Tech

Using the Hourglass to Respond to Questions in a Crisis

Here at EPA, we were quite busy this spring providing information about radiation levels resulting from the earthquake and tsunami that damaged Japanese nuclear reactors. Check out the site! Now we’re thinking about lessons learned, and one thing I came up with was a concept of a question/answer “hourglass,” where we take in questions fromRead… Read more »

Can’t tell you if a product complies with Section 508

As part of my team’s job supporting the BuyAccessible Wizard, we often get questions asking if a specific product complies with Section 508. This is a question we can’t answer. Remember it is the agency itself that must comply with Section 508, not the product or the services. When an agency is determining the requirementsRead… Read more »

Next White Paper Outline: Featured Based Techniques for SharePoint

Featured Based Techniques for SharePoint Brian K Seitz Abstract What are Feature Based Techniques? Why are Feature Based Techniques important to SharePoint? Feature Based Requirements Techniques Problems with old methods Overly administrative Slow to delivery, Slow to receive benefits Complex relationships difficult to represent Problems with new methodologies (Agile) Disconnected from rest of enterprise, unlessRead… Read more »

Weekly Round-up: June 17. 2011

Gadi Ben-Yehuda Vivek Kundra to Leave White House in August. OMB Director Jack Lew has a nice good-bye post on the WH Blog for Vivek Kundra, who announced that he is leaving the administration in August for a fellowship at Harvard. Need to Find an Embassy? Look up a Travel Alert? There’s an App forRead… Read more »

2.0 Be Or Not 2.0 Be?

We now have a rival website! Built by a developer who works for one of our partners! Have a look to see what he has produced and what motivated him to develop it. Don’t worry, the current website you’re looking at won’t go away and neither will the data, but we’re very keen to findRead… Read more »

Social Media and Rioters

My friend Alexandra Samuel penned a piece titled “After a Loss in Vancouver, Troubling Signals of Citizen Surveillance” over at the Harvard Business Review. The piece highlights her concern with the number of people willing to engage in citizen surveillance. As she states: It’s one thing to take pictures as part of the process ofRead… Read more »

This Day in GovCon History, June 16, 1911: A Century of IBM Incorporation

Authored by Anthony Critelli June 16, 1911, was the founding of government contractor and corporate giant IBM. The company was formed via the merger of Tabulating Machine Company, Computing Scale Company of America and International Time Recording Company into Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) by trust organizer Charles F. Flint. Though the company is celebrating a centuryRead… Read more »

Code for America/Civic Commons Fellows Win at Apps for Good!

For the past three months, developers from across the country have been working with community partners to create mobile apps that will help low-income Americans improve their lives. Hosted by One Economy, the Applications for Good competition challenged developers to think about how technology can improve education, employment, health and finances. We were thrilled toRead… Read more »