In This Issue:

• Looking Ahead, ASPA Plans for 2017 Annual Conference
• ASPA President Appointed to Virginia State Board for Community Colleges
• Webinars, BookTalks and Student Series on the Horizon
• Exploring a New Section: Community and Economic Development
• Chapters and Sections: Lend Your Expertise to Advise State and Local Leaders
• Online Job Board Offers Summer Discount
• Andrew Young School Adjusts Center’s Registration Fees
• George Washington Trachtenberg School Fields Survey
• National Capital Area Chapter Launches New Website
• PAR Update
• New on PA TIMES Online
• New on the ASPA Blog
• Career Resources

Looking Ahead, ASPA Plans for 2017 Annual Conference

ASPA is pleased to unveil the logo for its 2017 Annual Conference, showcasing next year’s theme: Saluting the Public Service: A Bold & Noble Profession. Taking place March 17-21 in Atlanta, the official hashtag is #ASPA2017. Start tweeting it now in anticipation of great things to come!

ASPA is proud to announce the University of Georgia, Georgia State and Georgia Tech as the lead sponsors of the 2017 Welcome Reception, taking place the evening of Saturday, March 18. We also would like to extend our appreciation to ASPA’s Georgia Chapter for their support and leadership as ASPA kicks off its fundraising efforts. If your organization is interested in being a sponsor of next year’s event—either for the Welcome Reception or for other important aspects of the conference—please contact ASPA chief of program operations Lisa Sidletsky for more information.

Look for more details in the coming weeks as we prepare to announce conference proposal details, program committee members, website information and much more.

President Susan Gooden and the ASPA staff would like to extend early thanks to Conference Co-Chairs RaJade Berry-James, Lindsey Evans and Dan Lasseter. Their leadership is essential as we prepare to put together a stellar 2017 conference.

ASPA President Appointed to Virginia State Board for Community Colleges

ASPA is pleased to join Virginia Commonwealth University in announcing that Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe has appointed ASPA President Susan Gooden to the State Board for Community Colleges. Gooden was appointed to a four-year term to the 15-member board, which oversees the state’s community college system.

McAuliffe announced appointments on Monday, June 13, to fill four-year terms on the governing boards of the state’s public colleges and universities. The appointments are effective July 1 and members are eligible to serve two consecutive four-year terms.

"I speak personally with every person I appoint to serve our college and university system, and I ask each one to use his or her knowledge and experience to foster innovation at their institutions, to keep the burden of tuition as low as possible and to emphasize access and completion for every student," McAuliffe said in a statement.

"Virginia has one of the best higher education systems on the globe and I am confident that these leaders will keep their schools moving forward as we work together to build a new Virginia economy."

Webinars, BookTalks and Student Series on the Horizon

ASPA's professional development webinars are ongoing throughout the year. Averaging 85 attendees per webinar and free to ASPA members, these e-learning opportunities provide you with valuable insights and information at your fingertips. Here's a quick look at upcoming opportunities. Make sure you register today for sessions that interest you and visit our website to review further details about all upcoming webinars and BookTalks.


Four Key Approaches for Effective Data-Driven Decisionmaking
Thursday, June 23, 1 p.m.
Presenters:
Elizabeth Curda, Government Accountability Office
Benjamin Licht, Government Accountability Office
Adam Miles, Government Accountability Office

ASPA's Center for Accountability and Performance is back with a critical webinar about using data to make decisions. Failure to use performance information can hinder government leaders' ability to achieve critical results. In recent years, government leaders at all levels have begun adopting regular, data-driven reviews as a way to increase using performance information to guide decisionmaking. Through these reviews, leaders can identify and correct performance problems and make better decisions. Join us for this practical webinar and learn more about how you can put data to work for your organization.




Student Series: Resumes, Resumes, Resumes—Marketing Yourself on the Page
Tuesday, June 28, 1 p.m.
Presenters:
William Shields, Jr., Executive Director, American Society for Public Administration
Angela Kline (Moderator), ASPA National Council Student Representative and Ph.D. Student, University of Delaware

Students and professionals alike, our popular resume webinar is back! There are different perspectives and views on resumes—what should be on them, what should not, how long they should be, what they should cover, to name a few. The answers you get depend on whom you ask. What cannot be disputed is its importance. Your resume introduces you to a potential employer, sells your skills and attributes to that employer and hopefully gets you to the next step. There is no cookie cutter approach to resumes, but there are rights and wrongs. ASPA executive director Bill Shields will explain.




BookTalk: Public Participation for 21st Century Democracy
Tuesday, July 12, 1 p.m.
Presenters:
Matt Leighninger, Deliberative Democracy Consortium
Tina Nabatchi, Maxwell School of Government, Syracuse University

Written by two leaders in the field, Public Participation for 21st Century Democracy explores the theory and practice of public participation in decisionmaking and problemsolving. It examines how public participation developed over time to include myriad thick, thin and conventional opportunities, occurring in both face-to-face meetings and online settings. The book offers a practical framework for thinking about how to engage citizens effectively and clear explanations of participation scenarios, tactics and designs. Make plans now to participate!
Brought to you through the generous support of Routledge.

Exploring a New Section: Community and Economic Development

Community development is often broadly defined as the bettering of a community's social, political and economic assets. Community—and economic—development is also a key government function, especially at the local level. Public managers working in this area face unique administrative challenges. Public administration scholarship and practice can help managers solve these challenges and better their communities. To facilitate discussion within public administration, a number of members are looking to form a Community and Economic Development Section within ASPA.

Before these efforts begin, ASPA members are invited to participate in an online study examining how community development is both practiced and taught in the public affairs field, while also gauging interest in developing this dedicated Section. A better understanding of how practitioners and scholars define, and therefore teach and practice, community development will improve knowledge about this subject in the public sector, allowing for improved community development policy and practice in the future.

Data from the surveys will be confidential and results of the study will be presented in aggregate summary form. Data will not be presented in a way that the individuals could be identified. The survey data may be submitted to journals for publications or presented at conferences. If you have further questions about the study, please contact Ashley Nickels (researcher) at Miami University. Other individuals involved in the survey and in exploring forming the Section include Colleen Casey (University of Texas-Arlington), Prentiss Dantzler (Colorado College) and William Hatcher (Augusta University).

Chapters and Sections: Lend Your Expertise to Advise State and Local Leaders

Calling all Chapter and Section leaders: we need your help identifying critical state and local issues relevant to elected officials.

Prior to the 2012 national election, ASPA and the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) initiated Memos to National Leaders, 10-12 papers for the incoming Congress and President about important management and policy issues that also reflected the expertise at hand in ASPA’s membership. In conjunction with NAPA, ASPA is replicating this project for 2016, now called Advising Leaders.

ASPA leadership believes a similar project focused on state and local policy and management issues could be equally—if not more—useful. But the diversity of our states and municipalities makes identifying key issues much more complex than has been the case with the national Advising Leaders project.

ASPA contacted you last month to ask for your help in engaging your Chapter and Section to identify these issues. To do so, you may choose to take any number of approaches, including surveying your membership about their perception and understanding of the key issues for state and local governments; or organizing a meeting or panel session focusing on this question.

ASPA leadership appreciates your assistance and we look forward to hearing from you about the insights and observations generated. Our goal is to produce an inaugural Memos to State and Local Leaders report by Fall 2017, so we need all Chapter and Section input and suggestions prior to December 2016.

Please contact ASPA executive director Bill Shields to inform him about your Chapter’s or Section’s participation in these efforts, as well as any questions you may have.

Online Job Board Offers Summer Discount

If your organization has an open position ready to advertise, consider posting it on PublicServiceCareers.org. This job board advertising public service positions is a great place to post jobs speaking to your ideal candidates.

For the month of July, PublicServiceCareers.org is offering a 50 percent discount on advertising pricing. Contact NASPAA’s executive director, Laurel McFarland, for more details.

If you're looking for a career change or are new to the job market, bookmark PublicServiceCareers.org as your first place to check for open positions serving the public sector! Look below in this newsletter for some of its most recent job postings. Postings span the nonprofit, government and academic sectors.

PublicServiceCareers.org is jointly operated by NASPAA, ASPA and APPAM; proceeds from advertising revenue is split among the three organizations.

Want to add an event? Email Melissa Jun with the details!

Andrew Young School Adjusts Center’s Registration Fees

After July 6, interested parties will no longer be able to register for the Center for State and Local Finance's (CSLF) entire 2016-2017 session. Register now so you can take advantage of an early-bird discount for all six core classes, including the popular leadership training in February. Once this deal expires, it will not return for another year. The $6,000 bundle pricing available saves participants nearly $100 per class on top of the already discounted public sector price. (General yearly tuition is $8,850.) If you complete all requirements throughout the year, participants will also be guaranteed to receive the CSLF's Certificate in Public Financial Management. Register here. For additional details, contact CSLF or visit cslf.gsu.edu/training.

George Washington Trachtenberg School Fields Survey

Attention directors of MPA, MPP and Ph.D. programs: we are requesting your participation in a brief survey of current and former directors of MPA, MPP, Ph.D. and related graduate programs. The purposes of the study are to describe program directors' roles and responsibilities and examine how academic administrative positions affect job satisfaction and academic productivity. Your participation is completely voluntary and no identifying information is requested in the survey. If you have questions, please contact Dr. Lori Brainard. If you would like to receive a copy of the findings, please email Dr. Donna Infeld.

National Capital Area Chapter Launches New Website

The National Capital Area Chapter (NCAC) just launched a new chapter website. It is fully responsive for computer and mobile viewing and enables users to create contributor profiles to syndicate content such as blogs. It also features interactive widgets for event planning, page commentary, stylized menus and new ways to engage site participants. Be sure to check out the newest addition of IAmPublicAdministration, NCAC’s monthly feature to illustrate the face, purpose and professional diversity of our valued public administrators. NCAC aims to be a central hub for public administration in the Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia region. Please send any feedback and questions to [email protected].

PAR Update


Speak Your Mind
“Speak Your Mind” is a PAR webpage feature that allows you to offer insights about big questions in public administration. The responses serve as a community forum for discussion of specific editorial contributions and the format provides a platform for exchange of different ideas about how we think of public administration as a professional and scholarly enterprise.

Moving Toward an Open Research Culture in Public Administration
Transparent reporting, replications and open data are vital for scientific progress and developing useful knowledge for practice. However, public administration is not fully transparent (for instance, null effects are seldom published), replications are almost never conducted, let alone published, and few open datasets are available. We do not have a fully open research culture. In this article, Lars Tummers (Utrecht University) first argues that this is problematic. Second, he shows how we can make progress. At the moment, we are facing a collective action problem: the research community would benefit if we promote an open research culture, but individual scholars lack incentives. One fruitful way to move forward is for journals like Public Administration Review to step in and actively promote values like transparency, openness and replication. This can be done by adopting—in a thoughtful and nuanced way—the recently developed Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines for journals. Link to Speak Your Mind

Editorial
Building Global Public Administration Knowledge

James L. Perry (Indiana University, Bloomington) discusses whether we are on a path to building global public administration knowledge. The internationalization of our professional exchanges, conferences and associations hardly guarantees the development of knowledge that transcends its local or national roots. Are we on a course to develop public administration knowledge where we can see the connections to scholarship and professional practices grounded in the United States, United Kingdom, China, Korea and other jurisdictions? This is discussed as a fundamental challenge of the early 21st century. Link to PAR Early View

Perspective
Behavioral Insights for Better Implementation in Government

Amira Choueiki (Social and Behavioral Sciences Team) discusses how, for good reasons, most efforts to research, discuss and improve policy focus on broad questions of design. However, many policy objectives remain unmet not because of a faulty initiative, but rather because of poor delivery. Link to PAR Early View

How Research Can Drive Policy: Econometrics and the Future of California's Infrastructure

Public administration scholars worry about how to make research findings, no matter how important, drive policy. Mark Pisano (University of Southern California) discusses how Southern California demonstrates that it can be done. Link to PAR Early View

Book Review
Danny L. Balfour and Stephanie P. Newbold, Editors
The Responsive City: Big Data versus Big Government

Mark C. Hoffman (Grand Valley State University) reviews The Responsive City: Engaging Communities through Data-Smart Governance (2014) by Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford. Hoffman explains how the book’s story-telling style is not intended as a “how to” manual or theoretical analysis. It is intended to be inspirational and political. For these purposes, the stories are very effective. For other functions, the stories have serious limitations. Link to PAR Early View

Call for Papers
Symposium: Does a New Public Governance Demand New Public Ethics?

As new forms of governance have emerged we have witnessed a parallel rise in the ways we try to understand integrity and ethics. Integrity systems, for example, have been developed at all levels: organizational, local, national and international. New policy initiatives such as the Open Government Partnership have brought values such as transparency and integrity to the fore on the global stage and have led to cross-cultural conversations. Yet despite these trends, or perhaps because of them, scientific evidence about the nature, legitimacy and ethics of new governance paradigms remains relatively scarce. The normative dimensions of new governance dimensions are not well understood. This call for papers on the ethics of new public governance is intended to remedy limitations in current scientific and normative knowledge. Link to PAR Early View

New on PA Times Online

New on the ASPA Blog


Looking for interesting commentary on news events and contemporary issues? Check out the ASPA Blog, which features a collection of authors writing on everyday life from the eyes of a public manager, student or young professional.

Featured recently on the Blog:

Communication is Key

A Failure to Coordinate = Citizen Ridicule

Career Resources


Find your next career opportunity at publicservicecareers.org. This online job board is the perfect resource for making a career change or landing your first job in the public sector. It lists dozens of positions in academia, government and the nonprofit sector. Below are examples of current listings.

Hilton Postdoctoral Fellowship – WORLD Policy Analysis Center, Los Angeles, CA

Research Manager-Legislative and Budget Process Section – Congressional Research Service, Washington, DC

Assistant Professor of Urban and Metropolitan Development – UC Davis, Davis, CA