The Buzz with ACT-IAC

Among America's Indigenous communities, the legacy of settler colonialism has left deep scars. As they confront disparities in health outcomes, economic development, and political attention, Tribal governments must routinely do more with less to provide necessary services to their people.

In addition, accelerating climate change threatens local ecologies, which many tribes rely on both culturally and economically, in...

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is a small government agency with an important charge - to research and communicate to the public the personal safety risks of the everyday products that we buy and use.

But our cluttered information landscape makes any sort of public communication challenging - let alone for (traditionally) dry messages from public sector agencies with limited budgets. How can the government ...

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, so this week we present a session from ACT-IAC's 2023 Cybersecurity Summit.

TSA CIO Yemi Oshinnaiye kicked off our summit with a broad-ranging discussion of his experience in cyber, why cybersecurity matters, and how the IT community can confront the cyber challenges of the present and future.

For more from ACT-IAC, follow us on LinkedIn or visit http://www.actiac.org...

This week, The Buzz presents a session from ELC 2014.

Mikey Dickerson initially came to the federal government on a temporary basis as part of the team assigned to rescue the unfortunate Healthcare.gov rollout in 2013. Less than a year later, he was tapped to serve as the first administrator of the fledgling US Digital Service, which sought to bring a modern service design and delivery approach to the rest of the federal g...

This week, The Buzz presents a session from our first ever Future Evolution of the Workforce Forum.

For decades, the Government has competed with private industry for talent by offering what were generally perceived to be better benefits, job stability, improved working environments and a greater sense of fulfillment via a sense of purpose built around agency mission. Unfortunately, workers entering the job force today do ...

Last month marked the 1-year anniversary of the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. The somewhat simple name belies the breadth and scope of this enormous piece of legislation.

Among other changes like tax code and Medicare reform, the IRA is also the most comprehensive piece of US climate policy in history, and it contains a dizzying number of new programs and incentives that seek to reorient the US industrial base a...

This week, we present our season finale of How Government Built This! This year, our theme was "Strengthening and Empowering our People and Culture", and we looked at how applying the principles of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA) can promote innovation within an organization.

This week, our guest host is Jennifer Lasko,  Human Resources Specialist and DEIA Advisor at the Bureau of Fiscal Ser...

This week, The Buzz presents a session from our 2023 Climate Change Summit.

DoD, DHS, and the State Department have long recognized that climate change’s impacts - including sea level rise, weather-related challenges to installations and operations, and forced migration - can significantly threaten our national security.  In January of 2021, President Biden signed Executive Order 14008 that declared climate change to be a...

As detailed in the President's Management Agenda and Executive Order 14058, a major priority of the current administration has been to improve government service delivery to the American public. The challenges of receiving federal benefits have been well-documented - from confusing paper applications to unclear responsibilities between multiple federal agencies - and so a reform effort is underway to make service delivery fast...

As August comes to a close, The Buzz is here to get you up to speed on the top stories in the federal technology sector from this summer, as well as share what ACT-IAC has coming up in the fall. 

From climate change to government AI, we'll give you the most important updates from the past few months.

Resources:

AI News:

• No Section 230 for AI Act 
• Block Nuclear Launch by Autonomous Artificial Intel...

This week, The Buzz presents a session from our 2023 Emerging Technology and Innovation Conference.

In this panel discussion, representatives from government and industry discuss how hyperautomation is reshaping roles and responsibilities in the working world, and the skill requirements for organizations to operate these powerful new technologies.

Panelists:
Mike McKinney - Vice President at Amivero
Gopa N...

This past July, a series of severe floods devastated central Vermont. After more than a decade of drought, early 2023 brought a series of 12 "atmospheric rivers" to California, dumping trillions of gallons of water up and down the coast and causing billions of dollars in damage. Last summer, parts of Eastern Kentucky experienced more than a foot of rainfall in less than 5 days. Rivers swelled and coursed through small App...

If you have a gas car, you never really need to double-check which gas station you go to when you fill up. Every gas station in North America is compatible with every personal vehicle. This standardized fuel network enables our gas-driven transportation system in a way that most of us don't notice on a day-to-day basis.

If you have an electric vehicle, though, you do notice this. Or rather, you notice that a similar n...

Over the past few weeks, we've seen a host of state governments triumphantly announcing the arrival of federal funds - usually over $1 billion apiece - to expand broadband access, particularly to rural communities.

The seeds of this arrival were planted nearly two years ago, when Congress passed the Infrastructure and Jobs Act. The wheels of government do spin slowly, but hopefully the scope and scale of this investme...

In December 2022, scientists at the National Ignition Facility, of NIF, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory did something that had never happened before on Earth – controlled fusion ignition.

What is nuclear fusion and why does it matter? This week on The Buzz, we'll be talking about why last year's experiment represents an enormous breakthrough in the future of energy, by hearing from some of the public se...

While "the Future of Work" has become a popular topic in the post-pandemic era, the conversation has largely focused on how white-collar workers are adapting and reacting to a workplace and labor market governed and facilitated by digital technologies. The expansion of remote work has sparked plenty of discussion about our relationship to technology, both economic and philosophical.

Missing from this discourse, ...