Communications

Exciting news for the VHA and open source healthcare information technology

The Open Source community has a history of using the FOIA version of the VHA’s VistA/CPRS and making it accessible for use outside the VHA. The open source, Liberty Medical Software Foundation has now started an organization proposing collaboration with the VHA for further development and innovation of the VHA’s system. In this time ofRead… Read more »

Direct Mail May Fall 10% This Year

NEW YORK Add direct mail to the list of analog media being crushed by the Great Recession. – Todd Wasserman The Direct Marketing Association originally predicted that direct mail volume would only fall 1 percent this year, but the organization has revised that to as much as 10 percent. “This was mainly driven by theRead… Read more »

Why does the press seem to love a Social Media bad news story?

The release on August 5th on a Marine Corps memo “banning” Social Media was misinterpreted by AP and started a firestorm of coverage in the press. At present, a Yahoo news search reveals over 1300 articles mentioning “Marines Ban Social Media”. However, when the Marines issued a clarification the next day stating specifically that theRead… Read more »

UK Google moves into local government

Twitpic Ross L Grant Google UK launched it’s local government division on Friday August 8 with a day-long event held at their London offices and attended by around 65 people. As I have been talking and writing about their stuff (aka promoting!) for a few years now this day was pretty exciting for me. IRead… Read more »

Facebook has Some Missing Nouns

I just posted this on my blog about local elected officials who use social media. Any thoughts on whether I am making too much of the language within Facebook? The original post is at http://electing2blog.blogspot.com/2009/08/facebooks-missing-noun.html As Facebook becomes more popular, it seems to become more effective. I posted a note asking for volunteers for ourRead… Read more »

Australia and Government 2.0 – not quite right

I am passionately interested in greater engagement between government at all levels and the public. So much so, that I’ve volunteered my time on several projects that seek to enable the transition to a more open, engaged, conversational form of government – the type of government being termed Government 2.0. I’ve been stewing over thisRead… Read more »