10 Gigabit: What are the opportunities

UEN is preparing to upgrade their network backbone to 10 gigabit. You'll find more detail in Tab 30 of the October Steering Committee agenda. The increased use of our Richfield "alternate" data center is one of the key drivers for the upgrade. Customers such as the University of Utah Hospital and other higher ed institutions are making COOP plans a reality with the increased bandwidth. UEN now has four separate internet connections with the need to add more. The Utah Pioneer library, UEN eMedia, and others are making large collections of video content available to users. Utah GovCast features a growing database of multimedia content as well. A few pioneering agencies like UGS are using virtual environments to enhance knowledge and learning. Gigabit service to all schools will open up access to tools like Croquet and interactive whiteboards. With 10G almost a reality here, I'm sure we will start thinking about the applications and services that will drive 100Gbit.

Utah Strengthens Ties with India

A Utah trade mission spent today in New Delhi resulting in agreements to collaborate more in the life sciences. The group will go to Mumbai tomorrow with plans to work out agreements in areas like global medicine and clinical trials.

News from India on the Utah visit:

• Economic Times
• Confederation of Indian Industry
• Moneycontrol

Mortgage Fraud

This week, Governor Huntsman announced the creation of a new Mortgage Fraud Task Force in conjunction with the US Attorney. Unfortunately, Utah recently ranked as the top state for mortgage fraud. A similar task force was convened in Texas last month. The partnership "is intended to improve collaboration among residential mortgage regulators and law enforcement officials." The Texas AG's site outlines some of the scams that exist. HB25 in the last legislative session focused on mortgage fraud, but did not pass. Here is the House floor discussion on the topic.

• Mortgage Fraud Blog
• Ten Tips for Avoiding Mortgage Fraud - Utah Division of Real Estate
• Mortgage Fraud Presentation to the Utah Legislature
• Utah Fraud Alert
  

Safe and Well List

In order to be effective, the American Red Cross Safe and Well List needs more coverage. During the last 24 hours, there have been 750 registrations. According to the media, there have been about 500,000 evacuees. If it was recognized more widely, everyone could go here to find information about people they know that are endangered. It would also be nice if you could not only search the service online, but also be notified by email when the person you were searching for is later added to the list.

Fire Map Symbols on Google

Looks like the LA County Fire Department is using the same Google maps symbols as the State used in its mapping of the San Diego fires. I guess we have an evolving standard now for mapping fire incidents.

The Dept. of Homeland Security has also distributed guidelines for how agencies should manage content on the web during incidents like this:

• Immediate web content focus is on saving lives, sustaining lives, and ensuring a comprehensive recovery effort reflecting current citizen information needs.
• It is not helpful for an agency web site to duplicate information that is the purview and expertise of other agencies.
• Information needs to remain under control of the “expert” agency and linked to by other agencies.

What You Can Do

• If your agency is providing resources on your website, please use a shortcut address, /californiafires. For example, www.youragency.gov/californiafires
  • Let me know as you create a /californiafires shortcut to your site. I will compile.
• Go to www.disasterhelp.gov and review resources on this site that is in your lane. This is a redesigned website that offers recovery information for individuals and small businesses. If there is information from your agency you would like to add or change, let me know at gwynne.kostin@dhs.gov
• Add lane links as it makes sense. Please note, redirects following the convention of /californiafires will be forthcoming. In the meantime, you can link directly to
  • Main federal recovery information—How to Get Help http://www.fema.gov/hazard/wildfire/ca_2007.shtm
  • Finding friends and family, and general lane information http://www.usa.gov/californiafires.shtml
  • Local California Resources, including fire maps are available at http://www.calfires.com/
  • Heath and Safety information will be available at http://www.hhs.gov/californiafires

GeoFeed from the WDIN

Kirk Keller of Missouri pointed out this Google map created from geo-entries on the Wildlife Disease Information Network (WDIN) blog. This is a collaborative project involving multiple state and federal agencies. The map lets you see where wildlife disease news and issues are happening across the country. We should consider creating a GeoRSS feed for things like our travel events and state parks activities. Another good one would be the new statewide business calendar that will be developed by USTAR.

California Wildfires - Local

Both state and local websites are using video to communicate on their websites. Over 80,000 San Diego residents were notified through reverse-911. The Google map shows where shelters are with updates about capacity and status (full or not). I think future exercises here should include working with the tools we would use to generate public information and response. The closure of city services and facilities is all being announced in one place.

The MODIS large incident fire map is also being updated regularly.

The LA Times has also created a Google map with fire information.

You can see that a traditional map like the one on Malibu's website is not nearly as effective.

ESRI provides some fire-related maps for journalists, including this map updated last night.

The Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) tracks fires throughout the world with satellite imagery and will provide you with email notifications including maps of the area that you designate. The service is supported by the University of Maryland and NASA. You can create multiple subscriptions to a single email.

Earlier today, I happened to be working on our budget request for continuity of operations. We have several critical IT operations that are in the high liquifaction area shown on this map that still have no redundancy / off-site capability.

California Wildfires

What can we learn from California in the use of technology and egov with respect to disaster response and the California wildfires. Over 400,000 people have been evacuated so it is an event of significant magnitude.

There are many different sites attempting to provide government service with respect to controlling and responding to the fires and providing appropriate public information.

The state has created this map that identifies specific information about the fire, including locations, area and extent, response centers, closures, etc.

View Larger Map

Fire disaster assistance information is available as a PDF, not the most dynamic way to present the information, but it does includes forms to use and contacts so that affected parties can print it and take it with them when making calls and collecting information. Information is consolidated from various sources; FEMA, the California Insurance Dept., and insurance companies to make it easier to use as a singly compilation of information.

Activity reports are fairly current. I would have preferred that this information be available as an RSS feed so it can be subscribed to by your desktop or mobile device.

More information is available at www.calfires.com.

NIC Partners Conference

NIC sponsors a partners conference each year, providing an opportunity for states to discuss egov initiatives that they are working on. I didn't go this year, but noticed that Tara Hunt, who was on the panel at NASCIO, is giving this presentation at the Partners Conference:

| View | Upload your own

Podcasts

Doc Searls mentions that a google search for "podcasts" in September 2004 yielded only 24 results. I just repeated that search and got 270,000,000 results. An interesting note is that Yahoo Podcasts, the fourth highest result is announcing that it will close as of October 31st.

Government podcasts continue to grow in number, but often remain in oblivion. GovWatch recommends that government do a better job of marketing the content they produce, including the use of channels such as Wikipedia, Technorati, Digg, DMOZ, etc. Based on the recent emails that I have received from the Government Content Managers Forum, many are doing exactly that. There was a lot of discussion about the effective use of Wikipedia which has became the #8 site on the internet. For example, the US Forest Service has a very useful Wikipedia page with graphics, links, and useful info. In fact, I found some information links there that I had never seen before.

Many government podcasts are listed on freegovinfo.info, such as CoreCast from USGS.

The US Plants database is an amazing resource. Perhaps even more, is the Global Biodiversity Information Facility Data Portal. This resource has geo-based information for species and other groups of plants, animals, fungi and micro-organisms, including species occurrence records, as well as classifications and scientific and common names from around the globe.

WorldCat

WorldCat is changing the way you search for library resources. I entered a simple search and it returned results from a variety of libraries in the area; University of Utah, Logan City, Hill AFB, Uinta County, etc. I can then go in and make a reservation, post comments, buy the book from Amazon, or several other things. According to LITA, after only a quarter of implementing WorldCat, the University of Washington library has seen a drastic increase in their borrowing. Prior to World Cat, there was an increase in borrowing of 6% a year. With the implementation of WCL, Ill Borrowing at UW has jumped to 39.5%.

Free Avatars

I'm glad to see that others are agreeing with me on the concept of interoperability for avatars. Looks like IBM and Linden Labs are already developing an open standard that would allow avatars to move from one world to another in the 3d worlds of tomorrow.

Local News Sources

There are many small local news sources (including blogs) that cover local government much more in depth than what you find in the big media outlets or sometimes even on the local govt. website. Here are a few that I have become aware in Utah:

• Sugar House Journal
• Cottonwood-Holladay Journal
• Sandy Journal
• Midvale Journal
• South Valley Journal
• San Juan Record
• Moab Times
• Richfield Reaper
  
• More here

It would be really nice if each of these sources had an RSS feed.

Many of the university news sites now have RSS available, including:

• Southern Utah University RSS
  
• College of Eastern Utah RSS

Weber State has some new podcasts, some of which relate to state government.

Snow College South Sevier Center has an RSS feed of their events calendar.

In the process of reviewing this, I have added about a dozen new Utah government sites to the Utah.gov search engine. In the future, we will have a way to leverage all of the RSS / news feeds to create a statewide government news source that is as comprehensive as the site search or the services search.

Utah Senator Visits Kyrgyzstan

I enjoyed reading Senator Valentine's account of his visit to Kyrgyzstan (I've usually referred to it as Kirgizia - in Russian Киргизия). I have always had an interest in the countries of central Asia. The senator mentions how cordially he was received which is what I would have expected. He also mentions that Kyrgyzstan's national budget is about a tenth of the budget of the State of Utah, even though the population is 5.3 million (almost exactly double).

• Maps of Kyrgyzstan
• Bishkek, the capital city, has a population of about 900,000 people with a stunning view of the Tien Shan mountains in the distance - I'd love to visit there myself.
• US Embassy in the Kyrgyz Republic
• The US has an operation at Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan that supports operations in Afghanistan
• A 15-person delegation from Kyrgyzstan was hosted in Utah last month
• The Open World Leadership Center hosted the exchange. The center provides grants to US government and nonprofits for this purpose.
• BYU Newsnet article posted to the Open World site.

Due to similar climate and geography, there have been several exchanges with Kyrgyz delegations in the past on topics such as agriculture, economy, and egovernment. 2003 2003b 1996 The Kyrgyz ambassador discusses the importance of this relationship, "Today for us the key issue is to develop trade and economic cooperation with the United States. Its implementation depends also on building a direct partnership with the individual American states. So, with this policy Kyrgyzstan has built close direct relations with such states as Montana, Utah, Pennsylvania. These relations have culminated in historical visits to Montana, Utah and Massachusetts of our President Askar Akaev. We have a very productive partnership with all these states in economic, business, educational, and many other spheres."

UCLT Promotes Creative Thinking in Education

The Utah Coalition for Educational Technology does a good job of advancing the use of technology in schools throughout the state. Their monthly newsletter is very well done.

Their upcoming UCET 2.0 conference will focus on some creative uses of technology in education such as:

Language Arts: Online resources such as Starfall.com for beginning readers and ESL, online interactive resources-such as MarcoPolo’s Read-Write-Think, teaching writing through Podcasting-Movie Making-Blogging-Digital Cameras (multimedia), using Inspiration for graphic organizers and writing preparation, and/or Pioneer Library for Big 6 research skills.

Mathematics: Online Virtual Manipulatives and other online resources-such as USU’s Matti’s website, spreadsheets or InspireData for analyzing data, SketchUp for Geometry, effective use of calculators, and/or the teaching mathematics through Podcasting-Movie Making-Blogging-Digital Cameras-PowerPoint (multimedia).

Science: Using probes/microscopes for science experiments, student use of National Science Digital Library or other online science resources, using online experts, teaching science through Podcasting-Movie Making-Blogging-Digital Cameras-PowerPoint (multimedia), and/or using robotics and student inventions.

Social Studies: Google Earth and SketchUp, online resources such as CultureGrams-CIA world fact book-Library of Congress, Expeditions from National Geographic, NationalAtlas.gov, original source documents-such as the American Memory Project-National Archives-American Rhetoric, Virtual Museums, teaching social studies through Podcasting-Movie Making-Blogging-Digital Cameras-PowerPoint (multimedia), and GPS/GIS.

The Utah quarter is being minted today.

I have been interested in the 3D internet for business for some time. It will be interesting to see what comes from this IBM-Linden Labs partnership.

I am wondering about the impact of this announcement from ICANN: "The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will launch an evaluation of Internationalized Domain Names next week that will allow Internet users to test top-level domains in 11 languages." As of yesterday, the evals are live.

The Web 2.0 Summit starts tomorrow.

The Utah League of Cities and Towns has a blog entitled The City Cafe discussing issues of interest to municipal government.

Bulgaria recently announced their new egov portal.

Europe's eGov Awards

Having recently returned from the Best of the Web awards ceremony, it is interesting to get this peak at Europe's eGovernment Awards...

Blog Action Day - Wind Power

According to the EPA Blog, The Flow of the River, today is blog action day when bloggers are called upon to write something about the environment. Interesting timing, since several environmental issues are high on the agenda right now in Utah. One is renewable energy. There seems to be a new push for wind power. Utah used to have a separate url, wind.utah.gov, which doesn't seem to exist currently, but some interesting resources can be found on the UGS website. Park City has partnered with the Utah Clean Energy Alliance to purchase a significant share of the city's energy from wind sources. I also added this page from EERE to the utah.gov search engine.

Improving the Usefulness of the State Portal

It looks like some of the new things that we have been implementing are starting to have an impact on the users of the state portal. Utah.gov unique user counts have been climbing steadily since the release of the portal and some of the new services.

Newt Gingrich speaks on Capitol Hill in Second Life

It is interesting to see someone as prominent as the former speaker of the House appear as an avatar in Second Life. A growing number of public entities are creating a virtual presence there, including the city of Boston, the CDC, NASA, the House of Representatives, and NOAA.

The U.K.'s Press Dispensary just set up shop last week as the "first European agency" to establish a permanent presence there.




Interesting debate on CDC's presence on Second Life can be found on CDC Chatter.

Task Force on Strategic Unconventional Fuels

The Task Force on Strategic Unconventional Fuels was established in 2005 by Congress and charged with the following objectives:

• “… develop a program to coordinate and accelerate the commercial development of strategic unconventional fuels, including, but not limited to, oil shale and tar sands resources within the United States, in an integrated manner” [Sec 369(h)(1)], and to
• “make such recommendations regarding promoting the development of the strategic unconventional fuels resources within the United States as it may deem appropriate” [Sec 369 (h)(3)]; and to
• “make recommendations with respect to initiating a partnership with the Province of Alberta Canada for purposes of sharing information relating to the development and production of oil from tar sands, and similar partnerships with other nations that contain significant oil shale resources”. [Sec 369 (h)(4)]

The task force is chaired by Governor Jon Huntsman of Utah and Governor Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky. Their three volume strategy and program plan, as well as the report to the president is now available online.

The Department of Energy has a new site, energycodes.gov that includes access to energy code software, webcasts, and other online services. The state of Utah offered a training course earlier this week. Other commercial and residential training is available online.

This roadmap from Alberta offers some suggestions for U.S. energy planners.

Here are a few government blogs I haven't seen before

Here are a few government-related blogs I haven't seen before:

• Government Information News from Fondren Library, Rice University
• Accountable Strategies
• Free New York
• Governmentauctions.org
• Law Librarian Blog
• Open Government Blog
• Republican National Convention
• India Uncut
• e-belarus.org
• E-Government News
• The Digital Divide Network - DDN creatively lets users add themselves to its map
• E-Government Bulletin Live

And check out this service from the city of Santa Monica, CA. It tells you where available parking stalls are throughout the city and is updated every 5 seconds. Santa Monica has a nice directory of all their services.

dotgovBuzz

The Federal CIO Council recently released 7 architectural principals to help achieve consistent, effective IT decision-making. We would do well to just replace the word [federal] with the word [state] to say:

• The [state] government focuses on citizens.
• The [state] government is a single, unified enterprise.
• [State] agencies collaborate with other governments and people.
• The [state] architecture is mission-driven.
• Security, privacy, and protecting information are core government needs.
• Information is a [state] asset.
• The [state] architecture simplifies government operations.

That works, doesn't it?

Thanks to GSA for Utah.gov kudos in their latest newsletter.

I'm getting ready to fly out of Tucson and depart the annual NASCIO meeting. Thanks to those who participated on the panel, including PK Agarwal, aka epk, moderator of the panel. One quick meeting with Jeff Fraser, then I'm out of here.

eGov in Korea

We've all known of the tremendous strides that Korea has made in broadband and wireless. D.C. Misra of India summarizes a new book that covers Korea's eGov experience.

Deborah Bryant is discussing the Government Open Source Conference in Portland.

The government of Victoria (Australia) set up a presence in Second Life and has written a case study of their findings.

I have read a lot of Spanish to English automated translations from Google, Babelfish, etc. and they seem to not be too bad, but this translation of Thorsten Koch's egovernment blog is pretty rough.

From Hungary - A new textbook on GIS and e-government. That is certainly an area that can use more emphasis.