Views of Federal Acquisition Workforce Skills Vary Widely, Who's Right?

It appears that members of the acquisition workforce have a much more positive view of their skills and capabilities than do their leaders. Comparing acquisition professionals' own ratings of their competencies to a recent survey of their leaders' views shows wide ratings gaps in many areas.

This matters, because the workforce competency survey is used to set the acquisition training agenda for civilian agencies. The perception gap may mean that the skills that acquisition leaders believe are critical won't be identified as educational priorities because acquisition workforce members believe they already have them.

https://www.asigovernment.com/ideas-insights/asi-analysis-surveys-reveal-large-gap-in-views-of-workforce-skills/

Is America a "Congenitally Racist Country Erected Upon the Plunder of Life, Liberty, Labor and Land?"

At this moment especially, when we search for answers to Ferguson, New York and elsewhere, we can find them in this stunning piece of real, old-time, long-form, investigative journalism, from the cover of the Atlantic magazine in June. And the chief answer, without question, is that we are a nation founded on white supremacy and still imposing it actively through governmental power, from policing on up to health insurance and housing policy and much more.

Here is the author, Ta-Nahesi Coates, from a Nov. 26 post about the agony of watching a black president contort himself so as not to have to address the essential core of racism at the heart of our economy, polity, history and America's existence"

"In nearly every major American city one can find a population of people whose very existence, whose very history, whose very traditions, are an assault upon this country's nationalist instincts. Black people are the chastener of their own country. Their experience says to America, 'You wear the mask.'"

White supremacy is pervasive and it is part of everything we are as Americans. If you read nothing else, please read "The Case for Reparations: Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racists housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole."

We must name the truth of our country and we must face and honestly confront and answer for it. Only then, do we create a way to heal.

Uber Netflixed Taxis, Who Will Uber Uber?

Credit: Getty Images

Digital disruption ala Uber vs. taxis, is an accelerating, inexorable force. It's not a question of if software will eat you; it's just a question of when.

Back Again!

I've waited a bit just to make sure, but it appears that Vivek Kundra finally is back to stay.

His saga is a cautionary tale for everyone seeking to serve the Obama administration, though. Washington is a "no good deed goes unpunished" town. In attempting to make personnel decisions carefully and to avoid conflicts of interest, the Obama administration has unleashed an evil djin--a crowd of pundits, bloggers, reporters and groups ready to pounce on the slightest taint. Once leashed, this monster will leave no stone unturned, no closet unopened. I suppose that is as it should be, especially in this era of transparency, but it's going to take some getting used to. Remember the days when all manner of private peccadilloes remained private?

I guess sunlight will be disinfecting us all now. So here's a reminder: Don't commit anything to the Ethernet, public records, or anywhere else unless you are prepared to see it, well, everywhere.

And now that Kundra is back, expect to see mountains of once-hidden or impenetrable federal data being unearthed, cleansed, transmitted and revealed. The Data.gov countdown begins . . .

Say It Ain't So, Vivek Kundra!

So Vivek Kundra already has been forced to take leave of his brand new post as federal chief information officer just days after he finally was officially named to the job. He had been working in the Office of Management and Budget unofficially for a while before the formal announcement, giving rise to rumors and mutterings about why no announcement was forthcoming.

Today, as he spoke to a large audience at the government technology expo, FOSE, in downtown Washington, FBI agents raided the offices where he had served as the District of Columbia's chief technology office since 2007.

According to WTOP Radio, which broke the story of the raid, they took two men into custody. One, Yusuf Acar, is acting chief security officer for the District and buys computers and hires contract employees for city offices. He was charged with bribery of a public official, money laundering, wire fraud and conflict of interest. The other, Sushil Bansal, is president and chief executive officer of Advanced Integrated Technologies Corporation. He also is a former D.C. government employee, charges against him include bribery of a public official, money laundering, wire fraud and conflict of interest.

The two allegedly conspired to fraudulently bill DC for inventory and workers that never appeared, then split the payments.

WTOP reported that AITC had been working for DC since 2004, but that its billings doubled to more than $5 million in 2008 after Kundra took over.

Let's face it. This doesn't look good for Kundra. Even if he bears no taint at all of the alleged crimes, they occurred in part on his watch. According to WTOP, "Bansal's company has offices in D.C. and India and received more than $13 million in business with the D.C. government in the past five years, according to court documents."

So many people, myself included, have had such high hopes for Kundra as a prophet of virtual government and a smart, apparently good-hearted agent of change who both understood and appreciated public servants and the challenges they face. Of course he is innocent until proved otherwise, but Washington is an unforgiving town and Obama is a very careful and tough president facing a snarling GOP ready to pounce. Already he has passed on a number of nominees with lesser problems than a new FBI investigation swirling around them.

Having been on a panel with Kundra and studied him and his accomplishments from afar, I was an early supporter. I remain a supporter of his Gov 2.0 spirit and accomplishments today. But I am sad. Just very, very sad, no matter how this turns out. It's like the tragic story of White Sox slugger "Shoeless Joe Jackson," who was suspended from baseball for life with seven others accused in the infamous "Black Sox scandal" of having thrown the 1919 World Series. "Say it ain't so, Joe," a young fan is said to have implored Jackson outside the courthouse. Tonight I feel what that youngster must have felt.

Shoeless Joe and his seven compatriots were acquitted by a Chicago jury in 1921, but were banned from the game nonetheless. One fears a similar fate for Kundra.

Whatever happens, I salute WTOP's Mark Seagraves for sticking with this story like a terrier with a bone. It's nice to see some good old shoe-leather reporting for a change. It's a dying art, Mark. Big ups.

What Does 'Transparency' Mean?

FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Reposted from GovLoop, Feb. 11, 2009

At CGI Federal, where I now work as a "thought leadership" editor, we've been mulling the meaning of transparency lately. Current parlance seems to have it meaning things like posting legislation and regulations for comment, posting videos of speeches and directions via YouTube or other such services, agencies getting on Twitter. All sorts of public-facing openness, in other words.

But we've been focused on another sort of transparency: "management transparency," for lack of a better formulation. Admittedly, this interests us because we put into operation a large percentage of the government's financial management computer systems and we know they can harvest a lot of very useful data and transform it into insight about agency operations. In other words, we have a business interest in managerial transparency. But even if we didn't, I would be thinking about transparency this way.

I am, after all, a true federal management geek. I ran Government Executive magazine's part in the Federal Performance Project for five years, for Pete's sake. The thought of dashboard displays on the computer screen showing things like changes in units of performance by location and cost per unit in different operations boosts my blood pressure. Discussions about how to best measure results of federal programs in outcome terms can keep me up until dawn!

So I am, of course, hopeful that the Obama administration's transparency focus includes the notion that federal managers should be making decisions about programs, personnel and budget using data about how well or badly their programs and administrative functions are delivering internal and external results. After all, data-driven decision-making should apply to more than just global warming!

So now I am wondering, is anyone else looking at and thinking about transparency this way? That is, as opening the books on how agencies operate and how money is apportioned within them both to those who run the programs and to the public and Congress and everyone else with some skin in the game?

Has anyone gotten past the "coolness" factor to begin thinking about what meaningful and relevant transparency would be within government? I just read David McClure's new Gartner piece about transparency and even he only hints at this kind of definition. I ask because if we don't get past the MySpace/mashup phase of transparency, we'll have wasted a prime opportunity to apply data-driven decision-making where it could really do some good.

I'm just askin' . . .

I'm Back, So Is Kundra

News of my disappearance has been greatly exaggerated!

Those of you who had written me off should have known better. In fact, I was simply hibernating until my prediction about Vivek Kundra came true, well, almost. Today has WFED radio in DC and NextGov (a blogging stomping ground of mine) reporting that Kundra will take not the greatly diminished federal CTO slot, but the old Karen Evans position in the Office of Management and Budget, administrator for e-government and information technology.

This is good news. The CTO seems to have been relegated to a more ceremonial, bully pulpit sort of job and Kundra would be wasted there. He's much more a pragmatic, practical, let's-get-it-done sort of guy. Just ask people in his Washington, DC, CTO office for an idea of how he will handle the OMB post, if the news is true. I draw upon my own firsthand experience of him in November at the national Academy of Public Administration annual conference.

Kundra was a surprise speaker on our panel about Web 2.0 in government. I can't recall the verbatim exchanges during the workshop, but I do recall the gist of what happened next. After he quickly recapped all the instances in which he had capitalized on 2.0 tools in DC, a county government employee asked a question. It seemed that his council members were pressing to have all the checks written by his department posted online so citizens could see exactly who the government was paying and for what. The questioner wanted the workshop attendees' opinions of that idea since he found it disturbing and impractical, essentially because people would have no context for viewing the checks and would likely misconstrue some of the spending as a result.

Kundra gently, politely and firmly said, in essence, so what? Do it anyway. His clear preference is, as is President Obama's, for more transparency than less, more use of 2.0 tools than less, more reuse of existing and ubiquitous applications (e.g. Google docs) than fewer, less development of complicated, large new systems and more simple, elegant innovation via participation (e.g. Apps for Democracy).

So again I say: Prepare for pre-solicitation conferences on YouTube and other public video sites, basic office work apps in the cloud, exposure of many heretofore hidden processes to the public and lots of "Why not?" queries to the naysayers. This administration has a much higher opinion of citizens' intelligence and right to know and understand the workings of government than any that came before. This public has a much lower tolerance for being kept in the dark because government is just too complicated to understand than any public of yore. And we're all way too economically pressed and angry and frightened to put up any longer with not knowing how our taxes are being spent.

No more enterprise architectures so complicated and Byzantine for even their intended users to understand. No more Frankenstein's monster Lines of Business, no more endlessly caveated performance accountability reports. Patience is short, time is short. This is the fierce urgency of now. If we have more than one of it, shut down the least effective ones or consolidate them into the most. If it isn't vital, stop doing it. If government can't do it as well as the private sector, have the private sector take the government employees and do it better. If it can't be used across all or most agencies, don't buy it, create it, improve it, or even propose it.

I am certain that Vivek Kundra paid his taxes and lives a life not unlike most of the rest of us. I doubt he has accepted a car, a driver or fees from anyone likely to be benefiting from his posts. So I am reasonably sure he will be taking the OMB job, and thank goodness.

Federal CTO Prediction

OK, I'm going out on a limb here about a piece of real Inside the Beltway insider baseball: the name of the new federal chief technology officer. You should care, actually, because if this person reflects the spirit of the Obama presidency, he or she will soon be calling on all of us to help fix what's wrong, improve what's right and come up with what's next for technology in government. I recently opined that it didn't much matter who is named because in many ways, the new CTO will be all of us.

The Obama campaign and the Obama moment and the Obama approach all point to greater openness about the workings of government, more collaboration, more sharing and, finally, a call on Americans to quit shopping and step up to the challenges of reinventing democracy for the 21st century. But hey, no one likes to cede bragging rights, so I dropped a name in at the end of the piece as my prediction: Vivek Kundra. And now, guess what? he's suddenly gone all unavailable to the press. Here in Washington, that usually means either an indictment or an appointment. This guy is simply too busy as Washington, DC's CTO and too young and too clean to have an indictment, so I'm betting on an appointment: federal CTO.

And how cool is that?!? He's only been at the helm in DC since 2007. He's crazy innovative, he's daring and his dad was a high school teacher in the DC public schools for Pete's sake.

Here's my next prediction: procurement pre-solicitation conferences on YouTube.


Remember, you read it here first!

A Welcome Pat on the Back

We sole proprietors on the publishing frontier, better known as bloggers, toil in relative obscurity. Having once run a print magazine with a full reporting and editing staff, art department and business operation to handle fulfillment and printing and delivery and promotion and ad sales, I find performing all those functions myself particularly frustrating and sometimes defeating.

There's so very much more I'd like to write about and collaborate on and chew over and attempt. My audience is small (though hugely valued) and I need time to learn how to entice new readers. It would be ever so wonderful to actually be able to make any sort of a living doing this, too.

So as I stumble along alone, it is truly wonderful when someone at a meeting or reception says they subscribe or cites something I've written. It's heart-thumpingly exciting when someone links to one of my posts or includes The Agile Mind in their blog roll. But being recognized by folks in the field, well, that is beyond thrilling. And that's what happened yesterday, when BeatBlogging.org includedThe Agile Mind on its Leaderboard for the week.

What's BeatBlogging? Here's its description:

Beatblogging.org is a project of NewAssignment.Net that examines how journalists can use social networks and other Web tools to improve beat reporting.

Every day we highlight innovative beat reporters on our nominees list. The best of the nominees make our weekly Leaderboard.

We look at the latest trends and how they can help journalists and journalism. We find real-world examples of social media helping journalists improve their beat reporting.

We also have podcasts where we interview journalists who are pushing the practice. We ask them what works and what doesn’t. We are always trying to figure out what is the return on investment for investing time in social media.

This week's list highlights a hardy band of us covering the government beat in new ways. I am very proud that The Agile Mind made the cut, especially given that BeatBlogging describes the Leaderboard as "a list of the most innovative beat reporters in the world." The underlying goal is to give other reporters and news organizations ideas about how to innovate. Humbling thought that my fledgling effort might give someone else ideas!

What's even more humbling is being recognized by a project created by Jay Rosen, the widely respected New York University professor who created PressThink, a prize-winning blog examining journalism in the throes of tectonic shifts. BeatBlogging is among the progeny of NewAssignment.net, a Rosen-created site for experimental open source collaboration between amateur and professional journalists in reporting the news.

So anyhow, this is a long way of saying thank you from the heart to BeatBlogging.org for the recognition. You probably have an idea how much it means to those of us out here working without a net, but you don't know how much it meant to me specifically. Now you do.

America 2.0

Andrew Sullivan was right last year when he wrote "Good bye to All That: Why Obama Matters." for the December issue of The Atlantic magazine. Sullivan could not have foreseen the role of the financial crisis in sweeping Obama into office. Who saw that coming? But he did predict the sheer importance of being Barak--his unique suitability for this moment, his singular ability to cross over the Vietnam War divide, to overcome the religious wars and to begin closing the racial chasm.

And Sullivan clearly saw the power of Obama as symbol of America. Here's how he put it:

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy. The war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a function of both hard power and soft power. We have seen the potential of hard power in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. We have also seen its inherent weaknesses in Iraq, and its profound limitations in winning a long war against radical Islam. The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

I usually write about virtual government in terms of the immersive Internet, social networking, games for training, and other matters Web 2.0. But today, I am deeply moved by America 2.0, this amazing place where white men and African Americans, and Latinos and young people and millions of brand new voters carried an African American man into our highest office.

This astonishing act of hope and belief and love of all that is good about the country overshadows all the YouTubes, MySpaces, Facebooks, wikis, Twitters, -pedias, synthetic worlds, serious games, multitouch screens, blogs and artificially intelligent agents that usually excite me so. The mere fact of President Obama opens lines of communications, opportunities for collaboration and most of all minds and hearts in ways none of that can.

Yes, day-after euphoria over what we have achieved will give way to the cold, brutish clanging and clashing of governance. But consider what Noah Schactman over at Wired's Danger Room blog already found out about the meaning of Obama.

In January, Shachtman sat next to a flag-level U.S. military officer at a conference about U.S. information operations. The officer, a Christian conservative and warrior in what he sees as a religious war against terrorism, praised Obama. Shachtman explains:

You see, this officer oversaw special operations work around the Horn of Africa and the Middle East. Sensitive stuff, that requires delicate negotiations. And already, just as one among many candidates for president, Obama was making this officer's job easier. Officials in other governments were more willing to provide his troops access to their countries. Foreign intelligence services were more willing to share information.

Just as a President Obama forces change in the way black Americans view this country and white Americans, he also bleeds away the hypocrisy that has so damaged us abroad.

What is this new place we live in, where crowds gather in cities, horns blare and we shout a new president's name from our porches into the night? What might we become after choosing a man who lauds the struggles of women and gay people while accepting such a heavy mantle? Have we finally left our agonizing teenage years of rebellion and contentiousness to enter a national adulthood?

In June, I wrote: "With Barack Obama clinching the Democratic nomination today, comes a rare return to the feeling that anything is possible here in Washington. It likely won't last long, but it's stirring and wonderful, like the fresh breeze after one of our sudden, thunderous storms washes the stale, humid air of summer." Now, in the crisp orange and auburn of autumn, the wind has come. It blows clean the trees and streets, chills the shorter days and longer nights, augurs the icy winter, but also the spring, when all becomes possible again.

NASA World

It's one small step in the realm of virtual worlds and online games, but one large step for government into that world: NASA has selected three teams to present proposals for creating a massively multiplayer online world to carry the space agency brand. NASA hopes its virtual world will attract young people to careers in science, technology,
engineering and mathematics (STEM) and thereby help build its future workforce. The request for proposals for the MMO project went out at the beginning of the year. Long a user of simulations for training within, NASA now hopes to employ them outside the agency to draw support. According to the RFP:

MMO games can help players develop and exercise a skill set closely matching the thinking, planning, learning, and technical skills increasingly in demand by employers. These skills include strategic thinking, interpretative analysis, problem solving, plan formulation and execution, team-building and cooperation, and adaptation to rapid change. Today’s students have grown up with digital technology and video games and are poised to take advantage of the MMO communications and community building tools to collaborate on complex projects.

The screenshot above comes from the virtual world Entropia Universe, which is one of the options NASA will consider as a host for its world. Entropia is run by Mindark, a Swedish company. Saber Astronautics, six-engineer firm in Denver that hopes to set up a satellite repair shop in space, heads the second team. Members include Australian IT and gaming shop, Nocturnal Entertainment (video of their Flowerworks game below) and another Aussie company, Big World, which makes the middleware to create multiplayer online role-playing games.



The third team pairs North Carolina game-maker Virtual Heroes with Manitoba, Canada-based Project Whitecard. In August, the team won a contract from the Canadian Space Agency to create an online immersive game. According to the Project Whitecard press release:

The product will be designed to teach mathematics at the elementary and high school levels, featuring the famous Canadarm2 and Dextre robots. Canadian astronaut Julie Payette's role as the robotics lead on upcoming space shuttle mission STS 127 will be featured as students are immersed in the space robotics environment, take control of the virtual robotics systems, learn and apply age-appropriate math concepts and complete a series of robotics tasks similar to those assigned to Ms. Payette.

Virtual Heroes was among the original game firms involved in creating the Army's online recruiting game, America's Army. Serious games-maker Project Whitecard has created and won funding for an online interactive recreation of the Apollo Moon mission called Project Moonwalk.

The three teams will deliver line presentations on Nov. 7 at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Huge hat tip to Virtual Worlds News!

Pens Vs. Pandemics

Digital pens could prevent the next Avian Flu or West Nile Fever.

How's that? Yep, digital pens. You might have heard some of the growing buzz among tech writers about a new one, the Pulse from a company called Livescribe. Essentially they are devices that look like standard pens but use digital cameras, wireless positioning technology or special paper, even digital recorders to let users capture, store and transmit to their PCs whatever they have written. You can learn about the technology in detail from "Uniting the Paper and Digital Worlds," a new article in "Computing Now" from the IEEE Computing Society.

For those of us who take notes for a living, having a pen that can upload our scribbling to a computer in searchable form is a godsend. But for African farmers and herders, it's a matter of life and death.

Especially in Southern Africa, keeping livestock alive and healthy is both a struggle and an economic and human imperative. Some 60 percent of the population there depends on livestock production to survive. Not only is demand for livestock products growing within Africa, but African countries increasingly depend on livestock exports to fund development.

But until recently, the region has lacked the means to keep livestock free from diseases that could devastate herds and flocks and, by spreading to humans, could result in pandemics. Veterinarians are few--Malawi, for example, has none in its rural areas. Transmitting data about animal health to the government was tough without Internet access or even well developed phone systems. In many cases it took months. And in that time, infections could take a terrifying toll.

In Johannesburg, South Africa, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization Regional Emergency
Livestock Officer Fred Musisi and Phil Fong, the UN Regional Data Information Coordinator, struggled to overcome the communications problem. Fong learned of a digital pen that could transmit data via cell phone or the Internet when he faced a similar data reporting problem while working on the South African census. The pen did the trick then, so the two men applied it to the livestock crisis.

Here's how Financial Times described their experiment in a Sept. 21 story on FT.com:

The solution, provided by Xcallibre, a subsidiary of the South African company Data World, used digital pen and paper technology from Anoto that could collect the data as the workers wrote it down, and then transmit it over the mobile network to a central server. An 18-month pilot, which received funding from the South African government, was run with 35 field workers in five countries: Namibia, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania.

A UN Food and Agriculture Organization report quotes Musisi on the pilot program's success: “If there is a case of rabies or an outbreak of a deadly disease, a field worker can send the detailed surveillance data immediately only using a mobile. Worst case, if there is no mobile phone network nearby, the field worker has to move to a location with network or must find the nearest Internet connection. But no longer do they have to drive hours back to a capital city before the information can be confirmed."

According to the report, HIV/AIDS program workers now are mulling how to apply digital pen surveillance. Having tested the approach in countries with the toughest terrain, poorest communications infrastructure and worst conditions in Africa, Fong and Musisi expect it will be easily adopted elsewhere in the region.

And as I did in my last post about African computing ingenuity, I found myself thinking once again about how much easier it would have been to use digital pens for the 2010 Census than the handheld computers that have caused such disarray.

Working Virtually [UPDATED at 12:13 p.m.]

Talk about your multi-tasking! I'm writing this post while simultaneously attending the Cognos Virtual Government Forum and chatting with a Grant Thornton staffer whose virtual booth I stopped by while passing through the virtual exhibit hall at the virtual forum. Whew! Enough virtual. Henceforth let's stipulate that most places I refer to in this post exist on the Web, not in the real world.

I wrote about this forum for Nextgov.com's blog recently, so I felt I had to attend at least some of it. Now I am waiting for the opening address by John Kamensky, late of the Clinton administration's National Performance Review and now of IBM's Center for the Business of Government.

Meanwhile, this seems an appropriate moment to muse about working in another virtual environment, Second Life. Erica Driver, a former Forrester analyst, has set up a new analysis firm called Think Balm, focused on the immersive Internet. Better to find out what that means from her here, but in short, it's all things 3D and virtual online. I found her work at Forrester to be smart and insightful, so I've continued following her as the new firm evolves. She is a tad more sold on immersive spaces for work than I am, but refreshingly, her enthusiasm is buttressed by facts.

Just a few days ago, Driver blogged about a new study suggesting that work-related teaching and learning, collaboration and meetings all can be done effectively in Second Life. The Social Research Foundation, a nonprofit, surveyed 1,298 Second Lifers who participate in the foundation's First Opinions Panel and found 16 percent of them use the virtual world for work. A third of those folks said more than half their time in Second Life is spent working. More than a third reported using the environment not just to collaborate, but to work together on visualizing data and concepts in 3D, 17 percent use it for recruiting and interviewing and 12 percent for managing real-world systems, Driver reports.

The study, along with her own work, makes Driver bullish on enterprise adoption of the immersive Internet:

ThinkBalm foresees that enterprise use will be mainstream in five years. The main reasons for this are 1) convergence of hardware, software, and network bandwidth, which make immersive technologies accessible on a widespread basis, 2) the prevalence of social networking, which allows Immersive Internet experts and advocates to find each other and share ideas, learnings, and best practices, and 3) an economic downturn, which will favor IT investments that result in hard dollar cost savings.

One important caveat: Driver is writing here not just about Second Life, but about immersive environments in general. She is tracking two dozen sellers of such platforms.

Skeptics (like my friend and colleague Allan Holmes, Executive Editor of Nextgov.com) continually call for proof that people actually learn as well or better in virtual settings than in brick and mortar classrooms. It's a legitimate request, and one that academia is beginning to address. Perhaps the best work has been done at Stanford Medical School, where researchers have found that "virtual [emergency department] environments fulfill their promise of providing repeated practice opportunities in dispersed locations with uncommon, life-threatening trauma cases in a safe, reproducible, flexible setting."

And now, there's research from Penn State suggesting that solving problems in a virtual space might take a bit longer than in the real world, but can come up with better solutions. Researchers set up 10 teams working face to face, 10 teams teleconferencing and 12 teams in Second Life.

Using a mathematical problem finding and solving video trainer, the groups had to figure out how to rescue an injured eagle. Even though they could only communicate via text and had to learn how to use the keyboard to move their avatars, the Second Life teams came up with the most accurate answers.

Nothing hugely definitive yet, but lots of intriguing hints that Driver might just be onto something.

On the other hand like many people who visited the Cognos forum, I never was able to attend John Kamensky's talk. I kept getting an error message whenever I hit the "attend" button. The support folks told me to download and updated version of Flash, but doing so would have meant I had to close all my browser windows. That would have prevented me from writing this post and a host of other things, hence eliminating any advantage of attending a conference virtually instead of physically. Ah well, I suppose I could have gotten hung up on the Metro, too!

THIS JUST IN: Just received an email from high-end consulting firm McKinsey about a new study, "How IT Can Cut Carbon Emissions." Though they didn't consider the use of immersive environments, the implication is clear from what they did discover: "We studied the possibility of reducing emissions by “dematerializing” physical goods and processes through telecommuting, video conferencing, Internet shopping, and downloading content rather than using paper, CDs, DVDs, and so on to covey it. We found that these kinds of substitutions cut emissions significantly—by 0.5 metric gigatons a year."

It's not the kind of savings that can come from making manufacturing, electricity grids, buildings and truck fleets more efficient, but it's nothing to sneeze at either!

Africa's Leading a Computer Revolution We Cannot Ignore

Shackled to our desktop and laptop computers, we in industrialized nations might just be missing the next computer revolution. Wouldn't it be deliciously ironic if developing countries leapfrogged ahead of us by using inventiveness born of the need to make-do with less? It might very well already be happening in the form of mobile-phone-based computing.

With the advent of the iPhone, Americans have begun thinking about the broader potential of mobile phones, but in the developing world, especially in Africa, mobile phones have become the computers of choice. Joel Selanikio, star of the video above and a new hero of mine, calls it the "invisible computer revolution."

He notes that at the end of last year, developing countries had created an international network of wirelessly connected computers--mobile phones. While we think of them primarily as a medium for voice (and increasingly typed chat) conversations, Africans are making them much much more. Selanikio says the "one laptop per child" effort might just be left in the dust as the size of the mobile phone network continues to explode. He points out that sub-Saharan Africa, where neither laptop nor desktop computers are at all common, is the fastest growing cell phone market in the world.

Another new hero of mine, Nathan Eagle, an MIT research scientist, points out that Africans are jumping at the chance to learn mobile phone programming to develop the kinds of applications uniquely suited to meeting everyday needs in their own countries--needs no American or European programmer is likely to envision.

There's plenty here for the U.S. government to ponder. An easy question: Why can't the Census Bureau manage to move its citizen survey onto fancy handheld computers, while Selanikio's tiny nonprofit has been able to make an easily user-modified free public health survey software now being used on cheap cell phones all over Africa? Why hasn't the U.S. disaster response system put Selanikio's EpiSurveyor (about which more below) into place on every emergency health responder's cell phone? Why aren't federal agencies bringing smart African programmers here to teach them how to better serve low-income Americans via cell phones or having Eagle set up programs to teach mobile programming to youngsters in need of bootstrapping here at home?

Selanikio's certainly no stranger to the federal community. He's a former Centers for Disease Control epidemiologist, Public Health Service officer and chief of the Health and Human Services Department post-9/11 command center.

DataDyne, Selanikio's nonprofit organization, has created open source software that makes mobile phones into public health survey tools. The EpiSurveyor software first was designed to work on personal data assistants like the Blackberry or Palm, but now is moving to cell phones. That's huge in Africa, where mobile phones are huge.



With more than 280 million mobile subscribers in 2007, Africa had an overall cell phone penetration rate of 30 percent, according to Africa Telecoms News. There are more than 3 billion mobile subscribers worldwide, a 35 percent penetration rate. The African mobile explosion might seem surprising, but phones there are relatively cheap--as little as $20 new and much less used--and 75 cents can buy 10 minutes of off-peak calling in Kenya, for example.

Many who can't afford even those low rates simply buy a card to plug into someone else's borrowed, shared or rented handset. Phones are becoming a vital means of exchange. M-Pesa is an example. The service allows far-flung Africans to pay cash to a phone dealer in one town, who sends a code to the intended recipient of funds. That person or business redeems the code for cash from another M-Pesa dealer. The service, run by mobile carrier, Safaricom, Ltd. (owned by British multinational Vodafone), signed up 1.6 million users in the year after its March 2007 launch. Economists believe the opportunities created by mobile phone expansion cause economies to grow, perhaps by as much as 0.6 percent for every 10 percent increase in mobile penetration.

And that brings us back to Dr. Selanikio, who noticed the horribly inefficient and slow paper-based health information systems of the developing world. The obvious answer was to take advantage of mobile phones. His EpiSurveyor can be easily downloaded and adapted by national health ministries and their field workers. The system obliterates the need for error-prone data entry by hand and for paper.

It helped Kenyan health officials prevent a polio outbreak in 2006, when a refugee from violence in Somalia carried the disease into a Northeastern province after it had been eradicated 20 years earlier. Officials used the program to decide where vaccinations should be given and to control supplies.

And Nathan Eagle wants many more such applications to be developed by Africans themselves. His Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles program offers a variety of mobile phone programming classes in 10 sub-Saharan African countries. It also is teaching courses in creating applications based on cell phone text capabilities. And it operates txteagle, which connects Africans with cell phones and extra time with companies seeking simple text-based help, such as Nokia, which seeks African translation assistance, or health agencies seeking more effective ways of delivering services. The companies pay for the aid.

It's not hard to think up ways federal agencies could use such a service to improve their own services while helping people receiving Medicaid, food stamps and other assistance at the same time. Not surprisingly, Google already has figured out there's a market here, though not the mobile phone angle.

C'mon, Uncle Sam, here's a chance to grab the reins, head up another revolution like the Internet and find some efficiencies and much needed infusion of income for the growing number of hard-hit Americans. What's not to like?

Gamers Make Good Citizens

Nearly every American teenager between the ages of 12 and 17 plays computer, Web, portable or console games. Those who play them together in the same room are more often to become civically and politically engaged. It seems counterintuitive given games' bad rep as violent, addictive and isolating, but that's the chief finding of a new study by the Pew Internet and Life Project and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Released Sept. 16, "Teens, Video Games and Civics" finds that half of kids play online games with people they know offline and that almost two-thirds of them go online for political information, are committed to civic participation and have raised money for charity.

What accounts for this surprising twist on the common perception of gaming? Something Pew calls, "civic gaming experiences." While the study found that 63 percent of teen reported encountering aggressiveness, and 49 percent ran into hateful, racist and sexist activity while playing games, 85 percent also saw other players step in to stop the bad actors. This helping behavior is one of the experiences that inclines teens toward good citizenship, Pew reported. Others include playing games that teach about social problems and issues or that invoke moral or ethical decisionmaking and those that require running communities, cities or nations or organizing groups or guilds.

Another indicator of deeper civic engagement is game related social interaction, Pew found. Seventy percent of players who read or visit Web sites about games, review them and discuss them online also go online to get information about politics or current events. This group also is more interested in politics than gamers who don't contribute to online gaming communities.

What's more, while educational opportunities promoting civic and political involvement tend to be centered in affluent white schools, civic gaming is much more equitably distributed. Income, race and age were unrelated to the amount of gaming experience; only gender was, with 81 percent of boys, but only 71 percent of girls reporting frequent or average civic gaming experiences.

As a nation we might be bowling alone and participating less, but it looks like kids are gaming together and getting involved.

Get Your Free PowerPoints Here!

Brilliant! PowerPoint users rejoice!

Here's a great data visualization tool we'll all benefit from and we can have a voice in creating it. While I'm referring here to a new tool, "We Build Your Presentation," I'm pretty excited about it's home, "The Big Money," too. It's a smart-looking and -sounding new business news site from the folks at Slate.

This isn't the first nor will it be the last Web site to offer viewers free and easy PowerPoint slides, but with Slate's pedigree, it's probably going to be one of the best.

What I love about features like this one is their emphasis on making important data understandable and putting it within reach of, well, everyone, or at least everyone who can get to the Web. TBM's version has the added crowdsourcing advantage of letting users vote on what data they'd like to see clearly displayed. Since I am on a National Academy of Public Administration panel creating an augmented reality game to engage college students about the national debt crisis (I know, I know, sounds impossible), I would like to see TBM start tackling that, especially the likely outcomes of the path we're on, those of the presidential candidates and those suggested by the "experts." (Why do I have the nagging feeling that crowdsourcing might just beat all these options?)

Here's TBM's editor, James Ledbetter, explaining "The Big Money" and the new presentation builder. I've already added the site to my bookmarks bar, give it a once over!

Flying Real UAVs From a Virtual World

By now, we all have a mental image of how unmanned aerial vehicles are flown. Some young military service member sits closeted in a small, dark room with lots of camera and data feeds displayed on glowing screens and guides the Predator or other bird with a flight stick from thousands of miles away. But that's not quite right and omits perhaps the most important part of the experience: the intense, continuous attention to a sometimes unchanging scene over many hours and the degree of concentration and patience and visual acuity needed to "see" whatever it is the UAV is looking for and/or at.

So much information and attention are involved, in fact, that it takes not one, but two pilots to operate each drone.

Robert Kaplan captured some of the grim reality in a terrific September 2006 story in The Atlantic, "Hunting the Taliban in Las Vegas." Here's a look from his visit to a camouflaged trailer at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada where two Air Force pilots were flying a Predator over Afghanistan:

"There were grim, colorless computer bays in freezing, pulsing darkness—a three-dimensional world of flashing digits from light-emitting diodes. Like sub drivers, Pred pilots fly blind, using only the visual depiction of their location on a map and math—numerical readouts indicating latitude, longitude, height, wind speeds, ground elevation, nearby planes, and so forth. The camera in the rotating ball focuses only on the object under surveillance. The crew’s situational awareness is restricted to the enemy on the ground. Much of the time during a stakeout, the Pred flies a preprogrammed hexagon, racetrack, bow tie, or some other circular-type holding pattern."

Soon, this scene will change. The trailers likely will be abandoned, probably in favor of one or more 10-foot-by-10-foot-10-foot rooms with projectors illuminating all four walls, the ceiling and floor. Pilots likely will wear special glasses to render the projected images into a 3D immersive virtual environment. And they will control not one but several, possibly as many as eight, UAVs at the same time.

An Iowa State University team is developing the virtual environment in hopes of reducing the mental fatigue pilots suffer while monitoring a tangle of information on a welter of screens. Inside the room, pilots will see their UAVs, the airspace around them and the terrain below, as well as feeds from instruments, cameras, radar and weapons systems.


The 3-D audiovisual stereoscopic facility lives at ISU, where lead researcher on the project, James Oliver, heads the Virtual Reality Applications Center. The C6, as the wrap-around virtual display is known, was refurbished over the last several years thanks to Air Force funding. But it's used by many other federal agencies, as well.

The National Science Foundation is sponsoring Meta!Blast, a research application to let people walk around in plant cells to see what happens when researchers make molecular changes.

The National Guard wants to use C6 to let soldiers do battlefield walk-throughs before missions or deployments.

A combined Air Force and Iowa National Guard project, Virtual Battlespace, pulls together data about about land- and air-based forces and targets and sensor feeds and permits views from multiple perspectives. VRAC is working on a multi-touch table to serve as a controller for UAVs in the 3D space.

C6 has myriad commercial applications as well, but what lights up my imagination is its potential for helping people visualize data and the effect of human interventions. Given a complete enough simulation of the real world, walking through it should let users see relationships and consequences the might not otherwise imagine in urban planning, medicine, ecology, and who knows what else. Embedded Technology magazine has a fuller treatment of current uses here.

Nota Bene: You can find the articles I used in writing this post on the left column of the blog under the heading, "Recommended Reading." From now on, I'll be posting there links to stories and Web pages I find intriguing, informative and useful in my explorations of virtual government. The widget is courtesy of Publish2, a terrific journalism project by my friend Scott Karp, the wizard of Web 2.0 and beyond. By all means, have a look at P2.

YouTubing the Office

Coming soon, to an office near you, Web video about your job and workplace--a private YouTube just for your organization.

Google Video for business, launched Labor Day, allows any company, agency, nonprofit, you-name-it to host its own internal YouTube for the enterprise. For a mere $50 a seat, Google will give an organization a secure spot to store videos created by employees, the same viewers and ease of uploading as YouTube users get, but the videos are not available for the public to see.

Without a doubt, many employees soon will be viewing, rather than reading, quarterly reports, messages from the agency head or CEO, instructions, emergency missives, training and more. Heck, the Office of Personnel Management might just film the snowfall as evidence the next time it closes the government in Washington! Just like YouTube, this new app lets viewers rate and comment on videos, no doubt giving rise to a whole new form of office etiquette: artfully responding to videos of higher-ups. Hint: rate 'em high!

As easy as it is to use YouTube once you've got video to share, it's now becoming just as simple to shoot the stuff. Macs come with built-in video cameras--just tilt the screen and shoot. And the new Flip video camera is supremely user-friendly and lets amateur Spielbergs just plug it into the USB port and upload directly to YouTube and now to YouTube for business.

To be fair, there is another company in this market, a 2007 startup called Veodia, but it's hard to imagine Google won't own the space now that it has entered it.

For a workforce as large and far-flung as Uncle Sam's, this promises to be a huge boon for communications, if agencies adopt it. And who knows, with the right acquisition strategy--say a Networx contract for Google--agencies might just get YouTubed for a song. If the District of Columbia can afford it . . .

Setting Up in Second Life: A Guide for Federal Agencies

Federal agencies increasingly are curious about and are exploring virtual worlds. Some, like the State Department, are using them to interact with people they might not already be reaching. Others, like NOAA, CDC, and NASA, are doing public education, promotion, and even some collaborative work there.

Given the growing interest, I thought it would be a useful experiment in virtual journalism and virtual government to tell the story of one agency's experience establishing a presence in a synthetic world, in this case, Second Life. Above you'll see the first in a series of Webcasts I am creating to tell the story of how the National Defense University's Information Resources Management College bought islands, designed an environment, built buildings and now is hosting students in Second Life.

The three main characters hardly are the type of folks most of us imagine as denizens of an online world, yet they all had established in-world identities as avatars before they embarked on their official journey into Second Life. In my series, you'll hear of the challenges they faced buying virtual land through the very real federal procurement process, their personal struggles with creating appropriate appearances for their alternate Second Life personas, the communications hurdles in getting synthetic world designers to create space for a very serious institution. The stories are sometimes funny and frustrating, sometimes insightful and encouraging but always useful for anyone thinking ahead to a future when the real and the virtual aren't nearly to separate..

Second Life might not end up being the virtual world where most federal work is accomplished, but it's a sure bet that more and more of that work soon will be done virtually somewhere.

I hope you enjoy the first in the series, and if so, I hope you'll share the url with others. Either way, I invite your comments and suggestions and urge you to come back to see the next episodes of "Setting Up in Second Life."

UPDATE, Sept. 2: While I remain skeptical about the extent to which agencies and businesses will be able to use virtual worlds such as Second Life for "real" work, there's some pretty impressive evidence in new statistics from Canada. The Canada Border Services Agency is conducting training for border-crossing guards in Second Life and reports that in 2007 without using Second Life, students' average grade for interview skills was 58 percent. In 2008, after using the Second Life simulation, the average interview skills grade rose to 86 percent. More extensive coverage can be found on New World Notes. Here's a look at how the Canadians are doing it:


Hat Tip: Virtual Worlds News

The Google Earth Threat

Some of us can remember back to a time when our parents were thoroughly spooked by satellite photos showing Soviet missiles being delivered to Cuba. The scary, grainy black and whites lent even more drama in 1962 to what has become known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The shots from high out in space had to be authentic--only the government was up there after all.

Well, not so much today. In fact, governments are all shook up about the ease with which commercial entities are picturing every corner of Earth for whomever is willing to pay. Of greatest concern: Google Earth. The second photo up top, of the U.S. Air Force's top-secret testing site, Area 51 in Nevada, offers a case in point. It came via Google. "The Google Controversy--Two Years Later," a July 30 report from the U.S. Director of National Intelligence's Open Source Center, details the depth of concern about Google and its ilk and the steps nations are taking in response. Kudos to the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy News blog for publishing the paper and linking to many of its references!

After a Google spokesperson said in 2006 that the Earth-picturing site "presents no appreciable threat to security" because, hey, high-res satellite and aerial imagery is all over the place nowdays if you can pay, OSC stepped up its monitoring. Two years ago this month the center got hold of actual footage showing Google Earth being used by Iraqi insurgents to plan attacks on U.S. forces. In September 2006, the center reports, Al Qaeda-linked militants blew up four car bombs while attacking an oil facility in Yemen after planning the attack using Google Earth.

By 2007, The Chinese government had begun combing online mapping sites for images of its secrets and raising heck with Google, which a Chinese spokesperson praised as "very responsive." No surprise there given Google's overall obsequiousness toward China. But other spots get blurred, too. For example, Bahrain blocked access to Google Earth in 2006 for a few days because the rich didn't want their lavish holdings exposed.

According to "Blurred Out: 51 Things You Aren't Allowed to See on Google Maps," a piece in the July 15 issue of IT Security, other places that have won obscurity include Playland Amusement Park in Rye, New York, the White House, the U.S. Vice President's residence, a host of national security sites worldwide and the home of the Borings in Franklin Park, Pa., after they claimed Google Maps' Street View feature "violated their privacy, devalued their property and caused them mental suffering by posting images of a private road in front of their house."

Meanwhile OSC says, Thailand, India and China are creating their own versions of Google Earth. And countries, including India, China and Norway, are taking evasive action such as camouflaging facilities, hiding them in mountains and the like.

For a vastly more detailed and entertaining and authoritative job of delving into this subject that I can do here, see the terrific story by science writer extraordinaire Sharon Weinberger In Discover July 21: "Can You Spot the Chinese Nuclear Sub?" It's such a good story, in fact, that the OSC report opens by quoting extensively from it.

And that's a story in itself: There is such a center capitalizing on open source material and it's finding the really good stuff out there by the best journalists. Good for the DNI!

What caught my interest in all this is my growing feeling that the next version of the Internet might just be something that looks a lot like Google Earth. In a fascinating conversation August 1 with Don Brutzman, of the Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulation Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., I learned of his project to essentially recreate Google Earth in order to use it as a training and simulation ground for the U.S. military. He and his confreres in the Web 3D Consortium want nothing less than to make the Web itself the next virtual world. The kicker is, they don't want anyone. including Google to own it. Meanwhile, that appears to be exactly what Google wants to do.

It's a fascinating tug of war, mostly being played out behind the scenes by folks far too deep in the worlds of XML and KML and whatnot for most of us to understand. And yet, it could very well be the struggle that determines the course of, well, the Earth, or at least the one we get to inhabit online.

I found it hard to truly wrap my mind around the notion of Web 3D and Web 3D Earth, so here's a video that at least gets at some of it for those as mentally challenged as I:




Sources: Cuba photo-John F. Kennedy Library; NARA; Area 51 photo-Discover magazine online, July 21, 2008