Ever hear the news anchor or a reporter state at the end of their story: “If you’d like to know more about (story subject), please visit our Web site.”?  While I can appreciate the need to attract eyes to their web site to help sell advertisers, these news outlets may be providing a disservice to [...]

There are some great “year-end” blog posts and articles reviewing e-Gov, or government via the Internet.  This year, it is mostly about Gov 2.0 — stories or benchmarks for expanding collaborative technologies of Web 2.0 across the public sector.     All of these articles come from practitioners, intended for reading/discussion among other practitioners.  What’s missing? How [...]

Is the federal government up to the challenge of citizen engagement with the public on an individual basis?  Is it too much to expect an institution with an annual budget of three trillion dollars and as the nation’s largest employer with close to two million employees ready to go one-on-one with John or Jane Q. [...]

Florida Justice Summit brings together traditional methods and new technology to create and build an online community I had the pleasure to attend the first Florida Justice Summit on Monday/Tuesday (11/16-17) in Tampa.  The summit was hosted by the Collins Center for Public Policy.  The Collins Center is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that finds [...]

My idea is that it’s all about connectivity –the connection between government and its citizens, and the benefits that arise from that.

A New Look of Govt-Citizen Collaboration using Social Media (Part 1)   I recently read an interesting post on techPresident.com called “Government Needs Smart-sourcing, Not Crowdsourcing,” by Pete Peterson, executive director of Common Sense California.  Pete’s post focused on the quality of the government-citizen (G-C) engagement and the impact large numbers of participants have on [...]

“Hello. My name is Dan Bevarly. I live at 206 Pleasant View Avenue. My zip code is 40206. I’d like to speak to the Downtown Action plan that is being presented here this evening…” At 145 characters and still w/o my statement, you can be sure this is not a “tweet” on Twitter. It’s not a [...]

Some in government get it.  Others struggle with differentiating the two.  Some still ignore using either. Abstract  As government connects with citizens by using social networks like MySpace and Facebook, or video and imagery publishing sites like YouTube and Flickr, they are finding new outlets for publishing their content.  While using these new streams demonstrate [...]

We know they’re coming.  Social networks have gained wide acceptance and praise for their use in political campaigns.  It’s their use in actual government administration and public policy making environments where their absence is fueling new debate.  As a solution for government-citizen communication, they can be a powerful forum for collaboration.  Still, social networks remain [...]