No Furloughs at Customs and Border Patrol
Uncharted Financial Waters at Defense
Postal Service Eyes Cuba
Should Leaders Ever Lie?
Unions: Efficiency Board Is 'Offensive,' 'Unwise'
Tangherlini as GSA's Mr. Fix-It?
AUTHOR ARCHIVES
Joseph Marks
Staff Correspondent
Joseph Marks covers government technology issues, social media, Gov 2.0 and global Internet freedom for Nextgov. He previously reported on federal litigation and legal policy for Law360 and on local, state and regional issues for two Midwestern newspapers. He also interned for Congressional Quarterly’s Homeland Security section and the Associated Press’s Jerusalem Bureau. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin and a master’s in international affairs from Georgetown.
U.S. government broadcaster expands use of social media in Middle East
September 30, 2011
FROM NEXTGOV
As social media becomes a primary tool for communication, organization and subversion across the Middle East, the U.S. government's foreign broadcasting arm is increasingly relying on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to communicate with its audience. The weekly program Eye on Democracy, which runs on the Arabic language Alhurra station, has ...
Listening to users: How VA developed its PTSD Coach mobile app
September 30, 2011
FROM NEXTGOV
When Dr. Julia Hoffman wanted to build a mobile app to help veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, she went to the source: 80 residential PTSD patients at the Veterans Affairs Department Trauma Recovery Program in Palo Alto, Calif. The vets' top priority, they told her, was finding something to ...
Mineral, Va., quake?: 'Yeah, we felt it.'
September 28, 2011
FROM NEXTGOV
The once-a-century earthquake that shook the East Coast on Aug. 23 marked a milestone for the U.S. Geological Survey's decade-old Did You Feel It? earthquake report crowdsourcing page. Within hours of the quake that originated in Mineral, Va., the page had recorded more than 140,000 responses from as far north ...
Spy Agency to use Data Mining to Spot Emerging Technologies
September 27, 2011
FROM NEXTGOV
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's office is launching a new research project aimed at spotting important emerging technologies before they reach their tipping point. The agency's idea is to get in on the ground floor of important new technologies to maintain an intelligence advantage over adversaries, according to a ...
Feds are bullish on government apps, but few have downloaded one
September 27, 2011
FROM NEXTGOV
Almost half of federal managers use a mobile software application more than once a day, but only 15 percent of federal smartphone users have ever downloaded a government-built app, according to a recent survey. About two-thirds of federal officials didn't know whether their agency had built or planned to build ...
Obama's Online Town Halls: Is it the Medium that Matters?
September 21, 2011
FROM NEXTGOV
After wading throughthousands of 140-charter-or-less Tweets and retweets lobbed at President Obama during July's Twitter Town Hall, there's something satisfying -- almost indulgent -- about reading the lengthy LinkedIn questions posted in advance of that social networking site's presidential town hall set for Monday. Tweets, by design, are straightforward, uncomplicated ...
Cuts to E-Gov fund could slow federal cloud transition
September 21, 2011
FROM NEXTGOV
Current funding levels for electronic government initiatives in the House and Senate Appropriations committees could cripple the government's ability to modernize federal information technology and thereby save money in the long run, a General Services Administration official told lawmakers Wednesday. That includes new security and certification projects aimed at helping ...
Cuts to E-Gov fund could slow federal cloud transition
September 21, 2011 Current funding levels for electronic government initiatives in the House and Senate Appropriations committees could cripple the government's ability to modernize federal information technology and thereby save money in the long run, a General Services Administration official told lawmakers Wednesday. Read the full story on Nextgov.
White House releases open government action plan with new initiatives
September 20, 2011
FROM NEXTGOV
This story has been updated. The White House on Tuesday released its National Action Plan for Open Government, part of a 50-nation Open Government Partnership officially launched on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The action plan recaps many transparency initiatives from the first three ...
Task Force Asks Public How To Dot-Gov
September 19, 2011
FROM NEXTGOV
A White House task force charged with reforming the federal web presence launched a discussion board Monday to gather citizen feedback. The most popular suggestion by the end of the day was imposing stricter standards for what constitutes "plain language" on federal websites. Too much information is poorly written and ...
