Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia on Friday unveiled a new, smartphone-age tool designed to enhance the ability of citizens to send tips to law enforcement authorities. Flanked by several members of his command and investigative teams during a press conference at the Harris County Jail, Garcia touted “iWatchHarrisCounty,” a free downloadable application for Blackberries, iPhones,Read… Read more »
Social Media is becoming ever more ingrained in the political landscape, and the government of Palo Alto — a city known for its tech savvy — is taking advantage. Palo Alto Mayor Yiaway Yeh and City Manager James Keene participated in two Twitter discussions with resident recently. Participants could use the hashtag #askpaloalto during theRead… Read more »
Taking on the task of building apps to enhance a citizen’s ability to engage in the civic space is a complex undertaking. How do we successfully translate authentic civic engagement to the web? How do we move toward a common understanding of what civic engagement even means? Finding definitive metrics to gauge the success ofRead… Read more »
People aren’t just watching, talking, and tweeting about civic technology–they are acting! Over the week of February 25 – May 4, passionate citizens around the country came together to “Code Across America.” Eight events were organized by the 2012 Fellows and eight events were organized by civic leaders in other cities as part of theRead… Read more »
Battling back from a Gov’t PR nightmare and a New Tool makes Twitter easier to use by GovLoop Insights On today’s program for Thursday April 26, 2012 It’s been one of the worst weeks ever for public servants. Advice on how to be a good leader from the Partnership for Public Service. TwitChimp — theRead… Read more »
An interesting Google initiative is called “GovTransformers,” in which Google highlights a public servant who is bringing new and innovative ways to improve the way government operates. I’d encourage you to take a look at all the great case studies on the web page, and see how Google’s GovTransformers are leveraging Google tools and applicationsRead… Read more »
The use of big data has been gaining momentum over the last few months. The term big data still has some ambiguity in how it is defined, and for government there are numerous challenges to unlock all the benefits and promise of big data for agencies. Commonly, big data is viewed as taking large volumesRead… Read more »
The SEVEN stories that impact your life for Thursday the 26th of April, 2012 A Marine has been discharged after making disparaging comments about the president on Facebook. CNN says Sergeant Gary Stein was given an “other-than-honorable” discharge after Stein called Obama a liar and suggested he would not follow some orders issued by theRead… Read more »
Mark Drapeau (Washington, DC) – Microsoft and Internet2 have announced a new agreement enabling member universities to take advantage of Windows Azure to open up collaborative, instructional and research opportunities in the cloud. The announcement was made at the recent Spring 2012 Internet2 Member Meeting in Arlington, VA. This agreement is a significant step inRead… Read more »
Good news for Big Data users: Cloudera recently released the second and final beta for Cloudera’s Distribution Including Apache Hadoop version 4 (CDH4), meaning that the official CDH4 release is coming soon. If you aren’t already using CDH, Cloudera offers the leading open-source distribution of the fast, agile, and reliable distributed computing platform changing theRead… Read more »