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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With the advent of the Barnes and Noble Nook e-reader and the growing acceptance of e-books among readers and writers, it’s safe to say that we’ve reached what I’d call the Disintermediation Moment. This is the time when industries collapse, driven by changes in consumer behavior and expectations. Technology offers new solutions, eagerly adopted by [...]

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A few weeks ago, I received the following email:
Hi Joe,
I moved from Scottsdale, Arizona, to California last summer, and brought an unfinished painting of Papago Buttes along with me.  I looked around for a photograph to help me finish the painting, and I found one that seems to be attributed to you on Wikipedia.  The [...]

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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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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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