Posts By Patrick Fiorenza

GovLaunch: E-Neighborhood Watch Now Covers Half of the United States

Nextgov reports that a federally funded program called The Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative (NSI), which trains law enforcement officials how to electrically share tips and threats through a standard, searchable format, is now in effect in half of the states. Part of the NSI history comes from recommendations in the 2004 9/11 commission report,Read… Read more »

GovTech: New Facebook App Connects Citizens to Government

Government Technology reported that citizens in Burleson, Texas, now have another way to connect with government. A new Facebook application was developed to make it easier for citizens to report and request services from their local government. The Facebook application is called the Citizen Request Tracker (CRT). Public administrators in Burleson have seen an increaseRead… Read more »

FOSE Conference: IBM’s Watson

This morning I had the chance to listen to David McQueeney. McQueeney is the Vice President of Software at IBM. David spoke about the history of Watson and the potential uses of the technology. McQueeney gave a great presentation and there are a lot of great lessons that government can learn from how Watson wasRead… Read more »

Has social media made us lazy?

Here is an interesting article from Dean Obeidallah posted on CNN, Are Social Media Creating the Laziest Generation? Obeidallah comments, “Observing events and then commenting about them on social media has become our national religion. We anxiously wait for the next celebrity to screw up, another politician to be caught in a sex scandal, theRead… Read more »

GovBytes: GOP Task Force Finalized for Cybersecurity

GovTech has provided a full list of the Republican led task-force to evaluate the cyber-security legislation that was proposed by the Obama Administration on May 12th. GovTech states, “The legislation — Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act — focuses on protecting domestic federal networks and the national infrastructure, but would make the Department ofRead… Read more »

Social Media During a Crisis

I just read an interesting article by David Stephenson from Federal Computer Week, Give the Public a Role in Disaster Response. I wanted to share a few quotes from the article and connect with anyone who may be working in emergency management. David has clearly identified that social media has added another complex layer toRead… Read more »

Social Media Game Plan for Debts, Deficit and the Economy Conference

Dear friends, we know many of you can’t come to the conference or you’ve got ADD and will be fiddling with your phone/laptop. You can still join the conversation and do something with those twitchy fingers by amplifying our live tweeting. We will also be fielding questions from twitter to pose to the panelists inRead… Read more »