Frequently Asked Questions

The National Academy of Public Administration is a non-profit, non-partisan coalition of top public management and organizational leaders, chartered by Congress, who tackle the nation's most critical and complex challenges. The National Academy is hosting this Dialogue to gather ideas to inform a Congressionally requested study for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In this study, the National Academy will analyze organizational options for setting up a NOAA Climate Service, and your ideas will be critical to this research.

As the home of The Collaboration Project, the National Academy has developed expertise in conducting online dialogues. Because it is independent, the National Academy can serve as a neutral host for this engagement.

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The aim of this Dialogue is to provide the National Academy with a set of actionable ideas and feedback to inform recommendations for climate information and services. The National Academy will issue a report in September 2010. This report will be released to the public and available on the National Academy's website, www.napawash.org.

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We are asking internal and external stakeholders to contribute their best ideas on how the NOAA Climate Service should engage with users and providers of climate information and services. Specifically, we want your ideas on the following key questions:

• What is driving your need for climate information or services?
• What climate information and services do you find most useful currently and why? Who provides them?
• How could your access to climate information and services be improved?
• What mechanisms would you recommend to enable ongoing communication of your climate information and service needs to NOAA?
• How should the NOAA Climate Service engage with other providers of climate information and services to meet your information needs?

We want you to share your experiences and viewpoints and provide feedback on those of other users. The National Academy is pursuing this open and collaborative approach because it will allow us to bring together a community of internal and external stakeholders that are geographically dispersed and difficult to convene in one place. It is important to note that this Dialogue is not a survey - participants will be able to share their first hand knowledge and ideas with the National Academy, as well as each other.

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Anyone can register for this Dialogue. We encourage all internal and external stakeholders interested in engaging in a dialogue about a NOAA Climate Service to participate.

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Yes. The website www.NAPAclimatedialogue.org is public. Users will be able to see all ideas and comments in the Dialogue - however, before users can submit any ideas, comments, or votes, they must create an account.

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The Dialogue will be open 24/7 for two weeks beginning at 9:00 AM EDT on Monday, June 14, 2010 and ending at 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, June 27, 2010. Because the discussion will develop over the course of this two week period, we encourage participants to return to the site several times to see what new ideas and discussions have been taking place.

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The Worker Dialogue platform permits participants to do the following:

• Submit an Idea- Participants can submit their own ideas to the discussion by clicking the "Submit an Idea" button, which allows participants to explain their idea and its importance for a Climate Service. These ideas can then be rated and tagged by others.
• Commenting on Others' Ideas- Users can comment on others' ideas to more fully flesh out ideas and debate topics. Commenting is an important function and can help drive substantive discussion of emerging ideas.
• Rate Ideas- Users can rate an idea on a 5-star scale, similar to rating functions on other websites. Over the course of the Dialogue, with many participants rating lots of ideas, we will be able to assess ideas that resonate with Dialogue participants. This, in turn, helps us identify novel ideas, important best practices, and relative priorities.
• Tag Ideas- Participants can apply topic tags to their own submissions and the submissions of others. Tags are usually one or two-word phrases describing an idea's subject matter. For example, an idea about how the Climate Service should communicate with end users might be tagged with the phrase "communication"; after this tag has been used on other ideas across the Dialogue, users and the National Academy alike will be able to find interesting and relevant ideas, and have a short cut to see all ideas that deal with a given topic. Topic tags also make it possible to discern what broad themes and topics are being raised most frequently during the Dialogue. This happens primarily through the tag cloud, which displays a list of all topic tags; those used more frequently are displayed in a larger font.

For more information, visit our How to Use this Site page.

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The National Academy is hosting this Dialogue as an independent third party. Therefore, all personal information gathered from users will be kept strictly confidential and will not be shared with NOAA or any other party. Only aggregate data will be reported to NOAA.

In addition, participation in the Dialogue is anonymous, and users will not be identified by their ideas and comments unless users choose to use their real names as their username. When users register, they create a custom username that can be as anonymous as they would like (e.g., SuperMan123). Although registration does require users to submit an email address and answer a few demographic questions, this information will not be visible to any other user on the site, or provided to NOAA except as aggregated data.

For more information, please visit the Privacy Policy page.

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The National Academy will moderate the Dialogue continuously according to the Moderation Policy posted on the site. Posts made to the site are done in real time (i.e. comments will be posted without prior moderator approval); however, any post that violates the terms of our Moderation Policy will be removed. In addition, all users will be able to easily "flag" other ideas and comments to the attention of the moderator that they feel are in violation of this policy.

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For questions or assistance, contact the National Academy of Public Administration via email climatedialogue@napawash.org or phone 202-204-3594.

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