Happy Holidays Open Gov: Making Prizes More Attractive to and Possible for the Federal Government

Prizes and competitions provide one way to stimulate innovation and tap “solver communities” that may not have been leveraged previously when considering some of our nation’s grand challenges. As I wrote this past summer, both on my featured jennovation series on Govloop and the Phase One Consulting Group Transformation in the Federal Sector Blog, thereRead… Read more »

OpenSF: Film Commission Opens Data Trove to App Developers

San Francisco’s always been a special place for movie buffs. And now the City’s Film Commission is opening up its treasure trove of historical information to application developers. As part of the City’s signature “open data” initiative, the commission this week posted information on more than 800 San Francisco locations used in movie shoots fromRead… Read more »

CB2: On Location at the Colombian Floods

Hola and Feliz Navidad from 35,000 feet as I blog on my return flight from Bogota, Colombia where I return with sunburn, coffee and new perspectives after working with the government of Barranquilla to combat devastating floods in the country. Exactly one week after witnessing the Army Corp of Engineers’ giant levee plug in Vicksburg,Read… Read more »

Newton Software grows over 1000% in 2010, Moves Applicant Tracking Software to the Cloud

Newton, our popular applicant tracking software, joins leaders like Microsoft, IBM and Netflix in Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing environment. 2010 has been a banner year for Newton. We’ve added over 120 new customers and our revenue has grown by over 1000%. We’ve anticipated moving Newton, our popular applicant tracking software, to the cloud for aRead… Read more »

In Defense of Data Centrism

In the never ending search to know “what works,” we have a few choices. We can look to theories, i.e., this ‘should’ work; or we can look to data. Often the latter choice is considered backward looking, or stripped of context. Data autopsies are conducted with the results analyzed and presented as a ‘case study.’Read… Read more »

The Next New Businesses

Entrepreneurs, investors, dreamers, and others spend a lot of time trying to figure out the next new businesses. Will Rogers said investing was simple. Buy low, sell high. If it doesn’t go up, don’t buy it. This week I’ve seen several indicators of where profitable businesses are growing, in a stagnant economy with uncertain capitalRead… Read more »

The False choice: Bilingualism vs. Open Government (and accountability)

Last week a disturbing headline crossed my computer screen: B.C. RCMP zaps old news releases from its website 2,500 releases deleted because they weren’t translated into French 1) The worse of all possible outcomes This is a terrible outcome for accountability and open government. When we erase history we diminish accountability and erode our capacityRead… Read more »

Public/Private Relationship for Cybersecurity

Interesting article at Defense Systems “We’re not embracing the issue in its totality,” said Larry Clinton, president and CEO of the Internet Security Alliance, at the forum. “Right now, the private sector is in charge of securing critical infrastructure, and the government’s job is compliance. They have fundamentally misunderstood the relationship that needs to developRead… Read more »