Recently I met another civil engineer who works for a county in the State of Washington. He contacted me through the virtual world of Second Life where he is known as Jered Spitteler. Jered works for a county in the state of Washington and has been building a model in Second Life of one ofRead… Read more »
Makers is a future business fantasy by Cory Doctorow with the view of a society where traditional business structure has broken down and the economy is in the tank. Sound familiar – like what you read in today’s newspaper? Instead of relying on organizations to provide jobs, plan what to do and produce, and signRead… Read more »
3/10/12 Stocks experienced a long overdue pullback last week, but after two days of selling, the buyers stepped up and the S&P 500 flirted with new highs again. For the TSP, the C-fund was up 0.14% last week, the S-fund gained 1.04%, the I-fund lost 1.00% as strength in the dollar put pressure on theRead… Read more »
Dell and the American Red Cross are launching a new digital operations center – the first social media based operation devoted to humanitarian relief. The Red Cross is also recruiting digital volunteers to help respond to questions and provide information to the public about disasters as they happen. The center is modeled after Dell’s SocialRead… Read more »
This week, we read Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus Why I assigned this book There are a few different kinds of value that government agencies can wring from social media. The first is simply to use it as a venue for engaging citizens. Another is to listen to citizens as they talk to one another. StillRead… Read more »
As we welcome spring we also face the horror of a terrible tornado season. As you know, earlier this year, tornadoes swept through most of the southern states reeking havoc on many American lives. Nowadays, with the wide use of smartphones, people far from the disaster can follow how everything unfolded through eyewitness reporting. AtRead… Read more »
Thanks to Twitter, conferences are more social and open. A few years ago, if your audience is looking down at their mobile device, it probably meant that you lost them and they were checking email. These days, audience members clacking on their devices might mean they’re tweeting something meaningful that you said. Tweets from theRead… Read more »
Gadi Ben-Yehuda The Necessity of Government Digital Service. From across the pond comes this blog post by Carl Haggerty, “Does local government need a local government digital service?” Though the post (as its name implies) focuses squarely on local government, the lessons are applicable to all levels of government, and the answer to the title’sRead… Read more »
I love Star Wars. When I was a kid I used to queue up the entire trilogy (yes, the trilogy) empty my vast Lego collection out onto the floor and spend the entire day in the Star Wars universe building things I’d seen on the screen before me. It shouldn’t come as a surprise thenRead… Read more »
In response to my post yesterday one reader sent me a very thoughtful commentary that included this line at the end: “Rather than compare [Freedom of Information] FOI legislation and Open Gov Data as if it’s “one or the other”, do you think there’s a way of talking about how the two might converge?” OneRead… Read more »