Cloudera Day in DC: Cloudera Manager and Enterprise

Another valuable pannel at the DC Cloudera Day was Todd Lipcon’s look into Hadoop management software Cloudera Manager available through Cloudera Enterprise. Cloudera is in the business of making Hadoop, the open source Big Data storage and analysis platform, easier for enterprises to adopt and, though the first step is their Cloudera Distribution Including ApacheRead… Read more »

An Overview of American Political Parties

Most of the American political debate centers on the two major parties – Democrats and Republicans. Today, most Americans are fed up with politicians and would like to eliminate political parties altogether, but it would never work. Aristotle noted that humans are political animals and will always form associations based on common beliefs and experiences.Read… Read more »

One True Expert

David Weinberger is one of my heroes. He was one of the four who wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto, which laid out the “why” of social media. He has a hot blog The Journal of Heuristic Organizations (JOHO), and he has a new book, Too Big To Know, one of several recent books defining how information,Read… Read more »

Use the FAR to stop Iran from getting the bomb

Slogging my way through the DAU online COR training has generated a question. If we translated all Federal Acquisition Regulations into Farzi and secretly insinuated them into Iranian government policy, wouldn’t that completely halt their ability to procure anything, let alone a nuke, in under 50 years?

Putting “Commercial” Back in Commercial Item Contracting

As GSA works to establish the “Next Generation” of the Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) program, it is a wonderful opportunity to reinvigorate commercial best practices in the federal market place. As its best, the MAS program provides access to millions of commercial services and products to customer agencies. It is the largest, most successful commercialRead… Read more »

Q and Art: Folk Art

This post is part of an ongoing series on Eye Level: “Q and Art” and is the successor to our series “The Best of Ask Joan of Art.” Begun in 1993, Ask Joan of Art was the longest-running arts-based electronic reference service in the country. We retired the service late last year but want toRead… Read more »

Daily Dose: Small donors make up the base of Santorum, Paul, Gingrich fundraising efforts

Are you excited about the candidacy of Rick Santorum? Ron Paul? Newt Gingrich? Looking at the percentage of small donors who have contributed to their campaigns, many voters are. What about Mitt Romney? According to fundraising numbers, not likely. Though Romney has by far the most funds raised at $63.2 million, he has the smallestRead… Read more »

Wikis: Better Internal Communication During Crisis

You’ve worked all day. At 6 p.m., a crisis within your agency or city now demands your all-night attention. For communication professionals handling media requests, the difficulty of maintaining message continuity is a common dilemma. When a colleague finally rescues you after an all-nighter, you then face the task of communicating about communication. What mediaRead… Read more »