barbara haven: eGovernment

Tue, 07 Dec 2004 21:38:54 GMT

California identity-theft prevention legislation

Proposed California Bill Bans Distribution Of Social Security Numbers. The legislation introduced by state Sen. Debra Bowen seeks to prevent identity theft. [Security Pipeline]

Mon, 29 Nov 2004 16:32:01 GMT

After Thanksgiving, a little government-related web reading

Hope you had a good holiday (if your country celebrates Thanksgiving at this time) and a good weekend.

Web Won't Let Government Hide. Advocates for open government are creating search engines and websites to let citizens peek into the inner workings of official agencies. Now more than ever, they say, openness is essential to self-government. By Ryan Singel. [Wired News] Some good references to explore (later).

Last week's mess: The BBC and the Register report that the UK Government's Department for
Work and Pensions attempted to upgrade seven
PCs from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, and ended up with BSODs
on over 60,000 machines. The Guardian newspaper ran a good story.

Thu, 18 Nov 2004 17:29:21 GMT

Weblog Influence

Heritage Foundation: Can the Blogosphere Transform Government? [Scripting News]

Mon, 08 Nov 2004 21:42:03 GMT

California County Government Best Practice

Linux in Government: Stanislaus County Does Linux with a Best Practices Slant. A progress report on how one California county government systematically is turning to Linux and open source. [Linux Journal] [Leben ohne Micro$oft] from Der Schockwellenreiter

Mon, 08 Nov 2004 21:37:41 GMT

Reliable Egovernment

If you (as a egovernment website architect or service provider) don't measure your performance, availability and reliability, others will do this for you. On their terms, or their own performance indicators. They will also publish the comparative results.

David Fletcher posts on Reliable eGov.

AccountingWeb reports that the IRS has the nation's most reliable e-government website. Keynote also regularly ranks a small set of online services by response time and success rate. Based on Oct. 25th reporting, FDA and GAO rank at the top of those indices.

... from [David Fletcher's Government and Technology Weblog]

Now it's my lunchtime: here in Sacramento, the sky clouded up and looks like we might have rain.

Tomorrow evening is our local IT Service Management Forum (ITSMF) meeting, for which I want to stay healthy. Consultants and other people working in IT Service Management get together. This month's people share information from the recent National Conference in Long Beach (September 2004).

Service Management and other consultants predominate in our local group. I remember being a consultant and going around with a cold or flu much of the time, or at least carrying them. Sometimes consultants and contractors just don't go home sick, when they're contagious.

Fri, 29 Oct 2004 19:44:30 GMT

Grid as Supercomputer in West VA

West Virginia a grid power: Researchers and businesses in West Virginia will be able to log onto the first state-sponsored, public internet computing grid when the Global Grid Exchange is launched next month.

The project will function as a "supercomputer at a fraction of the cost" and is a joint effort of

the state
the West Virginia High Technology Consortium
Verizon (VZ)
Hewlett Packard (HPQ)

The West Virginia Economic Development Authority gave the consortium a $15 million grant to develop the grid, which will link computers in academic institutions, government offices and home personal computers that have excess capacity to advance work in such fields as biometrics and cancer research.

Fri, 22 Oct 2004 16:14:45 GMT

Government spending and saving

IT's role as a money saver. Politicians now seem to have decided the best way to introduce technology to Britain is by presenting it as a way to save money rather than spend it. [E-gov News]

In California, recent cost-saving recommendations in the California Performance Review went through further reviews (hearings), but who will decide the actual implementation?

Thu, 14 Oct 2004 21:06:54 GMT

Paris may favour gradual switch from MS to open source. 'Big bang' costs high, says study [The Register]

Microsoft offered sixty percent discounts. That's a good price-cutting strategy. I've been doing too much personal comparison shopping recently.

Now I need to restart. Performance isn't what it should be, drastically less. Time to clean up and get a fresh start on the afternoon.

Thu, 14 Oct 2004 20:49:27 GMT

E-Voting roundtable

SiliconValley.com is running an online roundtable this week about the security and trustworthiness (or neither) of E-voting. Panelists include Dan Gillmor, David Dill, Mischelle Townsend, and a host of other tech journalists, engineers, and voting activists. Readers can also submit questions.

"Diebold Election Systems and Sequoia Voting Systems declined to participate in this discussion."

Link
from boingboing.net

Mon, 04 Oct 2004 19:25:58 GMT

Experience Sharing

Recently, I'm looking for way to find out other's experience implementing service management (a la ITIL) and this is an interesting program:

Experience sharing workshops. From the 1st November to 3rd December 2004, the National Projects Experience Sharing workshops are being held with the aim helping to deliver Priority Outcome targets and meet the 2005 electronic service delivery deadline. [E-gov News]

Mon, 04 Oct 2004 19:23:04 GMT

Plunging back in

I'm back, and recovering from recent surgery. WHile I tried not to think about egovernment, service management and data centers while I was out, I wasn't entirely successful.

About data center consolidation, I noticed Phil Windley mentioned California in his introduction to Utah's Data Center experience:

Data Center Consolidation.

California is pushing data center consolidation among other things. Meanwhile Utah has its own data center consolidation issues. People continue to talk about it but until the legislature decides its time to stop allocating money for new data centers, they'll keep getting built. The Dept. of Corrections is building one in Gunnison, just up the road from the State's back-up data center in Richfield. Dave Fletcher, who runs the Richfield data center, is working hard to make it an attractive alternative for State agencies so that they won't build their own, but apparently that's somewhat threatenting to some Dept. of Corrections employees. At least Devin has the guts to say what he thinks in public---that shows more courage than most.

[Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

For me, life goes on! I hope for you also. My medical and work things are back to normal in a good way, but also shaken up in a way that helps me prioritize the way-too-long, to-do list.

Wed, 04 Aug 2004 16:28:36 GMT

November and ELections: closer than they feel now

Today is thoroughly summer-y. Generally leaves aren't changing color yet, except where water supplies are short. Some distant aspens or poplars turned yellow, and dropped a few leaves. However, an election looms on the horizon. What are we going to do differently about counting this vote?

Poll: Experts fear e-voting more than most voters. Worried about hackers taking over an electronic election? Survey finds most people aren't. Yet. [CNET News.com]

Mon, 02 Aug 2004 18:47:37 GMT

E-Accessibility for UK websites. Most UK websites are breaking the law when it comes to accessibility. A study found that 79 per cent of the websites studied failed to comply with the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act. [E-gov News]

The US has similar accessibility requirements, but global standards are needed. Which country requires more accessibility?

Thu, 29 Jul 2004 21:02:47 GMT

Closely connected with Government Blogs

Political Blogging. Sean Dodson at the Guardian has a nice story out today, "Falling through the net" that looks at MPs who blog. Apparently even George W Bush has a blog. [e-Government@large]

MPs are Members of Parliament, of course, not Military Police. The US has no convenient short term for elected Assemblies' members (like State Assemblers, SAs?), or State or US Senators and Representatives (Sens and Reps?).

For a very short time, former California Governor Davis's wife had a blog, but after the short recall, probably nothing remains. Does any California State Official have a blog? That allows comments?

Wed, 28 Jul 2004 21:41:52 GMT

On the e-voting front

Server crash blitzes Florida's e-voting records. Bring back Hanging Chad [The Register] Harbingers of voting problems? Who said "...Democracy is in the counting"?

Wed, 28 Jul 2004 21:39:02 GMT

E-Accessibility for UK websites. Most UK websites are breaking the law when it comes to accessibility. A study found that 79 percent of the websites studied failed to comply with the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act. [E-gov News]
Probably many US government sites also don't provide for disabillity access.
Last Olympics (2000) website probably learned their lessons, so let's hope for a highly accessible 2004 Olympics site.

Tue, 13 Jul 2004 19:18:30 GMT

Top Digital State Governments

Michigan, long known as an industrial-era powerhouse built on auto and steel manufacturing, has emerged as the leader, capturing first-place in the survey, followed by Washington, Virginia, Indiana, Arizona, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Arkansas, Colorado and North Carolina (tied for 10th).

Digital States is the nation’s original and only sustaining survey of state governments’ use of technology in serving the citizen. The all-new 2004 Digital States Survey provides a benchmark for the next generation of digital service delivery and reflects contemporary citizen expectations and the technologies used to meet them. [ links later, because I'm swamped with work.]

Thu, 08 Jul 2004 23:21:44 GMT

Gov. Guide to Open Source Announced

Australian government to offer guide to open-source. Public-sector support of nonproprietary software continues with how-to guide for technology procurement. [CNET News.com]

Tue, 06 Jul 2004 17:11:42 GMT

E-voting to be a 'train wreck'

From the weekend reading:

Activist: E-voting to be a 'train wreck'
By ambushing registrars and tracking down executives at their homes and offices, a literary publicist has uncovered conflicts of interests and security flaws inside the companies that make electronic ballot machines.
Searching the Web and poring over newspaper clippings, Bev Harris has unearthed obscure arrest records, ties to conservative political groups and other embarrassing secrets of senior executives at voting companies. [more]

Fri, 02 Jul 2004 17:03:40 GMT

Paris city government gets Microsoft discount

MS offers 57% price cut as Paris tilts to open source. Ils ne passeront pas? By John Lettice . [The Register]

Perhaps use weblogs to announce open-source investigations: would help governments notify Microsoft and evoke new discount offers.

At ThinkGeek, O'Reilly has a wonderful, pleasingly-tan-colored Linux T-shirt in French:

In France, there's a popular saying about Linux that essentially translates as: "Linux? You can get a less powerful system, but it will cost you more." (We know you all speak fluent French, so the T-shirt doesn't include the English translation.)

100% cotton, buckskin tan heavyweight t-shirt: front, a black bucking bronco, in their Wild West Linux theme; back, "Linux? Il y a moins bien, mais c'est plus cher."

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 18:01:18 GMT

Justice and Transparency

DOJ: Our Computer Ate the Info. The Justice Department comes up with a creative excuse for refusing a request for information about foreign lobbyists. It says providing such data risks irreparably crashing its computer system. Proponents of open government are not impressed. [Wired News]

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 17:59:11 GMT

Candidates' Websites Lack Security

If the major candidates' websites lack security, you can guess the state of other candidates' sites.

Campaign Sites Lack Security. The official websites of the Bush and Kerry campaigns have several security holes -- some small, some big. The result could be fake news stories or doctored photos, even directives to vote for the other guy. By Michelle Delio. [Wired News]

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 17:56:56 GMT

Electronic voting's merits and risks

E-voting: Nightmare or nirvana?. With a presidential election looming, experts square off in a special CNET News.com roundtable to debate electronic voting's merits and risks. [CNET News.com]

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 19:43:29 GMT

Western CIO Forum in Santa Fe

The 2004 Western CIO Forum in Santa Fe, New Mexico August 1-3. This year's forum continues an open-dialogue legacy among state, local and federal government. It also strives to gain an international perspective on issues such as intergovernmental communications, data sharing and e-Government.

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 19:04:27 GMT

Integrating Government services online. The UK Government is planning to offer all of its services through one web portal. [E-gov News]