Knowledge Management

Parsing Obama’s Town Hall Tweets

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Last week, President Barack Obama kicked off his first Twitter town hall with – what else? – a tweet.


“At 1:53 PM Today (July 12), from the White House: I am going to make history here as the first President to live tweet,” he wrote.

And then he sent another tweet to get the conversation really going: “Today 2:07 PM Obama says: in order to reduce the deficit, what costs would you cut and what investments would you keep – both.”

Before it ended about an hour later, a number of well-known tweeters (e.g. House Speaker John Boehner) and lots of lesser known folks had tweeted hoping to catch the President’s attention and get a personal response to their question or comment.


While lots of commentary has already and will be written about this historic event, I thought I could provide something different (wearing my data scientist/data journalist hat) and parse his tweets, and those of previous town halls, if I could just recover the tweet steam. I used Searchtastic to retrieved 346 Tweets for visualization. Keep reading →

 /  Published July 21, 2011 at 12:00 PM

National Archives Heads Into The Digital Age Despite Cost Warnings

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The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is forging ahead with its plans to digitize billions of documents, a project that will take years to complete and that already has faced criticism over out-of-control costs.

At the helm of this digital effort is Pamela Wright, the chief Digital Access Strategist for the archives. She’s been in this job for just a year, overseeing NARA’s internal and external web pages, social media efforts and Online Public Access (OPA) prototype, the public face of its electronic records archives. Keep reading →

 /  Published July 13, 2011 at 8:02 PM

Seven Management Imperatives: #4 Use Real-Time Performance Data

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The fourth in a series of “Seven Management Imperatives” for government leaders, based on the insights provided by some 300 senior government officials and more than 300 research reports, courtesy of IBM Center of The Business of Government.

In the coming years, government executives will need to utilize real-time information for decision-making and accountability. Specifically, they must (1) Collect better data; (2) Conduct better analysis; (3) Make better decisions; and (4) Take smarter action. Keep reading →

 /  Published July 13, 2011 at 6:30 AM

Five Tips for Creating a Digital Archive

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Pamela Wright, the chief Digital Access Strategist at the National Archives and Records Administration, says every agency can create a digital archive that is easily accessible to the public.

The payoff is enormous: “As we continue to work toward increasing access to NARA’s records online, our goal is to delight online users with a rich website that is easy to use,” Wright said. Keep reading →

 /  Published July 12, 2011 at 8:00 PM
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