WebNews                                                    July 10, 2014 |  Vol 17, Issue 8
NEWS in PHOTOS


 

 

UPCOMING EVENTS
September 1-3, 2014
Dublin, Ireland

Sharon Dawes will give keynote on E-government and Innovation: A Fresh Look at Experience.

In addition, Dawes and J. Ramon Gil-Garcia are senior faculty of the PhD Colloquium, and serving on the Program Committee. Ramon will also present two papers on which he is co-author, Towards an Evaluation Model for Open Government: A Preliminary Proposal, and The Problem of Technological and Social Determinism: Integrative Approaches and some Non-Deterministic Concepts for Digital Government. 

October 27-30, 2014
Guimarães, Portugal

OPEN HEALTH DATA

In a June 24th Viewpoint article for the Journal of the American Medical Association Erika Martin, Ph.D., M.P.H., director of Health Policy Studies at the Rockefeller Institute of Government of SUNY and assistant professor at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at UAlbany; Natalie Helbig, Ph.D., M.P.A., assistant research director for CTG; and Nirav Shah, M.D., M.P.H., former commissioner of Health for New York State and now the senior vice president and chief operating officer at Kaiser Permanente, have called for expansion of access to governmental health data.

 

The article shows how people and organizations outside of state government are using New York State's Health Data NY, an innovative initiative that makes many health data sets newly accessible to the public, available in multiple non-proprietary formats, free of charge, and with unlimited use and distribution rights.

 

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SUMMER STUDENTS

Five University at Albany graduate assistants and interns from an array of backgrounds and disciplines are already actively engaged in their summer projects at CTG.

Three computer science student interns are taking a team approach to both developing software products and implementing a software project management approach for CTG. Using the Agile/Scrum methodology, the team is currently engaged in a two-week sprint to refine a mobile app to help government professionals in their organizations' capabilities for the mobile work environment.

A returning spring semester student from UAlbany's School of Business continues to develop various financial tools to support CTG's budget and financial management processes. And, we welcome back a returning graduate student from Rockefeller College who is working on public value and smart cities research projects.

 
OPEN GOVERNMENT & PUBLIC LIBRARIES

CTG has released a Summary Report for The Role of Public Libraries in Enabling Open Government: A Stakeholder Workshop held on May 7-8, 2014 in Alexandria, Virginia. The workshop brought together a national forum of approximately 40 thought-leaders from public libraries, academia, government, open government, and other organizations to explore the ways public libraries can enable open government within their communities. The workshop is part of a larger initiative that CTG is leading with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) through a 2013 Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program (LB21) grant.

 

CTG IN THE NEWS
For most of the city, two companies, Time Warner and Verizon, provide broadband access, at an annual cost of close to $1,000 per home. For many houses, that means no access at all. About 2.9 million people in the city were in the digital dark, according to a 2010 study by the Center for Technology and Government at the University at Albany, part of the State University of New York. In the city's libraries, 68 percent of the people who make under $25,000 and are using the computers do not have Internet access at home. 

States' Apps Target Health and Safety


Pew Charitable Trusts | June 27, 2014
"It's a natural progression," said Theresa Pardo, director of the Center for Technology in Government at the University at Albany, a research center that focuses on innovation in government technology. "I think these new apps are really powerful. What underlies them is a massive effort to identify and integrate in sophisticated ways data that is relevant to an individual, particularly in the event of a crisis."

 

 

 

Memo to Next V.A. Chief: How Technology Allowed Corruption to Flourish, Hurting Veterans

 

The American Prospect | June 30, 2014

Sharon Dawes points out that, ironically, giving patients or families access to the wait time data on a site like data.gov might have identified the problem in Phoenix earlier. People closest to the problem would have seen that the wait times they were experiencing were far out of line with wait times that were being reported. This life-saving information was instead uncovered by an old-fashioned audits, hotlines, and whistleblowers. 

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