In Wuhan, where we watched the eclipse we were joined by an American astronaut, Alvin Drew. Drew at the time was the US representative to the Russian space program and was stationed in Moscow for a year. He had read about our group in an article in the New York Times and decided to join us.

In this earlier blog post, http://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/2009/07/23/a-solar-eclipse-is-much-more-than-just-a-visual-experience/, I wrote about the overall experience of watching the eclipse and included a picture of Drew with myself and another member of our group Howard Spero.

And here is a picture with Drew, myself, and Miriam and Tamar:

Drew was selected to be a member of the current visit to the Space Station, the last visit, http://www.nasa.gov/.

It was an honor to spend time with him talking about the space program and a thrill to actually have met an astronaut who has now flown in outer space. He even let us put on his special multi-million dollar sun glasses, a great guy.

Now if they would only bring back Firefly with new episodes, http://www.whedon.info/Firefly-Reruns-Join-The-Sci-Fi.html.

Ellen and I decided that we would do our 30^th anniversary ‘stuff’ later this year. Not everyone would understand this reference but this is not dissimilar to many American Jewish families who don’t like the time of year their son or daughter’s birthday is for having a Bar or Bat Mitzvah event so they just move it to another time of year.

It occurs to me that all of this may have begun when we moved historical events to being celebrated on Mondays regardless of when they occurred that year and how this shows our modern culture isn’t willing to deal with the problems they face and would rather deal with the problems they chose to, but I digress.

In any event, as part of my mantra to do whatever Ellen wants in order to continue to encourage putting up with me, we decided to go to a Bed & Breakfast in Harpers Ferry over the President’s Day weekend, tying accidently into the Monday holiday thing.

Oh, I need to mention one other thing before actually getting to the Monday breakfast and the subject of the entry. On Friday, February 18^th, I appeared on the Francis Rose In-Depth show talking about the three stories I thought important relating to Federal IT that week, http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?nid=17&sid=2276999. Other than noting that Francis is still another person who has played APBA baseball for many years, why I bring this up will become clear shortly.

So that is why the morning of February 21^st, Monday, Ellen and I found ourselves at breakfast with two other couples around a table at the Jackson Rose B&B, http://www.thejacksonrose.com/, no relation to Francis. The Jackson part comes from the fact that Stonewall Jackson used the building as a headquarters part of the time during the Civil War, the Rose part comes from a reference he made in a letter to his wife referring to a pleasant rose that grew there.

One note at this point, I pretty carefully do not express any opinions about the backgrounds and/or the political positions that some of the members of the other two couples in my description below. That does not mean I do not have them or in some cases might not agree with them. It is merely because I wanted to focus on something else as will become evident.

To my right was a couple from Richmond VA. The wife’s family came from Armenia. Her grandmother was pregnant with her mother when Turkey forced the family, among other others, out of country. From there they went to Beirut Lebanon and then to the US. She has been very active with the American Armenian community interested in publicizing what they call the Armenia Genocide, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide.  They were there because they came every year to visit.

Between that couple and we were a relatively young couple. The pregnant wife was from Palestine and is an employee at CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, http://www.cair.com/.  Her husband had come to the US some sixteen months ago from Egypt. During course of the breakfast, he said that he recognized me. We realized that on Friday while I was at the radio station, he had walked by and said hi. He worked there supporting the IT infrastructure. They were there because, amazingly, the Egyptian husband had developed a fascination with the American Civil War and was in the process of visiting all of the local Civil War battlefields. Harper’s Ferry was one of the last one’s on the list.

And of course, there was Ellen and I, American Jews whose families had come from various locations in Europe. During the course of the breakfast we discussed the recent events in the Middle-East and the viewpoints on a variety of topics including the homelands of each of the couples. Ellen discussed a recent play we had seen at the Theatre J, located in the Washington DC Jewish Community Center, called Return to Haifa, http://www.washingtondcjcc.org/center-for-arts/theater-j/on-stage/10-11Season/return-to-haifa/ with the Palestinian wife.

The play, written by an Israeli, was based on a novella written by a Palestinian. It tells the story of two couples and a child associated with both. One couple were Holocaust survivors who emigrated to Israel and as part of being given a house to live in were asked to adopt and raise a child left behind when Palestinians left the house in the chaos of the departure. The second couple was the family that left. The child became an Israeli soldier. The play went back and forth between the past and the present telling the complicated narratives that represent the difficulties in coming to an agreed to peace in the Middle-East today.

When we attended this was followed by a pretty highly-charged audience discussion with lots of disagreements. Audience members included Israeli’s, Palestinians, and US Citizens of various persuasions.

The Egyptian born husband was the first to remark that he felt that only in America could these three couples accidently come together, in Harpers Ferry of all places at a Bed & Breakfast, and have the conversations we had that morning. On this one point, everyone at the table agreed completely.

First when I woke up I checked my emails for the two classes I am teaching through distance learning, at the University of Maryland University College, a capstone class for an IT Master’s program, and at Syracuse University, about Cyber-Security Policy.

One of my students at Syracuse University was taking the class for a second time because he was unable to finish it the first time. The reason he could not the first time was because he had been stationed in Afghanistan and he wasn’t able to juggle the time he had to spend out in the field with the time necessary to complete the class assignments. This, coupled, by the intermittent Internet access meant he was unable to finish the work. As a result I arranged with Syracuse University for him to take it again this year without additional cost and with no negative grade consequences (small things for a large sacrifice on his part).

This morning his email confirmed that he will have to redeploy back to Afghanistan this coming week. Since he will be based in Bagram, he is much more confident that he will have sufficient Internet access and thus will be able to finish the final weeks this time. His role is to provide IT support for Forward Operating Bases, which doesn’t sound like something most of us would want to do.

He thanked me for being so flexible. I thanked him for his service, I told him it was a continuing honor to have him in my classes.

After reading his email, I went and voted.

All of us should, people like my student are the reason we can.

International Experiences with Integrated Services – United States

The conference has been very interesting. I have met a number of people supporting this effort who work for the Government, consultants associated with the project both from Brazil and other South American countries, and speakers from still other locations including a fellow panalist this morning from Korea who supported the Korean President for a number of years regarding their eGovernment effort and who spent the last three months in Paraguay working for the office of their president doing the same thing.

The power of the idea of eGovernment and its associated themes of empowerment and especially transparency are seemingly very strong everywhere.

At the same time, the issues are equally amazingly similar in each location. The biggest conclusions I draw are that it is very important to:

• have high level political support,
• well-defined goals plus if at all possible a credible supporting enterprise architecture, and
• a willingness to take small steps resulting in quick victories in support of the big rainbow in the sky that will occur when all this is implemented

That last point is the one that seems to be so often overlooked. People responsible for policy want to accomplish big results, which is a good thing. But if the first result is the big result often the end-point is a political investigation into why the whole project failed.

The other issue that has resonated with most people that I have talked to is the importance of exposing as much data as possible even when not in a final form, which is how I interpret one of Vivek Kundra’s big initiatives in the US. Allowing others to manipulate, create mash-ups and improve upon the data allows the government to have significant leverage in a time of tight funds.

The Rest of the Week

The next two days I will participate in meetings to talk in more detail about the current action plans and my associated advice.

The people here have all been extremely friendly. For those sessions or conversations which are not in English (and sessions which are not being translated on the fly into English), one or the other person will take their time to give me a rundown on the issues.

Around the Hotel

This evening I was tired so went to the hotel a bit before the final sessions concluded and then took a walk around the hotel including visiting a nearby shopping mall. I skipped past the McDonalds and Burger King, and of all things a Montana steakhouse, decided that ordering gourmet Chinese Food in Brasilia wasn’t a good idea, and instead ate at a place that seemed to have Brazilian food. I am not entirely sure what I ordered, but it tasted great.

Most important I found on the way back an open-air Shwarma restaurant a block away from the hotel. In the event that I end up on my own tomorrow night, I know how I will cap my time here. I hear that the best Shwarma in South America is in Brasilia (well, maybe I made that up).

Coming Home

So, I am scheduled to arrive at 6:30am Saturday morning at Dulles.

At approximately 3:15pm that afternoon, I and my younger daughter Tamar, get on a bus with a big group of Capitals fans and go up to Philadelphia to see the Ovechkin-less Capitals take on the Flyers, capping <bad choice of words I guess> my out-of-town Capitals hockey games.

I have a feeling that before and in particular afterwards on the way back from Philadelphia I might not be the life of the party on the bus regardless of the game result. No one call my house Sunday morning, please.

By the way, I have found the Google translation function, at least when dealing with Portuguese to English, works very well.

The major focus will include the issue of Interoperability and the plans in Brazil to enhance their implementation of eGovernment.

Both terms are interesting ones, I’ll have more to say either during the week or after I come back home about each.

Internationally there is a lot of emphasis and literature about Government Interoperability Frameworks (or GIFs) and thus the focus on Interoperability. While this was and is an interest within the US Government, I don’t recall hearing that specific term used very often.

eGovernment is obviously of great interest, especially in the US these days. The interesting thing  to me is that eGovernment seems to have so many different meanings depending on the person or group or society using the term, and its perceived value differs greatly accordingly. I will write further on this later on also.

Here is the first cut at my presentation understanding that I was asked to mainly talk about my personal experiences, though it is almost impossible for me to not at least attempt to generalize, and relate these experiences to the above topics. All comments are welcome either here or by emailing me directly. I will incorporate as many as I can between now and the presentation.

International Experiences with Integrated Services – United States

Once again, I believe I have demonstrated that talking, or writing, about issues is my happier place, not creating slides about them.

For those still reading, I thought it might be interesting to explain how this opportunity came about.

I have always wanted to teach. This sits in the giving back part of what I would like to accomplish. Further I find the “not wanting to appear like an idiot” syndrome forces you to think about the subject matter you are teaching where otherwise you might not really organize your thoughts. So once again we have the you get out more than you put in possibility as with so many activities.

Thus I have started doing some distance teaching for Syracuse University as an adjunct professor. My first class for what it is worth is in Cybersecurity Policy and Management which has proven to be great fun for me, if not for my students. I hope to also do some classes related to being a Federal CIO and looking at issues of management within the Federal space compared to commercial practice.

Through that activity and through my work at CSC I got to know a professor at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, http://www1.maxwell.syr.edu/default.aspx, one of the top public affairs schools in the country. She had been doing some work with people at the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), http://www.iadb.org/. The IADB had a contract with the Brazilian Government to provide advice regarding their eGovernment goals. They decided that getting some “real-life” inputs from a number of countries, including the US, would be useful. From the IADB to my friend at Syracuse University to me.

Thus my normal random Brownian professional movement once again provides another new and exciting opportunity, one I am thrilled and honored to be able to participate in.