Tech

Summary of NCDD survey on race dialogue — and next steps

Before the holidays, three was a flurry of dozens of messages on the NCDD Discussion list (our main listserv, with 1150 subscribers) on issues of race and racism within a period of a couple of days. Though our listserv can be a great place to discuss practice-related questions and share announcements, it is not aRead… Read more »

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

The TV show, Cheers, ran for eleven seasons during the 80s and early 90s with a tagline that made everyone feel good…‘where everybody knows your name.’ A group of unlikely friends went through some good times and some bad times while making us laugh…and these characters became part of our lives, because we knew theirRead… Read more »

Doing away with social media officers

Andrea Di Maio reports on the US Defense department doing away with dedicated social media officers: No more specialized offices, no more social media silos, no more experts or consultants building new strategies. Social media is a tool, amongst many others, for public affairs professional to do their job more effectively and efficiently. The nextRead… Read more »

Is open goverment just about the data?

The latest social media phenom is Quora. A kind of question and answer forum. Its neatest trick is that it encourages you to re-produce your social graph from Twitter. Ready made followers and people you probably already ask questions of to follow. Anyhoo…there was a question on Quora I answered recently Does open government requireRead… Read more »

Focusing your Cloud Strategy

Recently we discussed the idea of how central to your cloud computing strategy’s success is having focus. You can garner that focus by communicating with your IT team and your business stakeholders to determine if you have any, or what your cloud computing key value drivers are. 1. Do we need to dramatically reduce ITRead… Read more »

Honourable Mention! The Mozilla Visualization Challenge Update

Really pleased to share that Diederik and I earned an honourable mention for our submission to the Mozilla Open Data Competition. For those who missed it – and who find opendata, open source and visualization interesting – you can read a description of and see images from our submission to the competition in this blogRead… Read more »

Gov 2.0 Roundup: Week of January 14

Drupal comes to Capitol Hill, on the lookout for civic innovation, and rulemaking 2.0, all in this week’s edition of the Gov 2.0 Roundup. –If you thought the White House and Congress couldn’t agree on anything, think again. The U.S. House of Representatives announced this week that Drupal, the platform on which whitehouse.gov is built,Read… Read more »

*BREAKING* DHS cancels SBInet

The SBInet program is no more, the Homeland Security Department announced January 14. Instead, the department will launch a new border security technology approach, “which will utilize existing, proven technology tailored to the distinct terrain and population density of each border region,” DHS says in a fact sheet (.pdf). “SBInet cannot meet its original objectiveRead… Read more »