This last Friday I participated in the Federal News Countdown with Ron Sanders, Booz Allen Hamilton, hosted by Francis Rose, WFED. The transcript and audio can be accessed here, http://www.federalnewsradio.com/86/3301646/Federal-News-Countdown-Furloughs-fizzle-spectrum-search-GS-update.
The way the show works is that each guest brings three articles from their least important, number 3-3-3-3; to their most important, number well you get the idea.
3rd Most Important Article
Google Says Government Content Removal Requests Rise 26%
This article was interesting for a number of reasons. It illustrates the growing integration of the Internet and all aspects of our life as well as Google’s approach to transparency about transparency.
Every six months, Google publishes a list of all requests that were made to remove content organized by source country and what it did in response to the requests. We will ignore the reality that it really is not possible to ‘erase’ an entry on the Internet (it would be like erasing a specific gene combination from your body, which would require a cell-by-cell editing process, not so practical).
The largest single reason for the 26% rise came from requests from Brazil relating to their last election. In fact, a pretty large percentage of the requests related to people in the public eye asking for references they felt were unfair to be removed, in general with Google turning down the request.
In a broad sense we find here the growing conflict that is being waged in the public square between the freedom of action and expression that has historically existed on the Internet versus the attempts of different parts of modern societies to edit speech they find offensive. Sometimes this is under the heading of stopping ‘hate’ speech, sometimes preventing speech/books/writing that some find inconsistent with their religious beliefs.
It is interesting to me that many of these groups who are in favor of one kind of censorship often mock those who are in favor of other kinds of censorship. The old saying that where one stands often depends on where one sits remains true.
In an even broader sense, this is just one aspect of the conflict between information sharing (uncensored at the extreme) versus information protection (deciding on a thought-by-thought basis at the extreme). Personally I lean toward freedom of speech in as absolute a fashion as possible though I seem to be in a shrinking group (as usual).
2nd Most Important
http://fcw.com/articles/2013/04/23/dod-directive-cio-role.aspx
DOD issues directive to define CIO role
Here too I was a bit more interested in the general issues this article raised rather than its specifics.
However a few specific comments first: Teri Takai, the DoD CIO has done, in my opinion, a really great job in helping to redefine the CIO role at DoD and in articulating the broad issues that DoD and all Government CIO’s face. This directive is a reflection of her thoughtful approach.
As the article says, one of the major changes was the adding of cybersecurity issues to the responsibilities of the CIO, which is a growing issue facing all CIO’s.
The role of the Federal CIO is being reexamined throughout Government. Congressman Issa has introduced legislation and Senator Carper’s staff is looking at the same issue to potentially update the Clinger-Cohen act which provides the current legislative basis for the authority, or lack thereof, of Governmental CIO’s.
One of the lessons I learned at DOT was that in the Government it is important to both measure program results and process quality. In fact, the latter while in some sense are less important they are much (much) easier to modify and often can lead to improved program results. One of the things I would do if I ran the world , e.g. OMB, would be to take the DoD document as a template for the responsibilities that all Departmental CIO’s should have and measure whether they do and publish the results in a green-yellow-red scorecard.
1st Most Important
http://fcw.com/articles/2013/04/22/spectrum-search.aspx
The search for more spectrum
One of the big issues these days relates to the implementation of Government solutions based on mobile technologies and the associated changes to system architecture and organizational culture that results from doing so. (Shameless plug, which after all, is the most satisfying kind – take a look at the Advanced Mobility Academic Research Center, AMARC, home page, which I am the President & Executive Director of, http://www.amarcedu.org).
In the end however all of these mobile transactions have to be transmitted somehow, over some part of the spectrum. Once again infrastructure planning and implementation has an enormous impact on results.
The problem here is that we are running out, have run out, of available spectrum. Much of the spectrum that has been reserved and may not yet be in active use is held by the Federal Government. The article deals with the difficulties in deciding how much of this reserved spectrum can be made available for commercial usage.
There are both technical and cultural issues in making these decisions as well as deciding how to make it available (how much should companies pay and where the resulting money should go).
It probably would not surprise anyone to find out that, at least according to the article, that no one has a complete and accurate inventory of who owns what spectrum.
I look forward to the entrepreneur who figures out a way of multiplying the capacity of spectrum already in use.