The U.S. Department of Transportation is officially nowhere to be found in social media circles, but DOT Secretary Ray LaHood is everywhere, including Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.
The Justice Department has produced 17 videos on everything you ever wanted to know about the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Great FedTalks presentation from David Dejewski of the Department of Defense Business Transformation Agency where he discusses Web 2.0, MilSuite including MilBook, MilWiki, MilBlog and MilTube.
The Department of Health & Human Services launched Healthcare.gov, an all-in-one healthcare information site related to the Affordable Care Act dedicated to helping citizens ‘take health care into your own hands.’
Features include Find Insurance Options, Get Prevention Tips, Compare Care Quality and Understand the Law.
The Obama Administration’s Open Government Directive ordered Federal agencies to produce open government plans by April 7th, and while some advocates are disappointed, we have before us a bewildering number of initiatives to improve transparency, collaboration, and participation across the Government. It will not surprise you to learn that I spent some time looking for places where open source is being used in these plans.
Put down the best-seller and cancel the rest of Spring Break, the White House announced today federal agencies have released their open government plans. The plans are part of the Administration’s Open Government Initiative and should make for great beach reading.
Regardless of nationality, people from all over the world are treated in American hospitals. You don’t have to be a U.S. citizen to purchase private health insurance in the U.S. nor do you have to be a citizen to pay to see a doctor. The U.S. has a private healthcare system that is open to everybody, who pays.
By now, most people in the Gov 2.0 community have heard of Drupal, the popular open source social publishing system powering close to 500,000 websites ranging from big government to Britney Spears. Drupal has seen steady growth from its inception as a Belgian grad student’s experiment in 2001 to one of the most heavily used open source content management systems in the world, downloaded by a quarter million people per month. A growing trend the Drupal community is following closely this year is government interest in the platform to further open government initiatives and broaden adoption across government.
President Obama’s Cabinet taped ‘Year One’ videos to highlight their respective department or agency’s 2009 accomplishments and or goals for the next year.
What do you think? Which are most informative? Authentic? Is this an effective way to familiarize citizens to public servants and put a face on government?
If H1N1 can have a rap video then so can Gov 2.0. Recently, Dr. John Clarke’s H1N1 Rap won the flu prevention video contest sponsored by the Department of Health & Human Services. Dr. Clarke’s innovative approach using social media to spread an important message got me thinking:
“Gov 2.0 needs a video.”
In an effort to inspire creative govies, Gov 2.0 enthusiasts, civic songwriters, comedians, poets and musicians, GovFresh is sponsoring a ‘Best Gov 2.0 Video’ contest.
“Using Gov 2.0 to Enable Better Engagement and Reduce Burden on Farmers†video interview with a U.S. Department of Agriculture representative from the Microsoft Public Sector CIO Summit 2009.
He discusses how the agency is trying to get a consensus on what Gov 2.0 is, citizen engagement, the importance of broadband in connecting with farmers, how they collaborate (teleconferences, face-to-face meetings, CoLab) and USDA’s approach to social media usage, from individual teams to the agency-level, especially Twitter and Facebook.
Voter ID and Civic Innovation
Since 2008, there has been a wave of voting law changes that impose barriers to the ballot box. Georgia Rep. John Lewis, a veteran of “Bloody Sunday,” called the new laws “the most concerted effort to restrict the right to vote since before the Voting Rights Act.” The right to vote is being chiseled away [...]