Blog
August 31, 2006
Dreaming of an English-Based Object Oriented Language
MIT’s media lab has created “Metaphor”, a facinating tool that parses
standard English into a programmatic pseudo-code. Take a look at: http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2005/032305/Tool_turns_English_to_code_032305.html. Metaphor seems very cool, but to deal with the ambiguities of its English parser, it ends up with non-working pseudo-code. They…
August 29, 2006
Quick File Thunderbird extension
I have a lot of folders in my Thunderbird install, to track projects, people, companies, and so on. When I receive mail, most of it is filtered out into the appropriate folders but that leaves plenty of others that are not caught by…
August 21, 2006
GAO report panel discussion — got questions?
The National Grants Partnership is planning to host a panel discussion about the GAO’s last report about grants streamlining on September 12th. It looks like I will be moderating the panel, so if you’ve got a question that you’d like addressed to some…
US slips in e‑gov rankings
As reported on GovExec’s Fedblog:
U.S. Leapfrogged in E‑Gov Rankings The United States government has slipped a spot in the world-wide rankings for electronic government compiled by Brown University’s Taubman Center for Public Policy. Researchers analyzed nearly 200 countries to come…
GSA to study agencies’ service to citizens
While its focus will be on call centers, e‑mail responses, and web sites, it’s still good to see the GSA studying how well agencies are servicing citizen’s information needs. The first iteration of FirstGov was an amalgamation of sites but…
August 12, 2006
OMB seeks proof of e‑gov cost savings
Following Congress’s action to reduce funding for e‑gov, OMB is now asking for agencies to identify e‑gov costs and savings. This is going to put more pressure on folks in CIO offices to gather yet more data. It’s data that…
August 9, 2006
Measuring government ROI
InfoWorld reports that SAP executives have said that “struggle to define and measure the economic, social and political returns of government-funded technology programs”. At the root of this, of course, is the desire of vendors like SAP to help government…
August 3, 2006
2007 Excellence.Gov Awards topic: Leveraging Technology to Enhance Collaboration
Every year the Excellence.Gov Awards are held to highlight the very best government IT projects, and I’m the chair this year! The awards receive significant publicity every year, including the annual award ceremony, which is one of the Industry Advisory…
S.2590 amended
The THOMAS site hasn’t been updated yet but here’s the amended version of S.2590. The revisions are as follows:
Enactment date delayed from beginning of 2007 to beginning of 2008;
Requirement for a 10-year archive of data has been removed;
Individual…
August 2, 2006
PMA scores improve for e‑gov
GovExec reports today that agencies are generally improving their e‑gov scores against the President’s Management Agenda. The scorecard shows that:
For progress of implementation:
Interior, Justice, DOT, VA, SBA, and SSA are all scored red (“unsatisfactory”)
Defense, EPA, DHS, Treasury,…