Socialfeds

GSA is Looking for Federal Mobile Applications

Sara — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:49:30 +0000

GSA is collecting data about which federal agencies have mobile applications — apps that are specifically designed to be accessed via an iPhone or other mobile device.

Examples could include: accessing real-time weather data and maps, looking up product recalls with a barcode #, locating a nearby government facility, getting evaluation ratings about a health care professional, etc. (As one example, see NASA: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/iphone/spaceimages/).

They are looking for apps that have already developed, as well as those that are under development and may be available in the next several weeks.

GSA has put together a very simple survey (just a few Qs) to make it easier for you to share what you have, and later share it with everyone:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/92DYQWP

At this time, they only need to collect data on FEDERAL apps. But if you’re a state or local agency and have something great to share, feel free to share it as well.

They do have quick turnaround to collect the data, so please respond no later than COB this Wednesday, March 3.

This is a great opportunity to GSA about new, innovative tools you’ve created that make it easier for people to access key government information and services — no matter where they’re located.

Getting Big Things Done in Government

Sara — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:02:52 +0000

The eagerly anticipated new book from Bill Eggers (director for Deloitte Research) and co-author John O’Leary (Research Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School) titled “If We Could Put a Man on the Moon…Getting Big Things Done in Govt,” is being launched in a 2-hour event tomorrow at the Grand Hyatt, DC.

Bill and John worked together with a team of more than 70 graduate students to examine 75 major public initiatives - both great successes and monumental failures. They looked for patterns and sought to ID universal characteristics of large public undertakings and found that nearly all public sector initiatives follow a predictable path and face a set of common challenges. From this they were able to ID a series of “traps” that define most failures and point to why some signature government initiatives succeed where others fail. The result is basically a guide to making government work better.

Getting Big Things Done in Government
Book launch: Wednesday, November 18^th, 2009 from 6p - 8p
Bloggers roundtable 4:30p - 5:30p
Register at http://www.govexec.com/specialevent/

Additional Resources:

Andrew Krzmarzick, over at GovLoop, interviewed Mr. Eggers to gain more insight on the inspiration for the book and target audience. Here the interview here.

And be sure to RSVP for tomorrow’s event on GovLoop.

More about the book, including press coverage, reviews and a great chapter-by-chapter guide.

Find the book at Harvard Business Publishing.

Hear a podcast interview with Eggers.

Updating Socialfeds - What do you want to see?

Sara — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:49:10 +0000

I’ve made a few updates to Socialfeds that I’ve been meaning to do for a while. These include adding the videos from the Gov 2.0 Expo and Summit 2009 and I also added GovFresh to the lineup. What do you think?
Tell me what you like/dislike/want added!

USDA to Mix Social Media into Online Training

Sara — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 05:35:00 +0000

One of the leading online training programs in the federal sector has an interesting idea to improve the completion rate and overall quality of its online courses. The USDA’s AgLearn program has plans to install social media and “Facebook-style” aspects to their training program in order to provide a more traditional classroom structure to the emerging world of online training. Some of these aspects include blogs, wikis, groups, and comment/user tracking.

OhMyGov recently spoke with Stanley Gray, the USDA’s director of e-training, about this new idea and how it is coming along:

OMG: For those who aren’t familiar with AgLearn, can you give a little background about it, what it does, who uses it, and for what purposes?

Gray: AgLearn is a learning management system. We have about 130,000 users. This includes all of USDA’s employees, a number of partners that are closely affiliated with the USDA, and basically people who work alongside USDA employees.

We put a lot of emphasis on the online training aspect. Our online training handles a lot compliance training, mission-related training, and discretionary training. We have over 5,000 online courses and 12,000 online books from a variety of vendors that offer “off the shelf” type training.

What kinds of social media aspects are you planning to add?

Our strategy is kind of coming together in pieces, as the technology is available. We expect at the beginning of the year, our vendors will be able to connect users who read common books to share their comments. We also hope to incorporate “Facebook-style” qualities where you can see a profile picture, follow other users and their comments, and join groups. We want to build knowledge-transfer model.

We are also going through an upgrade with our learning-management system vendor. They are incorporating an open-source system called Lifeway that has blog and wiki capability in itself.

Incorporating social media into a training program, where did the idea come from?

One of the main issues with online training involves a lack of structure. When you go to a classroom you have people who you are interacting with on a peer level. That leads to some discipline with completing the course. When you are out in Nebraska in a small office of USDA only you know you are taking the course and there isn’t that same type of feedback and structure that there is with an online course. People don’t have the same type of incentive to finish courses and we see that in our numbers.

How far along are you in the process of updating the AgLearn system to incorporate these new aspects?

We are working as we speak on the technology rollout. There are some prerequisites we have to get ready first. Probably in the spring, we will have the initial rollout.

What are some of the goals of this program?

The knowledge-transfer aspect is sort of the holy grail. Training is 20 percent formal in the classroom and 80 percent is outside of that. We want to connect people up so they are exchanging knowledge in that knowledge-transfer model I talked about earlier.

What are the costs of incorporating this program to your department?

We track this pretty well. Our learning management system is regarded as the leading one in the federal sector. Our payback or return on investment was over 22 million dollars, which is over five times what it takes to operate and we are at nowhere near capacity. We could train a lot more with the same amount of money invested.

Online training, as a whole, is much more cost-effective. It is a fraction of the costs of traditional instructor-led training.

Is social media the only way that you feel you can enhance online training or do you have other plans for the future?

We are bringing in more popular content like Rosetta Stone. And we are also reaching out to structure with webinars where people might take an online training course and then have an opportunity to ask questions to an online instructor.

The AgLearn website is http://www.aglearn.usda.gov

Gov Blogger Position Open at CPSC

Sara — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:58:57 +0000

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) recently posted a job announcement for a Public Affairs Specialist focusing in Social Media. The person in this position will serve as the Media Coordinator and will be responsible for creating blogs and other social media content for the CPSC. The salary starts at $86k with a duty location of Bethesda, MD. Any US citizen can apply. The deadline is Oct. 20th. See the full announcement on USA Jobs for more information.

The CPSC has already gotten its feet wet in the new media arena with presences on Twitter, Flickr, and Youtube.

Potomac Forum Gov 2.0 Roundup

Sara — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 12:29:43 +0000

Last week (Aug. 26-27,2009) the Potomac Forum held a symposium on social networking tools and new media in the government. Many great Gov 2.0 project were showcased here including many projects on the White House’s Open Government Innovations Gallery. Highlights include presentations on OMB’s Max Wiki, Diplopedia from the Dept. of State, NASA’s Spacebook, and the TSA Idea Factory.

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend. Luckily, there was some great coverage around the web on this event (including video!). I’ve pulled together some great resources here for anyone else who was unable to attend or just wants a recap.

Full agenda
Video from C-SPAN (Aug. 26)
Liveblogging - Done by Robin Paoli on Govloop
Tweets - Archive of #pfgov tweets on Twapper Keeper, courtesy of @sjsanford

Federal Agreements with Social Media Providers Released

Sara — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:14:03 +0000

: Image via CrunchBase

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request in April by the Electronic Information Privacy Center (EPIC), the GSA has released the “Web 2.0 agreements” that were generated by the agency on behalf of the federal government with many social media providers in March of 2009. The release includes contracts with Blip.tv, Blist, YouTube, Flickr, and MySpace and the amendments to the Facebook, Slideshare, Vimeo, and AddThis Terms of Service. It seems that while these agreements may resolve legal concerns associated with many standard terms and conditions that pose problems for agencies, such as liability limits, endorsements and freedom of information, the contracts with the GSA consistently omit statements concerning Web 2.0 service providers’ obligations to protect privacy.

Related Post: Government Social Media Provider Update

Government Social Media Service Provider Update

Sara — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:57:15 +0000

In May of this year, the U.S. General Services Administration negotiated Terms Of Service (TOS) with several big social media providers. The goal was to arrive at a TOS federal agencies would be comfortable enough with to sign so each agency – and provider - would be spared from negotiating separate TOS agreements. The White House and GSA have now also negotiated Terms of Service agreements with nine additional social media providers:

Cooliris (video and picture browsing)
Dipity (multimedia timelines)
FriendFeed (social networking aggregator)
IdeaScale (voting and feedback)
MixedInk (collaborative writing)
Scribd (social publishing)
TubeMogul (video analytics and distribution)
TwitVid (video sharing)
Wikispaces (collaboration)

This brings the total number of agreements to 19, including previous agreements with AddThis, blip.tv, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Slideshare, Socrata (formerly Blist), Twitter, Vimeo, and YouTube.

You can read more about the Federal TOS agreements on Webcontent.gov.

Boston Announces First iPhone App for City Complaints

Sara — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:16:53 +0000

Boston city officials will soon debut the cities first official iPhone application, which will allow residents to snap photos of neighborhood nuisances - nasty potholes, graffiti-stained walls, blown street lights - and e-mail them to City Hall to be fixed.

City officials say the application, dubbed Citizen Connect, is the first of its kind in the nation. It was designed as an extension of the city’s 24-hour complaint hotline for the younger set, making the filing of complaints quicker and easier for iPhone users.

The application, which will be free to download from Apple, will allow residents to use the global positioning system function on their iPhones to pinpoint the precise location of the problem for City Hall. After submitting a complaint, users will get a tracking number, so they can pester city officials if the problem persists.

In the past, residents have grumbled that their complaints disappeared into a bureaucratic black hole. Some said they had to call the city hotline repeatedly to get results. A new computer system Menino installed last fall has quickened response times.

The iPhone initiative is part of a push to make City Hall younger, hipper, and generally more user-friendly, a campaign that Menino has intensified during the mayor’s race.

The application was largely the brainchild of Nigel Jacob, a 36-year-old mayoral aide who totes a silver MacBook covered in bumper stickers and holds the exalted title senior adviser for emerging technology.

City officials say they expect to pay Connected Bits, the New Hampshire firm that designed the software, about $25,000 for technical support this year, and then review whether the cost is worth it.

[Read More]

Government IT Dashboard Debuts

Sara — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:15:27 +0000

http://it.usaspending.gov/

Tuesday at the Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York, Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra and White House Director of New Media Macon Phillips announced the launch of the new government IT Dashboard (beta of course) to provide an online window into the details of Federal information technology investments and provides citizens with the ability to track the progress of investments over time.

Filled with news, statistics, and charts, the dashboard reveals IT spending across all the major federal agencies. Select any agency, and you can see its budget and spending pattern. For example, according to the site, the Department of Defense chews up the most tax dollars, with a 2009 IT budget of $33 billion.

An interactive data feed page lets you filter specific types of data by IT project, category, and department to see a spending snapshot and then export the data as a CSV file or RSS feed. While there is a thick smog of government-ease within this feature, the ability to export the data and create even more usable mashups is very promising.

I am very excited about the new Dashboard, however, I think the Whitehouse should take a step back from creating fancy new websites to evaluate and improve (or decommission) similar sites already out there. Late last year, the Visualization to Understand Expenditures in Information Technology (VUE-IT) site was debuted by the Whitehouse which basically gives the same info that the IT Dashboard has suddenly made “more transparent”.

The goal of VUE-IT is to improve the understanding of the annual Federal Government Information Technology investments made through the President’s Budget (sound familiar?). VUE-IT organizes IT investments by agency and bureau, as well as by the Federal Enterprise Architecture’s (FEA) service groupings; Service to Citizens, Support Delivery of Services to Citizens, Management of Government Resources, and Service Types and Components. While VUE-IT doesn’t have all the pretty pie charts and visualizations as the new Dashboard, it kinda makes more sense.

Hopefully both VUE-IT and the new IT Dashboard will contribute to the accountability that we’ve all been looking for in agencies to create a substantial change to how IT programs are developed and managed before they start spending the money.

New dashboard shows where federal IT tax dollars go

Whitehouse Preparing Data.gov 2.0

Launching in Beta - A Look at PdF ‘09, Day 2