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Mission drives agencies, and the need to deliver better services to customers at a lower cost-whether an agency is supporting the warfighter overseas, a teacher seeking classroom resources or a family figuring out how to pay for college-is pushing every level of government to look for new solutions. Today's amazing mix of cloud computing, ever-smarter mobile devices, and collaboration tools is changing the consumer landscape1 and bleeding into government as both an opportunity and a challenge. New expectations require the Federal Government to be ready to deliver and receive digital information2 and services3 anytime, anywhere and on any device. It must do so safely, securely, and with fewer resources. To build for the future, the Federal Government needs a Digital Strategy that embraces the opportunity to innovate more with less, and enables entrepreneurs to better leverage government data to improve the quality of services to the American people. Early mobile adopters in government-like the early web adopters-are beginning to experiment in pursuit of innovation. Some have created products that leverage the unique capabilities of mobile devices. Others have launched programs and strategies and brought personal devices into the workplace. Absent coordination, however, the work is being done in isolated, programmatic silos within agencies. Building for the future requires us to think beyond programmatic lines. To keep up with the pace of change in technology, we need to securely architect our systems for interoperability and openness from conception. We need to have common standards and more rapidly share the lessons learned by early adopters. We need to produce better content and data, and present it through multiple channels in a program and device-agnostic4 way. We need to adopt a coordinated approach to ensure privacy and security in a digital age. These imperatives are not new, but many of the solutions are. We can use modern tools and

Politics Transformed: The High Tech Battle for Your Vote is an in-depth look at how social media and digital tech is changing the way we choose our leaders. In it, Mashable reporters uncover how the campaigns are utilizing massive stores of data gathered through social networks to better target political advertising, how crowdfunding could shake up campaign finance, and we meet the masterminds shaping the digital best practices for electoral politics. We report on how watchdog groups are using social media to protect the vote, why social media has put even more heat on candidates to stay on-message, and ask whether voting over the Internet will ever be safe. In spite of its massive and unprecedented growth, we're only just beginning to figure out what it means to be social online, and political strategists are still in the early stages of figuring out what social media can and can't do. The trend is clear, however: digital will be an ever more important factor as each new election cycle rolls around. We can't know yet what the future might hold for social media and politics, but here's how social is changing things right now.

Researchers can find and read papers online, rather than having to manually track down print copies.  Machines  (computers) can index the papers and extract the details (titles,  keywords etc.) in order to alert scientists to relevant material.  In addition, computers can extract factual data and meaning by "mining" the content, opening  up the possibility that machines could be used to make connections (and  even scientific discoveries) that might otherwise remain invisible to  researchers. However,  it is not generally possible today for computers to mine the content in papers due to constraints imposed by publishers.  While Open Access (OA) is improving the ability for researchers to read papers (by removing  access barriers), still only around 20% of scholarly papers are OA. The  remainder are locked  behind paywalls. As per the vast majority of subscription contracts, Subscribers may read paywalled papers, but they may not mine them. Content  mining is the way that modern technology locates digital information. Because digitized scientific information comes from hundreds of  thousands of different sources in today's globally connected scientific  community [2] and because current data sets can be measured in  terabytes,[1] it is often no longer possible to simply read a scholarly  summary in order to make scientifically significant use of such  information.[3]  A researcher must be able to copy information,  recombine it with other data and otherwise "re-use" it so as to produce  truly helpful results.  Not only is it a deductive tool to analyze  research data, it is how search engines operate to allow discovery of content. To prevent mining is therefore to force scientists into blind  alleys and silos where only limited knowledge is accessible.  Science  does not progress if it cannot incorporate the most recent findings and  move forward from there.

The authors cover in depth how cities are using a host of social media tools to enhance governments' delivery of many different kinds of services, ranging from distributing health and safety information, to responding to requests for graffiti removal and infrastructure repair, to encouraging and soliciting citizen participation in policy-making. They also outline how different cities run their social media operations, laying out the benefits and drawbacks of centralized versus decentralized social media strategy, and detailing how some cities structure the approval process prior to posting content to social media sites. Beyond presenting best practices, "The Rise of Social Government" highlights emerging trends in social media and how governments can get take advantage of them. Essential trends include monitoring, measuring crowdsourcing and integration of the mobile web. The authors take care to differentiate between monitoring and measuring social media. While monitoring involves listening to conversations on various platforms, measuring involves tracking the numbers that encompass engagement and the report details tools for each activity. The authors also talk about the rise of mobile social media and mobile apps, and the use of crowdsourcing, especially for emergency management

"These examples bring me to the point of my story. It's not enough to drive system change through pedagogy and educational practices. System change is systemic. It starts with how we conduct our business, how nimble, creative and adaptive we choose to be, and how quickly we are able to modify what we do to take advantage of how to do what we do better. If the educational ship of state creaks along dragged down by the weight of outmoded business practices, then the result will be a weakened, badly positioned American higher education system. That outcome will diminish our productivity as citizens, workers and liberally educated thinkers. It will be bad economics, worse politics and a missed opportunity.  "

"August and September, in partnership with the International Economic Development Council (IEDC), I conducted a national survey of IEDC members and others affiliated with IEDC. The primary goal was to get a snapshot of how broadband impacts local economic outcomes. A secondary goal was to gather some insights to leveraging broadband as an economic development asset. This is the only survey that goes directly to the people who work in the trenches daily impacting local economic outcomes. Here is where I separate some of the hype surrounding broadband's power to transform local economies with some reality checks. Some of the findings from this year's survey include: only 11% of economic developers believe broadband's biggest economic benefit to individuals is helping them find jobs; 18% of respondents have insufficient speeds to produce economic outcomes listed and have given up hope for a solution; another 13% do not have enough speed to get the job done, but are actively trying to find or create a solution; 43.5% of respondents' jurisdictions exist under duopoly conditions, 15.5% are in communities that live with a broadband monopoly; about 12% of respondent' say their communities plan to start building broadband networks in the next 18 months, another 22% hope to build a network at some point in the future; 64% of respondents reject convention broadband remedies for urban areas to say "faster speeds, cheaper services" will have the biggest impact on economic development (value of computing centers compromised by crappy infrastructure in poor communities); fiber continues to outshine wireless in terms of expected impact on economic outcomes, with the biggest gap in expectations in the areas of attracting businesses to a community and making local companies more competitive; and 41% - 48% of respondents believe broadband can increase the number of home-based businesses; and significant percentages of respondents say broadband adoption doesn't mean j

t's spring break and summer is just around the corner, which means vacation season is upon us. From mobile apps to deal sites, people use technology more than ever to help find places to go. Technology also helps vacationers enjoy themselves after they reach their destinations. But just how much is technology changing the way we travel? Nearly one-third of social media users have used a mobile app to find good prices for flights and hotels, and 15% have downloaded an app specific to a certain trip, according to a survey by the market research company Lab42. And just because people are on break, they aren't necessarily taking a break from their devices. More than 80% of international vacationers use their smartphones while abroad. About 70% post photos to a social network while on vacation, and 46% use services like Facebook and Foursquare to check in to restaurants and other places they visit. For the full picture of how technology and social media are changing our travel experiences, check out the Lab42 infographic below. What role do tech and social media play in your trips? Let us know in the comments.

"I read a lot of reports on how to encourage broadband adoption. There are three kinds of reports - one focuses on getting folks at the far end of the digital divide to use technology, one focuses on creating super users (think GigU) and the other encourages average users to use more broadband - or faster broadband. No Field of Dreams: Eliminating the Waiting Game and Driving Uptake focuses on the upping the use mainstream users. Well, more specifically, it focuses on how to get those users to upgrade their subscriptions to fiber. Or as they say in the report to get customers to put their money where the providers mouth is."

Every web publisher - and especially content marketer - yearns for an engaged and loyal audience. But with the sheer volume of noise, clutter and - well, content - online it can be hard to figure out how to reach people and keep them coming back for more. The content marketing agency BlueGlass knows a lot about how to do this well. They've run successful campaigns for clients including eBay, Conde Nast and Greatist. Now BlueGlass is ready to share some of its secrets with Mashable readers. The company produced this exclusive infographic to run down some of the ways you too can build an engaged audience online. Here are a few quick tips: Make sure you have a gripping headline, keep your copy to the point, make sure to provide value and promote, promote, promote.

"The maker movement is gathering momentum. Slowly but surely people around the world are changing from passive consumer of the latest gizmo to active maker and modifier of existing designs. The promotion of an open source philosophy in the online era has given people access to myriad designs allowing them to make and modify almost anything. These days DIY not only applies to making simple home improvements, you can go online and learn how to build a robot if you feel up to the challenge! In America, MAKE magazine is the go-to publication for DIY and hack enthusiasts. Humans Invent spoke to MAKE's editor and overall hack guru, Mark Frauenfelder, to get an insight into how this movement is changing the nature of our consumerist culture."

Think of it as a health policy wonk's dream: Football stadium after football stadium packed to the brim with...health insurance claims data.  An odd dream, to be sure. But health insurance data is crucial to understand how health care dollars get spent. It shows how people use health care, what's changing and, in some cases, why. Health insurers, however, have tended to keep that data private, as it could tip competitors off to how they handle business.  That all, however, changes today. This morning a new nonprofit called the Health Care Cost Institute will roll out a database of 5 billion health insurance claims (all stripped of the individual health plan's identity, to address privacy concerns). 

It's about how organisations within a community can use technology as a catalyst or supporting tool to support ideas and create social action or change within that community," Amy Gadd, senior network manager of the community hubs project, told E-Government Bulletin. All the hubs' progress will also be measured over the funded period up to April 2013, to evaluate its impact. "We'll be creating case studies as we go, particularly in terms of how technology has made a change", said Gadd. "We're not expecting massive changes, they may be quite small, but significant to that community. And we'll be pulling some of those stories out, spreading them through the UK Online Centres network, so that others can follow.

Amitabh Chandra, professor of public policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, argues in a new video that investments in new medical technology should be done in a cost-effective manner. The video - part of a collaboration between Harvard and New York City nonprofit 92Y - tackles how to approach the costs that come with new medical tech. For example, Chandra points to Proton Beam Therapy as an example of how cost might outweigh benefit. Beam therapy is a new high-tech method for treating men's prostate cancer, but Chandra argues that it hasn't been proven any more useful than other, less expensive forms of treatment.

o you're standing around the water cooler on Monday morning, and Joe from accounting asks what you got up to over the weekend. "Oh, nothing much," you reply. "I learned how to pick a lock, how to make ricotta from scratch, and how to make a camp stove out of two soda cans, and that was just Saturday." Such an odd emporium of learning actually exists in Oakland, California. A pair of MIT-schooled brothers, Gil and J.D. Zamfirescu, have assembled a two day nerdapalooza they're calling Workshop Weekend

"One way to help students gain agency over their own education is through technology. Despite the Internet revolution, the field of K-12 education has been relatively slow to respond to digital media. That's why I paid a visit last week to the site of a promising experiment in digital learning in New York: the Bea Fuller Rodgers Middle School in Washington Heights. Last year, CFY, a nonprofit organization, provided home computers (and arranged for discounted broadband access) to every one of the sixth grade students in the school. (Almost all the school's families are Hispanics who qualify for the federal government's free or reduced lunch program. Currently, half of all Hispanics in the United States lack broadband.). In addition, CFY provided a four-hour training for the students and their parents in a free Web-based platform CFY developed called PowerMyLearning which contains 1,000 (soon to be 2,800) digital learning activities and games from across the Web that have been carefully selected and categorized by teachers and education specialists. Finally, CFY provided onsite training to the school's sixth grade teachers in how to integrate PowerMyLearning into their classrooms (practicing what educators call "blended learning"

"The Government Digital Strategy sets out how government will redesign its digital services to make them so straightforward and convenient that all those who can use them prefer to do so. This strategy: Follows the March 2012 Budget commitment to digital services being the default Has been developed collaboratively across government, as part of the Civil Service Reform Plan Will be followed up with departmental digital strategies, to be published in December 2012 The strategy also describes how delivering services digitally will result in savings of £1.7 to £1.8 billion each year, and commits government to the following actions:"

It seems very promising to chart the genealogy of hackerspaces from the point of view of hacklabs, since the relationship between these scenes have seldom been discussed and largely remains unreflected. A methodological examination will highlight many interesting differences and connections that can be useful for practitioners who seek to foster and spread the hackerspace culture, as well as for academics who seek to conceptualise and understand it. In particular, hackerspaces proved to be a viral phenomenon which may have reached the height of its popularity, and while a new wave of fablabs spring up, people like Grenzfurthner and Schneider (2009) have started asking questions about the direction of these movements. I would like to contribute to this debate about the political direction and the political potentials of hacklabs and hackerspaces with a comparative, critical, historiographical paper. I am mostly interested in how these intertwined networks of institutions and communities can escape the the capitalist apparatus of capture, and how these potentialities are conditioned by a historical embeddedness in various scenes and histories.

Everyone knows Amazon's cloud is huge. But many want to know exactly how huge it is. The latest to try is Deepfield Networks, a stealthy startup that worked with unnamed "network provider research" partners to figure out how much Internet traffic flows into and out of Amazon's cloud. It found that 1/3 of all Internet users hit Amazon-based services at least once a day and that 1 percent of all web consumer traffic is moving either into or out of Amazon's cloud.

One of the defining characteristics of digital media is interaction. It enables us to be active, make choices, build connections, express ourselves and exercise a new level of control over our media experiences. But how active is the UK online population really? And how might this change in years to come? With these questions in mind, my team and I conducted a large-scale, long-term investigation into how the UK online population participates using digital media today - from sharing links, to writing blogs and uploading photos. And it revealed a fascinating, and at times, surprising picture.

"If you are one of the 53.2 million people currently with an iPad, there's a good chance you've already developed habits related to how you best like to use your device. The team at Infographic Labs has put together an infographic that details how users have embraced the iPad over the years, from using it while watching TV to cozying up to it in bed or even using it in the bathroom."