chaos theory

I’m listening to a speaker from Hampton Roads Transit sing the praises of Google Transit. Last night, the folks from Alabama’s Homeland Security showed off Virtual Alabama, a statewide geospatial application built on Google Earth, which incorporated county data and aerial imagery with utility, law enforcement, school district and other data to create an all-seeing first responder’s application–allowing users, for example, to overlay sex offender data on school bus routes.

Government, especially local and state, loves the word free. And Google’s geospatial and other data standards have made them even more dear to them, since local government data has been locked up in GIS and other databases that would cost millions to integrate independently.

Also, it’ll make the transition to googlement that much easier when the googleplex takes over the world.

I am at the Government Leadership Summit today in Williamsburg, where I just moderated a panel on Intellipedia, a MediaWiki-based wiki that the us intell community is using to share data.

And as I type this on my Blackberry, folks from the Navy, State Department and GSA are talking about blogging. You wouldn’t think there would be so much regulation standing in the way of government talking to itself–let alone the public–via Web 2.0 tech. Procurement, congressional oversight, policy and administrative rules are all tooled against direct communication.

*and an edit from a real computer*

After taking in the whole conference, and looking at what 3 cups of coffee and a crackberry wrung out of me, I figured maybe I should expand on the buzziness above.

I had been away from covering government stuff for almost 15 years before this January. And as much as things have changed, the people in government IT largely haven’t. The average age of the Federal IT workforce is 47, according to a factoid I heard yesterday–which I’m going to have to get a cite for, but based on the folks I’ve seen at various events, it seems on target. Unlike the commercial world, there has long been a culture of risk-avoidance, and resistance to change is embedded in both the regulations and culture. One person I spoke to talked about how regulations are to the point that government employees now have to basically break them in order to get anything done.

Another problem is that there’s a dependency on contractors to do much of the deep technical work in government IT, and contracts are generally driven by specifications from within government. Cross pollination of new ideas — and a flow of fresh blood into the Federal IT gene pool– is something that hasn’t been made easy by the way the government does business.

So, the Woodrow Wilson Bridge is now my nemesis

It’s been a while since I posted here, mostly because, well, hell, I’ve been busy.

But now, I have a Blackberry.

And those trapped moments are now bloggable.

OK, I haven’t been gone, really. But let me just say that when you work at home like I do, and things go wrong with one part of the work/life balance, it all goes to shit.

I have no one to blame, really, but myself. Just because you can do a job doesn’t mean that you should take the damned thing. And sure, the first six months were filled with energy, ego-stroking attention, and other good things.

But the travel killed me. It really did. And the more I travelled, the less I slept, the less energy I had, the more introverted I became, the more useless to pretty much every freaking person in the universe I became. I imploded.

Unfortunately, I denied much of it up until the end. And then one day, WOOSH, it crushed me into a little tiny ball and spit me out.

I should have seen it coming. But few trapped inside the event horizon can see beyond it. Thankfully, the collapse freed me from the things that had prevented me from seeing the problem — a problem that, admittedly, I’ve struggled with before. I had fallen down the not-writing rabbit hole again, and it took all my creativity and ability to think rationally along with it.

And now I have emerged. Well, I emerged last month, really, but I’m still sorting my shit out.