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Category Archives: Gov 2.0
U.S. Navy releases new Social Media Handbook
“Re-verify our range to target… one tweet only”
–Captain Marko Ramius
Yesterday, the U.S. Navy publicly released its new social media handbook. The updated guide, embedded, below provides sailors with a guide secure use of Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the networked world.
“The rapid growth of social media platforms and technologies have flattened and democratized the communications environment in ways we are just beginning to comprehend,” says D. J. Moynihan, Navy chief of information, in the introduction. “Social media is an effective channel to communicate relevant, aligned and targeted information to the stakeholders that we want to reach, including some we have had a hard time reaching before. As with the advent of other communication technologies – phone, fax, websites – we must exercise caution to use these tools safely and effectively, and we must educate our Soldiers and families to do the same.”
Navy Command Social Media Handbook – Online Versionhttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/doc_player.swf?doc=navycommandsocialmediahandbookweb-101013124845-phpapp02&stripped_title=navy-command-social-media-handbook-web&userName=USNavySocialMedia
View more documents from US Navy Social Media.
This handbook should make for good weekend reading. As I thought about what it means to have more sailors online, I couldn’t help but recall an apt mock WWII propaganda poster by Brian Lane Winfield Moore: “Loose tweets sink fleets.”
Steady as she goes, gentleman. You don’t have to sit in a crow’s nest to see the need to take care with the new media platforms.
UPDATED: The L.A. Times called the Navy’s new social media policy “required reading for political campaigners.” Craig Howie compared these new rules of engagement for a virtually enhanced battlefield to the campaign front. The metaphor is probably inevitable in this heated election season, and given the advice in the handbook, useful.
USA.gov launches new iPhone app on its 10th Anniversary
This October marks the 10th anniversary of USA.gov, the nation’s search engine for government. And, as it turns out, now there’s an app for that. Nope, it’s not Apps.gov of even Apps.USA.gov. The General Services Administration quietly added a new USA.gov iPhone app to iTunes a few days ago. Why is it important? When American look for government information, they use search engines. While most of them go to Google and Bing, now they have another option when they fire up a smartphone.
The new app integrates access to a useful government dataset for citizens: a product recall database. The same access is available through a Product Recall app online, for Android or on mobile devices at Recalls.gov. That also means that citizens don’t have to have a smartphone to access public data, a issue for accessibility and the digital divide. For those inclined, the app also provides mobile search for local, state and federal websites, including predictive search.
The new USA.gov app is beautifully designed, lightweight and didn’t crash on me after ten minutes of searching and browsing. The integration of a “tap to call” feature with the iPhone on the home screen also preserves a handy “Gov 1.0” feature as well: 1 800 FED INFO.
As the app description in iTunes notes, the app makes public data like birth, marriage and death records freely available to all citizens (provided that they have an iOS device with an Internet connection). Search.USA.gov provides similar access on both mobile and desktop users, for folks who prefer a Web browser to an app. Information about schools, passport and visas, tax codes, government jobs and Social Security benefits is also available.
The addition of the USA.gov to iTunes ends a quiet but important lag in getting a free government app onto the world’s largest mobile application platform. When Apps.USA.gov launched, Apple apps were conspicuously absent. Months later, the legal difficulties between the feds and Cupertino appear to resolved.
As a result, parents can search the FDA database to see which toys have been recalled. While it’s true that analysts can (and no doubt will) point to the USA.gov app as the latest example of “shiny app syndrome,” making a better interface for open data is a win for everyone.
Slideshow: Fedtalks 2010
The slideshow above is a selection of pictures from today’s Fedtalks in Washington. (Look for more high quality photography soon from the event organizers). If you can’t see the Flash slideshow, you can view my full Fedtalks 2010 set on Flickr.
GSA launches Apps.gov NOW to offer Feds new citizen engagement tools
Will a platform for citizen engagement help federal government employees reach their open government goals?
Today at Fedtalks in Washington, the General Services Administration’s director of citizen engagement, Gwynne Kostin, talked about its new open government platform, Apps.gov NOW. Apps.gov NOW launched in August but the Gov 2.0 community hasn’t heard much about it until this morning.
The new platform, available at citizen.apps.gov, allows federal employees to choose from technologies that enables them to create blogs, challenge tools, wikis or forums. Kostin talked about how employees can then upload a banner, add plug-ins or traffic reporting, and import data feeds. It’s essentially turnkey technology, with the regulatory compliance backhaul simplified for usage. 508 compliance for disability is particularly relevant to many feds.
“We cleared away a lot of the issues with policy,” said Kostin. “We expect this tool to be especially important to small agencies or for projects that need to get market fast.”
Pattern Recognition and Spimewatch: Visions of Open Cities of the Future
If you had five minutes to talk about the future, what would you say?
Last month, I had the privilege of presenting at two Ignite sessions, Ignite NYC at the Web 2.0 Expo and Ignite D.C. later in the week. If you’re not familiar, Ignites are 5 minute-long talks where presenters share subject they’re passionate about, using 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. If you’re not used to that rhythm, it can be tricky.
The video of my talk at Ignite D.C. is embedded below:
The presentation and associated links is embedded below:
Visions of the Future: Spime Watch and Pattern Recognitionhttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=spime-watch-pattern-recognition-abh-101001132644-phpapp02&stripped_title=visions-of-the-future-spime-watch-and-pattern-recognition&userName=digiphile
View more presentations from Alexander Howard.
Curious about the title for my talks? As fellow science fiction fans know, the title for these Ignite talks is an homage to two author: William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling. Gibson, sometimes called the “noir prophet” of cyberpunk, coined the term cyberspace and wrote “Pattern Recognition,” an enjoyable yarn about the future-present. Sterling, also an notable cyberpunk author, maintains the excellent Wired blog “Beyond the Beyond,” which has an entire category called “Spimewatch.”
US CTO pitches open government, innovation and health IT to Silicon Valley
What is the federal chief technology officer up to out in Silicon Valley? From afar, however, it’s looks like federal CTO Aneesh Chopra is stirring up awareness about open government and entrepreneurship in the venture capital community in California. He’s also traveling with Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) CTO Todd Park to add his compatriot’s considerable enthusiasm for innovation in healthcare information technology (HIT). Chopra’s slides follow:
Aneesh Chopra DC to VC Oct 6, 2010http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=dctovc100610-101007114153-phpapp02&stripped_title=aneesh-chopra-dc-to-vc100610&userName=DC2VC
View more presentations from DC2VC.
Following is a quick rundown of the websites and initiatives Chopra referenced in the presentation:
- The White House Open Government Initiative
- Healthcare.gov
- A Presidential commitment to double available spectrum
- NASA Nebula and Eucalyptus
- Tech focused on healthier kids: Appsforhealthykids.com, healthgameschallenge.org and MyFood-a-Pedia
- Open government at the VA and www.mymedicare.gov
- The Healthcare 2.0 Developer Challenge
- The vai2 Challenge and Challenge.gov
- Standards to support the “secure and meaningful exchange of health information, at NHINDirect.org
- Private-partnership between the GovPulse.us entrepreneurs and the government in building the new FederalRegister.gov
For a classic dispatch written by a great tech journalist, Wade Roush, make sure to read his interview with Aneesh Chopra on entrepreneurship, health IT, open government and “data as a policy lever.”
During the event, I picked up some tweets coming out of a “D.C.-to-Silicon Valley” event and curated them using the Storify tool. It proved to be a bit unstable – apps in beta are fun! – but you’ll find a “living version” of the story embedded in the post below.
http://storify.com/digiphile/dc-to-vc-healthcare-it-summit-pitches-gov-20-and-o.js
HHS CTO announces HealthData.gov, explains Blue Button and next steps for Health2Challenge
Have you met Todd Park? He’s the first CTO of Health and Human Services Department of the United States. Earlier this week, he announced the upcoming launch of HealthData.gov, a new website that will publish open government health data. If you’re unfamiliar with Park, I interviewed him at this year’s Gov 2.0 Expo:
Park and I talked about his open government work at the Department of Health and Human Services, where he’s been trying to make community health information as useful as weather data. We also spoke about the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge, a series of code-a-thons and team competitions to build apps based upon community health data. “Games are a non-trivial information dissemination approach” that can drive actionable behavior, said Park at HealthCamp, referring to many of the entries that use game mechanics to socialize the data. The developer challenge culminated this week during the fourth annual Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.
The nation now can see more about what the tech community has come up since this spring, when the question of whether there’s a healthcare app for that was answered the first time. “Social value and economic value can go hand in hand,” he said to a health IT summit in San Francisco. Below, Park talks about the Veterans Administration’s new “Blue Button,” which provides access to downloadable personal health data.
In the video, Park outlines the agency’s plan to offer military veterans and Medicare recipients the ability to download their own health records using a digital “blue button” on MyMedicare.gov and MyHealthyVet. Fried reported on veterans getting downloadable health info at CNET.com. Park, VA CTO Peter Levin and federal CTO Aneesh Chopra blogged about the Blue Button at WhiteHouse.gov:
Veterans who log onto My HealtheVet at http://www.myhealth.va.gov and click the Blue Button can save or print information from their own health records. Using a similar Blue Button, Medicare beneficiaries who are registered users of http://www.mymedicare.gov can log onto a secure site where they can save or print their Medicare claims and self-entered personal information. Data from of each site can be used to create portable medical histories that will facilitate dialog with Veterans’ and beneficiaries’ health care providers, caregivers, and other trusted individuals or entities.
This new option will help Veterans and Medicare beneficiaries save their information on individual computers and portable storage devices or print that information in hard copy. Having ready access to personal health information from Medicare claims can help beneficiaries understand their medical history and partner more effectively with providers. With the advent of the Blue Button feature, Medicare beneficiaries will be able to view their claims and self-entered information—and be able to export that data onto their own computer. The information is downloaded as an “ASCII text file,” the easiest and simplest electronic text format. This file is also easy to read by the individual; it looks like an organized report.
More than 60,000 people have already downloaded their PHRs. As those technically savvy writers emphasize, however, this will create thousands of opportunities to have that sensitive data leak. They stressed the importance of using encryption and password protection to protect the records. For those watching the development of health IT, the future that the 3 CTOs hint about near the end of the post will be of particular interest:
Soon, Blue Button users may be able to augment the downloaded information that is housed on their computers—or that they transferred to a commercial personal health record or other health application—through automated connections to, and downloads from, major pharmacies including Walgreens and CVS; lab systems such as Quest and LabCorp; and an increasing number of inpatient and outpatient electronic medical records systems.
Keep an eye out for how that develops.
Below, Park kicks off the Healthcamp SF Bay event.
http://www.ustream.tv/flash/video/10033111?v3=1
Here are his slides from the event:
Todd Park – Open Health Data Oct 6, 2010http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=openhealthdata10062010-101007115012-phpapp02&stripped_title=todd-park-open-health-data&userName=DC2VC
View more presentations from DC2VC.
Below, he summarizes his Healthcamp session.
Making sense of Gov 2.0, Open Government and We Government at Ogilvy
How does making government smarter relate to open government, e-government or “We government?”
As Sifry put it in the Huffington Post this week ,
At Personal Democracy Forum, we prefer the term “We-government,” the co-creating of new forms of collaboration and service that use technology, public data and the social web to address vital issues and solve public problems, that enables us to do more with less. It’s neither Right nor Left, not small government or big government, but effective do-it-ourselves-government.
What are the early success stories and challenges for an open government in beta? This morning in Washington, I dodged rain drops on my way to a Gov 2.0 panel moderated by Ogilvy Digital’s Rohit Bhargava to talk about that very topic, joining Personal Democracy Forum co-founder Micah Sifry; Mark Murray, deputy political director for NBC News; Ari Melber, correspondent and blogger for the Nation magazine and Politico; and Gwynne Kostin, Director at the Center for New Media and Citizen Engagement at the GSA.
The panel was livestreamed at Livestream.com and integrated with the Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence Facebook page for an online audience. Fast forward to about 30 minutes into the archive for the beginning of the event.
“We’re just beginning to see the government using the Web in a more porous, participatory way,” said Sifry, who saw no reason that government workers couldn’t get technology in the same way other citizens else can. “Really, government workers have mastered the telephone,” he said. “The can probably use Web 2.0 tools.”
Gov 2.0 Case Studies
While Sifry was critical of the White House’s embrace of Gov 2.0 and open government, he observed that at the agency level he’s seeing “a flowering of initiative.” That’s backed up by what I’ve seen on the ground and have reported on in numerous studies. For instance:
- Barghava mentioned Pillbox at NIH, where socializing open government healthcare data built a better platform
- Health and Human Services, where CTO Todd Park is making community health info as useful as weather data:
- Crowdsourcing national challenges at Challenge.gov
- “There’s a movement to make sure that cities all put their data out in the same way,” said Sifry, as evidenced by the Open 311 initiative
- Sifry also referenced the targeted crowdsourcing example of Peer-to-Patent, an open government innovation pioneered by White House deputy CTO Beth Noveck
- The reboot of FCC.gov and rollout of APIs and developer engagement holds some promise.
- The launch of the Civic Commons code-sharing initiative could be a big deal to state and city governments.
- The progress of bringing open government to courts bears close watching.
- If you’re tracking the technology that will make government better, it’s clear that network visualization and the mining of open data sets will have major utility for fraud detection and reduction.
- Abroad, the growth of government 2.0 in Australia and development of open government in Britain are key case studies to watch, particularly Data.gov.uk.
“There is a civic surplus waiting to be tapped of people who want the country to succeed,” said Sifry. And, in fact, I reported on Harnessing the Civic Surplus for Open Government,” when Noveck spoke in Manor, Texas about all of these initiatives.
I’m shortchanging the comments of Melber, Kostin and Murray due to time, unfortunately, but the #Ogilvy360di tweetstream and archived livestream offer additional perspective. Both of the reporters provided ample insight into the hyper-charged world of national correspondents in Washington, where news and issues move almost as quickly as the polls. More of Kostin’s thoughts may also be fond at her blog, OnDotGov.
Selected reflections from the online audience:
@msspinach: “The hot question: what exactly is #gov20? Gwynne Kostin: ‘We’re still throwing spaghetti on the wall and seeing what sticks.'”
@voleynik: “#Gov20 = government using the web to create better services for citizens. Creating smarter more effective government.”
@SaBean21: “Our bill of rights is being used in a digital form. Open platform is a tiny & fragile thing we have right now.
@dlblack: “@digiphile: the gov20 / #opengov conversation can’t just be about Washington, it has to be about data people can use”
@msspinach: “#gov20 means whoever is in power gives up some cntrl. If u want group prticipation, ppl need to feel they’re being listened to.”
@merici:”Ok, social media exists. We get it. Moving fwd, what are ex of gov using web to be smarter, more efficient?”
@dlblack: “not all #gov20 projects need to be about mass participation, they need to be about exchanging knowledge w/right audience”
State of Minnesota Moves to Microsoft’s Cloud for Collaboration
This morning, the state of Minnesota announced that it would use Microsoft’s private cloud computing technology as a platform for its collaboration software. Microsoft’s blog post reasonably Minnesota’s move to the cloud as an “historic first.” Given that the state’s press release, embedded below, describes it the same way, that’s not unfair. Details have yet to emerge on the security or privacy requirements that the Redmond-based software giants signed to gain the customer but, as the release notes, “the move makes Minnesota the first U.S. state to move to a large collaboration and communication suite in a private cloud environment.”
While federal, state and local government entities have used Amazon, Google Apps or Salesforce.com, today’s news at least adds Microsoft’s offerings into the conversation. The implementation will likely deploy the Windows Azure platform to deliver Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).
“As states battle growing deficits, they are continually being asked to do more with less,” said Gopal Khanna, Minnesota’s State Chief Information Officer in a prepared statement. “Rethinking the way we manage our digital infrastructure centrally, to save locally across all units of government, is a crucial part of the solution. The private sector has utilized technological advancements like cloud computing to realize operational efficiencies for some time now. Government must follow suit.”
Not all reactions are quite as optimistic, however, particularly with respect to reduced costs. “I forsee short term gain,” tweeted researcher Simon Wardley, “large future exit costs, increased consumption, no long term reduction in IT expenditure.”
Why no long term reductions in state IT expenditures by going to Microsoft’s private cloud?
“See Jevons’ paradox,” Wardley replied. “Causes are co-evolution, long tail of demand, componentisation and increased innovation. In other words, you’ll just end up doing more. Countries & States are in competition with each other … not just firms. It’s not MSFT specific, it’s general to all clouds. The ‘cloud will save you money’argument forgets consumption effects. You might as well argue that Moore’s law should have reduced IT expenditure. [Cloud will] reduce your costs if your workload stays the same but alas it won’t, it’ll increase for the reasons previously listed.”
State of Minnesota Signs Historic Cloud Computing Agreement With M 092710090511 MN BPOS Announcement Releas… http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf
E Pluribus Unum 