E-mail, the World Wide Web, social media, and the cloud have led to outdated privacy laws that have left federal officials perplexed about how to collect and use information about citizens, even those suspected of crimes.
The Government Accountability Office’s latest of several reports on the issue recommends Congress act to update federal law to align with modern technologies. Keep reading →
Are you sure the agency Facebook, YouTube or Twitter account you follow is legit? How do you know it’s an official government account?
Before now, you couldn’t. But now through the efforts of the General Services Administration’s new Social Media Registry you can. Keep reading →
What makes today’s young professionals different than previous generations?For the past decade at least, Americans have been subject to variations of “40 is the new 30.” A mantra that is supposed to allow older people to do the things that had previously been relegated to younger people, either because their bodies were more capable, or society looked at those activities as within the province of youth. Keep reading →
South by Southwest (SXSW, or just SX for initiates) is crowdsourcing their panel selection for 2013, and as in prior years, there is a host of Gov 2.0-related offerings. Of the 3,123 proposals this year, 82 have been tagged as “Government or Citizen Engagement.”
Those tagged include presentations on law, coding, public participation, open government/innovation, and news from the nexus of politics, technology, and social media. Keep reading →
A recent interesting study by the Sunlight Foundation states that Twitter “has become an important tool for social revolutions and civilian mobilization” worldwide. It also says that Twitter has been “embraced” by the U.S. Government, notably the U.S. State Department through its embassies.
The Sunlight study suggests that embassy use of Twitter is “largely an organic process, and one that has outpaced headquarters.” I would say that throughout the U.S. Government, use of new media is an organic process, just as the move to the web was such a process in the last decade. Keep reading →
A comprehensive survey released today reveals the large and growing impact of social media on law enforcement in criminal investigations.
The survey, released by LexisNexis® Risk Solutions, revealed that currently four out of five respondents use various social media platforms to assist in investigations and found agencies serving smaller populations and with fewer sworn personnel (<50) use social media more, while state agencies tend to use it less (71%) than local (82%) and federal (81%) agencies. Keep reading →
Lately it seems that everyone is talking about “big data,” and for good reason – the potential to gain greater insight into the way decisions are made has implications throughout businesses, governments and societies the world over. Capitol Hill just took a deep dive into the big data pool, to look at what this relatively new concept really means and how we can leverage it to address the greatest challenges of our day.
Last week, IBM joined government leaders on Capitol Hill to discuss how we can apply new technologies – called analytics – to big data so that we make critical decisions to improve and better the lives of the citizens we serve. Keep reading →
Social media’s impact on building culture in the workplace is debatable, according to Deloitte’s new “Core Values and Beliefs” survey conducted online by Harris Interactive. Keep reading →
The Department of Health and Human Services is the latest federal agency to tap the creativity of the marketplace by running a contest to find the best products for their emergency preparedness apps.
HHS used a tool that is increasingly being relied upon by agencies to find the best mobile solutions, get the work done cheaply and make a device available to the public quickly. Keep reading →
CTC recently released a cool analysis of the Osama bin Laden letters by Recorded Future. Basically, they took the raw documents and ran them through a unique instance of Recorded Future so that they could use all of their visualization tools against the 175 pages of letters that were released. Keep reading →