Monday, March 14, 2005

An Opinionated Network. In covering the Iraq war last year, 73 percent of the stories on Fox News included the opinions of the anchors and journalists reporting them, a new study says. By washingtonpost.com. [washingtonpost.com - Media Notes Extra] 10:13:24 PM

	Thursday, March 03, 2005

e-Parliament. Carlos Guadian from Spain mentions e-Parliament, a new online institution to bring together elected officials from around the world into a global forum to help build a better world. I am encouraging some Utah legislators to participate. It looks like an interesting e-democracy experiment. [David Fletcher: eGovernment] 3:12:41 PM

	Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Service levels more important than e-gov deadlines: survey. Who'da thought it [The Register] 9:07:33 AM

	Monday, February 28, 2005

AnchorFree offers free Wi-Fi in 4-block SF area. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AnchorFree on Monday announced the creation of a free Wi-Fi hot zone in San Francisco's Marina district, along a four-block area of Chestnut St. between Fillmore and Scott Streets. Anyone with a Wi-Fi-capable device, including an Apple computer equipped with AirPort or AirPort Extreme, can use the service indoors or outdoors. The company said it launched the service in response to city mayor Gavin Newsom's 2004 announcement that "we will not stop until every San Franciscan has access to free wireless Internet service." [MacCentral News] 5:29:37 PM

	Sunday, February 27, 2005

WAPI Whacked. Chinese peeved, walked out over procedural move in ISO over WAPI: The Wireless Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure (WAPI) proprietary standard that the Chinese government originally intended as a mandatory element for all domestically sold Wi-Fi gear was made optional and moved into the ISO standards organization to be approved as an international protocol. It was fast-tracked for approval initially, but then through a procedural move placed into a slower track. 802.11i remains fast tracked and may be approved as an optional security standard by April. I learned recently that the Chinese object to 802.11i because it includes a 128-bit key length version of AES which they believe the NSA has the ability to decipher. The corresponding problem with WAPI is that it is a proprietary protocol controlled by the government which leads one to believe that it has either a back-door or a weak known flaw in it that would allow interception.... [Wi-Fi Networking News] 8:10:44 PM

	Sunday, February 13, 2005

Performance Measurement for E-Government. Genie Stowers does an excellent job of consolidating and organizing a body of knowledge on how states measure the success of their e-government programs in her recent report, "Measuring the Performance of E-Government." She identifies flaws in many states programs to adequately measure progress and proposes a set of 11 recommendations for measuring performance. A key recommendation is to "incorporate measures into a process of continuous improvement": "Performance measures should be actively used to improve services, not just posted on a website and left until the next update of the strategic plan." This seems pretty obvious, but is often not the case. The IBM Center for The Business of Government, which produced this study, also recently published another interesting report, Collaboration and Performance Management in Network Settings. New website: The Utah Department of Public Safety has upgraded its website. The appearance is much more like the standard Utah.gov look. [David Fletcher: eGovernment] 10:03:35 PM

Federal Process Improvement Systems. The U.S. federal government is a BIG enterprise. With that in mind, OMB and FEAPMO have created the Federal Enterprise Architecture Management System (FEAMS). FEAMS is supposed to help agencies during the budget process discover other e-government initiatives within the federal enterprise that might be leveraged by a given agency. In a large enterprise, this is very important. Agencies often do not know what their peers are doing which limits the development of cross-agency and enterprise initiatives. The latest quarterly federal report cards came out last week. It shows that almost every agency is making progress in eGov. However, only State and AID made enough progress to improve their overall egov status grade. Both moved from red to yellow. In conjunction with FedBizOpps, the federal government has created the Business Partner Network. BPN.gov refers to itself as the "single source for vendor data for the Federal government." BPN hosts the Central Contractor Registration system (CCR). Check out this flash training on FEDLOG, a logistics support system that has increased search productivity by a factor of 60. Quite effective. An Assistant Secretary of State gave this address yesterday on carbon sequestration. AGRC and ITS are supporting several regional carbon sequestration projects. This report from the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum provides some interesting background information. [David Fletcher: eGovernment] 10:02:46 PM

Ben's Blog. Check out the new blog of Ben Casnocha, a youthful entrepreneur from San Francisco who founded Comcate, an e-government solutions provider. Ben's company was recently featured in Western City magazine. [David Fletcher: eGovernment] 10:02:01 PM

Taiwan the best at e-government. According to Darrell West of Brown University, Taiwan is now the top ranked e-government. The Brown Center for Public Policy surveyed almost two thousand websites in 198 countries. This year's report is not yet available on the Center's website, but Singapore was ranked 2nd and the U.S. 3rd. I'm wondering about the the Scandinavian countries who traditionally place very high. The small town of Keizer, Oregon has a new website. A Louisiana columnist complains about that state's failure to use technology to more effectively communicate prior to and during the hurricane evacuation. Time for a self-evaluation. And state CIOs will be meeting in New Orleans in a couple of days. San Diego is the most connected via Broadband according to Nielsen ratings. Salt Lake City makes the top ten for narrowband connections. And former California CIO John Thomas Flynn has joined the Center for Digital Government. [David Fletcher: eGovernment] 10:00:52 PM

Brown Survey of State eGovernment. Brown University Taubmann Center announced their 2004 e-government winners. The top five are: Tennessee Maine Utah New York Illinois Tom mentions this in his GovTech Blog. Tom, the reason why Utah is not mentioned in the Center for Digital Government Best of the Web list is that Utah won last year and were not eligible for this year's competition. We'll do our best for 2005. Brown looked at 1,569 sites in their state survey which amounts to over 30 sites per state so it's a fairly broad survey. I am also much more impressed this year with the depth of the survey. On glaring problem they pointed out for Utah is the lack of titles on web pages (they identified 413). Other states had problems with other types of metadata, including keywords and alt tags. The key to this survey is getting the entire state to pay attention to detail in web design. There is some great data here that we will address in our next eGovernment product management council meeting on October 6th. Utah ranked very high for the percent of sites with online services, behind only Illinois. Illinois surprises me as does the fact that Virginia and Washington, who I tend to view as two of the top five digital states dropped to 23rd and 24th in this fairly comprehensive survey. Here's the complete survey [David Fletcher: eGovernment] 10:00:22 PM