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.
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.
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.
Some "entertaining" facts facts about Thanksgiving, from the fun folks at the U.S. Census Bureau.
As the bill currently stands, Congress will approve only $3 million to go to the E-Government Fund, which is a pool of money that all Federal agencies draw from for their department's eGov initiatives. That figure is down from $5 million last year, and $52 million less than was slated for the fund when it was created by the E-Government Act of 2002.
A number of Federal intiatives are budgeted with their own line items, and several of these will receive significant funding, including $35 million for NARA's Electronic Records Project, and $56.3 million for the GSA’s Office of Governmentwide Policy.
A couple articles (both via beSpacific) on the move to e-filing of documents by the U.S. government. The first article deals with e-filing of documents within in the judicial system. No specifics, but does track progression of these initiatives from its current nascent state (merely scanning paper documents by the courts), to the full realization of document submittal in XML.
I tried to play around with several of the courts they mention, but they all required an official login.
The second link has to do with the e-filing at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. They've begun filing electronic versions of documents on June 30 using a system they call Image File Wrapper (IFW), which seems to boil down to merely scanning existing applications. The eventual goal is to create an "end-to-end" patent application process by October, 2004. The initial iniative will require 100 terabytes of data storage.
If you haven't heard, the US Federal Trade Commission has recently set up a national Do Not Call registry. Registering with the DNC list will stop as much as 80% of telemarketing calls to your home. Telemarketers get the list from the FTC, and if they are found to be calling numbers on the list, they are subject to fines. Great idea, and something that has existed in various forms (especially at the state level) for several years.
This registry, which took me less than a minute to file (and only another couple seconds to respond to the email they send me), is part of the low level functionality that is essential to the success of eGovernment as a whole. This is the kind of thing that can spark public interest in the use of the internet to simplify their interactions with government. Sort of like a gateway drug for eGov. I don't know the exact numbers, but I've heard the site was swamped during its first several days, so it looks like the marketing was successful. Hopefully that translates into continued and varied usage by those hitting the DNC site during the first several days.
Last week the US Supreme Court ruled the legislation requiring libraries to use filtering software in order to receive federal funds was constitutional. The arguements were the compelling interest in shielding children from "harmful" material to the protection of free speech (or rather the ability to freely receive speech).
I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this whole issue - I agree that the government (via library funding) should not be required to provide access to material the community deems unacceptable, but I know how faulty both the technology and the application of it have been. Obviously, less control over the conduits of access, the better, and the SC ruling is a blow against that. There is a bright spot to the ruling, in that librarians now have more leeway in unfiltering sites for adult usage.
After a series of articles over the past couple weeks warning that eGov initiatives aren't quite the cost savers they've been sold to be, here is some news about ways eGov has saved time/money in the US. They cite consolidation of agency business activities as the prime reason for the savings, which includes $1.2 billion in payroll savings over the next ten years.
In the 2004 elections, the US federal government will be testing its Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE).
I've got some initial problems with SERVE, 1) it is only available on computers running on the Windows operating system, 2) the testing will be very limited to about 6 million potential voters (only citizens living abroad and members of the armed services), and 3) it requires a third step in the voting provess by requiring participants to register with SERVE to get a digital signature (the other two being registering to vote and actually voting).
Still, it will be the first use of the Internet for binding results in a US national election and should be a good test of the system.
Digital access to the UK's government art collection. Link via Experimental Space, who asks why the US doesn't have a similar digital archive. Good question. They may very well have one, somewhere, but the American Memory a digital archive from the Library of Congress, contains an extensive collection of pictures, sounds, text, and movies.
An excellent resource on information about restrictions on access to Government Information. This resource is maintained by the Government Documents interest group of the American Library Association, who also maintain this list documents regarding Freedom of Information issues. I wish I'd run across these about two months earlier while I was working on a paper about the Federal Depository Library Program, GPO Access and the neccessity to continue funding for both programs.
Here is another good resource on access to government information post 9/11. Though, OMB Watch are probably a tad too radical for my tastes.
Last week the Council for Excellence in Government released a report on the attitudes and expectations of eGov. The study found that half of all Americans and 75% of all Internet users have interacted on some level with an eGov website.
The research found that those performing tasks, like renewing their drivers licence, were easier online, which is a pretty obvious conclusion. Actually, all the findings were obvious - users would like to complete tedious tasks (like filing taxes, and paying parking tickets) online, they felt eGov would only get better over the course of years, but there were some privacy issues. Still, it is sometimes worthwhile to do a survey like this to confirm that end-users and developers are actually on the same page as far as expectations and desires.
This isn't strictly about eGov, but it is related. The Internet Library of Law and Court Decisions is a database of over 300 court decisions shaping the law of the web. Each case includes an extensive summary filled with facts, analysis and pertinent quotes. Topics addressed include "copyright, trademark, dilution and other intellectual property issues, jurisdiction, linking, framing, meta tags, clip-art, defamation, domain name, e-mail, encryption, gambling, click-wrap agreements, shrink-wrap licenses, spamming," and more.
I was a bit wary of this material, since it is collected and written by a law firm, but the site has been approved by Scout, so it is definitely on the level.