The Crewe Astronomy Club

Virginia State Parks offer many wonderful events and programs all throughout the year. Many of these programs are free or very moderately priced which helps in today’s economy. I was lucky enough to attend one of these events at Pocahontas State Park this weekend when the Crewe Astronomy Club came to hold an educational programRead… Read more »

The Kansas Secretary of Transportation is bloggin’!

Kansas Transportation Secretary Deb Miller used her first blog post on K-TOC to explain her no-earmarks policy. I’m not competent to assess how innovative this is; maybe these days there are all sorts of state cabinet officials out there blogging the whys and wherefores of their policy thinking. But I’m thinking probably not. There’s beenRead… Read more »

“Ask Your Government”: Web 2.0 facilitates dialog between Citizens and Federal agencies

Check out the new blog by Ed O’Keefe (washingtonpost.com) “Ask Your Government,” where U.S. citizens ask questions and Federal agencies have the opportunity to provide answers using video clips that are imbedded within the blog. The NIST Weights and Measures Division and Metric Program were just featured http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2009/03/ask_your_government_when_will.html Excerpt: The latest answer comes in responseRead… Read more »

Let them write columns

Yesterday’s UK policy paper Working Together – Public Services on Your Side includes some encouraging noises about greater interaction with the public online and greater access to information – what some people call Government 2.0: “Renewed and reformed public services are the key to strong communities and a more socially mobile society. We will putRead… Read more »

Project of the Week – “Around the Corner”

Over the past year or so, blogs in the federal space have become more common and are increasingly being used to share information and ideas both internal and external to the agencies. Some great examples are Air Force Blogspot, Navy CIO, and NASA Blogs. OMB Director Peter Orszag just started a blog and the ObamaRead… Read more »

How Will U.S. Government Procurement Processes Handle the Stimulus Spending Surge?

By Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D. The Obama Administration has made it official: spending Federal stimulus money is being scrutinized and reported on very carefully and in great detail. This is called “oversight.” The organizational and publishing infrastructure for doing this are evolving rapidly. At the Federal level the public web portal is Recovery.org. Experienced no-nonsenseRead… Read more »

Practical benefits of online media for government

Republished from eGovAU. Some of the practical benefits for government of online social media are beginning to emerge from various jurisdictions around the world. One that has particularly struck me as very positive is the use of online media by Washington DC to convince felons to voluntarily turn themselves in. Written about in Using SocialRead… Read more »

Chris Anderson on “Delivering on the Promise of Gov 2.0”

Chris Anderson, of Wired magazine and “The Long Tail” fame, was the keynote speaker at FOSE this morning. He spoke on “For the People and By the People: Delivering on the Promise of Gov 2.0”. Anderson started off with an interesting example – the infamous Twitter fail whale. Countless users have bemoaned the unreliability ofRead… Read more »