As they do every year, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) is tracking Santa Claus' progress across the globe. NORAD used their sophisticated radar and web of satellites to track the progress of Santa Claus, and provides access to both on their website.
Merry Christmas.
E-Travel is basically a portal/software exchange that provides a centralized location for all organizational travel to be planned, booked, and managed. The GSA is requiring that all Federal agencies move to E-Travel. The agencies have until March to submit their migration plan, and until 2006 to complete the transition. The GSA is requiring agencies to choose between three approved software packages.
This is a great idea, and will can save much time and money. The only more significant travel savings would be from a distributed workspace system, but this is a start.
Still, having worked on a corporate E-Travel migration (that would be probably be similar in size to even some of the larger of Executive agencies), I have to say that this transition should take months, not two years.
The Washington Post looks back at one year of the E-Government Act. The federal eGov initiative has been reasonably successful, expecially considering that it has received roughly 1/10 of the funding proposed in the 2002 Act.
There is another (and actually much better) year in review available at FCW.
A little design change. I've tested across a couple browsers and it looks best in Internet Explorer, and okay (but not perfect) in Opera and Netscape. I'm sure it looks like crap on a Mac, and in older version of old browsers, but what are you going to do? I also wanted the design to be pure CSS, but I had to fudge a bit with tables. Please let me know if the site looks like crap in whatever OS/browser combination you are using, or have an design/code advice.
If you are an information professional, you've likely already read your share of articles decry that Microsoft's PowerPoint software makes you dumb. Now, PowerPoint is being blamed for the Columbia Space Shuttle accident. As much as I'm not a fan of the software, I'd say such a charge is going perhaps a tad too far. The problem isn't PowerPoint, but that people are confusing its ability to deliver high-end information quickly and easily with some ability to deliver in-depth information as quickly and effectively. It pains me to think that government decision-makers would rely on information presented in PowerPoint slides, and PowerPoint slides alone, to guide the fate of nations, much less space craft.
Another Google link, but I thought this little find was worthwhile. Uncle Sam is a specialized search engine for government information. It uses Google's API to return results only from federal, state, and local government websites.
Seems like a much better search engine for visible online government information, though FirstGov is going to be the only way to connect to the invisible (grey) web.
Someone has set up a web tool that allows users to enter a keyword/phrase, and then uses Google search results to find how each of the 2004 U.S. Presidential candidate rank on that phrase.
Not very scientific, though a lot of fun, if you are into that sort of thing.
Cash-strapped state and local governments are discovering what millions of eBay aficionados already know: You can sell almost anything on the Internet.
. (link via beSpacific). Many of the agencies say they are netting three times as much as they previously had from their local auctions.
I see nothing wrong with this, other than that authenticity might be a problem. E-Bay's reputation management system goes along way to solve that. Still, shouldn't a forward thinking legislator read an article like this and see the possibility of something like an "auction.gov", where federal, state, and local governments across the country can place items for sale in a single location?
For those of you on either side of the arguement about the restriction of Constitutional freedoms following 9/11, here is a list of Federal legislation related to the attacks that you can use to root out the truth (which is certainly somewhere in the middle).
From the site: "The selection, made by hand, is necessarily subjective, as the September 11th attack had a ripple effect on legislation in the second session of the 107th Congress, making boundaries difficult to draw. "
The list was compiled by the Library of Congress.
The Association for Federal Information Resources Management (AFFIRM) has recently released the report from their annual survey of the senior federal Information Technology (IT) managers to determine the most critical challenges facing federal Chief Information Officers (CIO).
The survey found the top challenges, which have not changed since last year, include:
The most vital tecnologies / uses were:
Most interesting to me was that less than federal IT mangers felt only 21% of intitiatives would successfully initiated in 2004. (Another 76% responded intiatiives would be "somewhat" successful). This doesn't seem to bode well for the President that their isn't a great deal of confidence in his eGov Agenda. Still, these confidence numbers have increased significantly each year, so there is a liklihood those with negative projections will be change their opinions once the plans are in place and working.
California, probably the most forward thinking state in terms of eVoting initiatives, are working out the kinks of their current system. The Seretary of State's office has recently released an Report from their Ad Hoc Touch Screen Task Force.
Nothing especially earth shattering in the report, though the directive that all touch screen voting systems must include an accessible voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) is a step in the right direction, and should qualm many fears about the possibility for funny business with eVoting.
As gift giving season is upon us, it seems the perfect time for the Fed to releaseRecalls.gov, a portal for information on recalled consumer items, motor vehicles, recreational boats, food, medicines, cosmetics and pesticides.
As I was reading about this, I had one of those Tim Berners-Lee moments, imagining setting up a user agent to check my credit card purchasing history against the Recalls website, and then sending any matching items directly as a text message to my cell phone. But thats the future.
For now the site, which is a coalition between the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Coast Guard, Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, Food Safety Inspection Service and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, has a partnership with over 20 retailers, trade groups, and consumer advocate groups to help promote awareness of the resource.
Check out the Digital Government Document's Clearinghouse, a project of the American Library Association's Government Documents Round Table.
The goal of the project is to collect information to facilitate cooperation and partnerships between libraries for digitization projects. They hope to do so by providing a centralized database of digital resources for local, state, federal, and international government documents that are currently planned, in progress, or already completed.
You can add a project (not necessarily your project) to the database, or search it by keyword (though I'm certain they'll have more sophisticated retreival of the information once the project is completed). From what I can tell, there are already in excess of 150 digitization initiatives already entered into the database.
The Center for Democracy and Technology's 10 Most Wanted Government Documents. It is no wonder the number of judicial documents on list considering the stranglehold Lexis and Westlaw have on the legal information database market. One of the biggest issues in the next several years (though I hope it is raised sooner, rather than later), is the use of free government information by private services, that then turn around and provide those services to consumers at exhorbitant rates.
Currently, the policy is that if the vendor attaches enough added value to the information, such use is allowed. Lexis certainly provides value to the government information contained in its database. But, there should be a time, and soon, when more judicial information is available online, through better interfaces, and directly from the government, and it'd be a shame if Lexis' juice prevented that information from being made available for free (which it seems is currently the case).
Just because the Freedom of Information Act requires the transfer of government documents doesn't mean it is neccessarily easy to actually attain the information. There is a definitive process that must be followed, and it can certainly be confusing for the average citizen. I happened to run across the Department of Justice's FOIA site. It includes documents available without having to make a FOIA request, the FOIA request process (including appeals), a list of FOIA contacts in each federal agency, links to those agencies' FOIA web sites, and a reading room that includes relevant federal regulations, information about FOIA cases, and FOIA Post, a newsletter for federal agencies offering guidance on how to apply the law to their organization.
Making a FOIA request is always going to be confusing, but this is an excellent starting point (especially the links to agency websites, contacts, and reference sources). As much as we may worry about the infringement of our civil liberties, this (Federally mandated) site is tool in ensuring the transparency of government.