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This article comments on the article "Asian Americans in the Public Service: Success, Diversity, and Discrimination," by Pan Suk Kim and Gregory Lewis, published in one of the 1994 issue of the periodical "Public Administration Review," where in the authors noted that Asian Americans experience discrimination within the federal service, suggested that the problem is pervasive and serious and proposed remedies. This writer has personally witnessed at least two incidents of employment discrimination against Asian Americans. Neither of these episodes involved federal personnel, but it seems reasonable that the federal service is not totally immune to prejudices evident elsewhere in society. However, Kim and Lewis's statistics shed little light on such discrimination's pervasiveness. Anti-Asian discrimination may not be as important a federal phenomena as their article concludes. Kim and Lewis's lucidly presented statistics can be interpreted in varying ways. Thee alternative interpretation which follows may also have implications for identification of discrimination against other groups, such as women, Hispanics and African Americans. Using 1990 and 1992 statistics, Kim and Lewis describe differences between Asian Americans and nonminority whites. Asian Americans make up 2.6 percent of the civilian work force but constitute less than 1 percent of municipal officials.

Abstract: Electronic media has enabled new forms of communication with the potential to provide more effective means of conveying evidence to public servants. This article explores what is known about the use of these new capacities in public affairs to visualize the results of research. The authors first explore the value of visual engagement for increasing comprehension. Then, they examine what is known of studies of the effectiveness of visualization and offer basic design principles that underpin effective visualization. Finally, two original public affairs examples are presented to illustrate what is possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women have made great strides in the past 100 years. As the iconic cigarette commercial told us almost 50 years ago, 'You've come a long way, baby!' Yet women are still underrepresented in the highest leadership ranks, including state and federal office. Before being asked to 'lean in' or share valuable insights, a small group of very capable women were leaders long before those two words were seen in the same sentence. One such remarkable woman, Helen Holt, was a 'servant-leader' throughout her illustrious and inspiring career as a member of West Virginia's House of Delegates, then as secretary of state (1957-58), and later as a presidential appointee charged with developing the nation's nursing home system. Holt's work in state and federal government, her appointment by seven U.S. presidents to develop and implement the national nursing home program that is still in use today, and her leadership in civic and nonprofit organizations have made her an inspiration to countless women and men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of the Open Government Initiative, the Barack Obama administration has called for new forms of collaboration with stakeholders to increase the innovativeness of public service delivery. Federal managers are employing a new policy instrument called Challenge.gov to implement open innovation concepts invented in the private sector to crowdsource solutions from previously untapped problem solvers and to leverage collective intelligence to tackle complex social and technical public management problems. The authors highlight the work conducted by the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies at the General Services Administration, the administrator of the Challenge.gov platform. Specifically, this Administrative Profile features the work of Tammi Marcoullier, program manager for Challenge.gov, and Karen Trebon, deputy program manager, and their role as change agents who mediate collaborative practices between policy makers and public agencies as they navigate the political and legal environments of their local agencies. The profile provides insights into the implementation process of crowdsourcing solutions for public management problems, as well as lessons learned for designing open innovation processes in the public sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on articles in the issue, "Marching to Different Drummers? The Performance Effects of Alignment between Political and Managerial Perceptions of Performance Management," by Richard M. Walker, Chan Su Jung, and George A. Boyne, and “Government Reform, Political Ideology, and Administrative Burden: The Case of Performance Management in the Bush Administration,” by Stéphane Lavertu, David E. Lewis, and Donald P. Moynihan. Walker and team compared performance management attitudes of bureaucrats and politicians, while Lavertu and colleagues discussed the application of the U.S. Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) to government agencies based on their perceived conservatism or liberalism. The author advocates improved standard performance metrics and goals.

The article focuses on the mobility factor of government employees in the U.S. According to the author the government has made it difficult for an individual to grow and to move from one occupational field or one governmental level to positions in other fields, in other agencies, and at other levels of government. This weakness of mobility factor has wasted scarce public resources and denied many individuals of opportunities for advancement and self-fulfillment. The public service mobility now is the product of the exigencies of an acute manpower shortage stemming from an unprecedented combination of external and internal crises. The American Society for Public Administration has been regularly facilitating mobility in the public service. The Society received a grant from the Ford Foundation to explore issues involved and to stimulate professional concern in facilitating governmental career mobility. The author also refers to the mobility project initiated by the society to analyze and eliminate the problems related to personnel mobility.