What Does It Mean to Disconnect?

By AdamElkus Are we too connected to our gadgets? Many journalists and social thinkers seem to think so. Are we all too fixated on emailing, tweeting, just plain staring at our screens to participate in the world around us? The answer may be more complex than that, but you won’t find it in posts likeRead… Read more »

The Federal Workforce: What Improvements Can We Make Now?

We are constantly hearing about how the polarization in Congress is making it impossible for anything to get accomplished. Are there any issues that can be not only agreed upon by our officials but also acted upon and implemented? The National Academy of Public Administration and the American Society for Public Administration came together onRead… Read more »

An In-Memory Big Data Use Case: Sabre and Terracotta

By BobGourley The press release below caught my eye since it highlights a use case where real time access to terabytes of data is providing mission critical support to a commercial firm. Similar use cases exist in many other enterprises including the federal government. The solution uses Terracotta’s BigMemory solution. From the press release: TerracottaRead… Read more »

MarkLogic Government Summit 14 Nov 2012

By BobGourley The MarkLogic Government Summit will be held 14 Nov 2012 in Washington DC. I’ve seen an advanced copy of the agenda, and it is looking awesome! It includes some real heroes of enterprise and government IT. Get more info and register here The following is from the event write-up With mission critical bigRead… Read more »

Tools I use for learning

Recently, as part of a survey of members of the Social Learning Centre, I put together a list of ten sites or apps I use a lot in my own learning activity. Actually, I thought ten was rather a lot, so to share it here, I thought I’d whittle it down to half that number.Read… Read more »

20 Ways to Find Your Calling

Jessica Hagy writing for Forbes.com: 1. Ignore the future, deal with the present. The question, “What should I be when I grow up?” is wrong. Ask instead, “What is next today?” People become fat one bite at a time, and we become adults one hour at a time, so what we do today matters. OriginalRead… Read more »

Making APIs for government data – should agencies do this or leave it to third parties?

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are a technique for interacting with data (usually on the web) which liberates users from relying on particular applications or having to do complex programming to reuse the data in interesting ways. Unfortunately few government agencies go the extra distance to release their data with an API, instead using specific dataRead… Read more »

Who Is Winning The Real Cyber War?

By BobGourley “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind,” said Sir Winston Churchill at Harvard University in 1943. He frequently spoke of humanity’s minds in descriptions of the future and this is such an important point. It is our brains that give us both the vision for what we want theRead… Read more »