GovTechNerd

DC Fires Contractor For Botching $12 Million Data System

2009-09-29T13:04:03Z

Interesting. The fact that this happens all over leads me to believe the entire development model is wrong. The world has changed, but enterprise systems vendors haven't. Rapid development, prototyping, and iteration might save projects like these.

The District has fired the contractor hired to build a $12 million data repository for critical information about D.C. schools, citing missed deadlines, software defects and failure to make available the personnel it promised, officials said Monday.

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) and State Superintendent of Education Kerri L. Briggs announced the dismissal of Williams, Adley & Co. , an accounting and management consulting firm, at a late afternoon news conference. The firm was awarded a contract early last year to create the Statewide Longitudinal Data Warehouse, which was to compile information about student academic growth, teacher quality and graduation rates and make it available to policymakers and parents. Much of the data is scattered among government agencies, public charter schools and the D.C. public school system.

And by the by... why does DC have a "State Superintendent of Education" and a schools chancellor?

Twitter Has No Plans to Move Into Enterprise Messaging

2009-09-28T12:54:55Z

Interesting. There are a few people playing in this space, but I wonder, do you see the value in a Twitter-like application within the enterprise?

One thing I learned on Day 1 of The Twitter Conference: Twitter has no plans to adapt its platform for the corporate market. It turns out that the financial promise of secure, business-friendly micro-blogging would only get in the way of the altruistic Twitter's larger goals.

"There's still so much to do on the broader consumer-facing product," Twitter's lead developer, Alex Payne, told me. "The founders are interested in enabling a big, global conversation."

It's hard not to admire sticking to one's ideals, but once the VC funds run out, the lack of a revenue-generation plan is going to force Twitter's hands. Nonetheless, for the time being, Twitter is content to let others do the corporate bidding.

User Centered Design for Government Websites

2009-09-22T14:29:13Z

Kath Straub's presentation is a *fantastic* introduction to user centered design on government websites. Check it out:

Webmanager University New Media Talks: User Centered Design

View more documents from kath straub.

Are Government Sites Task-based or News-based?

2009-09-21T12:14:14Z

Candi says they should be mostly focused on citizen tasks. I agree that tasks are important, but I think news can be, too. What is probably unimportant is news about the agency head, though that's what public affairs and media staff want to focus on.

Last week, I was talking to a friend who is a private sector usability specialist. I asked her if, like me, she is noticing that some agency websites seem to be slipping backwards, featuring agency news rather than top citizen tasks on their home pages. She said that, indeed, she and her colleagues are observing the same thing. It appears that agency public affairs staffs are really getting into websites (and web management) - which is a good thing - but they haven't yet learned this truth: the public comes to government websites to do things - perform tasks - not read the news. They go to newspaper sites for that...

Putting news and press releases as the featured items at the top of government websites shouts, "me, me, me" - not "you, you, you." It is not furthering transparency - it's obscuring service and engagement. In several cases, I've seen agency news (including photos of agency officials) crowding out and pushing down links to what the public really wants - top tasks..those services that they pay taxes for. This is a step backward.

Keep It Simple, Governments!

2009-09-17T15:39:20Z

One of my biggest inspirations, Tom Steinberg, has a post up about governments trying to duplicate the fantastic services that mySociety built, but failing miserably.

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I'm really pleased to see government trying to build services that are useful to citizens. On the other, I'm disappointed that they're doing such a poor job of it, and that they're leaving user experience almost completely out of the mix. This is a great example of why I think classic enterprise service providers are in trouble.

Check out mySociety's FixMyStreet, which makes it dead simple to report a problem:

And now check out the local government's own solution, built in Java (I think?) and completely borked:

Which would you rather use?

Lessons for Government Websites: 4 Things Great Websites Do

2009-09-16T11:00:02Z

Gwynne (my always-favorite gov blogger!) took away four lessons from Time's 50 Best Websites list. They're great for government managers looking to make an impact:

Last week, Time published its Top 50 Websites for 2009, and there was nary a government site on the list.

The closest dot-gov came was #39, BabyNameWizard.com's NameVoyage, which uses Social Security Administration data to help parents find popular--and not so popular--names across the ages. But ssa.gov didn't make the list.

Looking at the sites that did "make it," Time's criteria for selecting Top Sites are clear. There are four main themes shared by Top Sites, and four lessons for government site owners who want to meet citizen and stakeholder needs.

Opening the Data Up Isn't Enough

2009-09-15T21:48:03Z

Brian Drake has some interesting commentary on last week's Gov 2.0 Summit:

There were a few areas where I felt the conference just didn't quite hit the mark. First was the whole "Government as a Platform" theme. I found myself agreeing more and more with Andrea DiMaio on the idea that government is quite the opposite. At several points during the conference I just felt that the analogy was exactly a fit. I don't think this issue was as damaging as I feared. I was glad to see the volume on this dial tone turned down.
The second issue I had was with the focus on citizen participation. Clearly the focus of the Summit was on showing government executives the value of citizen developers. "Just open the data up!" was the transmission and our receivers were on. I felt like this focus often left out those of us working inside of government and do not have a way/responsibility/reason to liberate data.

He's right on the mark here - there's a huge sector of government practitioners who are interested in advancing Government 2.0, but who need actionable information and business cases to take to their bosses. Right?

K-12s: Why Are You Still Maintianing Those Ugly Mail Servers?

2009-09-15T11:30:00Z

Now that Google is offering free messaging with Postini security for FREE to all K-12 school districts, why are you maintaining those ugly legacy mail servers?

Google Message Security - powered by Postini - provides the capability for administrators to limit messages based on who they are from, where they are going, or the content they contain. Message rules can be applied to groups of users, allowing customization for different user sets (like younger students, older students, and teachers).

Crisis Communications: H1N1 in New York City's Public Schools

2009-09-08T13:00:00Z

What Happened

In mid-May, New York City's Department of Health (DOH) realized that the H1N1 (swine) flu was spreading in distinct pockets throughout the City, particularly through children, the afflicted, and the elderly. At the Department of Education, we knew that our 1,500+ schools could be a key transmission point for the flu, and we were already seeing higher-than-normal absence rates at selected schools whose geography correlated with DOH's data.

On the advice of DOH, it became clear that we'd have to close select schools in order to prevent the spread of disease. As importantly, we had to be clear about why were closing particular schools, why others would stay open, and we had to reassure parents and the public that we were taking the right course of action. It's easy for situations that affect the public health, like H1N1, to quickly spiral into panic.

There aren't many templates for this sort of thing - public health crises don't happen that much anymore in the United States. We've got a decent public health system that keeps the transmission of communicable diseases and the ill effects of them to a minimum. New York City itself is larger than all but the most populous 12 states, and our public school system alone is larger than the 8 least populous states with 1.1 million students.

What We Did

From the online communications perspective, the first thing we did was decide to make clear that our website should be considered the most reliable source of information. It's easy for the media to twist a story and we knew it was critical for the public to know that the Departments of Health and Education, along with Mayor Bloomberg's office, were the *only* official sources of information.

I placed a key line at the top of our website that doesn't sound important, but is - "This page will always contain the most updated information available." Citizens are used to the government moving a bit slow, and they rely heavily on the media. I wanted to set the expectation from the first moment that our website was a canonical source of information.

Second, we began listing the "last updated" time on both our homepage (which gets 9+ million page views per month) and our H1N1 "canonical information" page. There were points where we were updating these pages several times a day and when school closing decisions were happening on a rolling basis, so it was important for everyone to realize that we were updating very frequently.

We didn't try to reinvent the wheel - we didn't have the time, expertise, or desire to be the Health Department - so we asked them to keep their URLs stable and we linked out to their key FAQs about public and personal health related to H1N1.

Finally, I dedicated a large portion of my time to fielding online inquiries from concerned parents and citizens. These came in through our Twitter account and especially our Facebook page - parents wanted to know why particular schools were not closing, why others were, and how to protect their families. I did my best to get them information specific to their local community; with over 1,500 schools, the answers could be vastly different for each parent.

I also used Twitter and Facebook to "correct the record" anytime discussions veered away from the facts. Realistically, that's one of the biggest fears of government leaders when engaging online, so the value of active engagement and participation cannot be overstated.

What We Learned

So what did we learn about government communications in a crisis? A few key things:

People rely on the web. Traffic to our H1N1 pages spiked and rose each day as we were dealing with H1N1. People were visiting multiple times a day and wanted the latest information.
Keep it simple and set expectations. Once people knew to expect the most up-to-date information from official NYC.gov sites, it was clear that the sensationalist feedback loop the media uses was damaged.
Engage, don't just release. When people have questions, provide answers. It's not just about press releases and blanket statements; people can draw lessons from specific information you provide. For instance, if I explained to one parent why we didn't close a particular school, other parents understood better the broad criteria that had already been explained.
Your community reinforces itself. If you're not there, someone else takes control. If we had not engaged on H1N1, I suspect that the public's reaction would have been more severe. Clearly we would have done *something*, but it was about taking measured but meaningful steps - doing the *right* something - that helped everyone keep their wits about them and kept a limited physical outbreak from becoming a psychological crisis.

What about you? Have you been in the middle of a public crisis where online communications played a key role?

Greg Palmer is the former Director of Web Communications for the New York City Department of Education. He is now the chief user experience advocate at Keystone UX and an independent writer.

VA Scraps 45 IT Projects After Dashboard Evaluation

2009-08-31T17:31:15Z

It's tough to pull the plug, even though IT professionals know that somewhere between 50-70% of all IT projects ultimately fail. That's a lot of wasted money, time, and effort. But declaring failure is not always an acceptable part of the culture. So we modify, tweak, fail, and declare success. It's terrible.

But in prepping to release data to the federal IT spending dashboard, the Department of Veterans Affairs scrapped or put on hold 45 IT projects that had gone off track. Gwynne (my new fav!) has the story:

This project is a tough one for agency CIO's. They are required to very publicly report and evaluate their projects. Many of them are responsible for projects that they didn't approve and in some cases went sour before their arrival. But it's important to begin to get an honest handle on IT projects and expenditures. And it's even more important to do something about them.

Quick and Effective Search Engine Optimization

2009-08-28T13:28:58Z

Gwynne of on-dot-gov has some great tips for quick and effective search optimization. Go for it!

2. Use normal words. Speaking of not knowing, search engines can't translate your arcane, governmentese into something findable. Especially when you are using your own special language. You may love your acronyms, but the uninitiated will not have a clue. No clue means they can't find you...

4. Select some pages and make changes. Identify a few terms and their pages you want to drive people to. Update the page title, headers and copy with the normal words. Check your progress by searching on these terms on Google, Bing, YAHOO, Ask. The results are easy to see....

Read the rest!

Thoughtful Critique of Tim O'Reilly's Vision for Gov 2.0

2009-08-27T12:48:31Z

Very interesting critique on The Breaking Time:

The problem here is that for better and worse, O'Reilly is seeing government as most of us do, from his own perspective. Thus a technophile's faith in gadgetry and a mogul's love of private enterprise are a given. Add those two together, with government acting as a mere foundation, and you seem to have the essence of "government as platform."

While he no doubt is being honestly altruistic here, it's telling that this form of government would be really, really beneficial to technologist entrepreneurs: in short, people like him.

That's a flaw, and a nasty one. For one thing, it's hard to see how a "government as platform" would handle issues of power, violence and class; the most pressing for any society.

Also, as Tim is wont to do (because he's thoughtful and appreciates discussion), O'Reilly responds.

Government Use of Cookies Should Be Limited, Says NYTimes

2009-08-25T12:18:21Z

From this morning's New York Times:

The Office of Management and Budget is developing the new rules. Officials say they recognize that people must be told that their use of Web sites is being tracked -- and be given a chance to opt out. More is needed. The government should commit to displaying such notices prominently on all Web pages -- and to making it easy for users to choose not to be tracked.
It must promise that tracking data will be used only for the purpose it was collected for: if someone orders a pamphlet on living with cancer, it should not end up in a general database. Information should be purged regularly and as quickly as possible. These rules must apply to third parties that operate on government sites.
The Obama administration is working to better harness the power of the Internet to deliver government services. That is good. But it needs to be mindful that people should be able to get help and be assured that their privacy is being vigilantly protected.

What do you think? Cookies certainly have the potential to be harmful, but they're usually innocuous...right?

MTA - Transit Schedules Are Protected by Copyright (Bollocks!)

2009-08-24T12:55:58Z

Chris really shouldn't owe the MTA anything, "licensing agreement" or not. MTA shouldn't be able to enter into a licensing agreement for data that is 1) public and 2) compiled at taxpayer expense.

New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority has sent a take down notice to Greenwich man Chris Schoenfeld for using Metropolitan Transportation Authority schedules to power his StationStops iPhone application. The popular blogger created an $2.99 application that gives commuters access to MTA train and bus schedules. He received a DMCA last Friday to remove the application from the app store The MTA claims that its scheduling information is copyrighted intellectual property. You read that right. Public train schedules are being treated as copyrighted material.

In an interview with the Stamford Advocate Schoenfeld said, "The copyright law is very clear that you cannot copyright facts and tables of data. A train schedule itself might be considered intellectual property, but the data itself has nothing artistic about it." Schoenfeld believes the DMCA came as a result of him delaying licensing negotiations. The blogger was expected to pay the MTA 10% of his app profits and $5000 in advance royalties.

Ten Things You Should Know About Content Strategy

2009-08-18T19:03:33Z

Excellent deck from Melissa Rach of Brain Traffic on the importance of content strategy.

View more presentations from mrsruble.