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Modernizing the 990-PF to Advance the Accountability and Performance of Foundations: Part 2 (posted 03/21/2011 to website) (John Craig is executive vice-president and COO of The Commonwealth Fund. Craig is chair of the Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York, and a former chair of The Investment Fund for Foundations (TIFF). He serves on the boards of the TIFF Education Fund, the Greenwall Foundation, the International Women's Health Coalition, and the National Center for Law and Philanthropy, and on the investment committee of the Social Science Research Council.)

- "MedAssurant, Inc., a leading provider of data-driven healthcare solutions, and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan (BCBSM), one of the nation's top health care plans, today announced an expansion of their partnership to achieve an industry-leading capability to improve delivery of care to its Medicare Advantage members. The partnership centers around integrated quality outcomes, utilization improvement, financial performance, and business intelligence.  With a focus on highly coordinated analytics and interventions, BCBSM has partnered with MedAssurant to implement a suite of eight solutions spanning CMS 5 Star Complete Quality Management (CQM™), NCQA HEDIS management, Prospective Advantage™, Capitated Risk Adjustment (CARA™), Claims Aggregation Analysis and Submission (CAAS™), CareSync Advantage™, Business Intelligence, and Distributed Analytics™."

Speech by Steven R. Chabinsky, Deputy Assistant Director, Cyber Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation  - delivered March 23, 2010 "...to talk with you about the cyber threat, why it's important, and how you can help your organizations-and in doing so, help our country-rise to this enormous challenge. Some of you no doubt are on the front lines of the cyber security problem and are quite familiar with it, while others of you may only have passing familiarity with this growing problem. First, let me share with you the importance of the cyber security problem from the lens of the FBI. As you know, the FBI is a law enforcement agency that investigates hundreds of federal crimes as well as a domestic national security agency that combats terrorism, espionage, treason, and sabotage.

The head of California's state office of technology sees social media as a "force multiplier" and is aggressively expanding the state's mobile presence this year, aiming to double the number of mobile apps offered in 2011. Adrian Farley, the acting director and chief technology officer of OTech, told OhMyGov.com in an exclusive interview that the state of California, one of the earliest adopters of social media in government, had been very fortunate in experiencing almost no cultural pushback in attempts to integrate social media into official public communications. 

Social media tools, such as twitter and facebook, played a significant part of the overthrowing of Mubarak. With two-thirds of Egypt's population under the age of 30, it's no surprise that internet-savvy, educated, young Egyptians used such tools to break barriers in a country that has been ruled under unjust dictatorship throughout their lives. These tools helped organize and gather the millions of protestors that have sparked revolution in Egypt. Social media and sharing information online has played an almost unimaginable role in this process and certainly poses a threat to governments around the world with dictatorships and a significant proportion of the population who is educated and able to use these tools.

"In an effort to crack down on child pornography, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the seizure of 10 domains as a part of a new initiative called "Operation Protect Our Children" but they also shut down 84,000 seemingly innocent sites in the process."   A clear example of how attempting to exercise government control over the Internet in the United States on a even a small scale can present problems that were not the intent of the US gov. officials & decision makers!!!!!

See photo at top left of article showcasing one of their high-tech, computer laden facilities on display for this article "What are the most significant security threats? What do we know about them? What don't we know? What is just around the corner that we should be preparing for now? These are the kinds of questions we ask ourselves every day. It's part of our intelligence-driven, threat-based, future-focused approach to defending the country from a range of national security and major crime threats. Today, the FBI combines its investigations and intelligence operations to be more predictive and preventative-more aware of emerging threats and better able to stop them before they turn into crimes. "

Yet another journalist's/expert's opinion on how to best use facebook for a non-profit, including the importance of goals

Gives good tips on how an organization should use facebook. Some of the good tips promote communicating to the fan-base as well as encourage fan-to-fan communication. One of the most important things about NPOs and Facebook is to have a purpose with your page. This article strongly condemns having a page "just to be on facebook" and says that having a strong purpose makes facebook that much more successful.

"It's important for any digitally-minded non-profit to be on Facebook because of the sheer number of active users. So, great - you set up a Facebook account for your organization. Now what?" Note:  "Eight of the world's top ten brand use the Buddy Media Platform (sponsor of "The Facebook Marketing Series") to power their social marketing on FB."

Obama talking about the importance of investing in wireless technology in Marquette, MI, up north last Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011. This part of a new White House focus on "innovation, competitiveness and infrastructure as a pathway to jobs and 'winning the future.' The president compared the goal of extending wireless access to important successes that connected previous generations of Americans: the building of railroads and the federal highway system."

I really like the plans he is pushing for. Mobile devices is obviously the current frontier to win. The impact on nonprofit activity will be enormous. Most businesses for that matter now have to consider a mobile device plan in supplement to their initial web design plans.

After seeing the tragedy that has hit Japan, I found this story to be useful as a great example of how tech can really affect people's lives. Google has provided a system where you can search the name of a person in Japan and find out about their status in the country after the earthquake. This tool is so important for government to use during a national disaster because it allows families, no matter where they are across the globe, to better find out what has happened to their loved ones after such a tragedy. Governments or non profits such as the American Red Cross can use this technology in all types of different relief effort circumstances when a number of people somewhere in the world have been the victim of such a disaster.

Is there an art to getting ReTweeted on Twitter? Dan Zarrella says yes and has been studying the "Science of ReTweeting" for the past nine months. Zarrella analyzed five million tweets and 40 million retweets and compared the two, noting the time of day they were tweeted and ReTweeted, which words and url shorteners were used most often, and more. Check out the results of Zarrella's study below.

Clearly, social media has emerged as a powerful mobilizing tool, particularly for issues like labor disputes, where political passions run high. Whichever side you're on, labor or management, experiences like the one the DSO and its musicians have faced for the past six months tell us that social media is here to stay and nonprofits have to understand how to manage - no, embrace - the now-dominant form of communication for more and more of their community members.

The Cellebrite UFED Physical Pro is a high-end, all-in-one solution for logical and physical extraction. The UFED Physical Pro expands your current device capabilities to extract deleted mobile device data, user passwords, file system dumps, and physical extraction from GPS devices.

From the company product brochure for "UFED Physical Pro": 'THE COMPLETE MOBILE FORENSICS SOLUTION Cellebrite's UFED addresses the growing need for fast, comprehensive mobile forensic capabilities. An add-on module for advanced extraction and analysis of evidence Physical Pro enables the basic UFED system with physical data extraction, file system dump and reconstruction, and password extraction. UFED Physical Pro enables recovery of invaluable evidential information that isn't accessible by logical extraction methods alone. In use by military, law enforcement, governments, and intelligence agencies across the world, UFED Physical Pro allows users to rapidly extract a wide variety of data types in a forensically sound process from both phone and SIM memory. Extracting data in a forensic manner and presenting it with the integrity of the data intact ensures that the evidence will be admissible in court.

Online .pdf Brochure Description of 'extraction device' continued (notice the GPS and mapping capability also): AT A GLANCE * Complete extraction of existing, hidden, and deleted phone data, including call history, text messages, contacts, images, and geotags * Powerful search, reconstruction, and analysis of the phone hex dump that can be used for intelligence gathering, investigative research, and as legal evidence in court * Expanded coverage for GPS devices, with mapping of GPS locations on Google Maps and visualization of GPS locations on Google Earth * Unrivaled phone coverage and compatibility * Fast, intuitive extraction process source: http://www.cellebrite.com/images/stories/brochures/UFED%20Physical%20Pro%20Brochure%20%20ENGLISH.pdf

This is a secondary post to accompany one of my earlier ones on public education and administration strategies. Related to previous post about Obama wanting to create an Ed-Tech agency. This official White House website posts a complete outline of Obama's broader plan for American Innovation to build the economy of the 21st century (in the form of an executive summary).      Interesting pyramid figure conceptually charting the projeced impact on innovation for "Sustainable Growth" and quality jobs.

Just so nobody misses the point - there's no evidence that the incidence of spam and malware being generated is improving. "What we have seen is a significant uptick in the area of malware related to the expanded use of social networking sites. Although we are isolating the malware, it blows my mind how significant it has become,"

Technology pop quiz for business owners: What's more secure? A. Data stored in redundant back-up server installations (or "the cloud"), automatically updated and maintained, in a facility secured from outside threats. Or B. Data stored or backed up to an on-site tape or flash drive, whenever the company's controller or non-IT back-office staffer remembers to do it - then left in the drive? For many, the answer in theory is A, but in practice, it's B. Why is this important? Because studies have shown that 70 percent of companies go out of business after a major data loss and 60 percent of companies that lose their data will shut down within six months. Yet those unfamiliar with cloud computing still believe onsite back-up is a safe, secure solution. Therein lies one of the most compelling reasons to embrace cloud or ERP (enterprise resource planning) computing.

The Apple iPad, one of apple's hottest sellers, is seeing frequent use by those in the government sector. With the seemingly endless amount of apps available for use with the iPad, many help government workers to become more efficient. The apps that are seeing the most use include twitter, quick office, evernote and flipboard. Twitter is helpful to disperse quick messages to others in the work place, and obviously has social networking benefits as well. Quick Office is seeing a lot of use as a microsoft office productivity tool. Evernote allows the user to take notes, record sound bytes, add pictures and video, and other helpful pieces of information into one "note" that is easily dispersed to others in one piece, together. Flipboard is presented almost as a "personal magazine", where feeds from social networking sites and other sites the user selects appear directly on the iPad's interface.

A non-profit out of California has created software for human rights workers that is designed to secretly store data about human rights violation abuses in the country where they are located. There is talk about it already being used in the Middle-East recently. The software includes a 'panic button' that a human rights worker could use that would instantly delete all the files on the computer about government violations. The data is then stored in the cloud and accessable only with a password and secret 'key.' This is a great example of nonprofits working together to fight enormous challenges, with human rights being one of the most dangerous and exhaustive areas of work in the non-profit sector.

Reports expenditures of the $787 billion dollars of the Recovery Act funds. Citizens can use to identify fraud, waste, and abuse of those funds.  Zip code map to find how funds being used in your area. Social Media feeds of all types.