From my research with government technical staff, I discovered that strictly speaking, there are not many issues that are truly “unknown.” Usually, the case is that the issue has at least has been experienced by government staff, but no best practice has clearly emerged. And then, sometimes it is not the issue that is unknown, [...]

Standing amidst the gilded geometries of the Netherland Plaza for the National Association of Government Webmasters (NAGW) 2011 conference held in Cincinnati, some vicarious nostalgia set in for halcyon days of bygone eras. But this French Art Deco plaza, constructed in 1931, was actually a relic of the Great Depression. And yet, here we are [...]

I feel like I just came back from a journey to the secret nerve center of local government IT: the 2011 national conference of NAGW, the National Association of Government Webmasters, held in Cincinnati, Ohio last week. There’s some wonderful stuff happening there — I’ll give you an example in a moment. I attended the conference together [...]

In the last weeks of 2010, we solidified our web presence by acquiring the “civiccommons.org” and “civiccommons.net” domain names, and we’d like to start off the New Year by thanking Countywide Community Forums for giving us those domains on very generous terms. Countywide Community Forums is actually an interesting Gov 2.0 effort itself. They provide [...]

We’ve been talking to government IT departments at many levels about how to use open technologies, and how to release their in-house code for other jurisdictions to use. In that process, we’ve made a couple of profound discoveries: Everyone would love to open up their code, as long as it doesn’t cost anything to do [...]