Ines Mergel

AI Innovations in Public Services This open access book offers policymakers and library managers implementation guidance and case studies on how AI can shape the future of libraries.

📖 Our new book "AI innovations in public services" is available here link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Book Authors: make sure to check to see if you are eligible for payment (re: Anthropic Copyright Settlement Website) One of my 2 books is (both should have been my one of my publishers failed to register my copyright) www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com

Digital transformation leadership: A public value-centered measurement scale We introduce a psychometrically validated scale to measure Digital Transformation Leadership in public organizations. As governments adopt new digital…

For the article in GIQ, see

Opinion | The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education

The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education www.nytimes.com/2025/11/16/o...

Data collaboration in digital government research: A literature review and research agenda Sovereign data infrastructures are a central building block of the European Data Strategy, yet little is known about how public administrations share …

🤓 Take a look at our co-authored article with lead author Juliane Schmeling on "Data collaboration in digital government research: A literature review and research agenda" published in Government Information Quarterly: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Optimism predicted Trump’s victory: explanatory style during the 2024 presidential campaign Candidates’ explanatory style – how they attributed causes to bad events – predicted election outcomes. We analyzed causal explanations from the 2024 presidential campaign using Content Analysis of...

Candidates’ explanatory style – how they attributed causes to bad events – predicted election outcomes.

Trump team axes contracts with publishing giant Springer Nature The action comes as high-ranking US officials criticize top journals as ‘woke’ and ‘corrupt’.

The next step in dismanteling science: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A.I. Is Starting to Wear Down Democracy

A.I. Is Starting to Wear Down Democracy www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/t...

Former DOGE engineer says federal waste and fraud were 'relatively nonexistent' NPR's Juana Summers talks with Sahil Lavingia, who worked for the Department of Government Efficiency as a software engineer assigned to the Department of Veterans Affairs, about his experience.

Not surprising:

www.npr.org/2025/06/02/n...

Outcomes of Value Co-Creation and Co-Destruction in the Digital Transformation of Public Services | Digital Government: Research and Practice Transforming public services from an analog to a digital delivery mode is generally assumed to have positive effects. Most recently, these transformations include the co-creation of newly designed dig...

✨ Our new paper, co-authored with Noella Edelmann and Nathalie Haug, was just published in the journal Digital Government: Research and Practice: "Outcomes of Value Co-Creation and Co-Destruction in the Digital Transformation of Public Services." ✨

🆓 Read it here: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

There are elections next week.

Our paper "Digitally-induced change in the public sector: a systematic review and research agenda" was the top-cited article in Public Management Review.

You can read it here open access: lnkd.in/eTbE-MSj

Le sigh... 🫣

If you worked for 18F and got fired, Group together to start a consulting company.

It’s just a matter of time before DOGE needs you to fix the mess they inevitably create.

They will have to hire your company as a contractor to fix it. But on your terms.

I’m happy to invest and/or help

18F, the federal government’s technology shop, was just demolished by Musk’s team. It was a cost-recoverable org, charging agencies for their expertise, using a consulting model. Its cost to government was negligible, its benefits huge. My team there once saved DoD $500 million.

A thread about 18F:

18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated shortly after midnight. Read our letter to the American people:
18f.org

❤️ A very special thank you goes to Jessica Sowa, a brilliant scholar and world-class editor at PPMG who takes on tasks that go so far beyond what you might expect from an editor. She makes academia a kind place and is deeply invested in the articles she helps to move forward in the process.

We use the theoretical framework of co-production to highlight who is involved in which phase. Based on the empirical evidence, we advance our conceptual understanding of what co-production looks like when it comes to digital public services (instead of analog public service co-production).

❗ In this article, we interviewed digital transformation experts who explained to us how they proceed to implement digital public services.

New article alert 🤓

"Co-Production Phases in the Development and Implementation of Digital Public Services," co-authored with Noella Edelmann and Nathalie Haug

Now published in Oxford University's Perspectives on Public Management and Governance journal: doi.org/10.1093/ppmg...

Trump Costs America Highlighting the real people whose lives have been ruined, the good American jobs that are being destroyed, and the important public goods being lost.

Website to track firing of federal employees in the US: trumpcostsamerica.com?fbclid=IwY2x...

Not Incentivized Yet Efficient: Working From Home in the Public Sector: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Help Denmark Buy California – Because Why Not? Buy it from Trump, the bigliest crowdsourcing ever

Why not help out? 🇩🇰

denmarkification.com

Introducing ChatGPT Gov ChatGPT Gov is designed to streamline government agencies’ access to OpenAI’s frontier models.

openai.com/global-affai...

Analysis | How DOGE could succeed — or fail miserably Government efficiency experts say Elon Musk has a chance to build on what the U.S. Digital Service accomplished — or ruin it.

I talked with three experts on government efficiency about DOGE taking over the Obama-era US Digital Service, including its co-founder @pahlkadot.bsky.social. They all said Elon Musk has a rare opportunity to make government work better. And they all worried he might blow it. wapo.st/4jHi3s3

How Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency Will Work The structure and goals of the cost-cutting effort have changed over the past 10 weeks. Here’s how.

DOGE will take over the US Digital Service - effectively destabilizing its integration into the bureaucracy given that DOGE itself is only a temporary organization: www.nytimes.com/2025/01/21/u...

Sad loss to the community of public management researchers :(

Academic writing is getting harder to read—the humanities most of all We analyse two centuries of scholarly work

Hello editors, what can we do to make our academic content more accessible? We need to write in plain language, avoid wild abbreviations, explain better/easier than convoluted language, maybe put the research design into an appendix, and get right to the core of the findings.

Not only keep them out of evaluations, but stop entirely. Do not use.

How the 'Frankfurt kitchen' triggered a domestic revolution – DW – 12/27/2024 Around a century ago, working in the kitchen was still cumbersome and inefficient. But then a Viennese architect had a groundbreaking idea that has endured to this day: the fitted kitchen.

Wouldn't it be nice to apply similar design principles to public service design? www.dw.com/en/how-the-f...