Citizen Services

It is my favorite defense-related story of the Christmas season: NORAD, the command responsible for tracking possible airborne threats to America tracks Santa as he roams the globe.

In addition to tracking Santa on the day, the site offers Santa Cams that show Santa at locations around the globe, as well as lots of Christmas music and some games. Keep reading →


Now that usage of mobile apps has overtaken browsing on the desktop web, it’s starting to challenge television, the analytics firm Flurry says. The San Francisco-based mobile analytics startup says that consumers are spending 127 minutes per day in mobile apps, up 35% from 94 minutes a day in the same time last year. At the same time, desktop web usage actually declined slightly by 2.4 %from 72 to 70 minutes.

This means that U.S. consumers are spending nearly two times more time in mobile apps than on the web.

The dramatic growth carries a variety of implications for government agencies focused on improving citizen services, how citizens interact with government, and the adoption of mobile technology.

The growth also has implications for the television industry as a whole. The time spent on mobile apps is now starting to challenge time spent watching TV. Flurry estimates that the average U.S. consumer watches 168 minutes of television per day, based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2010 and 2011.
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This article was originally reported by Kim-Mai Cutler and our colleagues at TechCrunch. For more news and insights on innovations at work in government, please sign up for the AOL Gov newsletter. For the quickest updates, like us on Facebook. Keep reading →


This feature
showcases one video each Friday that captures the essence of innovation, technology and new ideas happening in government today.

This week’s video is courtesy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Keep reading →

This feature showcases one video each Friday that captures the essence of innovation, technology and new ideas happening in government today.

This week’s video is courtesy of Stanford University. Keep reading →

For the candidates, it’s all over except for the voting (and now that’s over too.) But for those of us who follow money in politics, it will take months to close the books on what will be the most expensive election in history.

This article originally appeared on Huffington Post. Keep reading →

This week, millions of voters will confront not only the decision of who to vote for, but also the more mundane questions of where and when to vote, whether they need to bring identification, and who or what exactly will be on the ballot.

Despite the march of technology that makes that information available online to more and more people, finding the correct information for a given voting district has been a continuing challenge for veteran and prospective voters alike, as well as state and local election officials. Keep reading →


A new mobile app from the National Military Family Association serves as a central resource to help military families navigate issues with children, deployments, education, and other challenges they face.

MyMilitaryLife offers personalized to-do lists and access to myriad resources to achieve goals. Keep reading →

The future of the federal statistical system in an era of open government data was the subject of the recent Association of Public Data Users Conference (APDU). It gave me the unique opportunity to pose three questions about the ironic state of federal statistics to an august panel of experts.

The panel included: Connie Citro, Director of the Committee on National Statistics, National Academy of Science; Robert Groves, Director, US Census Bureau (until recently when he became the Provost at George Washington University, that allowed him to speak freely as you will see below); and Shirin Ahmed, Assistant Director for Economic Programs, US Census Bureau.


My three questions were:

Q: Why, when the current administration has spoken so much about data, hasn’t the federal statistical community leadership (e.g. OMB Chief Statistician Kathy Wallman) spoken up?

Answer: Because she is only an SES (Senior Executive Service member) and not a political appointee. (Connie Citro)

Q: Why didn’t a data agency like the Census Bureau get the job of hosting and managing Data.gov?

Answer: It fell victim to (former federal CIO) Vivek Kundra’s federal IT program and federal IT and statistics live in two different worlds. (Robert Groves)

Q. Why doesn’t the federal statistical community maintain FedStats.gov when my analyses shows that it still has better quality data and metadata than Data.gov does?

Answer: The current administration and political candidates are not talking about statistics and there needs to be a statafacts web site for this. (Robert Groves)

It is important to understand both the history of federal statistical data and the perception that statisticians have of open government data to understand the different worlds of the federal IT, Data.gov and the federal statistical communities FedStats.gov

I thought Connie Citro expressed it best with the title of her presentation: “The Federal Statistical System – A Crown Jewel, But Its History Makes It Harder to Meet Today’s Challenges.”

Shirin Ahmed articulated one of the key problems: There needs to be a legal basis for statistical agencies to share data and passage of the Data Synchronization Proposal by Congress will help.<

Then, Census Historian Margo Anderson, co-author of Encyclopedia of the US Census asked: Haven’t We Been Here Before? Historical Perspectives on the Federal Statistical System.

Anderson described the evolution from our basic founding principles to know who we are, to how are these data critical for job creation, poverty alleviation, and policy making. She described how the federal statistical system has periodically attempted to integrate administrative and operational records into the statistical system and how open data proposals before us now are different from the past.

Open data includes operational and administrative data used now by public agencies for statistical purposes. It’s changing the world of data users and producers alike.

Statisticians refer to their data as design data (data from survey’s designed to capture data that can answer questions with statistics with confidence levels) and open data as data that just turns up and becomes “big data” because it has no end, which a survey does, like the every 10 year census that lasts several months and then is done until ten years later.

So in answer to the question about bringing these different worlds of data together: Yes we have been there before, but it is definitely different from the past and in the words of Margo Anderson: “it is both brash and exciting.” Keep reading →


The Partnership for Public Service honored the nine winners of this year’s Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals at a Washington, D.C. gala Thursday evening.

This video features physicist Jacob Taylor of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, winner of the Call to Service medal for his work pioneering scientific discoveries that could lead to significant advances in health care, communications, computing and technology. Keep reading →

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