Wednesday, February 26, 2003

Pioneer 10 Pioneer 10 fell silent last month.  Back in 1974, NASA Administrator James Fletcher recognized the accomplishments of the Pioneer 10 team, "The achievements of Pioneer 10 would not have been possible without the dedicated hard work of' many, many people. All of them in NASA, in industry, and in the scientific community have our appreciation and admiration for their parts in making Pioneer 10 the success it has been. As Administrator of NASA, I take great pride in giving those receiving awards today and the entire Pioneer 10 team my congratulations for a job well done. " In 1983, long after completing its mission of orbiting Jupiter, it became the first manmade object to leave the solar system.  The Deep Space Network made a final attempt to contact the spacecraft on February 7th with no response.  Perhaps in another 2 million years it will reach the star Aldebaran. 7:18:24 AM

Technology Legislation Senate Bill 151, sponsored by Dave Steele, passed out of committee yesterday.  The bill, entitled "Amendments to Information Technology" not only revises the ITS and CIO statute, but makes major changes to the composition and mission of the IT Commission.  The Commission will become the Utah Technology Commission and address issues like aeronautics and biotechnology in addition to just information technology.  An advisory board of industry leaders will be created to advise the commission on how government can promote technology development in the state.  Even though it is late in the session, I expect this bill to fly through the legislative process and pass before the session ends next Wednesday. 6:57:14 AM

eGov in Egypt Egypt's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) is taking the lead at integrating egovernment into the country's government service delivery. Welcome to the world of e-government. A new Egypt is rising on the banks of the Nile – from Parliament down to the level of local government offices, the Egyptian government realizes that the Internet is an effective way of conducting public affairs.  "Nations are no longer identified by roads and reservoirs, but by their position in the global information society,” says Dr. Ahmad Nazif, Egypt’s Minister of communication and Information Technology. MCIT was formed in October 1999 with explicit goals of supporting the information society in Egypt and is supported by USAID ICT project.  The project's website makes use of Plone, an open source content management system.  Ray Matthews informs us that the Governor of Texas has built his website using Plone's content management solution combined with the Zope opensource application server. Richard Heeks writes about how egov is being used to reform government in Africa. 6:48:41 AM

© Copyright 2003 David Fletcher.