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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Gwynne Kostin has written about how efforts like the Online Presidential Town Hall can reveal larger problems. In her article, she mentions that world-class government web sites, like the Centers for Disease Control, hand-code web pages.
Most large-scale web sites use some sort of content management system (CMS) to publish and organize their web sites. Even small-scale [...]

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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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Vivek Kundra is the newly appointed Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the federal government. He is the first federal CIO ever and previously served as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the District of Columbia. He spoke this morning at FOSE, the major government technology tradeshow in Washington, DC.
I wanted to write up my notes before [...]

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Chris Anderson, of Wired magazine and “The Long Tail” fame, was the keynote speaker at FOSE this morning. He spoke on “For the People and By the People: Delivering on the Promise of Gov 2.0″.
Anderson started off with an interesting example – the infamous Twitter fail whale. Countless users have bemoaned the unreliability of Twitter, though [...]

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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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YouTube is ubiquitous. Millions of people visit the site every day. For the Wired Generation, it’s the functional equivalent of television. Yet, despite the vast audience of YouTube, many government agencies do not make their videos available on the site. Some are even worse – and ban their employees from even visiting YouTube.
By withholding their [...]

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There’s a really interesting article in the New York Times on how Obama tapped the power of social networks to fuel his run for the presidency.  Here’s the nut graph:
Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new. Instead, by bolting together social networking applications under the banner of [...]

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This is 2008.  Everyone these days has a blog.  Yet, within some sectors of government, there is resistance to using this not-so-new communications tool.  Why?  What are the “perceived risks”?
We don’t trust our employees.  This comes across in two ways.  
First, some federal agencies block all social networking sites (YouTube, MySpace) and this includes any [...]

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