Taking a page straight from Mark Coddington’s excellent week in review at the Nieman Journalism Lab, my inaugural Radar post looks at government 2.0 news from the past week. If you have news and tips about the government 2.0 space, please let me know at alex@oreilly.com or @digiphile on Twitter.
WhiteHouse.gov 3.0
The White House called for a CEO Advisory Board, reported Information Week. The new “Management Advisory Board” will act as a complement to the President’s Management Council, according to a post by Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag, on the agency’s blog. The news that President Obama had issued an executive order creating an official advisory council on science and technology didn’t go unremarked by techPresident’s Nancy Scola, who wondered if the new PCAST was the same as the old PCAST.
In other tech news from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Dark Reading reported that the White House revamped its approach to FISMA compliance to better address the cybersecurity threats of the 21st century. Federal CIO blogged about “faster, smarter cybersecurity” at WhiteHouse.gov.
When you look back at the history of Whitehouse.gov, it’s easy to see the site has come a long way since it launched in 2004. Now in “version 3.0,” the White House has released open source Drupal modules used in WhiteHouse.gov. The modules included Node Embed,” which will allow government .gov websites using Drupal to meet the accessibility standard, Section 508, by ensuring all rich media and images to have the metadata required to make them readable on by screen reading software.
More steps toward transparency?
Google said it would provide greater transparency around government requests for censorship of online media. Google launched a new site for government censorship requests, re-emphasizing its commitment to the Global Network Initiative.
Sunlight Labs launched its national data catalog, which Clay Johnson wrote will be “a great resource for government data. Most importantly, the system has its own built in documentation system powered by our community.”
Open Data, Open Source, Open Government?
The World Bank opened up their data, including over 2000 indicators and a public API. The bank launched Data.worldbank.org as an information browser for the data sets. Expect more useful infographics to appear. World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick describes the Bank’s new open data initiative in the video below:
World Bank’s Open Data Initiative from World Bank on Vimeo.
Up north, David Eaves guestimated that open data saved Canada a cool $3.2 billion. And over in Europe, the Danish government asked for advice on open government and open data atData.norge.no.
Heather West wrote that flagship initiatives shine in open government plans.
State governments are also contributing to open source: The NYSenate.gov codebase contributed to Drupal. Adriel Hampton reported more on the story from DrupalCon on open source and open government for Gov2.0 Radio.
Celebrating Earth Day
The nation celebrated the 40th anniversary of Earth Day on April 20th. Along with recognizing the history of the event that helped to precipitate its creation, the EPA asked people to pick five actions to celebrate Earth Day at EPA.gov and chose a winner for it “My Environment” video project (below).
Federal clouds
The General Services Administration is preparing plans to acquire cloud computing infrastructure services. NASA’s cloud computing guru, Nebula CIO Chris Kemp, now has a new role: he was named CTO for IT.
Archiving tweets in the Library of Congress
Following the announcement that the Library of Congress had acquired the entire Twitter archive, the chief archivist of the U.S., David Ferriero, explained what we might all learn from mundane details.
Now that it has all of those tweets, should the Library of the Congress have an app contest? Steve Lunceford also had a few more important questions about Twitter and government.
Gov 2.0 bits and bytes
In other news from around the government 2.0 world:
- From the department of innovation: Spray-on skin? Inside the Pentagon’s “extreme medicine wing” at Wired.
- How can website consolidation save governments money? Sarah Bourne commented on her experience at Mass.gov at GovFresh, along with Gwynne Kostin from the GSA.
- Kristin Johnson and Ted Nguyen of OCTA won the top award for new media in California government.
- Craig Newmark wrote about how social media can effect real social & governmental change
- Laurel Ruma wrote about the civic Web” in GOOD Magazine in “Go Local 2.0“
- Genome.gov celebrated DNA Day, commemorating the completion of the Human Genome Project.
- U.S. Navy started blogging this week, at navylive.dodlive.mil