Politics and Elections Blog
Trends, tools and news from the Google Politics & Elections team
Google for the Public Sector lands in Oz
Thursday, September 17, 2009
(Cross-posted from the
Official Google Australia Blog
)
The Australian public sector has a great track record of embracing the web. Australia was the first country to launch a
Google election site
in 2007, the
NSW government map
makes public spending more transparent, and the recently announced
Government 2.0 taskforce
has been charged with
accelerating Government onto the web
.
Australians spend more time online than on any other media, and more people access government information online than in any other way. The Internet makes government more transparent and accountable and has opened up communication between politicians and their constituents.
In this spirit Senator Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, tonight launched Google for the Public Sector,
www.google.com.au/publicsector
, a guide to the tools and best practice for the public sector to reach, communicate and engage with their communities.
Many of these products are used by governments around the world to:
Foster direct and open communication (
YouTube
,
AdWords
,
Blogger
)
Encourage participation in public debate (
Moderator
)
Tap into the public pulse (
News Alerts
,
Insights for Search
)
Target and maximize online presence (
Webmaster tools
,
Analytics
)
Lead the shift to cloud computing (
Apps
,
Enterprise
)
To see these tools in action:
Posted by Iarla Flynn, Head of Public Policy
Open Source report from Gov 2.0
Thursday, September 17, 2009
(Cross-posted from
Google's Open Source Blog
)
Clearly designed as a conference to start but certainly not finish the conversation, last week's
Gov 2.0 Summit
assembled an impressive cast of presenters and interviewers. Key White House decision makers, government innovators and industry enthusiasts took the stage and lined the hallways for three days.
Having spent the last five years focusing on helping government adopt Open Source software and its collaboration model, my radar was tuned for explicit mentions / inclusions / endorsements of Open Source software. It appeared that leveraging Open Source software to solve some of the thornier technology problems challenging government (think healthcare and public safety interoperability) had been more implied than expressed in recent months. For the wider community looking for more signs of game change, the event provided plenty of evidence that Open Source is clearly at play.
Paul Rademacher, Google and AllForGood.org, Brian Behlendorf, White House Consultant and Richard Lin, CodeforAmerica.org
The Google-hosted reception Tuesday evening packed the public space at their headquarters on New York Avenue. The event was attended by private industry, publicists and social media converts, non-profit and Open Source community leadership and government attendees and offered a nice opportunity to mix it up after a day of the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase I sadly missed. Some of the sessions however are
video-archived
on the web.
Lifting off in a small flurry of debate over the right hash tag for the Gov2.0 Summit, the two day Gov2.0 Summit opened with the and energy and grin of
Aneesh Chopra
, Federal Chief Technology Officer. Chopra earned a reputation for creative collaboration with industry in his prior role as the Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia and brings the same to the federal scene. Virginia's extensive use of Open Source and open collaboration, as well as that of former D.C. CTO — now Federal Chief Information Officer
Vivek Kundra
, is well known.
The conference brought attendees through a whirlwind tour of recent innovation in government IT: data transparency projects like
Apps for Democracy
and resulting mash-ups and visualization as inexpensive and "dirty" Open Source solutions to real problems. Open Source and its exceptional benefits of open standards and interoperability were highlighted in many presentations.
Conference highlights:
Beth Noveck
provided the most
comprehensive picture
of what progress had been made by the new administration and its policy road map.
Best of Show for Crowd-Rallying:
Carl Malamud
discussed the need to make judiciary information — data and hearings — truly public in a day where “public” means “on the Internet.” In his speech designed in part for an audience not in the room, his closing comment asserted government operating systems should be Open Sourced brought the crowd to resounding applause.
Favorite Projects: Anything visualized — and most frequently enabled by Open Source.
Killer App: All things Geo-spatial.
Significant Announcement: The
General Services Administration
(GSA) will begin experimenting with the use of
OpenID
to manage identity on government web sites.
David Recordon, OpenID Foundation Board of Directors
For the seasoned government attendees, there was in reality not a great deal of new information to be had. That was, in fact, good news; as one government manager shared with me, social media tools like
Twitter
and
GovLoop
have made it much easier to stay in touch with what other agencies are up to, plus the 2009 Federal IT Strategy has been broadly distributed and much discussed internally.
The White House will release its new
Open Government Directive
in a few weeks and will set federal agency wheels in motion. Implementation will be challenging and require the philosophy of change to shift into gear. Industry and government seem to agree that the next non-trivial challenge to technology innovation will be procurement reform.
Guest post by Deb Bryant, Public Sector Communities Manager, Oregon State University Open Source Lab and Producer, Government Open Source Conference
Google Australia: Public sector tips from Down Under
Monday, September 14, 2009
Our Australian team keeps the globe on its toes - they were the first to launch a
Google election site
. Over the next few days they will be posting best practices from down under - stay tuned!
Posted by Ginny Hunt, Public Sector team
Gov 2.0 Summit Videos
Monday, September 14, 2009
If you weren't able to make the
Gov 2.0 Summit
last week in DC, you're in luck -
videos of most presentations are now online
.
A few Googlers had the chance to participate as speakers.
John Markoff of the New York Times led a discussion about developing an effective platform with
TCP/IP creator
and Googler Vint Cerf, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and Facebook's Tim Sparapani.
And as we mentioned on a previous post, Tim O'Reilly interviewed Google's Chief Economist Hal Varian about how government can take advantage of real time data and economic indicators.
We'll post an update when Ola Rosling's presentation on
public data search and visualization
is online.
Posted by Ginny Hunt, Public Sector team
Transparency, Technology & You: A Message from Gov 2.0
Thursday, September 10, 2009
At the second day of the
Gov 2.0 Summit
in Washington, DC,
Chris DiBona
, Google's
Open Source
and
Public Sector
Programs Manager, explored how transparency can first be considered a social problem rather than a technical issue.
Using the
DARPA
logo as focal point for his talk, he noted the difficulties in getting a high resolution version of the agency's logo and the required searching through the
USPTO's
databases to ensure he was complying with trademark law when using the logo in his presentation. Chris closed by encouraging the audience of more than 200 to build transparency into government and its applications from day one, thanking everyone for creation of the ultimate open platform, the Internet.
For those of you who couldn't join us, check out the slides from Chris' presentation.
Post by Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team
Real Time Economics and Google Domestic Trends
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
One of our readers gave us a timely tip to include
Google Domestic Trends
, a new feature within Google Finance, on our list of interesting tools for the public sector.
Hal Varian, our Chief Economist, spoke today at the
Gov 2.0 Summit
about the general topic of real time economics and wrote a
blog post
announcing Domestic Trends:
Google Domestic Trends tracks Google search traffic across specific sectors of the economy. The changes in the search volume of a given sector on google.com may provide useful economic insight. We've created 23 indexes that track the major economic sectors, such as retail, auto and unemployment.
For example, the
Google Luxuries Index
tracks queries like [jewelry], [rings], [diamond], [ring], [jewelers], [tiffany] and so forth. As you can see from the screenshot below, this index has seasonal spikes in December — however, in the last two years there has been a pronounced decrease as the recession made consumers wary of spending on luxury items.
Read more about this on the
Google Finance Blog
, and be sure to check out the
Google Research Blog
for info on Hal's research on using Google Trends data to predict economic activities.
Congrats to Apps for America 2 Winners
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
We were excited to support
Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge
and even more excited to see the submissions. The public sector developer community never fails to impress. Congrats to the winners!
DataMasher
Datamasher allows you to take two different public data sources and mash them up with an operator (+ - * /). Then you can share them with your friends and comment on the mashups of others. A few of my favorite mashups include:
High School Graduation vs. Guns in Household
,
% Total Population in Prison
, and my favorite:
People per US Representative
.
GovPulse.us
GovPulse is a
Federal Register
browser. The Federal Register is the official journal of the federal government of the United States. In it, you find any kind of notice, notification and solicitation that a federal agency puts out. GovPulse parses it and gives you a way to browse the tens-of-thousands-of-pages-log register by agency, category or date. What's also compelling about it is the visualizations and analysis the software does on top of the register. For instance, check out the
agency page
to see sparklines of the notices from each agency, or the
map of places mentioned by an agency
.
ThisWeKnow.org
This we know is probably best described as the
EveryBlock
for federal data. Type in your zip code or city and state, and ThisWeKnow will provide you with details that the federal government has about your community. The depth of information in the site is incredible. You can see the mass exodus occurring in
Bellevue, NE
or the breakdown of
people diagnosed with cancer
in Los Angeles.
Posted by Ginny Hunt, Public Sector team
"Choose the Future" - Google Japan's 2009 Election site
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Cross-posted from the Google Japan blog,
posted by Google Japan "choose the future 2009" team
In preparation for Japan's recent election, the Google Japan team launched a 2009 election
"choose the future"
site with election information and candidate responses to "5 Questions" asked and selected by citizens via Google Moderator.
The site, which now displays election results and news, also included candidate search trends leading up to election day.
Japanese voters could find their polling place and directions to get there:
＜東京都渋谷区桜丘町 26-1 の例＞
"Example 26-1 Sakuragaoka-cho Shibuya-ku in Tokyo"
＜東京都渋谷区渋谷の例＞
"Examples of Shibuya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo"
The "5 Questions" video responses could be viewed on a map for each electoral district.
There were three different ways to find candidates and their videos:
Search by any street address.
＜東京 7 区の例＞
"Ku, Tokyo 7 cases of"
Search by party and district:
＜愛媛 1 区の例＞
"Ehime district example"
Search from constituencies
:
＜神奈川 13 区の例＞
"Kanagawa-ku, 13 cases of"
News and resources across Google
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Lots of product and country teams at Google work with the public sector to make information more easily available - on projects like releasing
Los Angeles wildfire imagery
or the
flu public service announcement contest on YouTube
with the Department of Health and Human Services.
We'll be using the public sector blog to update you on these projects, and the next few posts are an effort to bring us up to speed.
If there's something we've missed, leave us information in the comments - we read them!
Posted by Ginny Hunt, Public Sector team
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