In October 2009, the National Archives hosted the fifth annual McGowan Forum on Communication, Technology and Government. A panel of distinguished experts discussed the transfomative effect of Web 2.0 on the relationship between citizen and government.
They sought to answer the question: "Can Government 2.0 technologies build a new kind of participatory democracy?"
Moderated by Darrell M. West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, the discussion focused on how collaborative democracy can be designed.
Panelists included Beth Simone Noveck, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Mark H. Webbink, visiting professor of law, New York Law School, and executive director, Center for Patent Innovations; Gigi B. Sohn, president and co-founder, Public Knowledge; and Jason R. Baron, director of litigation, National Archives.
InformationWeek's Executive editor Fritz Nelson interviews San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, Chief Technology Officer Blair Adams and Director of Innovation Jay Nath, about DataSF.org and building applications from newly open datasets.
Mayor Gavin Newsom speaking about San Francisco's Open data initiative:
I think we're about to go through the most transformational period in how government operates...I cannot understate the significance of open data
For details on some of the applications already developed, check out DataSF's Application showcase.
The White House is soliciting feedback on improving Data.Gov and the creation of an Open Government Directive (OGD) Dashboard. They're look for ideas from the public in relation to these substantive initiatives of the the White House Open Government agenda.
1. Open Government Dashboard: The Open Government Directive calls for the creation of an Open Government Dashboard to measure progress and impact. Deputy Chief Technology Officer, Beth Noveck is looking for your input, including as to the metrics by which we measure success.
The Dashboard will combine quantitative and qualitative measures of progress and we are looking to you for your input about what metrics the Dashboard should measure.
The Sunlight Foundation has a dashboard up and running to monitor progress. Ideas could also be taking from existing government dashboards, including the IT Dashboard and Recovery.gov. For more on existing government dashboards, check TechPresident's recent analysis.
2. Future of Data.gov: The Open Government Directive instructs all federal agencies to make available high-value data that promote national priorities and improve the lives of everyday Americans through Data.gov. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra is asking for your help in shaping the next version of this key open government platform. He wants to evolve and expand on the principles upon which Data.gov is based. These include:
Through initiatives like Data.gov, we are laying a new foundation that changes the default setting of government from closed, opaque and secretive to open, transparent and participatory.
As part of the Data.gov Dialogue, you can download the draft plans, submit a new idea, or comment on someone else’s. The online Dialogue has already received dozens of suggestions and hundreds of votes.
The White House has a nice collection of blog posts written by SAVE Award finalists. They outline their stories and the reactions they received after becoming finalists. The sense of pride and achievement they feel is invigorating. It showcases the passion and dedication of many in the federal government towards saving money and improving efficiencies.
All in all it was an overwhelming but exciting event to be involved in. I think that everyone that worked on the project submitting ideas or reviewing them and organizing everything should be very proud of themselves. As we begin to see some of the ideas implemented in the next few months or years, I can look back and smile as I know that I had a part in it.
Huston's (Department of Housing and Urban Development) idea and interview with Federal News Radio:
Becoming a finalist among more than 38,000 candidates is one of the greatest accomplishments in both my career and my life. I received tremendous support from my family, church, friends and co-workers.
As word got out about the “Final Four,” I started to receive emails from Forest Service employees all around the nation thanking me for submitting this idea because they are just as frustrated with our collections process as I am. Those emails (from folks I don’t even know) and good wishes from present and former Forest Service co-workers and friends (as far back as college) really made this time special for me.
While I'm bummed that my idea didn't win (so I'm not going to meet with President Obama), I am totally psyched that there are already serious discussions higher up in my agency about how this process can be streamlined.
Julie Fosbender's (Department of Agriculture) idea and interview with Federal News Radio:
Nancy Fichtner is due to meet the president on Monday, so there will be an update from her then.
Nancy Fichtner's (Department of Veterans Affairs) winning idea and interview with Federal News Radio:
NASA has Nebula. DISA has RACE. Both are cloud computing platforms that are showing how the Government can use this technology.
That's the starting point of an interesting report from Jason Miller on Federal News Radio.
The report notes that the Office of Management and Budget will require agencies to develop an alternative analysis discussing how they could use cloud computing for all major technology projects for the fiscal 2012 budget.
As part of this Senate lawmakers have recommended that $15 million should be used for:
improving innovation, efficiency and effectiveness in federal IT, including an initiative on optimizing common services and solutions/cloud computing. This initiative would provide for pilots to identify enterprisewide common solutions to eliminate duplication at the agency level and lower the total cost of federal IT infrastructure.
Of this $15 million, the Committee is including $7.5 million for the Center for IT Excellence proposed by GSA. The center will deploy a selected set of infrastructure services, cloud based applications, offer Infrastructure as a service to agencies, and provide portal government applications.
Several agencies are already using Cloud computing services and platforms, and expect to offer these as resources to other areas of government - in a similar vein to how Amazon offers cloud services to individuals and businesses.
NASA's NEBULA
Speaking about Nebula Chris Kemp, NASA Ames chief information officer, explained more about the Nebula Cloud Computing pilot under development at NASA's Ames Research center. He outlined how a new white paper will explain to agencies how 'to take the Nebula platform and implement it in their own hardware and play around with it'.
Nebula is to the Data center what Linux is to the personal computer...We're trying to have an integrated set of open technologies...that will allow you to have a full self-service cloud platform.
Kemp went on to explain how NASA is trying to make the NASA platform easily accessible to other agencies through GSA's app store. He says NASA will put the platform in the Apps.gov storefront in early 2010 so agencies can use a government credit card to provision space and resources on the platform.
However, he stressed that NASA is not seeking to become another Amazon or Rackspace for the government. Rather they want to create a platform suitable for NASA's needs, which could then be released back to the opensource community or commercial sector, to provide back to NASA.
Nasa is not in the business of providing IT. We're in the business of solving mission problems.
As a corollary to this, he explained how they will be releasing their entire business model to provide visibility and transparency into the structure of the platform and its related costs:
The government in order to adopt cloud computing quickly and take advantage of these opportunities needs to be a smart buyer and understand the technology. The biggest challenge at NASA is not the technology, it's the 50,000 people that need to know how to deploy, procure and implement processes and standards around the technology.
DISA's RACE
The report goes on to discuss the Defense Information Systems Agency's (DISA) cloud computing services. Henry Sienkiewicz, DISA's technical program director for the computer services division, recently announced that Department of Defence users would have the ability 'to self-service provision operating environments within the highly secured Defense Enterprise Computing Center’s (DECC) production environment'.
our users can now customize, purchase, and receive their test and development computing platform within 24 hours and the production environments within 72 hours, and that’s a must for worldwide missions with ever-changing computing requirements. Our goal is to allow software development to securely occur within the decision-making cycle.
The platform already has 3,000 users and hundreds of projects. It's working with other areas of the DoD with parts of the Army and Air Force to host Customer Relationship Management applications, and is discussing moving some of the Microsoft Office suite to the RISE platform.
Sienkiewicz says the goal for all of this is to virtualize at least 50 percent of its environment, and reduce the time it takes to take an application from an idea to production to about a week, instead of the current average of 40 days.
OMB's mandate
The Office of Management and Budget will require agencies in 2010 to participate in pilot projects using cloud computing. Federal News Radio reports that 'Agencies will be expected to tell OMB why they wouldn't use cloud computing for these initiatives [technology projects]'.
Then in 2013, 'agencies must give OMB a complete alternatives analysis for mixed life cycle projects where agencies are spending new money-known as development, modernization and enhancement-and steady state or operations and maintenance funding for how they could move to cloud computing'.
For this reason, NASA and the DISA are trying to help agencies move data and other applications onto their cloud based platforms. If they're to compete for government business with Amazon, Google or Microsoft they need to provide services provisioned easily with a credit card through a web portal.
It looks like NASA and DoD will be providing the cloud computing 'public option'. Whether they win business from agencies will depend on the quality and cost effectiveness of their services, rather than the fact that they're part of the government. It does, however, open up the intriguing prospect of a number of government entities competing for cloud computing business.
For more on GSA's Cloud Computing initiative see the presentation below, or Casey Coleman's session at the recent Gov 2.0 summit.
Jen Pahlka discusses Citizen 2.0. She explains how our consumer experiences on the Internet are changing our expectations of how we interact with government.
'We're obsessed with the customer experience..we think of ourselves first and foremost as consumers'
'We then elected Barack Obama...and started to imagine our role as citizens might be as important as our role as consumers.'
'What would a citizen experience look like?'
'Voting is a narrow and unsatistifying experience as a citizen.'
'We have bybrids of citizens and consumers.'
'Citizens building the products they want to buy and consume'
Consumer -> Participant -> Citizen
'We've come to understand ourselves as citizens not through our experiences with government, but through our experiences online.'
'We're bringing our online expectations to the government and they cannot meet them.'
'The federal government could stand to be more like a tech company.'
'Working in government is like running a marathon. Blindfolded. Wearing sandbags' - Katie Stanton, White House Director of Citizen Participation
'Lots of people in government that want to meet our expectations of citizens...but they need/want our help.'
The City of Los Angeles recently selected Google Apps to replace its current email system for all 34,000 city employees. Los Angeles Chief Technology Officer Randi Levin and Kevin Crawford, Assistant General Manager of LA's Information Technology Agency, discuss the reasons behind the city's decision.
Improved collaboration. Collaborative tools such as instant messaging, video conferencing, and simultaneous review and editing of documents by multiple people, employees will allow emplopees to work more efficiently and collaboratively.
Easier remote access. Easier access to information from any computer with an internet connection, as well as from their mobile phones.
Expanded storage. Employees will have 25x the email storage they have today, saving them from having to make difficult decisions about which emails to keep or delete.
The City of Los Angeles expects to save $5.5 million over five years and achieve a return on investment of up to $20 million.
The winner of the first-ever winning of the President's SAVE award has been announced as Nancy Fichtner. Her idea - on how to make the government perform more effectively and efficiently - was picked from the "final four" as the winner.
See video of President Barack Obama explaining the initiative and the finalists.
On Monday, December 21, Nancy will present her idea to President Obama at the White House.
The winning idea (from Nancy Fichtner of Department of Veterans Affairs)
Veterans leaving VA hospitals should be able to take the medicine they’ve been using home with them instead of it being thrown away when they’re discharged.
As is the case in most hospitals all across the country, medicine that is used in the hospital is not given to patients to be brought home; instead, it is thrown out. “Currently the inpatient medications such as ointments, inhalers, eye drops, and other bulk items are being disposed of upon patient discharge.”
Nancy proposes ending this waste and finding a way to allow this medicine to be used by those who need it.
Cool video explaining how the Salt Lake Valley Health Department uses social media tools like Twitter and Facebook to communicate H1N1 information to citizens and media.
For more on their Web 2.0 outreach programme, check their Social Media Outreach page.
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