Tech

Regulations.gov: Remaking Public Participation

This announcement from the rom the eRulemaking Program Management Office comes from NCDD sustaining member Alexander Moll, Communication Specialist at the Environmental Protection Agency – eRulemaking Branch… WASHINGTON – In recent months, the eRulemaking Program, a Fed-wide E-Gov and Open Gov initiative, which manages Regulations.gov has met with various groups and organizations to discuss waysRead… Read more »

Why Government Agencies Use Private Cell Phone Number Databases?

As a database administrator, I have been working on various non-profit and for-profit projects in the past couple years. Recently, I have been managing a database for a reverse phone lookup company that helps discover the identities behind certain hard-to-find phone numbers, including unpublished mobile numbers. What I have noticed is that there are manyRead… Read more »

Back Away From the Pronouns!

While pronouns have their place in the work world, writers want to maintain precision with their e-mails and memos to avoid confusion. So while I will concur that using pronouns can avoid verboseness, here are two pronouns to use sparingly and the reasons why. 1. Be precise rather than use “it.” If your memo reads,Read… Read more »

Code Across America: A Week of Civic Innovation

From February 24 through March 4, hundreds of passionate citizens around the country will come together to “Code Across America” – to make their cities even better. In over a dozen cities, there will be hackathons to build civic apps, “brigades” to deploy existing ones, unconferences to plan for the year ahead, and meetups toRead… Read more »

GovBytes: Criminal Identification Improves in Western States

Several western states have come together to improve their integrated fingerprint databases for a better criminal identification system. The states which participate in the Western Identification Network (WIN), a nonprofit responsible for the program, include; Alaska, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. The improved system will provide high-definition palm and fingerprint matching.Read… Read more »

We Feel Your Pain

As you read this, you may be going through many of the same things that I went through long ago. In fact you’re joined by thousands of other readers right now who are going through much the same thing you are. Some of us are trying to land our first job in project management, someRead… Read more »

Leap Year Wikithon 2/29!

You can leap into citizen-facing mobile strategies and other topics at our “Leap Year” Wikithon on Wednesday, February 29th from 3-5 in D.C.! Wikithons are gatherings of Mobile Gov professionals to create and develop content for the Mobile Gov Wiki and discuss various mobile practices. The wikithon theme this time will be DATA and weRead… Read more »

Social media monitoring is critical for government operations

As Congress goes about grilling Homeland Security over the department’s monitoring of social media—as it did in a hearing last week—a more fulsome understanding of the benefits of social media monitoring and analysis is needed. The value of social media monitoring extends far beyond the important but niche domain of monitoring terrorist chatter online. RatherRead… Read more »

Predictive Policing with Big Data

Police Departments nationwide have been using data and statistics to drive policing since the 90s in an approach founded by the NYPD named CompStat was credited with dramatic reductions in crime and increases in efficiency. CompStat, a process and philosophy rather than a single technology or software, uses databases and GIS to record and trackRead… Read more »

Web Manager University Gets New Name. Same Great Training

Web Manager University, the federal government’s training program for web, new media, and citizen engagement managed by GSA, has changed its name to DigitalGov University (DGU). We changed our name to reflect the growing demand to help agencies serve customers through digital media and citizen engagement. Our broad curriculum includes training in social media, citizenRead… Read more »