Case Reports and Open Source Work Products in PAR

• Author: David S. Reed
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12775
• Published date: 01 May 2017
• Date: 01 May 2017

Case Reports and Open Source Work Products in PAR 473

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 3, pp. 473. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12775.

David S. Reed is founder of the

Center for Public Administrators, a 501(c)

(3) civil society organization that builds

communities of practice in the public sector.

He is also a civil servant in the U.S. federal

government.

E-mail: david.reed@pubadmin.org

Communication

James L. Perry ’ s editorial, “Amplifying the Voices of

Practitioners in PAR” (March/April 2017) describes

the steps Public Administration Review ( PA R ) has

taken to include content from practitioners. I suggest

an additional step: publish two types of professional

literature that are not research.

The first type is case reports, as are published in

medical journals. A case report is a description by a

practitioner of a situation she encountered, what she

did about it, and the results. Case reports are different

than the case studies used in public administration

teaching and scholarship. Case studies focus on the

information about a case that illuminates a technique

being taught or a theory being considered. By contrast,

one value of case reports is presenting specifics that do

not fit any existing framework. For example, AIDS

research started with a case report of an inexplicable

case of Kaposi ’ s sarcoma. Another difference is that

case studies are typically by a researcher who was not

involved in the events, whereas a case report is by a

practitioner who handled the case.

Case reports of actual experience with widely accepted

practices, such as performance metrics, could be

valuable. They could reveal aspects of such practices

that are not considered by academic theories and

therefore not tested by empirical research. Case

reports of actions that are initiated by practitioners

independent of agency officials could also be valuable.

Such independent actions include side projects,

cuff systems, and effectual intrapreneurship. These

independent actions are little researched, but they

constitute an important part of public administration

practice.

A second type of professional literature that PAR

should add is open source work products. The

narrowest definition of open source is disclosing

the human-readable “source code” of a computer

program. But open source has evolved a broader

meaning, in which computer source code or another

sort of work product is shared publicly, so that any

interested person can contribute improvements to

it. The work products that public administrators

could make available to each other for open

source collaboration include procedures, position

descriptions for personnel, statements of work for

contracting, and any number of other artifacts we

produce and use in our practice. Center for Public

Administrators is experimenting with open source

collaboration on “annotated work instructions” as

an alternative to ISO 9000. The paper version of

a journal could not present an open source work

product in a convenient form to copy and alter, but a

journal article could provide links to the work product

in its native format, just as articles sometimes provide

links to their data sets.

Journal editors and peer reviewers can make a vital

contribution to evolving standards for professional

literature that is not research. For example, how

should concealing the identities of persons or

organizations in a case report, to protect their privacy

or to protect the author, be balanced against the need

to make sources and data open for replication or

refutation? What constitutes a useful contribution to

dialogue among practitioners, and what is merely self-

promotion or advocacy? Applying such standards is a

major benefit of including these types of practitioner

literature in journals, rather than relegating them to

uncurated websites.

Another benefit of including these types of literature

in journals is to legitimate practitioners’ disclosure

of their work. As Paul Posner noted in 2009,

“publication of articles on issues encountered in the

workplace is often viewed as a risk, not an asset, to

the agency by top officials.” Including case reports

and open source work products in recognized journals

such as PAR clarifies that, as long as they do not

violate a legal or moral obligation of secrecy, they are

part of a public administrator ’ s ethical obligation to

advance professional excellence, rather than leaks.

David S. Reed

Center for Public Administrators

Case Reports and Open Source Work Products in PAR