FCW Insider: Fed 100: Recognition matters

There are so many parts of my job that I love. One of them is FCW's Federal 100 awards program. As you may have noticed, we did something very different this year -- rather then waiting until the Fed 100 awards gala to announce the winners, we posted them all online for everybody to see. Check 'em out. As I mentioned before, we used to keep the list close because...well, we wanted it to be a big surprise. But, in this Web 2.0 world, we opted to post the list essentially as soon as it was completed. (Perhaps even a bit too early. There were two misspellings.) I think it is very network-centric of us. You make information available as it become available -- but you still do the necessary analysis and report back on that later. So, we are doing that. All the reasoning behind the decisions -- the analysis -- will be in FCW's Fed 100 issue, which will be out on Monday, March 24.

As I say, we do this in part out of the recognition that the list is spread all over the place anyway. After we have the finalized list, we notify the winners and they get the full list. But, as soon as the list it out there, it is out to all sorts of people -- the wonders of electronic information. So, as a Web 2.0er, we decided to do it the network-centric way. In the March 24 issue, you'll get to read why all of these people won.

But we will also be giving you a bit of a preview in the March 3 issue of FCW. That issue will have one of our 360-degree collaborative pieces looking at... well, collaboration. (The 360-degree pieces are where FCW, GCN and Washington Technology all focus on similar issues in the same week. So far this year, we have done them on IPv6, and we will be doing others as the year goes on.) The coming week, 1105 Government Information Group, the parent of all of these publications, is focusing on collaboration. For FCW's part,  we are profiling examples of collaboration. Coincidentally, all of them are also Fed 100 winners: the intelligence community's Intelipedia (Chris Rasmussen), TSA's Idea Factory (
Kip Hawley), OMB's budget wiki (Andy Schoenbach), and EPA's Puget Sound wiki (Jerry Johnston). In the March 3 issue, FCW will also profile the National Academy of Public Administration's new venture, which they call The Collaboration Project and New Paradigm's Government 2.0 project. (Read FCW's September 2007 story about the Government 2.0 project... Nobody at NAPA has been recognized for The Collaboration Project -- yet, but it just launched this week. You can hear TSA's Kip Hawley speak on NAPA's Collaboration Project Web site, which can be found at www.collaborationproject.org. But New Paradigm's Don Tapscott is a Fed 100 winner. And keep an eye on the NAPA folks for next year. Of course, you can read FCW's May 2007 interview with Tapscott here... and FCW named New Paradigm one of the organizations worth watching back in September 2007.)

Enough patting ourselves on our back and back to the Fed 100. It is also just amazing to see how far a little recognition goes.

I got this note from the folks down at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta:


Needless to say we are extremely proud of our director, Judy Kenny, being selected in this year's "Federal 100."

We thought we would send this forward as a suggestion for your March 24 issue cover…




I thanked them very much, but...leave the publishing to us. ;-)

But it is important to recognize the influential, the doers...and we're thrilled to do it.