White House Rolls Out New Plan for Digital Government
BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, May 23 2012
The White House on Wednesday rolled out a new strategy document on digital government that sets out government-wide goals and priorities for dealing with citizens online, creates a new center at the General Services Administration to encourage agencies to get onboard, and calls for new government-wide standards for IT procurement.
White House Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel and Chief Technology Officer Todd Park unveiled the strategy Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt, a technology conference held in New York City. In their remarks, they framed the strategy as a sweeping reinvention of the way the government interacts with citizens online designed to make it ever easier for people inside and outside of government to improve service delivery for Americans over the web.Read More
New York City Just Radically Changed Who Manages Its IT Projects
BY Nick Judd | Tuesday, April 24 2012
For the first time, Mayor Michael Bloomberg's New York City now has a single person responsible for overseeing all of its information technology operations.
Rahul N. Merchant, a former executive at financial services and technology firms, starts today as New York City's first chief information and innovation officer, the city announced. Merchant will report directly to the mayor and will be responsible for the city's IT infrastructure, making him in effect the alpha and omega for city IT across all agencies. Previously, one city department — the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications — was responsible for maintaining many core IT projects, such as a city wireless network and an ongoing project to consolidate data servers, but agency IT operations were more independent. Merchant will oversee information technology development and management across all city agencies.
Read MoreWatching Where the Plows Go
BY Nick Judd | Thursday, January 12 2012
The snow is moving in Chicago, and so is the City of Chicago's "Plow Tracker", the first part of its online snow-fighting portal to go live. Read More
In Chicago, The Snow Day as Civic Experiment
BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, January 4 2012
The City of Chicago on Tuesday unveiled Chicago Shovels, a suite of web applications designed to keep Chicagoans in the know when the snow banks start to pile up. Read More
Florida Town Goes From MS Frontpage to Responsive Design Theme
BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, January 4 2012
For the Gov 2.0 people we've been neglecting so terribly as the presidential campaign has heated up: Phase 2's blog has a Q&A with a consultant who built a new site for Lake Clarke Shores, Fla., using the a distribution of the open-source Drupal content management system called OpenPublic. The Q&A documents how the city's website went from something built on Microsoft FrontPage to a brand-new Drupal instance with a responsive design. Read More
All Eyes On Estonia, a Tech-Savvy State With a Balanced Budget
BY Nick Judd | Monday, October 24 2011
Both BBC News and Der Spiegel took time last week to run paeans to Estonia, a famously wired post-Soviet democracy that appears to have its fiscal house in order even as large countries, with citizens living higher on ... Read More
New Mobile Site Shows Californians Where Not to Find the Fish
BY Nick Judd | Monday, October 3 2011
A new, location-aware mobile version of a page on the California Department of Fish and Game's website shows visitors which nearby coastal areas are protected by state law and thus off-limits for boating, fishing and the ... Read More
From Tracking Fires to Fixing Potholes, a Roundup of Open Data Projects in Russia
BY Becky Kazansky | Friday, July 8 2011
After our post on the open data contest Apps4Russia late last month, we received an email from Gov 2.0 proponent Alena Popova, the chief executive officer of Gov2Project.ru, an incubator that invests in and consults with ... Read More
The Growth of Hometown Hacking
BY Nick Judd | Monday, May 23 2011
Inspired by soon-to-be-expatriate Chicagoan Christopher Groskopf, Virginia web designer S.D. Salyer now says he'll do for his native Washington County, Va., what Groskopf has begun to do for Tyler, Tex.: Following in ... Read More
Statehouse Tweets: Incoming Governors Pick Social Media Strategies
BY Nick Judd | Friday, January 7 2011
Source: Wikimedia Friday, if Twitter is to be believed, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley turned into a tweet machine, snapping photos on a BlackBerry and posting them to the social network in order to share his excitement ... Read More