Two worlds, not quite yet colliding

I went to two events yesterday. The first was the launch of the Government Digital Service, or rather a housewarming party for their shiny new offices. In fine agile tradition, they put on a slick show and tell with short sharp presentations about their work and achievements topped and tailed by Francis Maude, Mike BrackenRead… Read more »

RIP Virginia Tech Police Officer, Deriek W. Crouse

Everyday, we have our military, law enforcement officials, and government workers (at all levels of government… federal, state, and local) put themselves out there in danger when they are in the line of duty. Today was no different. Deriek W. Crouse, a Virginia Tech campus police officer, was shot and killed during a routine trafficRead… Read more »

Emergency 2.0 Wiki is Now LIVE!!

Today is a big day for social media and emergency management: The Emergency 2.0 Wiki is now live! For those already in the know about #SMEM and its rather large following this is great news. For those of you that have no idea what ‘m talking about, let me fill you in: #SMEM is theRead… Read more »

If You Use Hadoop You Have Been Waiting For This: Cloudera Enterprise 3.7

Editor’s Note: We were treated to demos of Cloudera Enterprise 3.7 at Hadoop World, and it really blew us away with its functionality for total lifecycle management of Hadoop Clusters. That lifecycle management includes planning, creation of clusters, management of their health, control of access, logging/auditing and many other tools, all put together in aRead… Read more »

Measuring Unemployment: Bad News, Good News, and When to Know the Difference

On the surface, the drop in the civilian unemployment rate to 8.6 percent signals an important and positive breakthrough. Data provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louisshows that since the most recent recession “officially” ended in June 2009, there has been an uneven, but steady downward trend in the unemployment rate. Figure 1Read… Read more »

How is best to communicate with residents through snowy conditions?

Hello from across the pond, It’s now December and icy roads, closed schools and uncollected bins tend to dominate local government over the coming months. Residents rush to council websites seeking to report problems and find information. Increasingly, there is an expectation for this data to be real time. So what should councils be doing?Read… Read more »