Government Technology

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?”

Technology proponents don’t need to make a case for the role of computer science in tomorrow’s job market. Today, it’s self-evident in the economy and daily life.

Tech advocates, however, are calling on educators to prepare students by institutionalizing computer science in core curriculums.

On the front lines of this campaign is Code.org. The advocacy group, which offers educational tools for teachers and students, lobbies to yoke computer science alongside traditional mathematics and science courses at all grade levels. T

he organization gained notoriety in 2013 with its Hour of Code campaign, which, since its launch in December, has drawn more than 38 million students who’ve participated in the campaign’s coding activities -- with 10 million, its initial goal, in the first three days of the campaign.

Roxanne Emadi, a promotional strategist for Code.org, says despite technology's pervasiveness there is great need for educators to distinguish between computer science, the study of how computers work, from technology training, where students learn software programs to accomplish tasks.

"We think there's a big difference between knowing how to use technology and knowing how to create technology,” Emadi said.

Against the tug of today’s digital economy, New York and Chicago public libraries are experimenting with two projects to take the Internet to the people by loaning Wi-Fi hot spots like books.

The Knight Foundation, a journalism and civic technology philanthropy, has awarded $500,000 to the New York Public Library system and $400,000 to the Chicago Public Library system to accomplish the task. New York and Chicago libraries, which represent two of Knight’s 19 winners, will attempt to bridge their city's Internet access gap with the hot spots in different ways.

Starting in New York, a pilot called “Check Out the Internet” will start in September to offer Wi-Fi hot spots to the public on an annual basis. It’s hoped that 10,000 low-income households will take advantage of the free service, thereby improving New York broadband statistics that report 27 percent of households are without access, according to a Knight release.

In Chicago, the hot spots are to be distributed under the “Internet to Go” project, which, instead of basing distribution primarily on income level, will make hot spots available based on neighborhood Internet usage stats -- areas with low Internet adoption will take precedence.