Another of the Governing magazine articles on social media in government: Twitter and Earthquake Detection. This one is a short article about a U.S. Geological Survey system (the Twitter Earthquake Detector) that pulls tweets and other user-made updates (and photos) that specifically relate to earthquakes. The purpose of the project is to allow quicker detection and notification of earthquakes.
Here is the list of apps submitted in New York City’s BigApps contest.
More on the challenges for open government, from InformationWeek.
Los Angeles County implements an intranet efficiency initiative, to include idea generation from employees, better communication, and cost savings tracking.
In a follow up to the recent Drupal rollout at whitehouse.gov, the White House media team recently spoke with Drupal developers. Whitehouse.gov is working to roll out custom news feeds, user authentication, and more tagged, searchable raw data. They are also looking into releasing some of their custom code to the open source community.
New web application for citizen interaction and 311, SeeClickFix allows for citizen reporting of problems and government response. They recently posted an example interaction with a citizen in Meriden, CT and the city manager.
Blogger and tech executive Anil Dash announced recently that he is forming an incubator (Expert Labs) to connect government with citizens technology experts. Great coverage at ReadWriteWeb and here.
The same city manager from yesterday talks about crowd sourcing at city hall, new communication tools, and the bad side of these new technologies.
This FederalComputingWeek article identifies 3 methods that different jurisdictions have used to get public input. Includes UserVoice for public input on budget priorities, WikiPlanning for a long-term plan, and blogging for public dialogue.
The US Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration are getting employees to brainstorm, using a new crowd-sourcing app.
FastTrackGov has a survey on social media for local government managers and elected officials. I would encourage everyone to fill it out, as FastTrackGov will release the results to the public, and higher participation will increase the relevance of the survey.
From explanation of survey: FastTrackGov conducted an on-line survey of municipal governments across the United States in an effort to assess the level at which these organizations are implementing collaborative strategies to improve efficiency and transparency while providing timely and relevant information to their citizens.