By executive order on Aug. 4, President Barack Obama refused entry to the United States of war criminals and human-rights violators (jurist.org, Aug. 4). He ignored, as he often does, the deeply documented factual evidence of war crimes committed by the Bush-Cheney administration along with grim proof that the Obama administration also violates our anti-torture laws and the U.N. Convention Against Torture we signed. Take, for example, right now under Obama, "The CIA Secret Sites in Somalia" (the nation.com, July 12).
I was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I said had to be repeated by hundreds of people so others could hear (a.k.a. "the human microphone"), what I actually said at Liberty Plaza had to be very short. With that in mind, here is the longer, uncut version of the speech.
Social computing will continue to grow in government, but won't hit critical mass in 2010.
Don't forget that there was some clamping down on social media in government during 2009 including the Marines restricting access to services such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter. Progress in 2010 will be better in state and to a lesser extent local government. The federal government will also struggle with a consistent policy and approach for internal and external social computing, which probably won't emerge next year.
Open data goes back to the drawing board. I've been bullish on open data and APIs for years and the government got religion in 2009 with data.gov. But the usage is down as government workers and businesses realize that the data is often far out-of-date and not in forms that can be used operationally.
Cloud computing will go big. While many agencies will just use the technologies internally for now in order to have public options later, there is tremendous interest in the cloud
Government portals (rightly) continue to incorporate social media, but deep engagement will be elusive for now. I've seen many overhauls of government portals this year, including Utah.gov and the Department of Defense, prominently incorporate social media right on their home pages. To be clear, these are major advances for the government to make on the internal/external boundary and I encourage them.