A coming soon banner obscures most of a new sign that greets drivers entering the seven story parking structure at Seattle Tacoma (SeaTac) International Airport but it is still enough to make an internal combustion engine stutter. Accompanied by a stylized graphic of a car, electric cable and lightning bolt, the sign announces that electric car charging stations are being installed on Level 5.
The move comes as MINI has just begun electric car trials in select markets on the east coast and California and two years before Chevy is slated to roll out the Volt, the plug-in hybrid on which GM appears to betting the company.
The executives of GM and the other Detroit-based auto makers are due back in Washington, DC for a second shot at extracting at least $25 billion in bridge loans from Congress by presenting more detailed plans for how they will use the money. It seems that, in the "other Washington," other public officials are presuming on the what those plans contain.
"Our Politicians Fiddle as Innocents Die," blared the Times of India newspaper on Sunday as the political recriminations began in the wake of last week's terrorist attacks in Mumbai. The headline coincided with the resignation of India's highest-ranking internal security official, who said he was taking "moral" responsibility for the tragedy.
While the country's black-cat commandos have been largely commended for their work in the street-to-street (and sometimes room-to-room) combat with the assailants, the Indian intelligence, counter terrorism and surveillance services faced almost immediate criticism for allowing the attacks to happen in the first place. There are even reports that the government had advance warning.
All of this sounds eerily reminiscent. The early reporting from India suggests that national governments have not learned the lessons from the failures of earlier targets of terrorism.
It is worth saying out loud that the strengths and weaknesses of the evolving media landscape were also on full public view during this latest tragedy, marking an evolution that can be traced back to natural disasters (hurricanes on the gulf coast of this country or the Asian tsnami) if not before.
Consider stories that were published and posted while Mumbai was still under siege. NPR introduced its listeners to Sreenath Sreenivasan, a journalist who also serves as dean of student affairs at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Within in an hour of learning of the Mumbai attacks, Sreenivasan "was hosting a Web radio call-in show with other Indian journalists relaying what they knew." It was the meeting of old and media, with the conventions of journalism tempering the noise that inevitably follows shocking developments.
Elsewhere, a Reuters dispatch reported, "Bloggers across Mumbai fed live updates ... [on the] ...attacks in the heart of India's financial
capital, highlighting the social media's new expanding role in news
coverage." It pointed to photos of the attacks on Flikr, frequent updates of an entry on Wikipedia, a steady stream of updates and comments on twitter and myriad bloggers doing what they could to help. Clearly, these Web 2.0 technologies are as effective as anything we have seen in terms of immediacy -- a particularly powerful attribute when they are in the hands of those on the ground with unique, authoratative information.
But, and there is are two big buts here: (a) precious few bloggers and even microbloggers are that close and that relevant, prefering instead the comfort of home half way around the world (present company included); and, (b) something disturbing happened to embedded links as they aged. Dina Mehta blogged furiously from Mumbai during the siege, originally describing herself as "upset and angry and bereft." But by Sunday night, visitors to her blog were greeted by a corrupted headline, "Why I am deleting comments Error 404 - Not Found." Another blogger, Gaurav Mishra, explained why in -- ironically enough -- one of the remaining comments on Mehta's blog. In short, some of the comments were deemed extremest and even "evil". Citizen journalism has no conventions to guide it, and those that comment are prepared to say almost anything under the veil of anonymity.
At the risk of making a snap judgment even as the events of last week are still unwinding, the response and the reportage were both only partial successes. Honoring those who served well is important but taking a hard look at what failed may be where the greatest value lies. It is the only way to perfect or reform institutions about which we care -- government, media and that still amorphous thing called Web 2.0.
A final note. There is another post about Mumbai that I struggled to write over the long Thanksgiving weekend. I couldn't get it right. Thankfully, CBC essayist Rex Murphy did:
We should not see what
happened ... in India - what is happening - as something in a
distant country, but as a chilling and depraved assault on on what all
decent people share in common.
Terrorism is the murder of innocents as
a tactic in the service of fanaticism. It is the anti-politics of our
time. It is a threat to us all. The blast was in Mumbai, but its
vibrations are meant for every civilized city of the planet.
... It is merely right therefore that we give our
thoughts to their particular plight - and offer - to these, our fellow
citizens - our alert and full sympathy.
The server logs at the Merriam-Webster online dictionary have spoken -- "bailout" is the word of the year as much for how often it was looked up than how many industries wanted one. The arbiters of the English language say the trillion dollar word eclipsed favorites from the campaign trail, "maverick" and "vet." (The list comes out just in time for the much anticipated holiday's slow news days.)
But this year's finalists hold the promise of being red meat -- "bailout" for conservatives, "maverick" for liberals -- at the extended-family Thanksgiving Day feast, which just isn't right because the day is supposed to be about turkey (the original white meat).
Of course, if you received an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner this year, you have probably figured out the wisdom behind the prohibition on talking politics and religion in such settings.
But there is an occupational hazard that could send your tryptophan-saturated hearers face down into the jellied salad. Infrastructure.
It is an easy shorthand in the private vocabulary of information technology but both high- and low- culture word watchers don't think much of it.
According to no less an authority than Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Director of the Annenberg School of Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania in comments at the fall NASCIO conference, IT's coupling of infrastructure and architecture has little meaning outside of the technology community and is confusing to the very people with whom CIOs and their kin seek to communicate.
MSNBC commentator Chris Mathews agrees. "Infrastructure is an awful word," he gurgled during an early on-air dissertation on the merits of the depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA) and how it may be time to try such a scheme again.
But his cable news colleague Rachel Maddow opened her show early on Monday by enthusing about the opening of the federal spigot under the new administration:
President-elect Obama's ... big plan? He's rolling out what amounts
to a new "New Deal" to invest in infrastructure. Yes. I've wanted
infrastructure to be a sexy political issue for so long now that when I
say the word, I can almost hear wakachicka-wakachicka background music
in my head - infrastructure, yessss.
That last little wakachicka-wakachicka bit has morphed into a downloadable ring tone under the heading of what Maddow calls infrastructure porn.
Even with infrastructure worth about 115,000,000 returns on Google, when and if real people think about it, they think about roads, bridges and schools. They don't readily think about the Internet and digital infrastructures. We run the risk of thinking we are part of this new national conversation when we are not. We don't share a common definition of the word, a word it should be noted that nobody really uses in casual conversation anyway.
The final caution can be ripped out of context from The Princess Bride, the 1987 Rob Reiner film that has become a perennial favorite rental on Thanksgiving long weekends. In a recurring exchange with Vizzini, Inigo Montoya calmly intones, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Inconceivable! No, infrastructure.
A bipartisan and independent California state agency is recommending further consolidation of the state's information technology infrastructure, assets and staff under the state CIO. The Little Hoover Commission, in an ironically-named report called A New Legacy System: Using Technology to Drive Performance, recommends:
Empower the state chief information officer with tools and resources to oversee a generational transformation of information technology in state government. The state must consolidate resources under the Office of the State Chief Information Officer, including the Department of Technology Services, the Office of Systems Integration, geospatial information functions and the information security functions of the Office of Information Security and Privacy Protection. Use public money for technology projects responsibly and with transparency. To rebuild the confidence of the Legislature and the public, the process through which California's technology projects are governed must be open and transparent. The Information Technology Council should expand to include legislative members as well as members from existing technology councils, and it should be empowered to prioritize overall technology projects for the state and aggressively monitor their implementation. The state chief information officer should regularly report on the progress of the state's information technology projects through a more robust Web site. Use technology to track, measure and improve performance. The state should encourage and foster the burgeoning development of performance measurement projects throughout state departments and agencies by re-establishing the technology innovation fund and creating opportunities to regularly integrate performance data into the state's management and budgeting strategy. The governor should hold regular public meetings with agency heads to evaluate performance data.
Even while tacitly recognizing that these changes will be difficult and take time, the Commission points to a new model for IT governance as key to a more effective fiscal management in the long run.
In the name of full disclosure, I was one of many who provided testimony to the Commission and worked with its staff in the preparation of the report. To read the full text of the report, download it here -- LittleHoover.pdf .
I substituted for Georgia Technology Authority Director Patrick Moore at the state's Digital Government Summit yesterday because Moore had 1.2 billion reasons not to be there at the appointed hour.
He was alongside Governor Sonny Perdue to announce the signing of a pair of contracts intended to consolidate and outsource the state government's IT operations. The larger of the two, worth $873 million over eight years, was awarded to IBM to take over infrastructure -- from the raised floor data centers, mainframes, services and disaster recovery to PC and laptops. The other will pay AT&T $346 million over 5 years to manage network services for the state. Both contracts have two one-year renewal options.
The state estimates that it will save an estimated $180 million over the term of the contracts but it comes at a cost to state employees, 92 of whom will lose their jobs in May 2009 and 322 others will be offered jobs with IBM and AT&T.
IBM and AT&T were effectively sole bidders after two other companies withdrew their bids before the apparently successful vendors were announced.
The award comes on the heels of a decision late last month by the state of Texas to suspend an $863 million outsourcing project with IBM to transfer state records to a centralized computer system. In a letter to state IT officials, Governor Rick Perry said the company had failed to backup the data of more than 20 state agencies.
"My plans require time and distance." That's the quote
carved in stone below a statue of Pacific Northwest pioneer Marcus
Whitman inside the entrance to the Washington State Legislature. Of
course, the commodity Internet has been collapsing time and distance
for more than a decade. Still the technology juggernaut's time
efficiencies have been frustrated -- by the deliberate process and
pacing of legislatures at the institutional level, for example, and by
you and me.
There is a name for this neo-Luddism that lurks just below the
surface of even the most enthusiastic technology booster: latency. We
carbon-based life forms are the prime source of latency in
semiautomated processes. Without us there would be no "semi" in
semiautomated. (Read: We are the problem.)
This isn't a new problem. Latency has a language of its own in communications media -- mail (Return to sender), broadcast (One moment please), over-the-counter (Back in five minutes), phone (Leave a message), e-mail (This is an auto reply) and mobile, instant messages and short message service (Subscriber could not be found. Message may not be delivered.)
Unified communications (UC), the latest evolution in converged
networking, promises to remove these excuses by making the underlying
problem -- humans -- more available. Enter "presence" -- described by
its supporters as "the dial tone of the future" because it keeps
real-time tabs on the availability, ability and preferred mode of
communicating. Presence is also the component of UC that's aimed at
reducing or eliminating human latency; it's also the key differentiator
between UC and previous iterations of any-to-any networks that combine
multimedia communications, such as voice, data and video; call control;
instant messaging; conferencing like audio, video, tele, Web; and
mobility.
Are UCs a sleeper issue? Perhaps. In a recent survey of 82
self-selected public agencies conducted by the Center for Digital
Government, 22 percent of respondents reported that presence was the
highest funding priority in their communications strategy. That's well
behind voice (60 percent) and video (38 percent), in line with data (26
percent) and e-mail (26 percent), and ahead of instant messaging (16
percent) and mobility (11 percent).
Presence is a compelling idea for institutional improvisation and
productivity. But presence is also a very personal matter. It's about
my presence and yours -- when and how to reach us, especially when
we're away.
It reminds me of the first time I was issued a cell phone in 1988 --
convenient yes, but maybe too convenient. Cell phones began to blur the
lines between work hours and personal hours, professional spheres and
personal space. Two decades later, we have become accustomed to how
cell phones have reordered our lives -- call it accidental
technological determinism. Presence is smarter than cell phones by
themselves -- our planning for presence and response to it needs to be
more deliberate because we could use a little time and distance.
This post originated in the pages of GT but this forum creates the opportunity for conversation about it. What say you? Am I overstating the creepiness factor here or is it just good thinking?
Disavowing that he was speaking in his role as a member of President-Elect Barack Obama's Transition Economic Advisory Board, and disavowing interest in serving as the new administration's chief technology officer, Google CEO Eric Schmidt did provide a hopeful view of the potential synergies among public policy, technology and economic renewal.
Schmidt is also the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the New America Foundation, the organization that hosted the speech and live webcast from Washington, DC on Tuesday.
Echoing incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuel's rejoinder not to let any crisis pass without taking advantage of it, Schmidt told his audience in the Ronald Reagan Building, "The country has faced many, many more significant challenges. ... Let's take the crisis ... and let's deal with it as an opportunity to get the structure right."
"If you're going to spur economic growth you've got to focus on infrastructure research and development and energy. These are jobs programs," he said, pointing out that the historical record was on his side of the argument, "Infrastructure is the foundation upon which wealth is created"
Even as the heads of the American auto makers and their unions lobbied for loans in front of a lame duck Congress just down the street, Schmidt said that there was a better way to go than invest in past failures, "Let's not just have bailout programs. Why don't we use the stimulus money to get infrastructure built?"
The strongest parts of the speech were those that were within Google's wheelhouse - the democratization of information. "In our life time, almost all people will have access to almost all the world's information. That is a remarkable achievement."
What's more important, said Schmidt, was having systems as open as the information that they surface and exploit, ""Open systems have this clear promise of innovation and greater choice.... It is that openness, the ability that [allows] anyone can play ... that drives the modern economy.... You never know where innovation's going to come from, but with an open platform, you welcome it,"
Aware of his audience and the location of his speech, the Google chief closed by noting that, in his view, the public sector has been a laggard in adopting new platforms for governing -- including but not limited to blogs and social network, "Government has not embraced generally the tools we use every day.... It's time to do it and do it right."
A pair of Bronze Medal Award Winners from Washington, DC's Apps for Democracy competition picked up additional honors on Friday night by picking up the People's Choice awards.
The District's new Car Pool Mashup attracted 22 percent of the 3,320 votes and DC Bikes took another 13 percent.
It could be that all of this only matters to a small band of Birkenstock-wearing, open source-coding, Obama-voting, Inconvenient Truth-watching, Latte-drinking residents in Washington, DC or it could foreshadow the democratization of government-held data and the applications that make them useful. Nothing against the former, but I'm betting on the latter.
In the shadow of the budget preparations by governors across the nation that mark the start the negotiations with their respective legislatures, there is considerable activity to position bills on a wide range of issues.
In Washington state, the 2009 legislature will be asked to act on the recommendations of the state Sunshine Committee to narrow the circumstances under which public agencies can cite attorney-client privilege to prevent disclosure of certain public records.
The original standard in the state's Open Records Act had been that there had to be an authentic threat of litigation against a public agency had to exist. Two state Supreme Court decisions in particular -- Hangartner v. City of Seattle (2004) and Soter v. Cowles Publishing (2007) -- had a broadening effect on the exemption by upholding claims of attorney-client privilege. The state's daily newspapers -- individually and through their lobbying association -- claim the result has been the loss of public accountability.
As worrying for the daily newspapers is what they perceive as a proliferation of exemptions, which started at only 10 in the original 1971 law and have grown to over 300 today, and were a catalyst to the creation of the Public Records Exemption Accountability Committee in mid-2007.
By a 7-3 vote last Wednesday, the so-called Sunshine Committee voted to recommend new legislation that force a tightening of the privilege definitions under the act, and push back against the Supreme Court. The no votes included a state senator and a pair of public sector attorneys who provide advice to public officials on legal matters. One of the no votes belonged to an attorney who was enormously helpful to me in the early days of the e-government movement.
The state's largest newspaper has called the trio out by name, and not in a complimentary way, as part of its campaign to have the legislature codify the committee's recommendation.
We are entering the fourth decade of America's citizen-led experiment with open records laws. They were created around broad principles but refined, as the 300 exemptions attest, incrementally with scalpel-like incisions. Considering the source of the minority opinion in the privilege recommendation, the legislature would be well advised to avoid replacing the scalpel with the blunt force of a hammer.
After only 29.5 years in Mississippi state service, Karen Newman has retired from the Department of Information Technology Services. Apparently a change is still as good as a rest - she joined The Clay Firm last week.
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