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Alex Howard (@digiphile)

Twitter Bio:: Washington Correspondent, @Radar, @OReillyMedia. alex@oreilly.com. Intrigued by societal change, taken with ideas, cooking, the outdoors, books, dogs & media.
Location:: Washington, DC
Website:: http://radar.oreilly.com/alexh

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Bryan Sivak to serve as new CTO at the U.S. Department of Health and Human ...

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Bryan Sivak will be the next chief technology officer at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), according to an HHS spokesperson.

Sivak has been a consistent voice for smarter use of technology and meaningful innovation here in DC and in Maryland.

This appointment will go a long way to ensuring that the groundbreaking legacy of Todd Park at HHS is not carried forward but extended and improved upon in the year ahead.

“Since April 2011, Bryan has served as the

Al Gore on How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think

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In an excerpt from his new book, The Future, the Nobel Prize winner and former vice president talks global networks, Marshall McLuhan, and how computing is changing what it means to be human.Writers have used the human nervous system to describe electronic communication since the invention of the telegraph. In 1851, only six years after Samuel Morse received the message "What hath God wrought?" Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: "By means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time. The round globe is a vast brain, instinct with intelligence." Less than a century later, H. G.

How Code for America Is Reinventing Government

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By 2030, it’s estimated that more than 5 billion people will live in urban settings. Therefore, it’s imperative for cities to integrate technology into their infrastructure so that metropolian areas can sustain this rapid growth in population. With hackathons and app challanges, we’ve seen the emergence of civic startups, like SeeClickFix, and we’re now seeing the rise of “civic accelerators.” We all know Y Combinator and 500 Startups — those are stellar accelerators, and they’ve given rise to game-changing startups like Dropbox, Airbnb and Wildfire Interactive, which was acquired by Google earlier this year. Civic accelerators, on the other

Twitter Back Up In Pakistan After An Order From The Prime Minister

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Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect.When it comes to work, she feels most... → Learn More

A temporary solution to the drama that unfolded this morning when

On email privacy, Twitter’s ToS and owning your own platform

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If you missed the news, Guy Adams, a journalist at the Independent newspaper in England, was suspended by Twitter after he tweeted the corporate email address of a NBC executive, Gary Zenkel. Zenkel is in charge of NBC’s Olympics coverage.

When I saw the news, I assumed that NBC had seen the tweet and filed an objection with Twitter about the email address being tweeted. The email address, after all, was shared with the exhortation to Adams’ followers to write to Zenkel about frustrations

Feds set to release government-wide ‘future-ready’ digital strategy

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The White House is expected to release a new digital strategy for the entire federal government, perhaps as early as Wednesday during TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City, where U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park and Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel are scheduled to appear together.

According to a draft document obtained by FedScoop dated April 4, 2012, “Building a Future-Ready Digital Government” outlines a plan for delivering better citizen services where agencies will be instructed to execute on a three-layer strategic approach that aims to help government “innovate with less.”

The three “layers” — information,

Thoughts on the Digital Government Strategy

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On a regular basis, I find myself working with increasingly bigger datasets, and investigating increasingly more complicated patterns. However, as data gets bigger and more complicated, government IT budgets are getting smaller. At the same time, the public expects government to quickly provide open access to data in a wide range of formats and delivery mechanisms. This leads to a conundrum - we understand that data is capable of many types of outputs, and we must allow it to serve as many uses as possible while keeping costs to a minimum.

This week the Federal CIO released a strategy for

Controversial cyber bill CISPA returns to Congress for debate, same as before

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President Obama announced a new cybersecurity executive order in his State of the Union address last night and urged Congress to follow his lead "by passing legislation to give our government a greater capacity to secure our networks and deter attacks."Congress is acting today by reintroducing the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), an older bill President Obama threatened to veto last year that would allow private companies to share information on "cyber threats" with the government and each other. The bill, which is said to be "identical" to the previous version, goes a step further than President Obama's cybersecurity order

Halfway home to reform: Time for Senate to move on DATA Act

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By Earl Devaney, former chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board - 05/22/12 02:30 PM ET

In February 2009 President Obama appointed me to chair the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. Our job was to prevent fraud and waste in the multi-billion dollar economic stimulus program and to establish a public website that would bring an unprecedented level of transparency to stimulus spending. Now, more than three years later, it’s clear that the Recovery Board and its oversight

Announcing We the People 2.0 and a White House Hackathon

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There are several ways that this e-petition platform could be improved, which is always true if you think of open government being in beta. (That’s particularly true architects are improving a given government platform using citizen feedback).While the code hasn’t been repurposed by another national government yet, in the months since, they’ve continued to work on an API that would allow other petition services, like Avaaz, Change.org, 38 Degrees or SignOn, to tie into it.In January, the White House released a snapshot of data about the nature and growth of the platform’s use but didn’t sharing open data about the Web analytics behind We The