National IT Dialogue Follow-Up #1

I got a very nice e-mail just now from Earl Devaney and Ed DeSeve, who headed up the recent Recovery Dialogue on IT Solutions, thanking me for my comments during the dialogue last week. I had commented on the two ideas submitted by NSGIC: enhancing recovery web sites with imagery and thoughts on a nationally consistent approach to collecting geospatial location information.

The "thank you" e-mail noted that there were over 500 ideas suggested, with more than 1,300 comments from among the over 23,000 unique visitors.

With your help, the Recovery Dialogue made history by providing government with a new, proven mechanism for gathering input from individuals and stakeholders. This initiative set out to allow the public an opportunity to submit, debate, and vote on the best ideas for providing the public transparent access to recovery information. We are now compiling the ideas, tools, and approaches from the Dialogue and, this week, the National Academy of Public Administration will present the ideas from the dialogue to the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to consider during the evaluation phase for building out Recovery.gov.

Needless to say, NSGIC will keep an eye on this process. We have two primary interests:

• Making sure that geospatial data and tools are used, and used well; and
  
• Trying to learn from this Dialogue ways in which we ourselves can do better job of communicating among the states and with our own constituents.
  

These are interesting times that we live in.