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 Service.

She's joined by Melanie Krause and Justin Marsico to discuss how supporting employees in their training and upskilling efforts benefits everyone.
 
 Melanie is the Chief Data and Analytics Officer at the IRS while Justin serves as the Chief Data Officer at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service 

 Thanks for listening to this season of How Government Built This, a miniseries produced in partnership with the Bureau of the Fiscal Service's Office of Financial Innovation and Transformation. 

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(Episodes 1-159: Intro/Outro Music: Focal Point/Young Community
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This week, The Buzz presents a session from our 2023 Resilient Infrastructure Summit.

DoD, DHS, and the State Department have long recognized that resilient infrastructure’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 resilient infrastructure to be an essential element of national security and directed agencies to integrate it considerations into their operations.  This discussion will highlight the science, risks, and realities that DoD, the Coast Guard, and the Statement Department are wrestling with as they implement adaptation plans and frameworks and incorporate consideration of resilient infrastructure into future planning. 

Speakers:
John Conger (Moderator) - Director Emeritus, Center for Resilient Infrastructure& Security
Chelsea Cervantes de Blois, Ph.D. - Resilient Infrastructure Security Analyst, U.S. Department of State
Candace Nachman - Senior Oceans Policy and Program Advisor, U.S. Coast Guard
Ester Sperling - Senior Resilient Infrastructure Advisor, U.S. Air Force

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(Episodes 1-159: Intro/Outro Music: Focal Point/Young Community
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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 faster, more effective, and more human-centered than ever before.

Out of this effort has grown the Life Experiences Project - a framework that focuses on the major life events where Americans have the greatest need to interface with the federal government to help them navigate these challenging moments. These are make-or-break opportunities where a positive experience accessing services will do a world of good, but a bad experience can be ruinous.

In this miniseries, The Buzz will be exploring the five major life experiences that CX teams from the US Digital Service focused on as a part of this project in collaboration with their agency partners.

 This week, we're kicking things off by looking at how new parents interact with the federal government to help them handle the trials and joys of having a child. We're joined by OMB's Federal Customer Experience Lead Amira Boland to introduce us to the framework, as well as Maya Mechenbier, the Birth and Early Childhood Project Lead from the US Digital Service.

Resources:
Having a Child and Early Childhood Overview at Performance.gov
Join the team at USDS!
Executive Order 14058 on Customer Experience
The Biden-Harris Management Agenda

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Intro/Outro Music: See a Brighter Day/Gloria Tells
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(Episodes 1-159: Intro/Outro Music: Focal Point/Young Community
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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 Intelligence Act
• CREATE AI Act
• Voluntary AI Developer Commitments
• AI Bill of Rights
• 2023 AI R&D Strategic Plan
• The EU AI Act

Resilient Infrastructure:

• CO2 Levels and Historic Comparison
• American Meteorological Society Journal on Weather
• Quebec Wildfire Study 
• Inflation Reduction Act Tracker
• NOAA Completes Supercomputer Upgrade
• Rhodium Group IRA Emissions Modeling

ACT-IAC Updates:

• Register for Imagine Nation ELC 2023!
• ACT-IAC Award Nominations are open until September 15th
• Upcoming Summits:
  The Future Evolution of the Workforce - September 19th
  Cybersecurity Summit - October 4th 

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(Episodes 1-159: Intro/Outro Music: Focal Point/Young Community
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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 Nair - Innovation Adoption Lead at the Technology Transformation Services at GSA
Jamie Holcomb -  CIO, US Patent and Trademark Office
Rob Brown - CTO, Systalex and former CTO at US Citizenship and Immigration Services

For more on emerging technology in the workplace, please join us at our Future Evolution of the Workforce forum on September 19th - Register Here!

This recording has been edited for time.

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Intro/Outro Music: See a Brighter Day/Gloria Tells
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(Episodes 1-159: Intro/Outro Music: Focal Point/Young Community
Courtesy of Epidemic Sound)

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 Appalachian towns, claiming the lives of 59 people.

All over the United States, the frequency and intensity of floods increase. Cities and towns are often underprepared for these events and lack the resources to respond effectively. Our nation needs a more comprehensive framework for dealing with disaster that includes cooperation between federal, state, and local actors.

To discuss the challenges and requirements of building an effective flood resilience system, we're joined this week by Mathew Sanders, the State Resilience Policy Portfolio Lead at the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Learn more about Pew's Flood-Prepared Communities Project

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Intro/Outro Music: See a Brighter Day/Gloria Tells
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(Episodes 1-159: Intro/Outro Music: Focal Point/Young Community
Courtesy of Epidemic Sound)

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 network is missing. There are currently 3 different charging standards for EV's in the US, so drivers have to routinely check maps to find compatible chargers or purchase and travel with expensive adaptors. The lack of charger standardization and availability has stood as one of the larger barriers to EV adoption in the US, which currently sit at a paltry 6% of total vehicle sales.

This needs to change quickly in order to meet the ambitious goals set by the Biden administration and car manufacturers and to eliminate the use of fossil fuels as quickly as possible. Fortunately, the majority of the major US-based automakers announced this summer that they would be transitioning to Tesla's North American Charging Standard (NACS) by 2025, opening a path to total standardization across the US EV charging network.

This week, we're diving into how and why this standardization process unfolded and why technical standards matter when it comes to technological transformation. We're joined this week by Andrew Russell, Officer-In-Charge and Professor of Science and Technology History and SUNY Polytechnic Institute.

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(Episodes 1-159: Intro/Outro Music: Focal Point/Young Community
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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 investment will pay major dividends for those Americans currently without quality, affordable internet.

So with this next step beginning in the fight for internet access, we thought it would be a good time to revisit an interview we conducted last year with Kathryn de Wit, Project Director of the Broadband Access Initiative at The Pew Charitable Trusts.

More from The Pew Charitable Trusts' Broadband Access Initiative: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/projects/broadband-access-initiative

This episode originally aired March 1, 2022.

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(Episodes 1-159: Intro/Outro Music: Focal Point/Young Community
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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 sector scientists directly involved.

Featuring:
Alex Zylstra - Experimental Physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
John Edwards -  Inertial Confinement Fusion Program Director at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Learn more at lasers.llnl.gov!

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Intro/Outro Music: See a Brighter Day/Gloria Tells
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(Episodes 1-159: Intro/Outro Music: Focal Point/Young Community
Courtesy of Epidemic Sound)

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, however, are the voices of low-wage workers. According to a 2022 Oxfam report, nearly a third of the American workforce earns less than $15 an hour. These workers, too, rely on the internet and smartphones to locate shifting and inconsistent job opportunities, yet they are not often considered in conversations about technology in the workplace, despite many earning the designation of "essential" in the darkest throes of the Coronavirus pandemic.

This week's guest set out to change that. In Left to Our Own Devices, Julia Ticona, Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, studies how low-wage workers must navigate an increasingly precarious economy using their smartphones and wits. In doing so, she reveals the ways in which these technologies can reproduce and magnify the economic, racial and gender inequalities that our society already grapples with. 

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Intro/Outro Music: See a Brighter Day/Gloria Tells
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(Episodes 1-159: Intro/Outro Music: Focal Point/Young Community
Courtesy of Epidemic Sound)