Common-Nature

By ‘we’ I mean government in general. What the heck is twitter?

It’s ‘micro-blogging’ and it’s getting traction. Check out this short post by Joshua Bullock at sumtingnu. You can also see what he’s up to during the day (via Twitter) here:
Want to start? Go to twitter.com.

So how can it help government? Some ideas are:

• Getting a person to twitter about their workday for education (e.g., what is a fireman’s day like?)
• Fast collaboration (e.g., what are the members of my team doing today?)
• Digging people out of the woodwork to help you do your job (In Joshua’s experience, he’s already run into several new Web tools and resources from people responding to his ‘tweets’ (a Twitter post…yeah, I know…).
• Jeff Davis suggests epetitions.

So are any government agencies tweeting? The Free Government Information blog lists several — including the FBI and Nasa….oh, and the British government (man, they kick our butts with social media).

Hmm..odd sidenote….who actually wrote this article? I’ve got two people claiming credit for it I think:

• Free Government Information
• Gov Docs on the Bayou!

[Note: the folks at FGI cleared up for…same person..just cross posted…see the comments]

Check out the recent article on ars technica. It discusses a new paper from researchers at Princeton University. David Robinson, Harlan Yu, William Zeller, and Ed Felten, all of Princeton’s Information Technology Policy Center, suggest that government officials focus less (much less) on developing usable web sites, and instead focus (much more) on providing raw public data such as regulatory decisions.

Why?

A number of reasons. The public sector has many developers and resources to develop innovative Web sites. While a government committee may spend weeks debating on what color icons to put on Web page, an individual can build a googlemap everyone can use in an evening. But individuals can only do this if they have access to the data.

We already know that good Web development means splitting out presentation, business logic and data access. We build applications that call Web services to access data. Then we post that information in xhtml pages that are styled with CSS. Why not build the Web services so they are exposed to the public? Then, anyone can access them.

‘Wait!’ You may say. ‘Our Web services are behind a firewall. We don’t want to punch a hole in our firewall.’ Fair enough..and you don’t have to. Consider this:

Many of us want to use AJAX in our Web pages. These AJAX pages must sit on a public accessible server (or else the public can’t get to them). AJAX pages require javascript to grab data for dynamic updates. Javascript cannot make calls to data services that are not on the same server as the javascript. This means that if you want AJAX in your application, you’ll need to have some sort of public Web service. In MDC development, we’re calling it a ‘proxy service’ (following the lead of Jeremy Keith of ‘Bulletproof AJAX‘ fame). This proxy service is a public accessible application that turns around and calls your real Web service that is behind the firewall. If you want to use AJAX for the public, this is how you’ll have to do it.

But if you’re doing this, anyone in the public can call that same application (because it’s on the public facing server). Poof! You’ve got a public facing Web service.

In short, building public facing Web services is something you’ll have to do to build AJAX pages. So why not develop a strategy now for figuring out how to make your data available to the public?

And why stop there? Why not have Missouri government foster an environment that encourages the public to access and mashup our data? I mean, what good is public facing data if no one knows it’s there?

In the United Kingdom, a non-profit group has joined forces with government to create the Ideal Government prize competition. To win the prize, individuals or groups in the public hacked government data with a free online map, and sent a short description and a link to Ideal Government contest. Entrants showed what’s possible in terms of locating public-sector data (schools, crimes, hazardous waste dumps, high-spending councils, whatever) on maps as easy to use as Google. All this was done by simply having government release access to its data. This group is even going further by actively engaging the public in government with ThePublicOffice.org.
Missouri could encourage such use of it’s data if it simply listed all agency data feeds. In fact, if Missouri government knew of all its existing data feeds, we could probably improve our own state and agency Web sites (by accessing feeds of other agencies). For more on this idea, see my posts on the Missouri Mapping Project.

In the next fiscal year, our development team here at MDC are going to be piloting these sorts of public Web services to expose information on our public conservation areas, job openings, area regulations, and available publications (we’re already releasing RSS feeds of our news in coordination with several other state agencies to present news on the Missouri state portal.)

For all this to work, then government needs to do the following:

1. Build public facing Web services
2. Make the URL to these services a permalink (i.e., a URL that will never change)
3. Make the public aware of this service (and encourage it)

So…how can we make this happen in Missouri?
As a final note, see what Utah government is already doing in this area by checking out David Fletcher’s blog.

Today I’m helping Mark Brunner of the Missouri Department of Conservation do a workshop on using Google maps at the MAGIC 2008 Symposium.

Here are some links I’m going to use during the presentation. Feel free to follow along

• recmap.org workshop notes
• Information about the recmap or missouri mapping project
• More notes on the project

Maps.google.com

A place we’ve all been to, but did you realize you can pull kmz or georss feeds into it? Go there and type in the following kmz or georss urls.

• http://wildsanctuary.googlepages.com/tour.kml
• http://feeds.feedburner.com/wdinNewsDigestGeoRSS
  (from the NBII..news postings related to wildlife disease issues)
• http://www.common-nature.com/?feed=rss2 (georss from my blog)
• http://api.flickr.com/services /feeds/geo/?id=8753840@N06&lang=en-us&format=rss_200
  (a rather lame photo album of mine on Flickr…pulled via georss feed from Flickr)
  (by the way, get rid of the space after ’services’ when copying and pasting..had to do that to get the link to fit across two lines)

My links on cool Google map apps. and developer links on my del.icio.us account.

So where am I presenting? See the link below.

Show on map

RSS feed readers: What they are and how you can use em.
Josh is doing a great job presenting and I’m busy writing this post via my Blackberry while he’s finishing up the presentation. Turn out is great. We’ve got about 40 here.

Some links to help you get blogging or using other social media:
Before you blog checklist

DMD presentation: The case for social media in government

I also came across Kevin O’keefe’s do’s and don’ts on company blogging, which provides a nice checklist to those getting ready to create a policy.

when to begin

Yes, I’m back after a long spell away from the blog. Today I and Joshua Bullock are polishing off a presentation we’re going to be doing at the Power Up 2008 conference and expo: A conference on Missouri assistive technology.

I will be presenting on why organizations should even be interested in social media. I’ve pulled out the old presentation I did back in June 0f 2007 and realize just how far everything has come in the past year. I’ve changed many references about how people may be using social media to definite statements (e.g., your employees are using social media now)

Joshua Bullock is a great Web designer I work with at the Missouri Dept. of Conservation. He’s one of the best Web designers I’ve worked with when it comes to CSS, XHTML and all things related.

Joshua is going to be covering the accessibility side of things when it comes to using social media tools like Wordpress, and Drupal. He’s come across an interesting observation. While these new Web 2.0 tools are great at presenting XHTML strict and 508 compliant pages to the people who read the pages these tools produce, they aren’t as great when it comes to compliant backend pages. Josh has more on his blog.

The conclusion? I’m thinking here again we have a situation where developers are so busy thinking of how the public uses their tools that they forget that employees or internal content developers may also need assistive technology.

Look for another post on the presentation as well as links relevant to the presentation.

Show on map

David Thorne from the Missouri Dept. of Conservation gave a great talk using social media to reach the public. You can read more about his presentation on his site. More on his presentation later.

Show on map

I’m in break right now, but wanted to post a couple of important links related to talks at the MNR Conference.

One of them is The Center for Generational Studies. They have some good material for understanding how to relate to next generations in the workplace. Robert Wendover (from the Center) gave a great talk on generational differences in the workplace. Robert also put a special link on the Center’s site for the MNRC containing resources related to his talk.

Louv’s talk was also great (more to come later). In the meantime, check out the Children and Nature Network site.

tag: Richard Louv, Social Media, MNRC

Show on map

I’ve been conspicously absent from here the last 3 to 4 months, but am now getting back into things online. In a future post, I’ll be able to fill you on some of the things I’ve been up to.

Right now I’m posting from the Missouri Natural Resource Conference 2008 down in Tan-Tar-A. Their theme this year: Get Ready for Change: Ensuring Resource Sustainability in an iPod® World (so they’re already thinking about future trends).

The keynote speaker? Richard Louv

More about that later. In the meantime, here’s a great presentation with some great facts about changes in worldwide trends….something to get people thinking about how we can no longer remain doing the same old things to reach people.

While you can’t understand every point made in this slideshow, you can learn some interesting facts about where we’re all going with this fancy schmancy web 2.0 stuff

http://www.slideshare.net/montymetzger/power-of-social-media

It’s also a great introduction to slideshare, yet another social media application…this one dedicated to sharing slideshows.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t tend to get excited about slideshows. However, the interesting thing about slideshare is that when you get thousands of slideshows in one place and vote on them, some really great presentations float to the top.

I’ve already found some excellent presentations on AJAX, the purpose of design in web development, etc.

Check slideshare out and see what I mean.

tag: Richard Louv, Social Media

Show on map

I’ve been busy preparing for the Google maps / GeoRSS workshop at the Organization of Fish and Wildlife Information Managers (OFWIM) conference this past week.

All the stuff we did there you can find at the recmap.org site.

There are a few tools we used at the workshop that might interest some of you wanting to use Google maps as a cheap way to provide maps to your areas (especially if your areas are for outdoor recreation).

One is a tool that will take shapefile data from GIS and provide you with both a KML and GeoRSS file as output. While the latest ESRI product now will export KML files, this tool still has merit since it provides you both with some options and a look under the hood at the conversion process.

Another item is a web page that allows you to input Google map code and execute it on the page. This served as a great tool during the tutorial on how to build Google maps.

Whether you’re involved in getting outdoor recreational activities on the map for the public or just the location of your government offices, take a moment to visit recmap.org and grab some code (or supply feedback or ideas).

tag: google map, egovernment, geotagging, GeoRSS, mapping, Missouri mapping project, OFWIM

At this point, the work on recmap.org now includes the following:

1. Information on how to mark up your areas in the recmap xml
2. A javascript you can deploy on your own site that will read your xml file and produce a Google map with tabbed windows.
3. Information on how to validate your xml file

I’m rather pleased with the javascript since it automatically resolves your correct domain (used when the javascript attempts to get your xml file) and it also successfully deals with IE and all other normal browsers when it comes to working with multiple namespaces in an xml document.

The next steps will be to complete the aggregator on the site. When this is complete, the site will able to periodically query the recmap xml files on community sites and pull their recreational opportunities into one central database.

While this project is geared toward Missouri outdoor recreational opportunities, the tools being developed can be used anywhere.

As always, I’m looking for any input or feedback. What do you think will make this project work better?

tag: google map, egovernment, geotagging, GeoRSS, mapping, Missouri mapping project