Government

"The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake-up call. They need to take a different approach and adhere in cyberspace to the same rules applied to weapons in the physical world. We need governments to consider the damage to civilians that comes from hoarding these vulnerabilities and the use of these exploits."

- Brad Smith, Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer, The need for urgent collective action to keep people safe online: Lessons from last week’s cyberattack, The Official Microsoft Blog, May 14, 2017.

In its largest ever Local Government study, VisibleThread identified that 82% of Local Governments websites do not meet target readability standards

Cambridge UK, Monday 5th September 2016. VisibleThread, a global leader in content quality management, has released an updated readability report which covers 191 Local Government websites.

UK Government’s Digital Service published its Writing for GOV.UK guide in 2014. In it, there are comprehensive guidelines to help writers, clearly stating that:

“Plain English is mandatory for all of GOV.UK... Plain English is the whole ethos of GOV.UK: it’s a way of writing.”

In today’s digital world, many people have become more worried about the possibility of having government agencies track them. Considering the controversy surrounding the leak of NSA programs that target U.S. citizens, these worries are not without reason. With the explosion of big data technologies, it has become easier than ever for governments to keep track of what their citizens are doing. It’s all in the effort of protection, at least in most circumstances, but it does have the feeling of violating personal privacy.

In most health care provider offices, fax machines are as ubiquitous as stethoscopes. And while many people might wonder why — after all, the traditional fax machine seems somewhat antiquated in today’s world of email, cloud services, and mobile applications — there are actually some very good reasons that fax machines are so common.

I was recently asked by the Argus Leader, a local newspaper in Sioux Falls, to give my two cents on the controversial South Dakota #DontJerkandDrive campaign. Since then the article has been syndicated out to USA Today and other publications. It seems that I caught the attention of a reporter when I labeled the campaign as "brilliant" on Twitter.

Acquia, a Drupal solutions provider, announced today that it has received a second Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) Authorization to Operate (ATO) for federal customers using Acquia Cloud. FISMA compliance provides a path for government agencies to develop next-generation digital experiences with Drupal that incorporate the web, mobile and social communities. 

Acquia, a commercial software company that provides enterprise level products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system, recently reached another milestone confirming their company’s ability to deliver secure hosting services for government web sites and online communities. Today, the company announced that it has received a FISMA Authorization to Operate (ATO) for Acquia Cloud.

I'm a huge fan of eGovernment and Government 2.0 initiatives. A few years ago we started seeing government sites adopting open data initiatives and adding features that allowed the public to provide more feedback to the government that served them. Changes such as these are good initiatives by governments as they continue their evolution into the digital age. Recently, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts redesigned their official website, Mass.gov, using the Percussion CM System.