Funny and somewhat scary Fund Race uses freely available data from the FEC on campaign contributions. You can search by zip code, address, or even name, to find who is donating, to which candidate, and how much. Find out if Susan Sarandon puts her money where her mouth is.
A federal judge in Washington yesterday ordered the Interior Department to shut down most of its employees' Internet access and some of its public Web sites after concluding that the agency has failed to fix computer security problems that threaten millions of dollars owed to Native Americans.
Internet Cutoff Ordered at Interior: Judge Says Money Owed to Indians Is Still at Risk
The Electronic Records Policy Working Group is inviting interested persons to provide their written views on issues relating to implementing section 207(e)(1)(A) of the E-Government Act of 2002. That section calls for ``the adoption by agencies of policies and procedures to ensure that chapters 21, 25, 27, 29, and 31 of title 44, United States Code, are applied effectively and comprehensively to Government information on the Internet and to other electronic records.''
The Working Group is seeking feedback on the following topics in their meetings and this notice.
1. The definition of "Government information on the Internet and other electronic records.'' The operating definitions currently used by the Working Group are as follows:
A. Government information on the Internet includes:
** Information posted on Government web sites,
** Information exchanged between Federal agencies,
** Information exchanged between Federal agencies and the public,
** Information exchanged between Federal agencies and other governments,
** Government-enabled web services,
** Standard government forms,
** E-government business transactions.
B. Other electronic records--electronic information meeting the definition of a Federal record per 44 U.S.C. 3301. Records include:
** All books, papers, maps, photographs, machine readable materials, or other documentary materials,
** regardless of physical form or characteristics
** made or received by an agency of the United States Government,
** under Federal law or
** in connection with the transaction of public business,
** and preserved or appropriate for preservation by that agency or its legitimate successor,
** as evidence of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations or other activities of the Government or,
** because of the informational value of the data in them (44 U.S.C. 3301).
2. Perceived barriers to effective management of ``Government information on the Internet and other electronic records.'' The operating definition of effective management currently used by the Working Group includes:
** managing through the life cycle,
** providing for accessibility and retrieval,
** providing sufficient security,
** ensuring consistency (ability to reproduce record),
** providing for the integrity of records over time,
** ensuring no loss of records,
** ensuring compatibility with standard formats,
** managing format changes over time,
** providing for long-term record storage and migration of formats,
** managing the location of records over time,
** appropriate long-term custodianship.
3. Guidance tools for Federal agencies that would assist in overcoming the identified barriers.
In order to solicit the opinions of those stakeholders who could not attend the focus group or public meetings, this message is being sent to relevant lists. Any comments concerning this topic should be sent to ERPWG@nara.gov no later than April 5.
Curious as to the success (or failure) of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act? School Results is a public-private collaboration to provide data from the first rounds of NCLB initiatives and standardized testing. The project is funded by the U.S. Department of Education.
Though the existing data is slim at the moment (only seven states are currently available, and 2/5 of the individual schools I checked lacked sufficient data to provide analysis), this is exactly the kind of use of the web to provide tangible evidence of the results of legislative actions. NCLB was proposed to achieve certain goals, with this data resource easily available, it should now be easier to determine whether those goals are being achieved.
The E-Government Act of 2002 calls for the U.S. Federal Government to enhance interoperability by adopting a common search standard. The Categorization of Government Information Workgroup has just finished the second version of their Statement of Requirements for Search Interoperability and are looking for comments and suggestions.
In English, the interoperability standards will provide a structure for information that, if adopted universally, will allow more efficient searching for information across agencies. The standards take into account metadata fields, search technology, and the role of information intermediaries (such as librarians).
Again, they're looking for comments to help refine the standards before delivery to the OMB.
The on again, off again Federal Do Not Cal List is now officially, and permanently, on again. Earlier this week a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the FTC and FCC's registry does not violate the telephone solicitors First Amendment rights.
If you've ever just sat down to dinner and gotten a call asking you to switch long distance services, you might think a Do Not Call List is enough to make you happy.
But, the true value of this ruling is that it opens the door to the possibility of a Do Not E-Mail List. In fact, in the new Anti-Spam laws allow for the FTC to establish such a registry. They will present such a plan to Congress sometime in May, but might also enact something without the approval of Congress (as they initially did with the DNC registry).
"The Industry Advisory Council’s (IAC) eGov Shared Interest Group (SIG) and the Federal CIO Council, in partnership with E-Gov, today announced the Federal agency programs selected as the “Top 5” within the Excellence.gov awards program. These prestigious programs were selected from a group of 25 program finalists for demonstrating excellence in e-government innovation. " Read more.
The Top 5 Winners were:
Small Business Administration – BusinessLaw.gov
Securities and Exchange Commission – Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval (EDGAR)
Department of Health and Human Services – National Practitioner and Healthcare Integrity and Protection Data Bank (NPDB and HIPDB)
The Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
Department of Defense, Defense Information Systems Agency – Federal Technical Data Solution (FedTeDS)
The 2005 U.S. federal budget includes just $5 million for the eGov fund. The amount requested for the year was $45 million. Last year the fund received just $3 million, which means over the last two years just $8 of the $100 million George Bush had requested for the fund when it was initiated
has been granted. The money is part of a central fund that federal agencies can use toward their eGov intiatives.
As a spokesman for Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) says: "On e-government issues in general, there's just no coordinated political constituency pushing appropriators to allocate money. They see no political benefit in targeting funds toward E-Gov projects, which would require taking away money from other pet projects. In addition, appropriators see the E-Gov fund as duplicative spending."
This is a very short-sighted view, considering that in the long run the fruits of the funded initiatives could end up saving money. Overall, the Government IT budget increased just 1% from last year (to $59.7 billion).
An eVoting pilot that would allow miltary staff stationed overseas to cast their ballots electronically has been postoned. The pilot program was scraped due to security concerns - concerns not just about the pilot, but the security of the Internet in general. The pilot, which was to be tested this week, was testing a system that was planning to be enacted in time for the 2004 Presidential elections. The initiative has seemingly been suspended indefinitely.
Hi! is an Arabic language aimed at youth in the Islamic world. It is published by the U.S. State Department, and features, from what I can tell of the pictures (it's in Arabic, after all), mainly stories about U.S pop culture.
The first issue came out last summer, but I'm just running across this now and find it very interesting. Check out this State Department press briefing which covers some of the questions that should immediately spring to mind about this venture. (you'll have to do a text search for "hi magazine" since it wasn't the only topic covered during the briefing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some "entertaining" facts facts about Thanksgiving, from the fun folks at the U.S. Census Bureau.
The National Archives and Records Administration has released an online version of the Warren Commission Report, presumably in conjunction with the 40th anniversary of the JFK assasination last week (link via beSpacific).
The reminds me of a couple years ago when the Starr Report was published online and so many millions visitors hit the site. It was, for many people, their first interaction with eGovernment. People love a scandel, but if it encourages the citizenry to interact, ask question, and become aware of resources otherwise unfamiliar, I'd have to say that's a good thing.
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.
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.
An hour long discussion of Natural language processing and FirstGov from the National Public Radio station at American University. Guests on the show include the CTO from the General Services Administration and the Vice President of the Council for Excellence in Government.
Haven't gotten to listen to the whole thing yet (on dial-up from home, yes it is very 1998), but what I have heard of it is very interesting and definitely worth a listen. (via the resource shelf)
If you are a government CIO and you don't happen to check your inbox very often, here is the memo from eGov Czar Mark Foreman specifying procedures to collect part of the $5 million federal budget allocated to eGov this fiscal year.
Inside Politics is dubbed a "Your Guide to National and State Politices," and is just that. There is a wealth of information here, mostly financial data about US legislators and research/polls performed by Brown University, which only makes sense considering the site is compiled by Darrell West, a profesor at Brown's Center for Public Policy. What should be of particular interest to anyone who'd be stopping by here are the Urban, State and Federal, and Global eGovernment reports. I wont offer any critique, since I haven't poured through them all yet, but I feel safe sharing the links since this is the third year West has performed this survey, and each of the reports seems to offer a very detailed analysis. The Global eGovernment report, for example, looked at 1,197 iniatitives in nearly 200 hundred countries.
ABC News is collecting daily "notes" from the presidential candidates and collecting them on one website. The notes can be on any topic, but must be 200 words or less. Most of the notes have been written (or at least attributed) to the candidates themselves.
The Washington Post is calling it a weblog, but I don't see it. I'm not sure what could more can be communicated by the candidates in 200 of their own words that isn't included in the reams of ink already dedicated to the campaign everyday by paid reporters and bloggers. Vermont Governor Howard Dean has an official weblog for his campaign. It is updated severeal times a day, with links to press, updates on movement along the campaign trail, and general commentary, but isn't updated by Dean himself, rather a collection of PR flacks (I'm guessing). Still, it is a good to see candidates embracing technology, and this should be an increasingly interesting read as the campaign continues, especially in light of the verbal volleys already taking place between Dean and Kerry.
It is staggering to hear, but US portal FirstGov does not currently use a Content Management System (CMS). Each page on the site is hand-coded, but not for much longer. the General Services Administration recently signed a half million dollar contract for use of Vignette's CMS software.
To illustrate why a CMS is so important, here is a quote from M.J. Jameson, s GSA associate administrator:
"When the Columbia shuttle tragedy happened, we took 24 hours to get up what we needed to get up," Jameson said. "If we had had this content management system, the people who do that for FirstGov could have done it from home within 20 minutes."
Not only do CMSs save time and money, they allow the technically illititerate to update without calling in tech support, the dynamic generation of content, and easier changes to design/site architecture. I'm really shocked they would still be hand-coding.
The license is governmentwide, which is also pretty amazing. Any government agency that is still hand-coding is wasting money, and should be strongly encouraged to make the move to Vignette as soon as possible (not that I have any pull in that regard).
Assessment of Electronic Government Information Products
This report was put together in early 1999, so is a little dated, but it is still an interesting look at the initital efforts towards providing digital access to documents in the Federal Depository Library Program. At the time, the study found that: there was no unified standards across government agencies, little thought had been given to permanent access to the digital materials, there are authenticity issues (census data provided by GPO Access rather than the Census Dept. website), no central web authority - even within individual agencies.
It seems like most of those concerns have since been solved (or at least addressed to some degree), but I wasn't able to find a follow-up report.
Does your Congressman have a website? Look for your Representative or Senator.
I didn't count, but it looks like all the Senators and most, if not all, of the Representatives have their own websites. It is interesting that, while all the congressmen are hosted within the Senate and House website, each is designed and maintained seperately, and some are pretty awful. It seems like it would be more efficient to provide a template (or a choice from a number of templates), and a content management system. Kind of like Blogger here.
This would certainly make it easier (and cheaper) to develop and maintain each Senate/Rep site. And though most users wouldn't need to visit the sites for any Senators or Representative other than their own, an arguement can definitely be made that a uniform template would make site navigation much simpler.
England has a pretty comprehensive effort to e-enable their government services. I haven't read through the entire strategy document, but it seems that, while the US federal government's strategy involves consolidating activities to a few central departments, the UK policy enourages more activity at the local level.
I suppose that has something to do with the way our constitution was written, what with state's rights and decentralized government and all that, but it will be interesting to contrast the effectiveness of a top-down vs. a bottom-up development strategy. It seems like the UK has an immediate edge, because concentrating on local iniatitives will allow them to deliver new services more quickly (for example, they speculate that the elements for eVoting could be in place as early as 2008), but the US strategy has a long range benefit in creating a stable platform to support more ambitious future expansions. We'll see.