Rock Creek Roundup (December 18 Edition)

Posted by: Meagen Ryan, Director of Strategy Dec 18, 2009 0 Comments

This week, the Rock Creek Roundup brings requests for dashboard help from the White House, a newly revamped website from the Department of State, a bevy of bold predictions about Gov. 2.0, and a new government-focused offering from Microsoft. Let’s take a look:

—As we passed along last week, the Open Government Initiative is aimed at making government agencies more transparent and accessible to the public. This week, the White House announced that it is looking for ideas from the public on help “holding ‘our feet to the fire’ and ensuring that we continue to succeed at changing the way that Washington works,” according to a blog post authored by Beth Noveck, the White House’s Open Government Initiative director. Noveck asked citizens to suggest both qualitative and quantitative metrics that they’d like to see represented on the dashboard, and to respond by leaving comments and suggestions on the Open Government blog.

—Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of State unveiled a new version of the State.gov website. The new site’s goal is to “present the State more transparently, effectively communicate the mission of the department, and increasingly engage audiences in an ongoing dialogue about foreign policy issues.” In addition to a completely new look, the revamped website includes enhanced searchability, easy access to the department’s social networking sites, and a welcome video featuring Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

—“Social computing will continue to grow in government, but won’t hit critical mass in 2010.” That’s the first of a total of seven predictions offered by business strategist Dion Hinchcliffe in a blog post titled, “The Government 2.0 Forecast For 2010: 7 Predictions.” Hinchcliffe also touches on cloud computing, predicting it will “go big,” and asserts that we’ll see a lot more citizen involvement and engagement as rich government data sources continue to be made available and individuals develop creative applications for the data. Even if Hinchcliffe doesn’t end up right on the money with every single prediction, the post still makes for an interesting read.

—Building upon the success of its SharePoint platform, software juggernaut Microsoft recently announced the availability of the Microsoft Gov 2.0 Kit. Intended to enhance the SharePoint experience by enhancing internal collaboration tools and expanding integration with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, the kit balances both communication and security needs. For interested government developers, the kit is available free of charge as an open source download.

Meagen Ryan

Director of Strategy

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