My perspective on the outlook for cyber initiatives is quite different heading into the New Year than in past years.
While there are always budgetary uncertainties and looming cuts in government IT spending, this year, we face an unprecedented financial uncertainty as our nation stands on the edge of a fiscal cliff. That will impact not only the resources we have to invest in technology, but how people work and live. 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 →
After two 20-something sisters lived through a tornado and its aftermath in their Massachusetts hometown last year, they vowed to transform a well-intentioned but unorganized disaster-recovery process.
The resulting online tool, recovers.org, is now helping local governments and nonprofits coordinate Hurricane Sandy relief efforts through a concept known as “community-powered” recovery. Keep reading →
For all the devastation it brought, Hurricane Sandy also showed how a cadre of Health and Human Services web sites have become a flexible and living conduit for crucial government information when public health and safety are at stake. Keep reading →
Our Video of the Week feature showcases a selected video each Friday that captures the essence of innovation, technology and new ideas happening in government today.
This week’s video and text courtesy of FEMA.
Keep reading →
This is one in a series of articles about innovation at the Department of Veterans Affairs and part of a larger series on innovation at agencies across the federal government.
A mobile app originally developed to aid veterans has been offered to mental health personnel helping Hurricane Sandy’s victims, an example of how innovation and technology within the federal government can have a broader reach than ever before. Keep reading →
Federal regulators say Hurricane Sandy knocked out a quarter of the cell towers in an area spreading across ten states, stretching from Virginia to Massachusetts. And the situation could get worse before it gets better, according to an Associated Press report.
Many cell towers that are still working are doing so with the help of generators and could run out of fuel before commercial power is restored, the Federal Communications Commission says.
Just how widely residents of the East Coast dependency on high speed mobile communications is illustrated in a map, developed as part of the FCC’s Eight Broadband Progress Report, released in June 2011. The map shows census block areas of the U.S. with access to mobile services of at least 3 Mbps download and 768 kbps upload (in dark green) and areas with or without services of at least 768 kbps download and 200 kbps upload (in orange.)
The landline phone network has held up better in the affected area, the FCC says, but about a quarter of cable customers are also without service
As FEMA, firemen, police and the National Guard wade into the devastation visited upon us by Hurricane Sandy, many of them are using maps and other information made available to them by intelligence agencies.
While intelligence analysts and their technical specialists usually spend their time targeting bad guys and helping troops plan to get them, some of them have gotten the rare and welcome chance to help their own countrymen at home several times since Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans. Keep reading →
The National Weather Service, FEMA, and other federal agencies have come along way in using the Internet and mobile applications to inform and interact with citizens during natural disasters.
The ability of agencies and other relief organizations to rally during a crisis, however, is frequently hamstrung by technical and organizational challenges that inevitably arise in the midst of the crises. Large volumes of traffic can overwhelm or crash websites. Key personnel may themselves be unable to access networks remotely due to the impact of disasters. And data sources can also get backlogged. Keep reading →