Tuesday, December 31, 2002

Economic Development The Utah Department of Community and Economic Development partnered with the MountainWest Venture Group to develop Utah's Deal Network, an interactive system that contains information on capital investment, public offerings, mergers and acquisitions in the state.  The department has also put its 2002 annual report online. 12:24:14 PM

A Scarlet Letter Rebecca Walsh begins, "State lawmakers might want to reconsider their efforts to facilitate e-government."  Wow, I hope they don't do that.  What's causing the stir is the posting of delinquent property tax payers online by some counties.  I didn't know they were doing that.  According to Salt Lake County which has the list online: Utah law, Section 59-2-1332.5, requires the county treasurer to make available to the public a list of delinquencies in the payment of property taxes by electronic means or by publishing in a newspaper of general circulation. Salt Lake County has opted to provide the required list by electronic means in 2002. We are working with the counties to make online payment of property tax available.  I think five counties have now implemented this service. 10:51:51 AM

Alan Mather and WiFi Alan Mather of the Office of the E-Envoy has been blogging government for a year now and does a good job of it.  His posts provide some nice insights into the internal happenings of egovernment in the UK. Several days ago, Alan blogged about WiFi in government.  I hope he comes to the conclusion that if government wants to implement WiFi as an enterprise tool - which is the way I would like it implemented in Utah, security is critical - and you have to go FAR beyond WEP.  Security has slowed down our WiFi project significantly, but we are closing in on an enterprise solution.  Testing will begin on Monday.  I'm not going to go into the details of our secure solution, but there are some great resources available, including the Unofficial 802.11 Security Web Page.  Alan was also wondering why people in government are not using it.  I think they are - we already have over 100 hotspots on our network and will roll out many more once the enterprise security solution is in place.  You don't want to have a system where you have to administer security individually at the access point level.  And you want to be able to ensure reliability, especially as we start making the service available at out-of-building hotspots in more rural areas. What about public WiFi?  Should government support the idea that has recently surfaced of a wireless commons.  King County (Washington) is now making wireless available at their libraries.  That would be nice, to walk into the library with your laptop.  Some more great ideas from King County libraries: you can check out an audio book, complete with MP3 player and you can reserve time on a library PC online - I've noticed those are always busy at our local libraries so it would be nice to make reservations in advance if you are a user of that service. I've also been looking at some interesting stuff on mesh networks to determine how and if we should apply the concepts in our WWAN and RF mobile data environments. 9:19:13 AM

DES Publication The Utah Division of Emergency Services does an excellent job of sharing information with their constituents in both state and local government.  Their December newsletter is now online. 7:44:20 AM

Emergency Management Weblog Terry, an employee with the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management has started a new emergency management weblog.  Way to go! 6:42:05 AM

© Copyright 2003 David Fletcher.