Group items tagged

Principles, not product.

Be a force for good. That's Twitter's new foundational principle — and it's interesting because it takes Google's foundational principle and does it one better.

Openness as a survival strategy. I

In the past few months, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asked us how a Netflix Prize sequel might affect Netflix members' privacy, and a lawsuit was filed by KamberLaw LLC pertaining to the sequel.

In light of all this, we have decided to not pursue the Netflix Prize sequel that we announced on August 6, 2009.We will continue to explore ways to collaborate with the research community and improve our recommendations system so we can constantly improve the movie recommendations we make for you. So stay tuned.

Learning from Dell

Customers are in control. Work with them and learn from them. Real conversations are two-way. Think before you talk—but always be yourself. Address any form of dissatisfaction head on. Be aware that any conversation can become global at any time. Size doesn't matter—relevance does. Just as one journalist can trigger a newscycle, one blogger can do the same. Don't be afraid to apologize. Develop direct links to customer community (IdeaStorm for Dell), listen for how we can improve. One customer is part of many communities. Teamwork, transparency and frequent consistent communication are key in this new world. No shortcuts are possible. Implementing business change requires much effort across departments.

Engage our people to make it work

Having a terms-of-service agreement with these new media providers will make it easier for government agencies to create pages and use them to dramatically increase access to information, offer education on government services, and further empower citizens to interact with government.

For the past six months, a coalition of agencies led by GSA has been working with new media providers to develop terms of service that can be agreed to by federal agencies. The new agreements resolve any legal concerns found in many standard terms and conditions that pose problems for federal agencies, such as liability limits, endorsements, freedom of information, and governing law

"We need to get official information out to sites where people are already visiting and encourage them to interact with their government," says GSA Acting Administrator Paul Prouty. “Millions of Americans visit new media sites every day. The new agreements make it easier for the government to provide official information to citizens via their method of choice.”

The first-ever quantitative assessment of online open government efforts has concluded that the perceived transparency of federal Web sites drives trust in government.

The longstanding approach to quantifying transparency has been, "well let's measure how much data they put out there," said Larry Freed, ForeSee Results' president and chief executive officer. "To me, that's not measuring transparency. That may be measuring confusion."

"If citizens find e-government transparent, they are more likely to return to the site, recommend it, and use it instead of a more costly channel," the study found. "They even express more trust in the government agency."

This document is a best practices guide for governments embracing the notion of "open data". It discusses why open government data is beneficial to society, i.e. how it is civic capital, and what kinds of technological considerations must be made when making government data open.

With APIs, you let other developers do your R&D for you. The benefit? You get development at scale with minimal investment. You effectively outsource risk because failures don’t cost you anything.

It’s easy to envision how brands whose core business revolves around technology or data could make use of an API

By providing access to that value through an API, they would allow the delivery of that value to spread exponentially.

Empower citizens and businesses Reinforce mobility in the Single Market Enable efficiency and effectiveness Create the necessary key enablers and pre-conditions to make things happen

I have said it before, and I say it again: yes to open data!

By involving third parties we can both improve services and be more transparent. That would be the definition of weGov.

The Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved landmark legislation to overhaul the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, a reform effort more than half a decade in the making that aims to improve the quality of patents and curb frivolous litigation.

Excluded from the bill was a controversial amendment, backed by many tech companies, that would have eased the process for initiating an in-house administrative review process at the Patent Office for challenges to patents that have been granted, a measure billed as a less costly alternative to private litigation.

The Senate bill would transition the Patent Office to a so-called first-to-file system, bringing the U.S. system in line with the patent regimes of much of the rest of the world. The shift would confer patent rights on the first inventor or company to file an application, rather than the current first-to-invent system

They say sunlight is the best disinfectant. Use digress.it to collectively dissect public documents like political speeches, corporate contracts or government transcripts.

digress.it makes this private space public, allowing communities of readers to turn documents into conversations

ScraperWiki is an online tool to make that process simpler and more collaborative. Anyone can write a screen scraper using the online editor.