Tech

Project of the Week: Intranet Makeover, British Columbia Style

So here’s the deal. The entire province of British Columbia just gave their government intranet system a complete facelift and let’s just say the result could be an episode of “Pimp Your Site” if that show even existed. Anyways the public servants in BC are now rocking out with an intranet system that includes drupal,Read… Read more »

4 Little Explored Areas in Contract Transparency

Sterling keeps a blog called All Things Sterling. Transparency. Accountability. Openness. Whatever you want to call it, it’s here to stay. Transparency is young, but contract transparency is an infant. This gives us the opportunity to set the agenda of what it really means and will look like for years to come. GovLoop has alreadyRead… Read more »

Complex or Complicated Solutions – a eGov issue

This started with my preparing a plenary keynote for the World Congress of IT, or WCIT, http://www.wcit2010.com/ due to be delivered on the 25th May. The theme calls for a new partnership between Government and Business in terms of the provisioning and use of technology in the creation of the emerging society we see today.Read… Read more »

Does Your Website Show Your Commitment to Customer Service, Government Executive?

Great customer service starts right at the top of any organization – private or public. Top executives set the tone and the standards for customer service. When those top executives pay close attention and make customer service a priority, they create happy customers. Happy customers – better business. Nothing new about that. But have youRead… Read more »

Don’t Have a City Facebook Page? It’s OK, Facebook’s Made One (For You?)

Back in April, Facebook launched something called “Community Pages,” which far as I can tell, simply scrapes Wikipedia content and public status updates and populates the pages with “fans” who mentioned the page term in their profile. Thought your city didn’t have a fan Page on Facebook? I’ll bet it does. Your council’s been handwringingRead… Read more »

Participatory Chinatown Launches

The original post can be found at my other blog: The Place of Social Media Participatory Chinatown launched on May 3 in Boston’s Chinatown. It’s a 3-D interactive game designed to augment the traditional community meeting. Instead of the traditional model of people responding to a powerpoint presentation about the neighborhood, participants in this meetingRead… Read more »

Designing Social Media Policy for Government: Eight Essential Elements

As we all know, despite the increasingly frequent use of social media tools by government agencies, managing this engagement remains challenging for many, especially at state and local levels. Last summer CTG began to explore this topic and what we ended up hearing often from government professionals that we interviewed was that they would reallyRead… Read more »

Why the Foreign Office is dabbling with Facebook Connect

As the post-election smoke clears, we’re launching a small experiment on the Foreign Office Global Conversations blogs. On a number of blogs (for now, mostly the US ones, such as this one), we’re adding the comment functionality of Facebook Connect. So for now, we have different mechanics on different blogs, but this is by wayRead… Read more »

Weekly Newsletter on Research and Best Practices

Research Reports 1. The Impact of Social Computing on the European Union (11/19/2009): Trends about user-centric and effective services as well as new forms of civic and political participation. http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/jrc/index.cfm?id=1410&obj_id=9410&dt_code=NWS 2. WEB 2.0 implications on knowledge management (2009): Web 2.0 can do more than broadcast messages to a wider audience. Through simple, user-driven tools, theyRead… Read more »