Accountability, ethics, and transparency are buzz words that have permeated politics and administration over the decade, becoming increasingly prominent as political and business scandals have been occurring far too frequently. Given democratic need for an informed public and the need to build public trust, achieving transparency continues to grow as an important dimension of effective governance. We developed a model that assesses the level of transparency in government web sites. The model contains three constructs, Policy, Management, and Information, which are subsequently applied to five southern state lottery web sites. We chose this policy arena for two reasons. First, the number of state lotteries has increased over time due to declining revenue streams and citizen dissatisfaction with increasing taxes. Second, fungibility issues have been raised as general fund contributions to education budgets have made only marginal increases despite large sums of lottery funds. Our analysis reveals that states that began using the lottery in more recent years learned from the mistakes that occurred in earlier years. As a result, web site development in the latter years was more transparent and suggests the likelihood that not only do programs become similar as administrators learn from the experiences of others but administrative expectations of transparency are integrated in the adopted programmatic design.

Management and leadership competence in collaborative settings has consequently become a job requirement of public and nonprofit managers. The reframing of collaboration to strategic collaboration offers an increased likelihood of success and positive outcomes from the collaborative venture as public and nonprofit managers become more purposeful about collaboration design and implementation processes, enable collaboration inclusiveness and effectiveness, decrease collaboration fatigue and frustrations, and proactively steer toward positive outcomes. Fundamental to achieving mastery of strategic collaboration practice is defining collaboration as a problem-solving approach that emerges over time through interdependent and reciprocal relationships. Public and nonprofit managers must learn to skillfully read the collaboration context, including an understanding of key actors motives and behaviors, and then, most critically, harness collective energy and steer toward results. Mastery of strategic collaboration requires the practitioner to adroitly translate knowledge and experience gained from organizational practice into a more nuanced and fluid situation as well as to continue to learn from collaboration experience.

Skillfully managing, leading, facilitating, and negotiating collaboration is difficult. This chapter introduces the strategic collaboration approach and the expertise that grounds the development of more refined, nuanced, and specific knowledge and skills for success. Strategic collaboration deliberately focuses on desired outcomes, products, or results throughout the collaboration's evolution or life cycle. Strategic collaboration produces three typical outcomes: outcomes related to the successful operation of the collaborative effort; deliverables and outcomes related to the established goals of the collaboration; and overall results. In strategic collaboration, the analytic knowledge area grounds the effort's work in methods and analysis that are both more intentional and inclusive. Intentionality speaks to the need for a systematic examination of the forces calling for a collaborative effort, while inclusivity speaks to the need to actively engage stakeholders to build or enhance shared understandings and elicit commitment to the collective effort.

Moving from silos to collaboration requires public and nonprofit managers to think differently about working beyond discipline, organization, and sector boundaries. While contexts, participants, and processes are unique to every effort, six overarching principles define the distinctive core of successful strategic collaboration practice. These are: choose strategic collaboration wisely, understand the strategic collaboration life cycle, strengthen leadership capacity, balance risk and reward transparently, cultivate innovation for meaningful change and emphasize outcomes and impacts. The chapter discusses six principles and includes a tool for implementation or furthering thinking on key practice elements of strategic collaboration. Together the principles and the framework can transform the hard work of collaboration into workable strategies for resolving complex public problems and advancing public service practice. In strategic collaboration, leadership matters- both the structures that set up the leadership roles as well as the individuals who take on these roles. Effective decision making in the strategic collaboration setting requires a sufficient, yet not overwhelming, process-oriented perspective.

During the latter half of the 20th century many states began to use the lottery as an alternative method to increasing the amount of revenue within their general funds. Apparently, this method was a lot more palatable than increasing taxes. Passing lottery legislation was easier in states where the funds were partially or wholly designated for primary, secondary, or higher education. The main purpose of this paper is to determine if the presence of a lottery impacts educational outcomes (high school graduations rates, bachelor degrees awarded, ACT, and SAT scores). Using state level data for the period 1985-2000 in a pooled time series regression model, the analysis indicates that the presence of a lottery is useful in models explaining educational outcomes.