In the wake of the recent disasters in Japan, many organizations used Twitter to raise donations for the relief effort overseas. However, Microsoft’s Bing pledged $100,000 and received a lot of criticism for their generous pledge. On March 12, Bing tweeted “How can you #SupportJapan? For every retweet, @bing will give $1 to Japan quakeRead… Read more »
More and more government agencies are jumping on the social media bandwagon, but not all are starting with a social media policy. Some simply go forth and facebook, not realizing the ramifications of generating official information on a third party website. Are social media policies really needed? Yes. I’d like to use an analogy toRead… Read more »
Every other year, my agency produces a Biennial Performance Report that shows the progress of IT initiatives across state agencies. Traditionally, we have published paper documents with a PDF version for download. This year, we flipped the model on its ear by turning this report into a website. By virtue of being online, there areRead… Read more »
In a week of hard work at the Center for Information Technology, a fact that slipped my attention. I then decided to write this post to mark what I called the technology acumen. Since 1997, we implemented the legislative branch in Fortaleza, streaming audio and video of plenary sessions over the Internet, and even workingRead… Read more »
It was a privilege to be able to chair the FutureGov Summit and the FutureGov Awards, held over three content-rich days in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia last week (October 12-14). From my point of view, most of the discussions were about five aspects of the “how” of e-government and government ICT – I hope this indicatesRead… Read more »
I couldn’t believe it when this tweet popped up: Was Texas Attorney General Jeffs sentenced to prison for sexually assaulting a child? Wait a minute… The Attorney General for Texas is Greg Abbott, not Abram Harker Jeffs. So, what’s going on here? If you look at the other tweets from Texas.gov, the Official State ofRead… Read more »
If you wish to be successful with your digital government initiatives, you must measure. Without reasonably good metrics you have no way to determine success and no way to gauge how you should direct your resources. Putting up a website is not a measure of success. You really need to understand what that website isRead… Read more »
Today, the City of Huntsville, Texas (www.huntsvilletx.gov) and eGov Strategies (website) announced the availability of the city’s comprehensive iPhone app to better connect residents and businesses with city government. It’s a uniquely innovative approach for a local government app that offers a wide range of city website content and services – uniquely designed for iPhoneRead… Read more »
When my son turned three, we got him a bike with training wheels. He did quite well, but when it came time to take off those training wheels, he violently refused. Even a three year old knew that going from four wheels down to two would increase his chances of falling from zero to incrediblyRead… Read more »
A group of researchers from some of the top schools with programs related to digital government got together last month to discuss the role of research in the digital government arena, it’s importance for the future, and how to get it better funded. The get-together was entitled “Information, Technology, and Governance: A Grand Challenges ResearchRead… Read more »