Will open government lead to a more rational electorate? That’s the contention of Clay Johnson, the former director of Sunlight Labs, a community of open source developers and designers dedicated to making government more transparent, accountable and responsible. He recently spoke on a panel at Digital Capital Week, a ten-day festival in Washington, DC focused on technology,
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Added by Joe Flood on June 22, 2010 at 4:30pm —
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What do fire dancers have to do with technology? Attendees at the opening night party of DC Week had a chance to find out.
Digital Capital Week (DCWEEK) is a 10 day festival in Washington, DC focused on technology, innovation and all things digital in our nation’s capital. DCWEEK takes place in venues throughout Washington and runs from Jun…
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Added by Joe Flood on June 14, 2010 at 3:44pm —
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Government web sites are public records. They exist to help citizens, not promote executives. They should not be used to advance individual agendas.
Yet, frequently, the first act of a new administration is to wipe out evidence of the prior leadership. This is more than just changing the names on the “About Us” page. Articles, photos,videos, press releases and other
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Added by Joe Flood on February 20, 2010 at 10:00am —
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Too much exposure to
USAJOBS has really turned me cynical. Despite news reports on the need to recruit
thousands of new employees, the main federal jobs site is a usability nightmare, unfathomable to even people who work on web sites, like me. While the site has few defenders, some have argued that it has to be that way, because it's…
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Added by Joe Flood on September 8, 2009 at 3:30pm —
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I wrote about this on my personal web site but thought that the GovLoop community might be interested. In a nutshell, an artist found a photo I took and used it to help him finish a painting. He was able to do this because I had my photo online and I had assigned it a Creative Commons license. The photo (of an Arizona landmark) that I posted to Flickr got picked up by Wikipedia, which led to the painter finding it.
Here's the story:…
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Added by Joe Flood on July 30, 2009 at 4:40pm —
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Note: I originally published on my blog but I thought this had a lot of relevance for government web sites. My point is that effective web design does not have to be complicated. In fact, by choosing simplicity you're making it easier for readers to get the information they need.
I was excited to learn that The Nature Conservancy won a
Webby for their web site,
nature…
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Added by Joe Flood on May 6, 2009 at 9:00am —
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I've been reading
Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. It's a brilliant book on the information revolution that we're going through. He believes that this revolution is as momentous as the development of the printing press, which triggered the Reformation and religious wars. The rise of amateurs and the expansion of consumer choice has meant the end of seemingly unassailable institutions like…
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Added by Joe Flood on March 23, 2009 at 10:57am —
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Vivek Kundra is the newly appointed Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the federal government. He is the first federal CIO ever and previously served as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the District of Columbia. He spoke this morning at FOSE, the major government technology tradeshow in Washington, DC.
I wanted to write up my notes before they got overtaken by events. Kundra spoke briefly, a little more than a half-hour and, to me, at least, he seemed distracted. I'd never heard him speak be…
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Added by Joe Flood on March 12, 2009 at 1:11pm —
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Chris Anderson, of Wired magazine and "
The Long Tail" fame, was the keynote speaker at
FOSE this morning. He spoke on "For the People and By the People: Delivering on the Promise of Gov 2.0".
Anderson started off with an interesting example - the infamous
Twitter fail whale. Countless users have bemoaned the unreliability of Twitter, thou…
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Added by Joe Flood on March 10, 2009 at 2:18pm —
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Some random thoughts about Transparency Camp 09. Here are my big take-aways from the conference.
Excitement: There’s a tremendous amount of enthusiasm among enlightened advocates of government transparency, fueled by the election of Obama and the mainstreaming of Web 2.0 tools like blogging. There’s a real can-do spirit, which is in marked contrast to continuing bad news about the economy.
The Importance of Free Beer: How do you get people to hang out after the formal sessions of a conference,…
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Added by Joe Flood on March 3, 2009 at 8:49am —
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Here's my notes from an event called "Pimp My Nonprofit." It was designed to help a nonprofit better use Web 2.0. Lots of similarities to government:
http://joeflood.com/2009/02/18/pimp-my-nonprofit-student-movement-for-real-change/
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Added by Joe Flood on February 18, 2009 at 11:30am —
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YouTube is ubiquitous. Millions of people visit the site every day. For the Wired Generation, it’s the functional equivalent of television. Yet, despite the vast audience of YouTube, many government agencies do not make their videos available on the site. Some are even worse and
ban their employees from even visiting YouTube.
By withholding their vide…
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Added by Joe Flood on February 13, 2009 at 3:50pm —
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Interesting article on Read/Write/Web about government web site managers and social media advocates. Govloop is mentioned as an example. But, best of all, IMHO, is the term that the author comes up for government web folks: Goverati. I like it!
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/government_20_rise_of_the_goverati.php Continue
Added by Joe Flood on February 5, 2009 at 9:54am —
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Have you ever wondered why there's no
ocean.gov? This is a valuable and easy to remember URL that the government doesn't currently use. And it should, for we all depend on the ocean for the very air we breathe.
When I was at NOAA, it was explained to me that there's no web site at ocean.gov because no one agency or part of government "owns" the ocean. Lots of federal and state agencies have jurisdiction and interest in what goes on in the watery realm. Doing somet…
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Added by Joe Flood on February 3, 2009 at 2:17pm —
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