April 2010 Archives
By Allan Holmes
04/30/10 03:19 pm ET
Nextgov announced on Friday that 19 finalists have been chosen for the inaugural Nextgov Awards. They represent a wide range of accomplishments, having developed new ways of managing cybersecurity, innovative systems to share information in real time and online applications designed to manage increasing workloads as the Baby Boom generation retires. And all the finalists did it in the face of bureaucratic inertia, strong political head winds, and big risks brought about by insufficient budgets and Byzantine rules that must be followed to the letter.>>
By Emily Long
04/29/10 12:52 pm ET
The General Services Administration this week announced that it plans to launch a new social networking site for government employees. FedSpace, which will be available in the fall, will enable interagency collaboration, communication and information sharing, according to agency officials.
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By Allan Holmes
04/28/10 05:24 pm ET
Wired.com's Danger Room blog has a surprising take on what the Pentagon thinks about posts on left-leaning websites.>>
By Allan Holmes
04/28/10 02:58 pm ET
In its recently released report on the outlook for federal information technology jobs, the federal Chief Information Officers Council says it is difficult to estimate just how many federal employees will retire in the coming years because the aging Baby Boomers (those 45 to 54 years old, a group that makes up 60 percent of all government IT workers) are delaying retiring. The reasons are a longer life expectancy and an economic recession that reduced retirement accounts and home equity, according to the report.>>
By Emily Long
04/28/10 07:05 am ET
The General Services Administration is heading full force into the Web 2.0 space, a move to increase collaboration among federal agencies, officials said Monday at the Web and New Media Conference. >>
By Aliya Sternstein
04/27/10 01:01 am ET
Agency websites have adjusted well over the past year to new leadership, showing a significant increase in satisfaction between the first quarter of 2009 and 2010, according to the latest quarterly report from the American Customer Satisfaction Index. >>
By Emily Long
04/26/10 03:29 pm ET
Social media seems to be the federal government's big new thing. Agencies are Facebooking, tweeting and hosting YouTube contests to communicate with the public, recruit new employees and build stronger individual brands. But, as Keith Kochberg over at iMedia Connection asks, is it possible to over invest in social media?>>
By Aliya Sternstein
04/23/10 01:43 am ET
Dashboards are all the rage in government. The online scorecards are in use at the Veterans Affairs Department to measure tech project performance and inside the White House to grade agencies' transparency efforts. Now, the nation's capital is developing a dashboard to monitor the subway system's accidents. >>
By Allan Holmes
04/22/10 07:03 pm ET
Managing risk is the job of government, and arguably the central mission of any agency, as Robert Charette wrote in a Government Executive March 2009 feature.>>
By Dawn Lim
04/21/10 08:48 am ET
The Office of Infrastructure Protection at the Homeland Security Department is in the midst of consolidating its dozens of infrastructure security databases--and adding new ones to the pool--to help government agencies and private partners better monitor threats. >>
By Emily Long
04/20/10 03:19 pm ET
Ever tried to watch your favorite YouTube video, only to find out that it is no longer available? Did you even know that law enforcement and government agencies can request that information be removed from Google servers? >>
By Emily Long
04/19/10 04:15 pm ET
Peter Sullivan of Nashville, Tenn. uses USA.gov, the government's do-it-all Internet portal, to identify his congressional representative, find tax information and read up on student loan information. He's also the winner of a $2,500 prize from the General Services Administration's public service announcement contest, which asked the public to submit videos about the website's most useful features. >>
By Aliya Sternstein
04/19/10 02:58 pm ET
Apple's recent decision to block Adobe's video player on the iPad is an affront to open government, officials at the software company claimed on Monday.>>
By Allan Holmes
04/19/10 01:03 pm ET
If you thought all that snow and cold in February knocked a gaping hole in the climate change theory, the scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have some data that helps us decipher what went on. It turns out, according to the agency, that February was the sixth warmest ever recorded. It just didn't feel that way to those living in most of the United States, Mexico and Europe. The above image says it all.>>
By Dawn Lim
04/16/10 05:29 pm ET
Before you pick up that office-provided cell phone to send out that text, think again. On Monday, the Supreme Court will deal with the question: Is there a reasonable expectation of privacy for text messages transmitted on a police SWAT pager? The court's ruling could just impact feds' right to keep private any messages sent out on phones and pagers supplied by the government.
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By Aliya Sternstein
04/16/10 04:13 pm ET
In the past, many agencies undercounted the amount of information they classified each year because departments did not include classification decisions made while communicating online. The fact that most agencies underreported the secrets they created last year may lead one to assume that number of secrets generated this year would go up. But the opposite happened. >>
By Allan Holmes
04/16/10 03:21 pm ET
One of the few -- and I mean few -- positives that occurred during the recession was a predicted shift of tech talent from the private to the more stable public sector, where it is difficult to bring in top talent. It didn't last long. From The Wall Street Journal on Thursday:>>
By Aliya Sternstein
04/15/10 04:36 pm ET
A $574 million program to overhaul the IRS' existing method for electronically collecting tax returns is supposed to provide instant processing capabilities and improved error detection, but the system is erroneously rejecting returns, according to report released Thursday, tax day, by a Treasury watchdog. >>
By Emily Long
04/14/10 02:03 pm ET
Think those 140-character ideas you have will be forgotten? Think again--the Library of Congress on Wednesday announced that it will acquire and archive every public tweet--ever--starting from Twitter's inception in 2006. According to the Library's Facebook page, that's more than 50 million per day and billions in total. >>
By Emily Long
04/14/10 01:14 pm ET
The .Gov space has thousands upon thousands of Web sites. Some are sleek and user-friendly (Whitehouse.gov, for example), while others appear to be forgotten projects from the Internet's early days. Austin Carr over at Fast Company has compiled a slideshow of the best and worst of government web design. >>
By Aliya Sternstein
04/13/10 05:19 pm ET
A White House official this month has been taking heat for doing something many of us do almost reflexively on a daily basis - chatter with friends, coworkers and bosses online. Andrew McLaughlin, the White House deputy chief technology officer for Internet policy, reportedly used Web-based e-mail to communicate with administration colleagues and lobbyists at Google, his former employer. According to images posted on the Internet, a list of his contacts showed he used his Gmail account to converse with Aneesh Chopra, the White House chief technology officer, and Katie Stanton, another Google veteran who now works at the State Department. >>
By Aliya Sternstein
04/12/10 06:36 pm ET
The federal government is not fully following information security initiatives, according to two separate reports published by the Government Accountability Office on Monday. Senators who requested the audits called for the creation of a permanent cyber czar in response to findings that agencies are not implementing a critical Homeland Security Department cybersecurity system, not reducing connections to external networks and not properly configuring security settings on workstations. >>
By Emily Long
04/12/10 04:13 pm ET
Jesse Stanchak over at SmartBlog on Social Media wrote an interesting post today on the ABCs of pitching to influencers (the media, basically). His theory: The widespread use of Web 2.0 technologies doesn't automatically equate to the effective use of those tools. Can his tips for using social media apply to federal agencies hoping to reach to the general public? >>
By Emily Long
04/09/10 05:42 pm ET
Facebook, the popular social networking site, is facing concerns from users over proposed revisions to its privacy policy. The changes, which would allow third-party access to user information, is receiving a chilly reception among members, according to Inc.>>
By Dawn Lim
04/08/10 04:28 pm ET
The Homeland Security Department has completed the first two stages of testing on the third and latest version of Einstein, a network security program that relies on commercially available intrusion detection services to monitor traffic in government agencies to guard against cyber threats. >>
By Aliya Sternstein
04/07/10 05:39 pm ET
In conjunction with the release of agency plans intended to ingrain transparency into departmental activities, the White House on Wednesday released several policies aimed at accelerating those efforts. The new policies and the open government plans were released on Wednesday pursuant to an open government directive issued in December.>>
By Aliya Sternstein
04/07/10 12:30 pm ET
You can now read the open government plans of every federal agency, the culmination of an experiment in transparency that President Obama launched the day after being sworn into office. In addition, the Office of Management and Budget has released guidance clarifying that Paperwork Reduction Act restrictions on collecting information from the public do not apply to most social media efforts. >>
By Aliya Sternstein
04/06/10 01:53 pm ET
A survey of federal IT officials published on Tuesday by a computer security firm reports that a third of respondents in agencies tied to national security experienced a cyberattack by a foreign nation or terrorist organization over the last year. >>
By Emily Long
04/05/10 05:13 pm ET
In a recent blog post, General Services Administration Chief Information Officer Casey Coleman highlighted the proliferation of smartphone use across government and the mobility that comes with them. Sure, smartphones enable users to check e-mail, but mobile apps also provide the capability to track packages, access databases and submit expense reports. But like any technology, smartphones present certain challenges for government users, she writes.>>
By Aliya Sternstein
04/02/10 02:49 pm ET
Many government accountability groups have been unimpressed with the White House's check-the-box system for tracking agency compliance with President Obama's transparency agenda. The administration issued a December directive instructing departments on how to disclose their daily doings to the public but has not followed up with an assessment. >>
By Tom Shoop
04/02/10 08:19 am ET
Need to get the latest info from the White House on the go? The Obama administration announced Friday that Whitehouse.gov has now been optimized for mobile devices, from the BlackBerry to the Palm Pre. (I'm looking at it right now on my Motorola Droid,...>>
By Dawn Lim
04/01/10 11:30 am ET
A governmentwide program that provides a centralized approach to security issues in cloud and multiagency IT systems soon will go into pilot. >>
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