Web 2.0 Successes in Government

Chris Warner

Email: chris@jackbe.com

Twitter: chriswarner2000

Web: http://www.jackbe.com

Blog: http://blogs.jackbe.com

Community: http://www.jackbe.com/dev

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Goals

– Understand the types/qualities of ‘2.0’ technologies.

– Share best practices.

– Provoke ideas and action.

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What’s a…

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…Mashup?…Blog?…Wiki?…Community?

…Mashup?…Blog?…Wiki?…Community?

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Topics for Discussion

• The Types of ‘2.0’

• Technology Issues

– Features and Functions

– Architectures and Architectural Impact

– Security and Governance

• People Issues

– Workforce Training/Development

– Management Buy-in

• Other Issues

– On-site/SaaS? Commercial/Open Source?

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Learn by Doing…Have You Tried All these Things???

Chris Warner

Email: chris@jackbe.com

Twitter: chriswarner2000

Web: http://www.jackbe.com

Blog: http://blogs.jackbe.com

Community: http://www.jackbe.com/dev

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/chriswarner

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/people/Chris-Warner/538484257

…and YouTube, GovLoop, etc…

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Mashup - City of Seattle

http://web1.seattle.gov/mnm/Default.aspx?tabId=1

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Mashup - Defense Intelligence AgencyMulti-source Situational Awareness

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Challenge• Laborious intelligence gathering and sharing process.• Requiring use of multiple ‘stove-pipe’ all-source applications.

Solution• Empower end users to quickly paint a mashup picture of situational awareness across various intelligence data sources. • A paradigm of drag-and-drop and book-marking, resulting in a private workspace for future use and sharing.

Benefits• Rapid solution composition and deployment. • No lengthy development and integration process.

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Mashup - WorldBank

• Ease of Doing Business Map (http://rru.worldbank.org/businessplanet/).

• If you're considering starting a global business, you might want to first check this mashup. It fuses the World Bank's global data with Google Maps to reveal the relative difficulty of doing business in different countries around the globe.

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Mashup - Tax Case Investigation Mashups

VirtualizeMashup

Source Y

Warehouse

Source X

• Taxpayer

• Past Exercises

• Current Exercise

• Past Filings

• Current Filing

• Filing Details

Challenge:• National tax authority seeks an agile solution for delivering data required for staff to increase efficiency in performing tax investigations.

Solution:• Mashups implemented to securely expose data sources so teams of developers & users could easily access & combine them to speed tax research.

Benefits:• Reduced IT and tax investigation costs• Faster case closures• Increased ROI for IT assets

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Mashup - Housing and Urban Development

• National Housing Locator System (http://portal.hud.gov/app_nhls/).

• The system, developed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, lets government users identify available temporary housing for people displaced by a disaster. It was recently employed to identify housing sources before the arrival of Hurricane Gustav. 

• Pulls in housing data that was previously isolated in various local, state and federal systems. The locator combines the housing data with other elements, including Google’s map application programming interface (API) and internally developed geocoding services. 

• “The integration of multiple services into an application allows for a [geographic information system] application to bring together basemaps, operational data, and analytical services to create simple to complex applications that provide information and solve common tasks,” said Lynn Allen, HUD’s deputy chief information officer for business and information technology modernization. 

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Mashup - California HealthCare Foundation

• One-e-App (http://www.oneeapp.org/).

• The Web-based application allows people to fill out a common application that they can submit electronically to various government agencies’ programs. One-e-App is used in Arizona, Indiana and 10 California counties. 

• “The mashup approach lets families apply once for a range of programs rather than fill out an application for each health or social service”, said Sam Karp, vice president of programs at the California HealthCare Foundation.  “We have such a disaggregated environment,” Karp said. “What One-e-App has done is build interfaces to these various government systems.” 

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Mashup - California Counties

http://www.fargeo.com/casestudies/category/enterprise-mashup

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Others to Look Into…

• A-Space: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_intelligence_community_A-Space

• Intellipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellipedia

[Got a Web 2.0 Success Story? Send it to chris@jackbe.com, http://www.twitter.com.chriswarner2000]

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Common 2.0 Mistakes

• The ‘Fall for the Buzz’ Mistake: Misunderstanding what a ‘mashup’ is, for example.

• The Self-Serve Mistake: Users are becoming more technically savvy and self sufficient every day (we call them ‘Business User 2.0’) but we’ll need IT for a long time to come, acting it’s new role as ‘enabler’.

• The Silo Mistake: Mashups/Wikis/Blogs that aren’t API-enabled fall into the same ‘silo’ trap as legacy software.

• The ”Oops” Mistake: Thinking about security as an afterthought.

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APIs That Make It All Happen (For Mashups in Particular)

• What’s an API?– ‘Mashups can also trim development time. A mashup’s ability to reuse data and software services contributes to

faster application implementation because developers can tap existing APIs to assemble a mashup. 

One-E-App uses a U.S. Postal Service API that lets the system verify applicants’ addresses via a USPS database, Karp said. Use of the Google Maps API lets One-E-App generate maps to help applicants reach nearby health care providers. 

HUD’s use of public APIs and existing software components developed internally cut the new application’s development time significantly, said Ramesh Ramakrishnan, division director at Citizant, which developed the department’s housing locator system.’

• Good catalogs of government APIs– http://www.programmableweb.com/featured/government-mashups-and-apis: – http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Reference_Shelf/Libraries/RSS_Library/Agriculture.shtml: Agriculture, Energy,

Environment and Parks and Forests.

• Good examples:– Washington DC Data Catalog: access to 274 datasets from multiple agencies.– US Postal Service: address information, delivery information, rate calculation, printing shipping labels, and

carrier pickup. – GovTracker API: (Rhode Island Secretary of State's eGovernment and IT Division): basic information on elected

and appointed officials, committees, boards, regulations, past and upcoming meetings, elections, etc.– EPA, NOAA, …

Got a Web 2.0 Success Story?

Send it to Chris Warner, chris@jackbe.com, http://www.twitter.com.chriswarner2000