Government Technology

Just like physical documents and emails, government social media conversations and interactions are considered public data.

But while many agencies have invested in automated tools to help them mine platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to fulfill Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, there haven’t been a high volume of them. Seattle and Austin, Texas, both use services to archive digital activity and communications. Yet, representatives from both cities said that they rarely receive any public information requests for social media postings.

The city of Philadelphia (PA) has signed a new deal with the IT services company Unisys to provide a comprehensive 311 system for residents. City officials say the new system will give citizens instant access to ask a question or lodge a complaint by landline, text, mobile device or on the Web.

Philadelphia receives between 1.2 million and 1.5 million calls to its existing 311 line, according to the service’s Executive Director, Rosetta Lue. To handle the expected growth in 311 calls, the city did an open request for proposals, and ultimately chose Unisys. Part of the appeal of going with the company, Lue said, is that it is offering cloud-based hosting, in partnership with cloud platform company Salesforce.

Attracting talented technology professionals to public service continues to be a challenge for government employers. But state and local governments are using some interesting retainment strategies that may eventually turn the tide in government’s IT workforce battle with the private sector.

Harris County, Texas, and the state of Utah have developed new job classifications and evaluation procedures that enable skilled IT technicians to advance their careers and make more money without moving into management roles. The hope is that as IT employees gain experience, they’ll feel enticed to rise up the ranks internally, instead of looking to the private sector for a new -- and more lucrative -- challenge.

Estella Geraghty, the deputy director for California’s Department of Public Health and the portal’s project leader, met with public officials on Aug 7 to announce the official launch of the site at health.data.ca.gov and to elaborate on next steps.

Geraghty said the initial sets of data tables will include birth profiles, popular baby names, poverty rates, and locations of vendors who accept vouchers from the California Department of Public Health (CDPH)’s Women, Infants and Children program (WIC). It will also contain health-care facilities data, a mapped timeline of West Nile virus incidents and asthma statistics.

Though all initial data stems from the CDPH, eventually the portal will serve as a hub for open data from other California HHS departments.

Nextdoor, a neighbor-to-neighbor social media platform, is growing at breakneck pace: from 176 neighborhoods to more than 38,000 today -- that number represents one in four neighborhoods throughout the US.

With such an upswell, cities have taken note and have already green-lighted departments to leverage Nextdoor for neighborhood notification purposes and dialogues.

Most are using the service for police and other emergency management agencies: 212 and counting. For government, the emerging startup raises questions about sustainability, its business strategies and -- integrated into workflows -- how best to apply Nextdoor’s high-touch access to citizens.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D-NYC) has signed two bills that improve government transparency.

The first, Introductory 363-A, requires online posting of the City Record -- NYC’s daily list of procurement notices, bid solicitations and awards -- within 24 hours of the print edition publishing.

The second, Introductory 149-A, mandates that New York City laws and its Charter be published on the Web.

Any changes to the rules must be updated online within 30 days. Mayor De Blasio called the Aug 7 bill signings an advancement of his administration’s goal of being the “most technology-friendly and innovation-driven city in the world."

Americans in most states have paid no taxes on Internet access for 16 years, thanks to a federal law banning states and local governments from collecting such taxes.

Now, with the Internet Tax Freedom Act (ITFA) set to expire on Nov 1, state and local governments are watching closely to see if Congress will once again extend the tax moratorium, which was first enacted in 1998 and since renewed three times.

The online sales tax could reap $23 billion in revenue for the states.

In the United States, more than 100 cities have publicly-owned broadband networks, according to a comprehensive map that plots US cities with publicly owned citywide wired networks.

Developed by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), a nonprofit economic and community development consultancy that advocates for community broadband, the map is the first of its kind to track community owned broadband access nationwide. The map shows communities that offer fiber-to-the-home networks on a citywide basis to residents and businesses and locally owned government cable networks.

More states and cities are announcing “mobile-first” strategies, but what does that really mean?

Seattle may take another shot at municipal broadband. Since the recent failed partnership between the city and Gigabit Squared, the future of broadband in Seattle has been up in the air.

Aside from municipally-run network, recently-appointed Chief Technology Officer Michael Mattmiller noted that the city should also consider the option of public-private partnerships and “leverage our assets to go out and deliver commercial Internet,” which presumably means finding a way to connect residents using the city’s miles of dark fiber.

“At this point we have to consider all options,” Mattmiller told the Seattle Times. “We have to look at, No. 1, how are we reducing barriers to competition, knowing that the marketplace is hungry for more broadband?”