Government News & Articles

Think Big Data, and many of us think Big Government. In a recent white paper called Governing the Cloud, Granicus CTO Javier Muniz and CEO Tom Spengler offer five reasons why the cloud is going to make government and large enterprise governance easier.

Have you heard the one about the contractor that tried to get the cautious government agency to sign their name on the dotted line for two new technologies -- cloud and Hadoop -- all at once? No, I’m serious and GCE Federal is too.

How do you feel about the Federal Reserve? I mean, how do you really feel?

Apparently, the Federal Reserve wants to find out, according to a recent Request for Proposal.

They're from the government and they're here to help you. No, really. Some of the biggest collectors of data are the various governments, whether on a national, state and regional or local level. Increasingly, governments are making this data available to developers, who are using it to produce applications.

In a move that Amazon hopes will give it a bigger piece of the US$ 78.5 that the federal government spends on IT, the company has announced the AWS GovCloud (US) Region, a cloud service specifically for the US federal government.

As the public sector begins to come to grips with the transformation of services to online delivery, it is more important than ever that councils and local authority departments select the right supplier to support their Web Channel Strategy.

It's unusual for the European Union -- which is normally a real stickler for individual privacy -- to be following the U.S. in a user privacy issue, but the European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda is calling for the E.U. to adopt "do not track" legislation similar to that the U.S. is working on. 

The W3C (news, site) has formed the Government Linked Data working group, the mission of which is to "provide standards and other information that help governments around the world publish their data as effective and usable Linked Data using Semantic Web technologies."

In a repeat of 2010, when he killed the "Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act" (COICA), Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has singlehandedly essentially killed the "Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011," or "PROTECT IP" bill, after it passed out of a Senate committee amidst a flurry of industry letters both for and against it.

The Google-Microsoft FISMA War entered its fourth day, with the two companies trading shots about which one really was authorized to sell to the U.S. federal government, and which one was lying about the other. 

On Friday, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) introduced H.R.654, which is intended "to direct the Federal Trade Commission to prescribe regulations regarding the collection and use of information obtained by tracking the Internet activity of an individual."

Uh oh. The government is here to help you.

The cloud is the new Wild West and the need for regulations is desperate. The lack of regulations hinders the growth of the industry. Major players, such as Microsoft, acknowledge this and ask the governments to do their job.

Cloud computing brings in many benefits to enterprises, governments included. The government of Australia has recently expressed its interest in moving its systems to the cloud, and is in the process of issuing guidelines for its diverse set of departments and agencies.

Running on a platform of good governance and corruption-busting, Benigno Aquino III won the Philippine presidency by popular vote in May, 2010. Having heavily utilized social media in his campaign, Aquino's administration is now actively using social networks as feedback mechanism. Official Twitter and Facebook accounts, as well as a blog, have been created to help share messages and encourage comments among the constituency. Recent events, however, suggest that Aquino's government may have pressured Facebook into removing a third-party "Benigno Aquino III" Page and moving its fans into the administration's official Page for better information control.

Fans of the OpenPublish (news, site) packaged Drupal (news, site) distribution aimed at publishers will be pleased to know that creator Phase 2 Technology has some interesting updates coming, and big plans to complete before the next Drupalcon.