In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

AnCiens RégiMes and the goVernMent aFter next ​ 6Steve Ressler wanted a job.1 Not that he had anything to complain about as a grad student at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The campus is an academic paradise wedged into an urban landscape, with large green open spaces, and plenty of room to sit, walk, and talk. It seemed like the perfect place for Ressler, a would-be professor. Ressler was studying social networking as part of his graduate program in sociology. The university has one of the oldest sociology departments in the country. US News & World Report ranked it then at number eleven in the country. But then one day Ressler discovered he was done with school. “I follow in a long list of successful PhD dropouts (Google anyone),” he said in a 2006 interview. “I was a third-generation public servant,” Ressler recalled. “The last thing I wanted was a job in government.” He had planned to spend his life in the academy. But then he got restless and started to reconsider. “I wrote a paper on Social Security when I was an undergraduate and one of my professors helped me get an internship at the Social Security Administration . I really liked it. I said, hey, people in government do some interesting things.” Gradually the notion of finishing his degree and becoming just another college professor seemed less and less appealing. Teaching “was just not practical enough,” Ressler concluded. Then 9/11 happened. When the Department of Homeland Security started up, its managers began looking for talent—and Ressler thought he had talent. Settling for a master’s degree, Ressler had landed a fellowship with Homeland Security, working at the ANSeR Homeland Security Institute, a federally funded research and development center that supported the department. That went well, but then when the department recruited him, the 194 Anciens Régimes and the government after next 195 bureaucracy was still too new to figure out how to actually establish the authority to hire him. Ressler had to troll the USAJobs website like everybody else. Luckily he soon landed a spot with the department as an information technology auditor. “It was kind of an obscure, random job,” he recalled. “I was responsible for working with managers to see how well they were managing IT to accomplish their missions.” The job turned out to have an unexpected advantage. It proved the equivalent of a PhD in understanding how the new agency was grappling with the task of conducting homeland security . Ressler got to learn about many parts of the department, with a bird’seye view of the obstacles in the way of the homeland security enterprise. Ressler increasingly came to appreciate the difficulties faced by many federal employees who just wanted to do their jobs better. That was when he got an idea. As there were many young federal workers in the Washington, DC, area, Ressler started hanging out with some of them. One of them was Megan Quinn, a program analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency, the ePA. The two shared a frustration, not too different from the angst expressed by Nate Allen and Tony Burgess commanding their army companies in Hawaii. “We were all sort of thrown into something, and there wasn’t any sort of support,” Quinn recalled. “There wasn’t any sort of mentoring. It was all our own initiative.”2 Ressler and Quinn decided to form a support group around a popular institution, happy hour. In 2003, they started informal gatherings. More and more people started showing up, and they came up with a name for their group—Young Government Leaders, or just yGL. Then they started to get organized, sending out e-mails to update all their members. When the group grew to several hundred, the e-mail listserv became too unwieldy. Since they didn’t have money, Ressler started leveraging free Web 2.0 services . Ressler was also being asked to speak at conferences and attend meetings . “I was the token young professional,” he observed. Ressler enjoyed the meetings. He learned a lot. But the conferences were pretty restricted affairs . Ressler remembered thinking, “What sucks is that: what are you supposed to do if you can’t go or if you have a pressing question that you need answered right now?” Social networking seemed a perfect way to address the problem. Ressler also thought Web 2.0 might be a good tool to bridge young professionals to the vast body of knowledge he had...

Share