For another project I'm working on I will be using faceted categories to organize the site's content. As a warm-up for that, I decided to take a crack at creating faceted categories here.
I struggled at first wanting to stick too closely to Ranganathan's five facet approach, but eventually decided on a sixe customized facets more appropriate to the content here.
The six facets are:
I'll have to make a pass through the archives to clean things up, but I'm satisfied with this solution, though I would appreciate any feedback.
P.S. I used David Raynes SubCategories plugin for MT.
The U.S. was founded on, amongst other things, the principle of a decentralized government. Early in the nation's history, this decentralization led to rampant corruption and cronism. Over the years government has become increasingly centralized and, at least in terms of technology, centralization should be the way to go. For example, enterprise architecture is a significantly more appropriate policy than each agency developing their own technology solutions.
Unfortunately, a recent report has found the Government Services Administration (GSA) is in need of a "thorough housecleaning."
The GSA is a centralized agency that handles much of the federal government's technology procurement and implementation. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley said that the GSA has "committed almost every conceivable contracting irregularity," and that the violations "seem to reflect an endemic and epidemic pattern of gross mismanagement, failed oversight, a flawed rewards system, and potential malfeasance."
Pending any additional investigation, I think it is a very safe bet that there will soon be major changes at GSA, effecting federal eGov/IT policy immensly.
Stumbled across an interesting little utility on the AFL-CIO website. The AFL-CIO is America's largest labor union (for anyone who doesn't know). The utility allows users to track congressional voting on issues of interest to the union. You can the voting record of your individual representative, your state as a block, or by piece of legislation.
They take an unfortunate stance of dubbing a vote in one way or another as "right" or "wrong", but I suppose that is the point.
UPDATE: I had a point, but was too tired last night to remember it when I wrote this (what was I doing up and readin union websites at 2am?). It seems like the AFL-CIO get their information for this utility from something like the Congressional Record and enter it into their own database. I can't say for sure, but it seems like much of the Fed info on the web is hand-cranked. It struck me that it might be useful for the fed to create their own database of bills, committee discussion, testimony, associated documents, voting records, and etc, and then allow that database to be accessed by outside sources, similar to the way Google (for example) allows developers to access their data with APIs.
It would force the fed to place their data in a more structured format, and then allow private organizations to use the information in their own applications, but with the assurance that the underlying data is from a reliable source.
I took an Electronic Records Management course last semester, and part of my personal research was to take a look at the RM policies of government agencies. My research was in no way comprehensive, but one of the best resources I found was the Georia Secretary of State's Records Management Services website.
They've posted complete RM retention schedules, information on legislation that guides RM policies, and standards and guides for microforms and imaging systems, among other things. The information on the websites covers both state and local level RM and is worth a look, if you are into that kind of thing.
I while back I wrote a little piece about domain names of official State government websites. If you haven't noticed, I spell horrendously, and I misspelled the name of Tennessee's official site, Tennessee Anytime. Apparently, the misspelled version of the name (one "e") redirects to a porn site. Over the last couple months the most frequent search term for visitors arriving at the site through search engines has been people looking for the real official site, yet somehow still managing to misspell the name.
Somewhat amusingly, this Google Search for tennesseanytime reveal that two of the other six results from other misspellings of the domain name come from official Tennessee government websites.
The 311 system has been in place in New York City since last March. I'm very curious as to the success/failure of the system, but the most recent report I've been able to find was from October. In that report, they estimate they'll log 5.5 million calls in the first year, and about 20,000 a day as of October.
They say the largest spikes during the black-out and after the Staten Island Ferry crash. This would suggest that the city doesn't do an adequate job sharing information with its citizens. I'd be interested to find out how many calls were the city "pushing" information to citizens rather than the intended purpose of the system to allow citizens to "pull" information from the city.
An excellent eGov 2003 Year in Review from the one and only Gotze. Not sure how I'd not managed to notice this earlier. Also check out his 2004 eGov Year in Preview.
Beginning this month, the Small Business Administration's database of small businesses wishing to do contract with government agencies is being integrated into the Department of Defenses Central Contractor Registration (CCR) database.
I don't have much to say about this, but I noticed I'd yet to utilize the Gov to Business category. The one thing I will add is that when it comes to information retrieval, centralized databases are almost always a superior option than several smaller decentralized resourses. The president's goal is for a single, integrated aquisition tool, known as the Integrated Acquisition Environment (IAE). This tool would be made available as a government-wide resouces, and with the merger of SBA's and the DoD's databases into the CCR, they are now much closer to that goal.