New Ideas : OpenOPM

Other OpenGov Ideas & Information Resources

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 20:30:49 PDT

Rather than post each of my "OpenGov" Ideas at 27 different websites, I have posted them at the GSA's website (since they are in the forefront of the OpenGov initiative). So, by this notice, the members of the OpenGov Team for your agency have been informed of those ideas. (At least, now, you can't say you were unaware of them.)

http://opengsa.ideascale.com/a/pmd/29640-6960

ALSO -- Your OpenGov Team members, and others tasked or involved in those matters, are also notified that news and information about implementation of the Open Government Directive in the various federal agencies will continue to be available through the following sources (see links below).

Therefore, it is YOUR choice about whether (or not) to be "in the loop" about the Open Government Directive.

Email-group --> http://groups.google.com/group/OpenGovernmentDirective

Wiki --> http://www.OpenGovPlaybook.org

Radio --> http://www.OpenGovRadio.com

Blog --> http://www.UStransparency.com

vr,
Stephen Buckley
moderator, OpenGovernmentDirective google-group
.

Comments (0)Working Together: Governments, Businesses, Non-Profits..., directive, implementation, team, buckley

New Technology to Help WithTransparency

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:43:24 PDT

Vote On Idea

Application of New Information Technology to the Transparency Objective
of the Open Government Directive

While the Open Government Directive offers an unprecedented challenge to Federal Agencies, information technology is now available to assist Agencies in achieving the Transparency objective of the Directive in a rapid, cost-effective manner. Throughout the Directive, the need to proactively provide easy to use, effective, and comprehensive, yet controlled access to Agency information is emphasized. Various references from the Directive emphasizing this theme include:

• 1.b. To the extent practicable and subject to valid restrictions, agencies should publish information on-line in an open format that can be retrieved, downloaded, indexed, and searched by commonly used web search applications. An open format is one that is platform independent, machine readable, and
made available to the public without restrictions that would impede the re-use of that information.
• 1.c. To the extent practical and subject to valid restrictions, agencies should proactively use modern technology to disseminate useful information, rather than waiting for specific requests under FOIA.
• 1.e.ii. In cases where the agency provides public information maintained in electronic format, a plan for timely publication of the underlying data. This underlying data should be in an open format and as granular as possible, consistent with statutory responsibilities and subject to valid privacy,
confidentiality, security, or other restrictions. Your agency should also identify key audiences for its information and their needs, and endeavor to publish high-value information for each of those audiences in the most accessible forms and formats.
• 3.a.i. A strategic action plan for transparency that ... (3) identifies high value information not yet available and establishes a reasonable time-line for publication online in open formats ...

Communicating the nature of the extraordinary impact upon the Transparency challenge offered by the new technology is best achieved with presentation of the problem, the opportunity, and the solution...

The Problem
For decades the information technology industry has refined our ability to house and retrieve information that is stored on computers in a clearly formatted manner that is generally referred to as structured data. Structured data has ample context associated with its format to allow the computer to present, manipulate, and retrieve it in virtually any manner we have
imagined. We even have tools that permit us to retrieve our structured data in ways not preimagined nor pre-defined, but in an ad hoc manner.

Although the amount of structured information housed within our computer systems continues to increase, it is proportionately decreasing as a subset of the total universe of computer housed information. Certainly there are advantages to housing this ever increasing volume of unstructured information. However, information, like memory, is only of value if it can be
retrieved when needed. Historically, the only way we have been able to retrieve unstructured data is by directly associating it with structured metadata that is created solely for the purpose of more easily locating unstructured data objects. The cost of producing this metadata is high
and it is not a comprehensive solution to the problem of finding our unstructured data. Thus we are left with a situation that allows us to properly manage and expose only a relatively small amount of the information we have collected on our computer systems, as we are not able to manage unstructured information as handily as we would like.

The Opportunity
Recent advances in separate areas of information technology are enabling an extraordinary convergence of technological innovation that is of significant relevance to the Transparency challenge of the Open Government Directive. Automated text recognition within images and within speech has significantly improved in its ability to discern language from otherwise unstructured media, from standard sheets of paper, to voice recordings, and to multimedia, in general. Meanwhile the explosion of the internet has brought with it the ability to crawl, index, and search through enormous volumes of search-able text.

Unfortunately, not all text is inherently search-able. For text to be search-able on a computer, it must be encoded in a form that is discernible by the computer, such as ASCII, EBCDIC, etc. However, much of our burgeoning information is stored in bit-mapped formats that can be rendered as imagetext and readable to humans, but alas, is not understandable as text to a
computer, and thus is not search-able. As with an iceberg, we can clearly see the tip of the enterprise's universe of information in the form of structured data. But, as the largest volume of the iceberg residing below the water
line is not clearly visible, so too, is our transparency unstructured data limited. Thanks to the advances in search engine technology that can be applied to any search-able data, i.e. encoded text, we are able to readily peer below the water line and have transparency to a large portion of the information iceberg.

However, there is still a very large portion of the iceberg that is not transparent. Enormous volumes of information are buried in computer files such as images, sound, and video. While the information in these files is render-able to a sighted or non-hearing impaired human, we cannot readily apply our new tools such as search and analytic engines to this vast
information resource. With the convergence of advances in automated recognition and text based tools, the potential exists to tap into vast reservoirs of knowledge and make use of the entire information iceberg. If only we had the remaining pieces to bring to bear these incredible
technologies to our unstructured data repositories.

The Solution
Applying these convergent technologies to our Transparency challenge still requires certain incremental advances...

• Automatic recognition of key words needs to be just a little better to get that last percentage of recognition,
• Automated recognition is extremely computer processor intensive, and thus cannot be done in real time. In fact, its application to large volumes is a challenge in scalability.
• The quantum leap in available information that is theoretically possible is incredibly powerful and for that reason must be done in the context of important privacy and security considerations,
• For universal applicability, open standards and formats are required.
Using our decades of experience managing unstructured data and some recent patent pending innovations we, at SYSCOM, Inc., have developed a complete solution to addressing all of the above issues. SYSCOM's Imagetext Business Intelligence Gateway (IBIG) can produce comprehensive Transparency to all of the information within the “information iceberg”, in a manner that is secure, open, and scalable.

SYSCOM's IBIG solution directly addresses the President's Open Government Directive by using modern technology to expose and disseminate useful information to the general public and other federal agencies. As the demand for more government transparency grows SYSCOM's IBIG solution can lead the way. Please consider the use of IBIG to support your Open Government Initiative.

Comments (0)Data Availability, Information Quality, Accountability...

Place public documents online and citable to a paragraph level

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 20:23:23 PDT

Vote On Idea

WHAT

Urge governments to publish granular permalinks for all documents on their websites.

WHY

* Enable citizens to reliably cite government websites on their personal blogs, on public sites like Wikipedia, or elsewhere.
* Provide unique identifiers that enable aggregation of citations.
* Make the civic discourse surrounding government websites more discoverable.

HOW

* An easy-to-deploy archival server that can take page snapshots
o Hosts all permalinks
o Could be hosted by the agency or a third party
o Uses a software version-control tool as the primary database
o Allows other parties to replicate the data
o Likely an easy install of a Linux server distribution with the archival tools included
* Quick and easy integration solution
o Include Javascript on each page that ensures the archival server takes snapshots as each page changes
o The Javascript also walks through the HTML DOM to add permalinks to each paragraph
o The "easy integration" method works with even static HTML
* Long-term integration solution
o Option one
+ CMS pushes changes directly to the archival server
+ CMS integrates the archival server's permalinks directly into HTML
+ Most streamlined option
o Option two
+ A proxy server (base on Squid/Varnish?) that pushes changed content to the archival server
+ The proxy server modifies the content passing through it to add permalinks to the HTML
+ Works with any CMS and even static HTML
o More accessible
o No Javascript required
o Broadly applicable integration model (text filtering/formatting plugin) that works with even basic blog and CMS tools
* Mark up documents using paragraph/sectional anchor tags to create nice anchors that go directly to the correct paragraph
* Permalinks are human-readable URLs with timestamps, document ID, and an an anchor to the section/paragraph
o Example: Http://archive.house.gov/HR1586IH/20030318233035#S1b1Bii
o The example would point to section 1, subsection b, chapter 1, paragraph B, clause ii in SB 1234 on May 2, 2009 at 8:26:16 am UTC

WHEN

* We are fund-raising to both hire programmers to write the tools and to have codeathons where programmers donate their time to write Open Source tools they believe in.
* We are recruiting different levels of government implementation one agency at a time. Your support on http://citability.org will illustrate the demand.
* We are asking various proprietary software vendors to implement this standard in their software products.

WHERE

* Http://citability.org - sign up and show your support
* http://citability.pbworks.com - to help promote or to feedback on the internal standards we are suggesting. We are talking various implementations in different software to backups and server failover settings.

Demos at DCcodeathon.eventbrite.com

Comments (0)Data Availability, Information Quality, Accountability..., citation opendata

Put Public Documents online and citable to a paragraph level

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:08:53 PDT

Vote On Idea

Comments (0)Data Availability, Information Quality, Accountability..., citation opendata

USAJOBS: Telework Positions and Positions with Flexible Hours

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:09:55 PDT

Vote On Idea

Create new formats for job postings on USAJOBS that include separate categories for Telework (y/n) and Flexible Hours (y/n). People who are looking for jobs would like to search for these, and it's not possible now. If employers have to step up and identify these types of jobs up front, telework and flex hours will be more job dependent than empolyee/boss dependent. Besides, putting them out there on USAJOBS will tell the world that the government really does intend to implement alternative work arrangements and to enter the 21st century. A good thing.

Comments (2)New Ways of Doing Business, New Tools..., advertise telework jobs & flex hour jobs

PENSION

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:01:55 PDT

Vote On Idea

I THINK OPM SHOULD HIRE ADDITIONAL PERSONNEL TO DISPENSE A RETIREE'S PENSION .

IT HAS BEEN FIVE AND A HALF MONTHS AND STILL NO PENSION. OH SURE THEY SEND YOU A SMALL AMOUNT AND EXPECT A PERSON TO LIVE OFF OF IT. THEY SEND ME A WHOPPING $714.00 A MONTH, THAT'S ABOUT $170.00 A WEEK.THAT IS REALLY NICE OF THEM.
I CALL OPM AND RECEIVE THE SAME RUNAROUND THAT I NOW HAVE A CASE WORKER, BULL!!!
I WONDER IF THEY COULD LIVE OFF OF $170.00 A WEEK?? THEY WOULD BE THE FIRST TO SCREAM THAT IT IS NOT FAIR AND HOW DO YOU EXPECT US TO LIVE.
IF THEY CAN'T DO THE JOB, THEY SHOULD BE REPLACED (A LOT OF PEOPLE OUT OF WORK) OR IF THEY ARE UNDERMANNED THEY SHOULD HIRE ADDITIONAL PERSONNEL.
I WILL CONTINUE TO CALL, WRIGHT THE NEWS MEDIA, CONTACT MY CONGRESSMAN, WHAT EVER IT TAKES. SOMEONE AT OPM OWES ME AND I AM SURE MANY OTHERS AN EXPLANATION.

Comments (1)Public Feedback & Involvement, Tools & Strategies...

Encourage use of more part time positions

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:52:43 PDT

Vote On Idea

I would like to retire and work part time closer to home. So, having worked for the government for over 32 years, I thought I'd take a look a options on USAJOBS. There aren't many there. I don't think managers naturally think of hiring people part time, nor do I think organizations make it particularly easy for managers to hire part time employees. Perhaps this is a cultural rather than a policies/procedures issue. I suspect it's a little of both. Thanks for looking into it, OPM.

Comments (1)New Ways of Doing Business, New Tools..., part time work

Life Insurance Open Season

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 09:57:41 PDT

Vote On Idea

I think it's about time that the Federal Government has an open season for Life Insurance. For most people, you only get one shot at selecting your life insurance. You can't get additional insurance unless you go through a medical exam and hope that everything is fine and then OPM will make the decision if you can get it nor not. Why not just have some open season's to let those that want to increase/change, just like the other open season's that we have.

Comments (0)New Ways of Doing Business, New Tools...

Hiring Reform

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 09:21:03 PDT

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I just wanted to give some praise to all those involved in the effort to reform federal hiring practices. From Berry's speech yesterday, I think we have a great upgrade in the system that will lead to improved performance, engagement and motivation. Thanks!

Comments (2)New Ways of Doing Business, New Tools...

Develop an OpenOPM Social Strategy

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 09:17:46 PDT

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Disruptive Technologies: A Holistic, Pragmatic Approach

New technologies are emerging at a faster pace than Agencies can swallow. The rate of obsolescence outpaces the rate of change.

Despite the new technology flood, Agencies lack a strategy to on-board these disruptions. As a result, they often react, flounder, or simply ignore them.

We can solve these problems in four major areas of practice:

Leadership and Management: How must leaders change with new technologies? How will this transform Agencies from the inside out?

Customer Strategy: How is the public behaving differently online? How can I reach them where they are?

Enterprise Strategy: Internal systems are connecting with external - How will I keep up with the dizzying pace? Employees are adopting collaboration and social tools without my control - How should I manage?

Innovation and Design: Experimenting on the general public is a bad idea, so how can I learn in a safe place? What vendors and providers should I lean on?

Here is a great slideshare webinar to get you started:
http://www.slideshare.net/charleneli/developing-a-social-strategy-webinar

Comments (1)Public Feedback & Involvement, Tools & Strategies..., social, disruptive, strategy, holistic