The Extension of Google Government Partnership

Looks like Google is extending its government search partnerships to municipalities now with Washington, DC being the first. Utah, along with California, Virginia, and Arizona were the first four states to announce such a partnership back in April. Managing the custom search engine has been very easy and I have really benefited from the ability to monitor and analyze the search statistics.

Priorities for Europe's new Ministerial Declaration on eGovernment:

• Strengthen the European dimension through the interoperability between Member States;
• Reduce the administrative load and consequently the administrative costs allowing for an efficient and effective interaction between public administrations and the people;
• Guarantee and ensure eGovernment services to all the people, especially in the case of the more economically and socially disfavoured;
• Involve the people in the political processes and increase their transparency.
• With respect to interoperability, Member States shall, until the end of 2008, establish new priorities for high impact services for the people, which can be developed over the whole of Europe with the aid of community programmes.

The Weight Loss blog asks an interesting question:

Can eGovernment Help the Obese eCitizen Lose Weight by Providing Proper Information?

Gov Gab - Official USA Blog

GSA released the official US government blog (blog.usa.gov) this week, entitle GovGab, with posts by Nancy, Sam, and Jake. It looks like the bloggers are each assigned to a different day and they casually discuss topics which (may) be of interest to citizens.

According to the initial post, "Gov Gab comes to you from the U.S. General Services Administration, where the blog team’s “day jobs” all involve making it easier for people to find government-related information online through sites like USA.gov, Pueblo.gsa.gov and ConsumerAction.gov, and by phone via 1 (800) FED-INFO."

So far, it seems to me that the URL should more appropriately be blog.gsa.gov, but I'll keep watching for a little while to see if the RSS feed is worth adding to my reader. For this blog to be what it claims to be, perhaps they should include other agents as well as state government.

Actually, I think I'm much more interested in another US government blog (Dipnote) that was introduced this week by the US State Department. Foreign Affairs always generates lots of discussions and this blog seems to hold true to form with lots of comments and interaction with citizens. I have also subscribed to the State Department YouTube Channel.

This is interesting: Linked In members discuss the top 5 services that they would like available online from their government.

Architecting Government

On the same day that the Best of the Web and Digital Government Achievement Awards were being handed out in Las Vegas, Europe was recognizing an array of countries for success in

• Cross-border interoperability;
• reduction of administrative burdens;
• inclusive eGovernment, and;
• transparency and democratic engagement.
  

Among the European awards was Norway's citizen portal.

In the photo, the State of Utah receives the Best of the Web Award from Center for Digital Government Director, Cathilea Robinett.

Our office was recently invited to participate in NASCIO's technical architecture initiative so you can expect to begin to see more posting on Bob Woolley's blog again, as well as the latest plans on the DTS site. This initiative has the potential to yield a variety of benefits to the State, business and financial, which we will try to identify and prioritize.

I tried out Google's new online presentation tool today and it seems to work great. It has a very simple interface and allows users to collaborate both on the development, but also during the presentation with a built-in chat function. I'll be using the tool to put together a few egov and technical architecture presentations to share with others.

There are a few other Web 2.0 tools that I want to look at that will be coming out shortly, including:

• SceneCaster
• Intel Mash Maker

The Utah Geologic Survey has designed a new internal site for tracking earthquakes with alerts and information. In the event of a real emergency, it would become real easy to switch this into a public-facing site to provide the kind of information that the public will need at that time.

Check out WorldMeter, it has an interesting look at real-time information.

City Blogging for Feedback

The town of Hyrum in northern Utah is considering annexation for the development of this resort. In order to open up the debate, they created a city blog and received this feedback from citizens. That's a great idea and a way to see what people are really thinking.

New Services on Utah.gov Services Search

I added about a dozen new services to the online services database today. Some of them are very useful, such as:

• Utah Water Rights Company Viewer
• Utah State Courts Online Juror Qualification
• Subscribe to Utah Wildlife Publications
• Salt Lake County Prisoner Information Center
• Utah Mineral Occurance System

Others were a little more esoteric, like Upland Game Bird Band Recovery Report.

Overall, I'm glad to see that agencies are continuing to push services online, with over 939 services now available through Utah.gov.

Online Presence

Although I'm concerned that towns in Utah such as Marriott-Slaterville with populations over 1,000 still don't have an online presence, 179 out of 191 (94%) member states of the United Nations had online presence in 2005. Twelve countries which did not have online presence are:1.Central African Republic, 2. Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, 3. Democratic Republic of the Congo, 4. Equatorial Guinea, 5. Guinea-Bissau, 6. Haiti, 7. Kiribati, 8. Liberia, 9. Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, 10. Somalia, 11. Turkmenistan, and 12. Zambia (DESA 2005)

State AGRC Developing Web Services

I met with the Utah Automated Geographic Reference Center (AGRC) this afternoon to discuss the development of the statewide GIS plan and came back very excited about the things they are starting to develop. I anticipate that we will make some of these things available to the public as well as state and local agencies to begin to take advantage of some of the tremendous data resources available in the State Geographic Information Database (SGID)

Here is an example of a webservice that they have developed that allows the user to submit an address and receive back a result set that includes all the political entities that the address resides within.

http://mapserv.utah.gov/finddistricts/

I expect that as we roll out the Enterprise Service Bus, many of the anchor services will be GIS-related.

Utah Wins 2007 Best of the Web

The Center for Digital Government publicly announced the state portal selections for Best of the Web today. Here they are:
1st Place Utah
2nd Place: Maine
3rd Place: Virginia
4th Place: Delaware
5th Place: Kentucky
Finalists:
Alabama
Arkansas
Nebraska
Tennessee
Texas

Thanks to everyone that helped with this year's portal efforts. Utah is now the only state to win this coveted award twice. And thanks to the Center for Digital Government for their sponsorship of the award. This kind of thing helps us focus our efforts to provide better online service to citizens. During the month of August, we had over 900,000 unique visitors to Utah.gov. It is our intent to provide them with the best service available from government possible.

Ultralight crashes one block from home

Last night as I was arriving home, I received an alert on my Blackberry that a man involved in a domestic shooting had fled using a paraglider or ultralight and was being pursued by police in Utah County. A few minutes later, several helicopters were flying over the neighborhood and the ultralight crashed just a block north of my home. Dozens of emergency vehicles soon descended on the area. Here's the story in the news:

• Salt Lake Tribune
• Daily Herald
• KSL
• KTVX
• Deseret News

It's an odd coincidence that Dell Schanze just posted this video on his blog yesterday:

GAO Reports

I have been reading GAO reports off and on for years, so I am now really excited to have them show up in my RSS reader.

Recent reports of interest include:

• Analysis of US-VISIT
• DHS Architecture Continues to Evolve
• Business Systems Modernization
• NARA Information Management
• Weaknesses in Information Security
• First Responders: Much Work Remains to Improve Communications Interoperability

Ensign Peak Slideshow

We'll be trying to portray through Utah.gov a complete picture of the state of Utah, its government, its people, its services. I'm collecting photos that I hope can help in portraying that message. Here are some taken from Ensign Peak, just above Salt Lake City.