The Department of Labor has emerged as a leader in transforming crucial information buried in online PDF files or impenetrable government websites into new applications that widely distribute government data. Keep reading →
mobile apps
Danny Chapman was selected as a Presidential Innovation Fellow for Project MyGov as part of the new White House Presidential Innovation Fellows program.
The purpose of Project MyGov is to reimagine how citizens interact with government through an experience designed around their needs rather than a confusing and fragmented bureaucracy.
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This is one in a series introducing 18 Fellows working on five initiatives that are part of the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows program.
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Chapman is passionate about web standards, responsive design, and creating well- crafted digital experiences that connect users to content. He most recently served as a Creative Director for eGovernment provider NIC. In that capacity, he led the transformation of RI.gov, Rhode Island’s official government web portal, into a nationally- recognized, award-winning state government web presence.
Recent awards include an Interactive Media Award 2012 (Best in Class in Government) and a MobileWebAward (Best Government Mobile Application,). His creation of a statewide design platform for Hawaii.gov will be unveiled in the coming months. Originally from the United Kingdom, Chapman graduated from Hamilton College with a BA in Art History and has used this broad understanding of art, design, and visual culture to inform his aesthetic sensibility ever since. He lives in Riverside, RI, with his wife and two children.
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What if you could call your city public works department, located about 45 minutes from your home, request a recycling sticker, and have a city worker show up at your door 18 minutes later? That’s the power of Boston’s new City Worker App.
Piloted last year, the new mobile app integrates seamlessly with the city’s existing 311 system for non-emergency information calls and service requests. It takes all of the service requests made by citizens for potholes, graffiti, streetlight outages, and even recycling stickers, and routes them to the Android-based mobile device of the nearest work crew from the responsible department. Keep reading →
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is ready to debut a high-tech tool to provide quicker disaster relief should it be needed after Hurricane Isaac, expected to hit New Orleans on Wednesday.
Federal officials, working to avoid a repeat of the delayed post-Katrina aid, plan to use a new app to track disaster relief rather than a pen-and-paper process for people applying for help. Keep reading →
On May 1, 2010, when al-Qaeda sympathizer Faisal Shahzad attempted to detonate an improvised explosive device hidden in a parked car in the middle of New York’s Times Square, first responders had to rely on their knowledge of evacuation guidelines that for decades have only been accessible via bulky, hardcopy binders.
Although Shahzad’s bomb failed to detonate, the lessons from the response to that potentially deadly attack were not lost on the Department of Homeland Security’s Science & Technology Directorate (S&T). Keep reading →
Among other points, he announced an “aggressive and accelerated procurement for new EPA collaboration tools”: one month to advertise, one month to decide, and four months to implement, so it is ready by November. Malcolm deserves credit on a number of fronts for pushing these ideas forward and quickly.
But it also reminded of a point about government that I experienced many times during my 30-plus years of government service at EPA: namely, senior managers in government repeat work that has been done in the past either because they do not know about it or choose to ignore it and start from scratch again.
I asked him if he was also working on the two functions that I had found important in my experience with doing this, provisioning content and dealing with limited bandwidth, and he said they were.
But I know from my experience at EPA that those two things are not going to happen in a short period of time. It took me three years to prepare EPA’s best content in a collaboration tool that supports limited bandwidth use on both desktop and mobile devices.
In my government experience, the 90-9-1 rule applies… only 1% will really use (new tools) and be doers and evangelists.”
I would have also felt better about what Jackson announced if he had mentioned it supported and followed the standards outlined by Federal CIO Steve VanRoekel in his Building a Digital Government Strategy.
One can do these things from the top down: That is, respond to the need for collaboration tools for an agency that work on mobile devices, procure them and hope that the employees put their content in them.
Or one can work from the bottom up: Use what employees are already using to put their content in to collaborate with others and see if those tools will scale up and federate.
We have all seen organizations procure yet another set of collaboration tools, only to then have a massive migration problem with legacy content and users still continue to use their tools of choice. For example, mobile has evolved from “This is the only tool we offer” (e.g. BlackBerry) to now Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) (e.g. iPhones, iPads, etc.)
So what should Malcolm and others in his situation do?
First, I would go around asking and looking for what has already been done and ask the real productive people at EPA, who are collaborating with others inside and outside the agency, what they are using (at EPA or outside of EPA) or would use if they had permission, and encourage others at EPA to try those pockets of excellence first.
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The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is trying to do for the public what the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) did for veterans by building on the VA’s popular “Blue Button” application, allowing patients to get their medical records electronically on their mobile devices.
The “Blue Button” mashup challenge will be designed to bring “health information to the masses,” said Farzad Mostashari, MD, the national health information technology coordinator. It will allow anyone whose doctor keeps computerized records to get those records on mobile devices like phones, tablets and laptops. Keep reading →
The U.S. Census Bureau is putting real-time economic statistics into the hands of Americans via a new mobile application called “America’s Economy.”
The new application, released today, will provide constantly updated statistics on the U.S. economy, including monthly economic indicators, trends, along with a schedule of upcoming announcements, according to Census officials. Keep reading →
The proliferation of mobile devices and applications is creating unique communication network challenges for federal government institutions. With the surge of new smartphones and multimedia devices, CIOs and CTOs are dealing with growing demands by employees to deliver improved productivity and efficiency that mobile networks are continuing to provide.
The resulting task is monumental and multifaceted, including managing smartphones and other mobile devices, ensuring multi-carrier support, setting security parameters and prioritizing access control for all the mobile devices on their networks. Keep reading →
This is one in a regular series on the latest innovation in mobile apps and mobile technology in the federal government.
With more medical data reaching patients through mobile devices, the Department of Health and Human Services is ramping up its efforts to require that the information be encrypted or otherwise protected from prying. Keep reading →