This week witnessed one of the most dramatic government information technology failures ever, with an outage that paralyzed twenty six state government services for days in Virginia. The Department of Motor Vehicles was the most visible outage, leaving thousands of frustrated motorists and forcing law enforcement to relax enforcement to allow time for drivers’ licenseRead… Read more »
How green is your phone? And do you care? The article in the Guardian swats at Apple, who refused to participate in the UK program analyzing popular mobile phones. http://gu.com/p/2j7qn Fast Company has a somewhat grayer take on this information, and challenges the way the phones were analyzed. Meanwhile, I’m hoping that some genius engineerRead… Read more »
I am new to govloop and excited about the possibilities for cross-pollination here. One initiative that I want to alert other gov technologists to is Tech@State. This effort is sponsored by the Department of State’s Office of eDiplomacy. eDiplomacy exists to help wed technology innovations with U.S. diplomatic efforts. One of the ways we areRead… Read more »
Anyone that has used Microsoft Excel to develop complex models including 50+ worksheets can tell you that it is not the best way to do things. Producing such elaborate models requires you to have VBA experience, is an incredibly slow and labor intensive process and can still be very prone to human error. Not toRead… Read more »
Join us on July 19th for Excellence in Government to learn the best practices & innovative tools your agency needs to implement open government. In one day, gain the complete tool set you need through:• Access to the latest open government developments • Interactive dialogue with leading experts• Actionable case studies• Best practices which canRead… Read more »
This is my first blog post within GovLoop. I am happy to be here. A little gov/tech background: I am a writer/editor/project manager/interactive designer who is currently working as a contractor on a federal website. I call myself a content wrangler; I’ve done everything from write copy for tiny display cards in a Kentucky arboretumRead… Read more »
Yesterday I attended a Meetup with the State Department at NAPA. The theme for the event was connective technologies and how can we use the internet as a catalyst to bring people together. The speakers were Alec Ross, Senior Advisor for Innovation in the Office of Secretary of State; Scott Heiferman, Co-Founder & CEO ofRead… Read more »
SOCIAL MEDIA Twitter’s has had major reliability issues this week. The site was over capacity and displaying the “Fail Whale” image numerous times. The capacity issue resulted in site breakdowns, slowdowns, loss of tweets, and more. In fairness, Twitter has been transparent (in true social media culture fashion) about the scaling issues coming from exponentialRead… Read more »
(Original post at www.kristyfifelski.com) One great way to encourage interaction on your government website is to include a “Quick Poll” feature on your homepage. The site visitor selects an answer and sees instant results from the other visitors. We’ve had over 9,000 responses to our homepage poll in the year and a half since takingRead… Read more »
Implementation updates The big news of the month is the deployment of IntelliDose to our final VISN 23 site, the Fargo VAMC. Reports from Fargo indicate that the clinical staff are doing well, and no unexpected technical problems have surfaced. Fargo is using the software for combination chemotherapy and for IV chemotherapy. Monotherapy with oralRead… Read more »