Tech

Open Foreste Italiane is Gathering Momentum

Wow – there is a great new article on Ushahidi’s blog about an application I told you all about recently, which encourages crowdsourcing to stop Italian forest fires before they start. This has huge potential to increase community resilience and assist current firespotting efforts in a nonintrusive way. A lovely video by Elena Rapisardi, theRead… Read more »

Free “What is Gov 2.0?” webcast with Tim O’Reilly – May 11

What is the open government revolution and why should technologists care about it? Join Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media founder and CEO, for a discussion about improving efficiency and transparency in government, citizen-government collaboration, and government as a platform. There will be an open question and answer session. For background reading, please see Tim’s “Government asRead… Read more »

Web 2.0 and IT

VERY INTERESTING COMMENTARY From the Gartner Blogs Legacy systems are not socially adaptiveMay 5th, 2010 · Author: Mark McDonald Business executives, technologists, academics and journalists marvel at the emerging power of social technologies aka Web 2.0. They see developments in social media as transformational, ushering in a new type of computing – social computing. TheRead… Read more »

Introducing ‘CityLife’: the mobile app for local government

This is a crosspost of http://dotgov.com In the past few months, the DotGov team has been working on developing a mobile application for local government organizations. Our participating cities and county have been providing us with great feedback and insights and we really appreciate their help on this aspect of the development phase. Our teamRead… Read more »

“Flash Mob” Insights on Open Government

This morning I attended a great session at the Open Government and Innovations Conference in Washington, DC, led my Amanda Eamich and Karen Malkin, both of the USDA. They broke out session participants into three groups based on the Open Gov pillars – collaboration, participation and transparency. As we split up, it felt a bitRead… Read more »

Hospital ship USNS Mercy deploys, represents humanity at its best

Originally posted on www.andrewdwelch.com at http://www.andrewdwelch.com/2010/05/hospital-ship-usns-mercy-deploys.html. Deployments of the United States Naval Hospital Ship USNS Comfort have become one of my favorite topics to cover here. In reverse chronological order over the last year: Haitian Mother and Child Reunited Aboard USS Nassau; Christopher Albon on “Designing The Next Hospital Ship and Lessons From Haiti”; USNSRead… Read more »

Government launches a book blog

Looking for a good read about the Civil War to take to the beach this summer? How about some facts and figures on Afghanistan and Pakistan? Or maybe a retelling of the history of the Metric system in the United States? (Okay, yes, that last one is a stretch.) The Government Printing Office has launchedRead… Read more »

Response to Why Twitter?

In his latest VLog (http://is.gd/bTIJZ), @cheeky_geeky (Mark Drapeau) asks those of us who work with government why we would use what he calls an unreliable service (Twitter and Facebook) on official government websites providing these services with a de facto endorsement. I think Mark clearly knows the answer. I think the fact that he isRead… Read more »