor to ensure consistency among the Real Stories and clarity of discussion in the Real Stories’ documents. Authors of the Real Stories chosen for publication will receive a stipend of $2,000. Three-to-four Real Stories will be selected for publication in 2009. There will be another call for Real Story proposals in 2010.

Real Stories deadlines
6/15/09 - Submission of Real Stories proposals for peer review
6/30/09 - Notification of selected proposals and guidelines for development
9/18/09 - Submission of Real Stories first draft for peer review
11/15/09 - Approval of final draft Real Stories
12/31/09 - Publication of year-one selected Real Stories

Proposals due no later than June 15, 2009, to CIPM@communityindicators.net

Questions should be emailed to Maureen Hart, CIC Executive Director: at ed@communityindicators.net

For more information about CIC, please visit our web site at www.communityindicators.net

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ABTA Conference on May 18

I will be speaking at the 2009 National Conference on Innovations in Government Accountability and Performance hosted by the ABTA (Activity-Based Total Accountability) Institute in Melbourne, Florida on May 18. The focus of the conference will be on linking local government budgeting practices to performance metrics.

My role there will be to continue to push for increased integration of government performance measurement systems with community indicator systems. This is part of a larger conversation happening around the country, and an important one -- community indicator systems add an external accountability to government performance measurement systems that internal reporting can never add. And they connect to the people in an entirely democratic and open way that builds trust and citizen involvement. And they are designed by people who understand that the CAFR (Comprehensive Annual Financial Report) is unreadable to the average system and is NOT a good model of transparent public communication.

So if you'll be at the conference, come over and say hello. I'm going to try to capture some of my thoughts and impressions after the conference as well to share them with this blog's readership (which keeps growing -- thank you, everyone.)

And look for some interesting announcements in the near future on how you can engage with this national discussion of performance measures and community indicators.

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Transparency and Open Government Newsletter

This has been tweeted and retweeted a number of times in the past hour, and just in case you missed it, I thought I'd pass it on. The CitizenServices.Gov site (which you may know as USASerivces.Gov, the Citizen Services Network E-Government initiative led by the General Services Administration’s Office of Citizen Services) has launched its new newsletter -- and it's a must-read for community indicators practitioners.

The Transparency and Open Government Newsletter (PDF) includes a number of items of interest in its 40 pages:

President Obama's Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies

A section on Democratization of Data including articles such as:

• Unfettered Access to Data Can Transform Government?
• Technology as a Game-Changer
• Information as a Public Good
• Citizen Views On Transparency

Another section on Practices at Work in Government, including:

• Texas Websites Improve Accountability
• Georgia’s Commitment to Customer Service and Good Government
• Transparency 2.0
• Measuring E-Government 2.0
• E-discovery, Transparency and Culture Change
• AGA Opens the Doors of Government to the Citizens

And much more, including:

• Through a Glass, Darkly. What do we mean by transparency in government?
• Transparency in Government Begins Outside
• The Collaborative Government: Beyond Transparency in Government
• Get Ready for Wiki-Government
• Building the Digital Public Square
• Open Government Serves Citizens

Whether you use government data in a government performance benchmarking report, community indicators system, or some of both, you need to be paying attention to how the rules are changing in how data flow from the government to you. The same models for data distribution at the federal level, including the assumption that the information is public unless otherwise restricted (instead of the assumption that information is restricted unless pronounced available), can be encouraged at the state and local levels.

Read the newsletter and let me know what you think.

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AGA's Perspectives on Performance April 2009 Newsletter Released

The Association of Government Accountants (AGA) just sent out their April 2009 Newsletter. There's a great deal of important information for us in the newsletter, so I highly encourage you to take a look -- see how the Sloan foundation is winding down its support for performance measurement initiatives, what's happening at the Public Performance Measurement and Reporting Network, and more information about citizen-centric reporting and SEA reports.

Why are you still reading this? Go see their newsletter!

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ASPA Conference

For those who were able to attend the ASPA Conference in Miami this past weekend, I'd love to hear from you about your experiences/impressions.

For those who could not attend (like me), here's some information to whet your appetite:

Andrew Krzmarzick discusses My ASPA 2009 Experience in a Twitshell, which is a whole different way to experience a conference session.

ASPA National's blog response to Andrew's workshop is here. (In fact, you can catch a whole series of blog entries from a student experience POV here.)

Anyone else have information to share about the conference? I'm particularly interested in the intersection between government performance measurement and community indicators -- who wants to fill me in on how the pre-conference session went?

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PPMRN Conference: Other Thoughts

I was excited about one session in particular on Saturday morning at the PPMRN conference. The session was entitled “Citizen Engagement,” and the teaser promised that we would hear the panel “discuss their innovative programs that encourage governments to involve citizens in performance measurement and reporting processes.”

What I heard was some really good work in enhancing the way governments provide information to citizens (or residents or people -- the nomenclature has been changing as communities struggle with inclusivity and their non-citizen populations.) There's also interesting work in surveying citizens to see what they want and what's important to them.

Both of these communication strategies are critical in how we link people to the governments that serve them, and how we promote increased information-sharing from government to the people and from the people to government.

The challenge is to move beyond information-sharing to this thing we call “citizen engagement.” We're dealing in communities with disconnects, dissatisfaction, distrust, and powerlessness. Engaging citizens in community governance is both a logical and a necessary strategy to resolve these concerns and create more effective governance. But engaging requires more than an information exchange, especially if the information exchange occurs through an intermediary.

The difficulty is that we can't overcome powerlessness without a willingness to share or transfer power. Real engagement requires shared conversations -- not just surveys -- and participation in the decision-making processes. For those of us in the measurement business, that can be as simple as bringing people and government together in a room and deciding together what is important, what good government looks like, and how to measure progress on reaching a shared vision for effective governance.

One benefit to this kind of approach is to reconnect citizens and government and to begin building trust. A second benefit is to involve citizens in creating the solutions -- how can people help improve their community on their own or in voluntary associations? (See de Tocqueville for our history with these kind of associations and their critical function in making communities work.)

The good news is that this is more than just a theoretical discussion. Across America, these kinds of discussions are taking place -- in Sheriff's Advisory Committees, in committee meetings, and in organizations like the one I work in.

As we continue to enhance the amazing work being accomplished in government performance measurement in reporting, we need to bring the people into the picture. Is it hard to understand? Let's take a moment and talk it through together. Does government have limits? Of course it does, and through shared conversation we can move from wishful thinking to the practical. But those conversation need to happen in order to help both citizen and government understand what good government looks like.

Last story and I will stop musing on the topic: We had, in one community, a named storm come through. Trees fell. Power was knocked out. Our Emergency Operations Center went into action. Plans were put into effect. Goals were met, and the lights were back on and the street debris was all gone within 48 hours. High-fives and congratulations abounded within the EOC. That is, until they started hearing citizen complainst that it took two days for the power to be back on and the debris removed.

The problem wasn't government efficiency. The problem was in developing a shared understanding with the citizens on what efficient government was. The real challenge wasn't the performance measures, but the lack of engagement.

I'd appreciate your thoughts and reactions on this topic. What am I missing? Oversimplifying? Let me know if you want to talk further about the roles outside help can bring to engaging your community with government.

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PPMRN Conference

I'm at Rutgers, attending the Public Performance Measurement & Reporting Network's Second Annual Public Performance Measurement and Reporting Conference and having a great time. The discussion has been lively and the presentations, for the most part, thought-provoking. The conference organizers are promising to have the presentations available online fairly shortly, and are recording each session in order to put the audio online as well -- though the presenters didn't always stay near the microphones/recording devices, so I don't know how well that will work.

Because the presentations should be available, I'll just share a couple of thoughts on Friday's sessions that I attended. (They had three workshops going on at any one time, so I had to pick and choose what I could attend, which is another reason I'm looking forward to the other presentations being made available.)

It became clear in the first session that "performance reporting" and "performance budgeting" and "performance management" and "performance measurement" were terms used by different presenters to mean related, but different, things. For example, one speaker defined performance budgeting as "requiring strategic planning by executive agencies, the development of goals and objectives, performance measurement development, reporting, benchmarking, and the evaluation of performance." Others saw performance budgeting as a piece of that picture, part of a system of performance management. David Ammons questioned whether performance management was a system or an act, and pointed to acts of performance management. It was heady discussion.

But I was there primarily to understand and talk about two things: how data are used to improve decision-making and policy, and how citizens get involved in the process. I was pleased to see those two topics visited by nearly every speaker, with a range of opinions associated with how citizens could be involved in government performance measurement. Some of the roles they described for citizens were:

• Audience. From most of the people I heard, government performance measures of some sort ought to be reported out to the people served by government. One speaker said it was the professional thing to do. Others were concerned that it might be too much information for citizens to understand, but there was general agreement that some level of information needed to be provided to the public and not just used for internal efficiencies and management purposes. (One attendee raised the point that there could never be too much data for the citizens, which I found heart-warming, but we were all largely data-interested folks there anyway.)
• Survey respondents. We had some great presentations about the use of survey data and citizen responses as part of a performance reporting and management system. I particularly enjoyed (and recommend) Gregg Van Ryzin's work on analyzing citizen surveys for derived importance -- it's a different way of looking at the data that helps understand and create priorities.
• Advocates for change. We heard of some performance management systems that were created because the citizenry demanded better performance of government.
• Voters. We also heard of the filter some elected officials use in evaluating performance management reporting and budgeting systems -- "how will this help me get re-elected?" The role of citizen as voter has to be part of the list, because of this impact on how performance management reporting happens.
• Participants in defining measures. A couple of speakers went farther to talk about how to involve citizens in defining what should be measured. I recommend Natasha Mihal's presentation from San Francisco as well as the Citizen Engagement presentation from Jacksonville -- yes, that's mine. Here's my particular bias: citizens can do more than just read a report or answer the phone when you want to know what they think. They can (and should) be full participants in the process. But you already knew that's what I thought ...
• Users of information to improve the community. This role goes hand in hand with the one above. If it's government's information, it holds government accountable to fix a problem defined as a government responsibility. If it's the community's information, the citizenry can be brought in as partners to address a shared community problem, in which government has a role to play. That's my personal soapbox, but it was validating to hear the results in San Francisco where citizen involvement and improved government performance reporting went hand in hand.

Today should be even more interesting. If you're at the conference and are reading this, I welcome your feedback into the big topics I missed. (I also need to write about David Ammons' extended analogy of the forest of hardwood and softwood trees facing the storm.) If you weren't, your feedback is welcome anyway.

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