1. INTRODUCTION: THE PAGP AND COMPASS

The Public Administration (PA) Genome Project (PAGP) is an effort to capture as many as possible of the “genes” (topics) of public administration, as well as their relationships. The objective of the PAGP is to use this knowledge to help public administrators and others better strategize to address relevant problems and opportunities that arise in the public sector. COMPASS (COMprehensive PA Support System) is an information and guidance system developed as part of the PAGP to help accomplish this purpose. For more background, see the home (front) page at http://pagenome-compass.pbworks.com/.

NOTE: The host company for the COMPASS database: PBwiki, recently changed its name to PBworks. So, in some hyperlinks and screen captures in this Manual you may find reference to the previous name (e.g., http://pagenome-compass.pbwiki.com/). These links are automatically redirected to the newly named site.

The purpose of this manual is to describe several processes for contributing to COMPASS beneficially. This manual describes the PA Genome briefly, then turns to depicting a very small piece of an illustrative project. All this is followed by an example of the methodology involving several ways in which significant parts of the various source cases in COMPASS can be created. See the User Manual at http://compassusermanual.pbworks.com for ways in which the resultant product can be searched for relevant strategies, external forces, and their joint impacts on relevant goal or “bottom line” variables.

To see a typical implementation of a case on the Internet, go to http://compass1.pbworks.com/. This case has to do with management of government donations to charities, particularly during natural disaster circumstances.

The net benefit of the PAGP is to provide a wide variety of people -- public managers, researchers, teachers, students, consultants, and concerned citizens -- with a substantial data base and appropriate procedures to enhance their understanding of', and develop a beneficial strategic plan to react to, the various public situations they may be facing, possibly for the first time.

It should be noted that in the Public Administration Genome Project, and therefore in COMPASS, one word topics (formally known as “cistrons”) are combined into variables (formally known as “operons”). And it is the latter for which relationships (formally known as “kineses”) are created.

The web implementation of a source case is comprised, in the first part, of some basic informational pages (like a brief description of the case) and, in the second, of separate pages for each variable along with its associated relationships.

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