Federal Register On Steroids

"The Federal Register is "the official daily publication of rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders and other presidential documents." It is published by the Office of Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration in the Government Printing Office's (GPO) Federal Digital System (FDsys)--"the next generation on online government information."

Attached is a snapshot that shows a very basic chronological order of posts with an issue of the Federal Register subdivided by agency/organization. It's organized and to the point!

Now, here is a new way of looking at the information from GovPulse, a site developed to "make such documents as the Federal Register searchable, more accessible and easier to digest...to encourage every citizen to become more involved in the workings of their government and make their voice heard." The site is built from open source.

You'll see that there is a lot more information readily available, organized in multiple ways, and really quite user-centric; some examples:

1) Number of Entries for the Day: The number of entries for the day are listed right at the top.

2) Calendar for Selecting Day of Interest: Next to the number of entries for the day, you can click on the calendar icon and get an instant 3 months of dates to choose from or enter another date of interest and be instantly take to there.

3) Statistics for the Day: The right sidebar displays the locations mentioned on a map and the types of entries and reporting agencies in pie charts.

4) Department Entries are Prominently Displayed: Both the number of entries for each department are identified as well as identifying their type and length along with an abstract for the entry. Each Department's entries can easily be expanded or collapses by clicking on the arrow next to the department's name.

5) Entries are Enabled for Action: By clicking on an entry, there are options to share it via social media to Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and Reddit to let others know about it and there is also a listing of your senators and representatives and their contact information to speak up on the issues.

Additional helpful features on the homepage--immediate access to areas that are last chance to act or what's new, such as:

1) Comments closing in the next 7 days

2) Comments opened in the last 7 days

3) Rules taking effect in the next 7 days

4) Rules proposed in the last 7 days

Moreover, you have another map with bubbles showing mentioned locations or you can enter your own location and get all the entries subdivided by 10, 15, 20 miles and so on up to 50 miles away.

Another feature called Departmental Pulse, show a trend line of number of entries per department over the last year or 5 years.

At the top of the page, you can quickly navigate to entries in the Federal Register by agency, topic, location, date published, or do a general search.

There are other cool features such as when you look at entries by department, you can see number of entries, places mentioned, and a bubble map that tells you popular topics for this department.

Overall, I think GovPulse deserves a big thumbs up in terms of functionality and usability and helping people get involved in government by being able to access information in easier and simpler ways.

The obvious question is why does it take 3 outsiders "with a passion for building web applications" to do this?

While I can't definitively answer that, certainly there are benefits to coming in with fresh eyes, being true subject matter experts, and not bound by the "bureaucracy" that is endemic in so many large institutions.

This is not say that there are not many talented people in government--because there certainly are--but sometimes it just takes a few guys in a garage to change the world as we know it.

Federal Register On Steroids

SIMON Says Open

Discovery Channel has a series called Future Weapons.

This is part 1 from Israel and Richard (Mack) Mackowicz, a former Navy SEAL show us "The SIMON."

SIMON is a high-tech, advanced rifle grenade for breaching virtually any door in hostile environments.

It is made by Rafael, one of the largest and most innovative Israeli arms manufacturers.

SIMON is in use by both U.S. and Israel armed forces.

Essentially, a bullet-trap slides over the muzzle of a conventional assault rifle like an M-16.

A regular bullet propels a grenade up to 30 yards into a door, and the blast wave from the detonation breaches the door and any locking mechanisms--with minimum collateral damage and keeping troops out of harms way.

Breaching doors in urban warfare is one of the most dangerous tasks in any mission as troops may be walking into anything from the spray of gunfire to booby traps.

Well as Mack says: "SIMON says open door;" It is an "instantaneous key to any door."

What I like about SIMON is the combination of its simplicity and effectiveness.

On one hand, it works with conventional rifles and bullets and is light and compact to carry. It's as simple as slide, aim, and shoot--and the door is breached for troops to enter and either rescue hostages or get the bad guy.

With whatever technology we are building--whether computers or weapons--they need to be user-centric and mission focused.

Israel has a history of innovation--everything from defense to medicine and making the desert bloom--and I think this has to do with that their survival is constantly imperiled.

The lesson is that we ought to recognize the dangers out there and respond to them with immediacy and vigor, as if our lives depended on it--because in many cases, they really do.

SIMON Says Open

Describing Meal Time

The USDA released their new dietary guidelines yesterday (2 June).

And while there is no surprise in the recommendations that we eat more fruits and vegetables; what was refreshing was the new imagery for conveying the information.

Gone is the Food Pyramid and in is the Food Plate.

This new visualization overall makes a lot more sense since:

1) As the Wall Street Journal stated today (3 June 2011), "People don't eat off a pyramid, they eat off a plate." In other words, this is something we can relate to at meal times.

2) The plate here is used like a pie chart to easily show what portion of our meals should come from each food category. For example, you can clearly see that fruits and veggies makes up a full half of the plate. (Boy, I'm sure there are a lot of smiling moms and dads out there today, saying I told you so!) Also the role of protein in a healthy diet is reaffirmed with almost a full quadrant itself.

I am not sure why this initiative, according to the WSJ, cost about $2.9 million and three years to accomplish, since the representation seems fairly straight forward (unless some of that went to modifying the nutritional guidelines themselves).

In any case, I think we can all be glad they got rid of the 2005 version of the food pyramid that "left many baffled" as to what they were trying to say.

Still even in this new visualization, there are confusing aspects, for example:

1) Greater than a Pie--The Dairy piece is separate and off to the right of the plate. I would imagine that this is supposed to represent something like a glass of milk, but it is odd in this picture, since it takes away from the pie chart presentation of the plate where theoretically all the food groups on the "pie plate" would add up to 100%. Here, however, the Dairy plate (or glass) is off to the side, so we have something like 120% total--confusing!

2) Missing Percentages--The actual recommended percentages are not noted in the diagram. This type of information had previously been provided in the 1992 Food Pyramid through the recommended servings. Where did they go? I would suggest they annotate the pie slices for each food group with the actual recommended percentages, so that we have the imagery of the slices, but also have a target number to go with. Helpful, if you are counting your calories (and food types) on a diet.

In short, information visualization can be as important as the information itself--with information, having quality data is critical or else you have "garbage in, garbage out." Similarly, with information visualization, you can take perfectly good information and portray it poorly and confuse the heck out of folks--in essence making the resulting information into potential garbage again.

This is why efforts such as the Choose MyPlate are important to help us communicate important information effectively to people, in this case so they can eat and live healthier lives.

I think the new Food Plate is generally effective at presenting the information and I support this effort wholly, but I'm still looking forward to version 3.1.

Describing Meal Time

Apps for Mobile Health Care

Talking about apps for your phone…this one is amazing from MIT Media Labs.

Attach a $1-2 eyepiece (the "NETRA") to your phone and get your eye prescription in less than 2 minutes.

What's next?
I wonder if they will come out with more apps for health and wellbeing that check your vital signs such as temperature, pulse, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and more.

I can envision the smartphone becoming our personal health assistant for monitoring and alerting us to dangerous medical conditions.

This will increase our ability to get timely medical care and save lives.
This is a long way from "I've fallen and I can't get up," and that's a great thing.

Apps for Mobile Health Care

Needed: User-centric Enterprise Architecture Now!

Article from New York Times, 27 February 2010, called "We Have Met the Enemy and He is Powerpoint" should be titled "We Need User-centric Enterprise Architecture Now!"

"Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti. “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter."

As the article later points out, "No one is suggesting that PowerPoint is to blame," but rather the problem is in how we architect solutions and communicate information about this to our users.

No more spaghetti charts, please. No more convoluted, eyesores masquerading as useful information. No more blah, blah, blah, gobble-de-gook writing. No more architecture that go nowhere, but in circles.

We need to use common sense when we think, architect, and communicate or even the wisest of generals and his advisors will be laughing their heads off at what is fallaciously presented as information.

Needed: User-centric Enterprise Architecture Now!

The Do It Yourself Future

Technology is the great emancipator. With it we can do things ourselves that we needed others to do for us before.

Of course, the examples are endless. As we approach tax season, just think how many people do their own taxes online with TurboTax or other online programs when before they needed an accountant to do it for them. Similarly, it was common to have secretaries supporting various office tasks and now we pretty much have all become our own desktop publishers and office productivity mavens. I remember having a graphics department years ago for creating presentations and a research department for investigating issues, events, people, and causes, now with all the productivity tools and the Internet, it’s all at our fingertips.

Wired Magazine, February 2010 in an article called “Atoms Are The New Bits” by Chris Anderson states that “the Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of participation and participants in everything digital.”

With technology, we are free to help ourselves. We are independent, self-sufficient, and that’s typically how we like it. And not only are we able to do for ourselves, but the barriers to entrance for entrepreneurs and small companies have come way down.

The author states: “In the age of democratized industry, every garage is a potential micro-factory, every citizen a potential entrepreneur.” Similarly, Cory Doctorow wrote in The Makers that “The days of General Electric, and General Mills, and General Motors are over. The money on the table…can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.”

We all know how Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, working out of a garage building computers, started Apple. Similarly, how Michael Dell started operations out of his dorm room. Nowadays, we see more and more people going out on their own as contract workers and as teleworkers, not tied to particular companies or work locations. They have been freed by technology to work for whom they want and where they want.

At the extreme and in certain cases, there is a perception that “working with a company often imposes higher transaction costs then running a project online…Companies are full of bureaucracy, procedures, and approval processes, a structure designed to defend the integrity of the organization...[instead] the new industrial organizational model [is] built around small pieces loosely joined. Companies are small virtual, and informal. Most participants are not employees. They form and re-form on the fly driven by ability and need rather than affiliation and obligation.”

While I do not believe that companies will be disadvantaged for large and complex projects like building a bridge or designing a new commercial airline, there is no doubt that technology is changing not only what we can do ourselves, but also how and when we associate ourselves with others. We can do work for ourselves or for others practically on the fly. We can communicate immediately and over long distances with ease. We can form relationships on social networks for specific tasks or as desired and then reorient for the next. There is a new flexibility brought about by a do it yourself culture facilitated with simple, affordable, and readily available technology, and this DIY phenomenon is only going to increase and accelerate as the technology advances further and further.

Some important implications are as follows:

• One, we need to constantly look for cost-savings in the organization and at home from the new technologies that we are bringing online enabling us to do more ourselves—there are cost offsets for the support we needed before and no longer require.
• Secondly, we need to encourage our employees to take advantage of the new technologies, to learn them, and use them to their utmost and not to fear them.
• Thirdly, the next generation of workers is going to demand more flexibility, empowerment, and continued work-life balance based on their increasing ability to go it alone, if necessary.
• Finally, new technologies that are user-centric—easy to use and useful—will outperform technologies that are overly complex and not intuitive; the new normal is do it yourself and technologies that don’t simply enable that will be finished.

The Do It Yourself Future