Jim McLaughlin's Blog

A few suggestions for assuring more user friendly, useful websites are provided here for your consideration:Get to know your IT personnel, interns or volunteers well. They are usually on top of innovation and applications that can improve citizen access.Whenever possible, get weekly updates on the number of hits to your website, where most consumers go… Read more

Despite heightened rhetoric about engaging citizens, improving customer satisfaction and restoring public trust in government, little significant success in doing so is evident today especially when we focus on the passage of the fiscal measure passed late on January 1 by Congress after more than 500 days of debate. This in part is due to… Read more

Education must move with the times. What can be done to reach a technology-savvy generation that relies on media every free second of their time? BYOD-Bring Your Own Device, a trend that is catching on quickly. Bring Your Own Device has transformed the classroom by creating new opportunities for learning. Via http://www.teachthought.com/technology/10-reasons-to-consider-byod-in-education/ Read more

A well-known poem by Robert Frost, “Mending Walls,” contains the famous line “Good fences make good neighbors.” This is also how a 2011 blog post on productive partnerships begins. The blogger pointed out that, while fences might support neighbors’ relationships, they don’t serve partnerships well at all. I have been interested recently in specifically what… Read more

Why does it feel so natural, even wonderful, to some of us to take a younger soul, a “protégé,” under our wings? Everyone knows that a mentor can profoundly affect your destiny. This world is no meritocracy. No matter how hard you work, without access to cultural capital, youll bump into brick walls. A mentor… Read more

While part of me cries “unfair” more than I would like it to, this is Johns list, and he gets to recommend as he chooses. What actually concerns me — and I hope you as well — is that in his canon of leadership books there are no womens voices, at least not in the… Read more