This is not a post-election think piece. Lord knows we have enough of those already. It is not a To-Do List for the Brokenhearted. It’s not an assessment of blame, a hope-in-a-dark-place mantra, or a rallying cry. This is just a statement of fact — a fact I believe sits at the heart of Tuesday’s election outcome — followed […]
Wired profiles former U.S. CTO Todd Park in an excellent piece that absolutely nails the issues with stagnation in federal tech: procurement and inertia. Park knows the problem is systemic—a mindset that locks federal IT into obsolete practices—“a lot of people in government are, like, suspended in amber,” he said to the crowd at Mozilla. […]
Maine was recently ranked 49th among US states for “quality and availability of broadband internet access.” At least we’re ahead of Montana. I thought this 20-page overview of the problem and 10 recommendations for addressing it (PDF) did a good job of cutting to the quick. It’s penned by the CEO of Biddeford-based GWI. Take […]
The movement to assess and improve the usability of federal government websites is small, vocal, and growing. GSA’s First Fridays program makes free usability testing available to federal agencies, and a wide range of agencies have undertaken their own regular assessments of their sites and applications. Slowly but surely, the archaic mindset that a .gov […]
Fascinating interview with telecommunications expert Susan Crawford on Bill Moyers’s show. The gist: public access to ubiquitous high-speed internet is being strangled by a lack of competition and oversight. A petition to support the appointment by the president of Susan Crawford as chair of the FCC is circulating now. After watching this video, you better […]
Our last crowdsourced endeavor was a real success — with dozens of people contributing over 80 examples of points of interaction between citizens and government — so why not push our luck and try another? With the election behind us, it’s time to focus on how government functions, and how that functioning can be improved […]
The more I’ve thought about Citizen Experience — with its goal of reconsidering and improving the experience citizens have when they interact with government — the more I find myself coming back to the same thought: we really need a list of all those points of interaction. This would include everywhere that public institutions and […]
For the last year or so, my efforts at work have been focused primarily on trying to improve the user experience for visitors to GAO.gov. We’ve undertaken a usability testing process and incorporated new, sound analytics into our decisionmaking. On every web project, we are in the room to ask what each new proposed element […]
Data: It’s for Yuppies and Hipsters. That’s the message I’m hearing lately from more than a few companies that deal in data. It seems like more often than not, the messaging around data is, frankly, elitist — based on an assumption that data is something for people of means. Because I’m a sucker for a good […]
…or, since it’s NYC, Subway Symphony? Either way, a very cool representation of a public transit system through color, motion, and music. Conductor: www.mta.me from Alexander Chen on Vimeo. Conductor (2011) by Alexander Chen. Video capture. View live at: mta.me Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s […]