Nextgov

Agencies lag on social media security, privacy concerns, GAO says

July 29, 2011 Federal agencies that use Facebook, Twitter and other social media to push their messages to the public and gather citizen input haven't adequately investigated privacy and security concerns with the new online tools, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office. About half the 23 agencies GAO surveyed also ...

Crowd sourcing can supplement whistleblowing, experts say

July 29, 2011 As public portals for information sharing improve, fraud and waste scandals that were traditionally broken by whistleblowers inside government will increasingly be sussed out of aggregated data from frustrated citizens on the receiving end of federal work, a transparency advocate predicted Friday. The website Seeclickfix.com, for instance, which has been ...

from govexec

From Nextgov: Crowd sourcing can supplement whistleblowing, experts say

July 29, 2011 As public portals for information sharing improve, fraud and waste scandals that were traditionally broken by whistleblowers inside government will increasingly be sussed out of aggregated data from frustrated citizens on the receiving end of federal work, a transparency advocate predicted Friday. Read the whole story at Nextgov.com.

Senator pushes cloud as deficit cutting tool

July 28, 2011 The federal transition to cloud computing is an overlooked source of savings as the government battles over trillions of dollars in spending reductions, the leader of a Senate oversight subcommittee said this week. A visibly weary Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., was addressing a conference Wednesday on the future of government ...

Bill Mandates Publishing Agency Reports to Congress

July 27, 2011 The chairman and ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday introduced companion legislation to the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act. The measure would require the Government Printing Office to publish agency reports to Congress online within 30 days of their submission. Digital copies of the reports ...

Watchdog laments dearth of information on data center consolidation

July 27, 2011 The Government Accountability Office was "right on" in a recent assessment that insufficient accounting and shoddy information gathering by federal agencies could cut into projected cost savings from a governmentwide data center consolidation effort, federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra said Wednesday. Kundra stressed, though, that the GAO report, which ...

Before giving websites the ax, feds should consider public satisfaction, analyst says

July 26, 2011 A task force charged with slashing and rationalizing the federal government's Web presence should look at traffic, redundancy and user satisfaction as it decides which sites should get the ax, an analytic agency recommended Tuesday. The company, ForeSee Results, manages the E-Government Satisfaction Index, a quarterly survey of customer satisfaction ...

No Hanging Out at Homeland Security

July 21, 2011 The Homeland Security Department has already blocked its staff from using Google+, the Internet behemoth's latest social media endeavor, which is still in a testing phase, a spokesman told Nextgov. Homeland Security is one of the few federal agencies that still blocks the majority of social media sites for most ...

Procurement office recommends new cadre of IT experts

July 21, 2011 The Office of Federal Procurement Policy has instructed agency acquisition chiefs to consider forming specialized teams whose members have deep subject matter knowledge to manage information technology purchases. The plan, outlined in a July 13 memo from OFPP Administrator Dan Gordon, generally jibes with a revised acquisition process described in ...

Minding the debt . . . and the desktops, too

July 21, 2011 The Bureau of Public Debt is best known for selling Treasury bonds to finance the government and repaying borrowers when those bonds come due -- a normally boring job that's taken on existential significance in recent weeks as Congress and the White House battle over raising the ceiling on federal ...