Joe Flood

It’s the end of the year, and the end of a decade. What were my favorite projects of 2009? What did I have the most fun working on?
Murder in Ocean Hall
I can’t help myself, I like to write fiction. People have asked me how I could leave my job and then spend countless hours alone, [...]

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Too much exposure to USAJOBS has really turned me cynical. Despite news reports on the need to recruit thousands of new employees, the main federal jobs site is a usability nightmare, unfathomable to even people who work on web sites, like me. While the site has few defenders, some have argued that it has to [...]

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I’ve been reading Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. It’s a brilliant book on the information revolution that we’re going through. He believes that this revolution is as momentous as the development of the printing press, which triggered the Reformation and religious wars. The rise of amateurs and the expansion of consumer choice has meant [...]

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Here’s what’s interested me this week:
Government 2.0: The Midlife Crisis
Hard truths about the difficulties of implementing Web 2.0 in government. 
It’s Time for Governance
Even more hard truths, this time about professionalizing web site management in government. 
Wil Wheaton Interview on Lulu
Interesting article on why a blogger went the self-publishing route. 
Apple Store Coming to DC
Finally! 
DCist Exposed
One more day [...]

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Some more random thoughts about Transparency Camp 09. Here are my big take-aways from the conference.
Excitement: There’s a tremendous amount of enthusiasm among enlightened advocates of government transparency, fueled by the election of Obama and the mainstreaming of Web 2.0 tools like blogging. There’s a real can-do spirit, which is in marked contrast to continuing [...]

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What’s Transparency Camp?  
This un-conference is about convening a trans-partisan tribe of open government advocates from all walks — government representatives, technologists, developers, NGOs, wonks and activists — to share knowledge on how to use new technologies to make our government transparent and meaningfully accessible to the public.
In practice, this meant a very smart and [...]

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“Rise of the Goverati.”  Isn’t that the new Terminator movie?
No, “goverati” is the term Mark Drapeau uses for:
people with first-hand knowledge of how the government operates, who understand how to use social software to accomplish a variety of government missions, and who want to use that knowledge for the benefit of all.
This includes people inside [...]

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Have you ever wondered why there’s no ocean.gov? This is a valuable and easy to remember URL that the government doesn’t currently use. And it should, for we all depend on the ocean for the very air we breathe.
When I was at NOAA, it was explained to me that there’s no web site at ocean.gov because [...]

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