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.
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?
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 first batch of outdoor Internet pay phones debuted in New York City earlier this week. The phones allow users to make voice calls at the usual rates, but also provides high speed internet access at 25 cents per minute. People can check email, visit websites, though pornography is blocked (it'd be interesting to learn what filtering method they use), and even send digital photos via the built in webcam for an additional charge.
What makes this news relevant here is that (although it wasn't mentioned in the article) access to the City's website is available for FREE through these terminals. There are hardly enough of these terminals to significantly bridge any digital divide. Imagine stopping into one of these phones to check traffic conditions, pay parking tickets immediately after receiving them, always be able to locate the nearest subway station, or any number of other services available on the City's website.
A UN sponsored report looked at the municipalities across the world and rated their level of eGovernance based on number of metrics. The study looked at 80 large cities and analyzed them using 92 measures in five core areas: 1. Security and Privacy, 2. Usability, 3. Content, 4. Services, and 5. Citizen Participation.
Four of the overall top five cities came from Asia (1. Seoul, 2. Hong Kong, 3. Singapore, 4. New York, and 5. Shanghai).
The full report is available here, and a table listing the cities in their rankings in each category is available here.
The District of Columbia has gotten a very nice revamp. According to this article from GCN, they didn't add much new content or functionality, merely reorganizing of the information already on the site. One of the major flaws in most websites is that sturcture of the site mirrors the organizational heirarchy, rather than the matching the needs and expectations of the users. This is especially true of some government websites, which, predictably skew much more toward the beurocratic than the usable. The navigation of DC's new site is task-centered, and much easier to get around. It also promintently features access to Ask's natural language search engine.
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.
For those of you who like to watch, the Advanced Traveler Information System (ATIS) of the New York City Department of Transportation (DOT) provides access to nearly 80 traffic webcams throughout all 5 boroughs. There are 62 cameras providing still images, which are updated every 15-30 seconds, and another 17 cameras that provide full streaming images.
The cameras are meant to help DOT staff assess trafic conditions around the city, but New York City decided that since the technology and capabilities were already in place they could let everyone have access (they also include the streams on the city's public access television station). Compared to Ohio (see below) this is a very forward thinking approach on the use of the web.
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.