Friday, August 30, 2002

Utah Geographic Information Council The UGIC is having its annual conference in September.  This is a great example of cross-government cooperation.  It also presents one of the greatest opportunities for new initiatives. 3:48:18 PM

Municipal Broadband This conference should be very interesting.  Paul T. Morris of Utopia will be speaking.  Morris is the Executive Director of UTOPIA (Utah Telecommunications Open Infrastructure Agency) and City Attorney for the City of West Valley City, Utah. Since 1997, he has chaired the Telecommunications Task Force for the League of Cities and Towns, representing government officials and wireline and wireless industry representatives. Interesting that the key players with UTOPIA are both attorneys.  (David Shaw, Murray City Attorney, is deputy director of UTOPIA)  Morris is also speaking at the IntelligentCities conference in October.  It looks like the cities are trying to position themselves in the middle of the future of networking.  Their vision is provided by a company called DynamicCity: "Technologically speaking, everyone can and should have broadband access. Wireless transmission technologies and high-speed cable and fiber optic solutions are already in place globally, servicing the world’s elite customers.  Now, thanks to recent advancements in fiber optic technology, broadband access can also become a reality for all of the world’s smaller customers—the thousands of cities and counties that don’t have millions of residents and therefore represent smaller financial markets. Once these cities and counties gain access to broadband connectivity, the Digital Divide will become a thing of the past" Currently, DynamcCity is conducting a feasability study for the network at a cost of about $10K to $14K a month. Utah cities are pushing the issue hard.  Provo City is putting in a network and is joining with other Utah County cities to form the Utah Valley Community Network.  UTOPIA has 17 charter members including West Valley City, Orem, Layton, Taylorsville, Murray, Roy, South Jordan, Midvale, Riverton, Cedar City, Brigham City, Centerville, Payson, Lindon, Tremonton, Cedar Hills and Perry.  It appears that Sandy City has withdrawn from the group and is doing its own thing, while Salt Lake City is interested in joining.    UTOPIA has enjoined a grant writer who will apply for $10 million by September 30.  This was published a couple of years ago: The Case for Municipal Fibre  3:32:50 PM

Really Simple Syndication Dave Winer's draft describing the RSS 0.94 specification is extremely helpful.  To date, I have not bothered myself with the detail of this incredible tool, but on its utility and implementation.  I can leave all the technical stuff for state CIO, Phil Windley, to discuss.  All I know is that I have a hundred projects that I would like to get done and RSS can help with most of them.  In terms of enterprise project management (see Dave McNamee) I would like to ensure that the project teams have access to common news and resources relating to the project.  RSS provides a great way to do that.  If each project manager had their own weblog, they would provide the feed into the project management website such as I've done with this news page for our homeland security project (thanks to Adam Curry for referencing this form-generated javascript). Among other things, I help publish a statewide newsletter called Capitol Connections to 20,000 state employees each month.  I would love it if every department PIO would post department news to their own weblog.  12:14:37 PM

Microsoft's Dominance I'm not sure that this will make much of a difference, but... Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Computer Corp. said earlier this month they will not bundle Works on some models geared toward consumers. Instead, a version of Corel's WordPerfect Office suite is pre-installed. We made the concession several years ago when WordPerfect moved away from Utah and the State began its migration to Word.  Before that time, this was WordPerfect territory. 8:37:42 AM

© Copyright 2002 David Fletcher.