Friday, May 06, 2005

Blogging Local Government Trudy Schuett maintains the Yuma Tech Consortium blog for the Yuma County Chamber of Commerce in Arizona. Government Technology provides some additonal ideas on how local governments can use blogs. The director of the Chicago Transit Authority, Carole Brown, is another public official that is using her blog to communicate with constituents.  In response, the "CTA Tattler" is calling for an invasion of Carole's blog. Former governor Jerry Brown of California is using his blog to promote his environmental agenda. bloggers without borders is discussing protections for "whistleblower" bloggers and discusses an article in the San Francisco Guardian entitled "Leave Bloggers Alone". 8:15:31 AM    comment []

Fiber and Intelligent Transportation Systems Bonj gives us some occassional updates on the IT consolidation efforts in Missouri.  I looks like right now, one of the major discussion items is the shared use of Missouri DOT's dark fiber.  DOT's around the country are putting in fiber networks to support the development of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Massachussetts is using the ITS fiber to provide internet service in underserved areas of the state and enhance regional competitiveness. Fort Bragg is anticipating savings of $50,000 a month through the implementation of a fiber based control network for their energy management system. An article in ITS world states that the fiber in Salt Lake Valley was installed at a cost of $51 million, but the ATMS (advanced traffic management system) has an annual benefit of $179 million.  That sounds pretty significant.  Another article provides details about the system: "...the ATMS provides instrumentation on 70 miles (112 km) of area freeways. The system includes closed circuit TV (CCTV) camera coverage every 3,300 ft (1,000 m), traffic monitoring systems that entail embedded loop detectors and microloops approximately every 2,640 ft (800 m), 31 variable message signs (VMS) located on the freeway, four weigh-in-motion stations on the I-15 corridor, seven roadway weather information stations (RWIS), and a fully redundant, self-healing fiber optic backbone communications system." Costs and other information are found in the 2004-2008 Wasatch Front STIP. There are some interesting comparison's with San Antonio's system.  Here's a look at their current data. 8:05:48 AM    comment []

Data Collection Project for Utah's IT Consolidation I mentioned earlier that we are doing a series of online surveys to collect data about the entire IT operation in the State of Utah.  The data will be collected in MySQL databases and then we will need to best determine how to produce meaningful output that can be used in creating the new consolidated IT structure.  I like how the Knowlex online encyclopedia has made their content available in several useful formats, so maybe we'll try to use something like iText to generate PDFs on the fly from XML data.  Since this is a cross-agency effort that extends across the state, we have surveys developed in Java, PHP, and ASP.  They are all integrated with our Utah Master Directory for authentication.  We will also be connecting the data to SPSS for analysis.  We are using dotProject 2.0 for project management.  The new version is a major upgrade with some very nice enhancements.  I can't wait to move all of our other project management over as well.  2.0 integrates very nicely with the PostNuke portal that we are using as well. 7:36:13 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2005 David Fletcher.