TECHNOLOGY AND THE BUSINESS OF GOVERNMENT
06/30/10 02:15 pm ET
OMB's Peter Orszag has made no secret of his disdain for federal information technology efforts, saying not only that staffers reported that going from the Obama presidential campaign into government was "like going from an X-box to an Atari," but also that "innovative uses...>>
06/30/10 01:56 pm ET
Remember that rumor about Disney movies including - er, we'll call them provocative images, amid the animation? Well apparently messages that are invisible to the untrained eye have infiltrated the Web, and are being used by spies to give away our secrets. Gizmodo reports...>>
06/30/10 09:10 am ET
Any federal employee or vendor who regularly visits .gov websites should be familiar with a popup message that reads something like this:>>
06/29/10 05:57 pm ET
Smashing Magazine, a publication for Web designers and developers, recently published a critique of military and intelligence agency websites worldwide, placing dozens of sites in one of its categories: Outdated, Poorly Coded, Poorly Designed, The Not So Bad, and A Few Good Sites.>>
06/28/10 04:55 pm ET
The social media revolution finally has reached the highest levels of government -- in Canada, that is. Mashable earlier this month designated June 30 as a day to celebrate all things social media, resulting in hundreds of meetups planned worldwide. But the city council in Victoria, British Columbia's capital, was the first government body to formally recognize the event. >>
06/25/10 05:13 pm ET
One civil liberties group that worked closely with the administration to develop privacy guidelines on the use of cookies says it is not satisfied with the final policy on such web-tracking tools that was released today.>>
06/24/10 01:14 pm ET
The General Services Administration's revamped Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies has its hands full with tech projects designed to engage the public, promote openness and improve government innovation and efficiency. >>
06/23/10 06:10 pm ET
Now it's just a dog-bites-man story. Journalists usually look for the man-bites-dog news -- the unusual, atypical stories. A stolen government laptop, which compromises government workers' personal identity, just no longer fits that bill. Still, here's another one.>>
06/22/10 05:24 pm ET
Government loves acronyms. So do technologists. But sometimes people don't think through the name of their organization, contract or program -- until it's too late. I'm not so sure the folks over at the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board were oblivious to what their group spelled out as an acronym. After all, their job is to rat out contractors or agencies that don't follow the rules. Someone over there had a sense of humor.>>
06/21/10 02:58 pm ET
The BlackBerry seems to be the accessory of choice in Washington. In bars, offices, the gym, you name it, you're likely to see more than a few of these gadgets. But could other smart phones catch up, even in the federal government? >>
06/21/10 09:32 am ET
A series of new application programming interfaces - tools that facilitate interaction between datasets and other software programs - will make it easier for developers to play and interact with the content on Data.gov, the online repository of federal information and a cornerstone of the open government initiative. >>
06/18/10 03:28 pm ET
White House officials on Friday announced they will begin rolling out governmentwide a mashup device currently used to detect stimulus-spending fraud, but they also noted a technological weakness preventing agencies from quickly spotting potential improper payments. >>
06/18/10 01:20 pm ET
Are we facing the end of the social media era? >>
06/17/10 10:10 am ET
Federal employees may want to telework, but only a small number have access to the resources and support necessary to do so, according to a new survey. >>
06/16/10 04:00 pm ET
Twitter, the ever-growing popular microblogging social network, has experienced some trouble in the past few days. Users increasingly have seen periods during which the site is over capacity and it slows down as a result. Company execs have acknowledged the site isn't quite ready to handle the high traffic demands, but as these delays become more regular, it begs the question: What should Twitter really be used for, and does the federal government fit that model? >>
06/15/10 05:08 pm ET
The technology behind e-Passports, the relatively recent identity document upgrade to include biometrics and other personal information, may not be safe from terrorists, counterfeiters and other malicious attacks. In fact, data security has been a key concern about e-Passports for several years. >>
06/15/10 03:34 pm ET
What's the biggest advantage of taking the job of cybersecurity coordinator at the White House? Being able to turn your nose up at Congress, apparently. >>
06/14/10 09:16 am ET
The Obama administration's strategy of hosting contests to find answers to the nation's problems seems to be an exercise in trial and error, as predicted.>>
06/11/10 10:21 am ET
The Washington Post ran an article on Friday that questions just how much -- if at all -- the high-tech gizmos like whiteboards (which replaced chalk boards) that schools have been spending millions of dollars improve learning and test scores. From the article:>>
06/11/10 09:43 am ET
Twitter announced this week that it would be hiring its first DC-based "government liaison" to boost government presence on the social networking site. This sparked off an intense debate over the kind of person it would take to get the government to embrace social media. >>
06/10/10 11:54 am ET
Tom Shoop, the editor in chief and author of the FedBlog at Nextgov's sister site Government Executive, started a bit of a debate on Wednesday over the supposedly sorry state of the government's computing power -- or is that the government's sorry state of leveraging computing power to create interactive apps that the public can use?>>
06/09/10 06:18 pm ET
Developing financial management systems that work has been a big, persistent pain for agencies for years and years. But now the Office of Management and Budget wnats to see if they can provide a solution. The office is getting ready to issue new rules to try to rein in the runaway systems, according to an article by Jason Miller at Federal News Radio.>>
06/09/10 09:11 am ET
As the CIA increasingly is making drone strikes the centerpiece in the war on terror, it is shaking the boundaries of international law and risking "developing a 'Playstation' mentality to killing," warned a senior United Nations official last week. >>
06/08/10 01:44 pm ET
The National Archives and Records Administration is going all-in with social media in hopes of assisting and expanding its audience. And the agency isn't approaching it haphazardly--look across Facebook, Flickr and Twitter and you'll find consistent names and information, as well as a centralized "one-stop shop" for social media on the Archives.gov website. >>
06/07/10 10:09 am ET
Wired's Threat Level blog reported late Sunday that Army officials have arrested a U.S. intelligence analyst who allegedly leaked military and State Department documents to Wikileaks, a whistleblower Web site. The site posted in April a video of a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed innocent civilians.>>
06/07/10 10:00 am ET
The United States on Monday is expected to announce the transfer of control of an online research library to the Iraqi people, according to a federally-funded nonprofit organization that had managed the project. The move represents the culmination of a four-year U.S.-Iraq partnership to reinvigorate scientific study in the Middle Eastern country after decades of myopic focus on weapons systems. >>
06/04/10 12:56 pm ET
On Thursday, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Don Proctor, Cisco's senior vice president and leader of the company's cybersecurity task force in the Office of the CEO. >>
06/04/10 12:42 pm ET
Nextgov posted an article on Thursday reporting that two Republicans have criticized the Obama administration for wasting taxpayer money on its initiative to create contests in which the public, businesses or even public agencies submit ideas to solve a long-standing national problem. The winner takes home either a cash prize or just the recognition that his or her idea won.>>
06/03/10 02:24 pm ET
Social networking, Twitter in particular because of its tight limits on characters, has given rise to a new set of clichés, trite musings and empty phrases. Danny Brown, a writer at Lawrence Ragan Communications Inc., a public relations firm in Chicago, wrote on Thursday that many of these worn out quips need to be extracted for good from social media.>>
06/02/10 05:59 pm ET
The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has generated lots of computer models, applications and Web sites. Here's another one: Geoplatform.gov, developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric and Administration. >>
06/01/10 03:39 pm ET
Government Executive's Editor in Chief and FedBlog author Tom Shoop posted an item on Tuesday about Recovery.gov's mascot contest. From FedBlog:>>
06/01/10 11:26 am ET
The House passed on Friday by a 229 to 186 vote the Defense authorization bill, which included an amendment to overhaul federal cybersecurity policy. >>
