The U.S. government is still very much a Windows world, but a group dedicated to bringing open source software into public agencies says it is seeing progress on several fronts. Read More »

Electronic health record compatibility at the nation's only fully integrated Defense and Veterans Affairs departments hospital remains an only partially-achieved ambition, says the Government Accountability Office. Read More »

Six weeks ago I noted here that Oracle had to decided to offer the codebase for OpenOffice.org, the open source word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet software suite to the Apach Read More »

Last March, the Aspen Institute and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation released the white paper Civic Engagement and Community Information: Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication (below). Read More »

The City of Columbus, OH, has just announced a mobile app that combines many of the aspects of Open311 and Open211.  More and more cities are building s Read More »

The Office of Management and Budget announced Wednesday that federal agencies will shut down 178 data centers in 2012. In April, federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra reported that agencies had closed 39 federal data centers in the previous five months and were on track to close nearly 100 more before the end of the year. Read More »

Fourteen military veterans and spouses sit behind a U-shaped set of tables, about to receive some basic training. Their mission: Shopping healthily and on a budget, and then learning or relearning techniques for cooking healthful meals. Read More »

The secretary of Veterans Affairs (VA) has launched a competition under Section 105 of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2011 to encourage widespread use of Blue Button personal health records (PHRs) to benefit veterans who receive care from non-VA providers. The competition began July 18 and ends when a winner is announced or on Oct. 18, whichever occurs first, according to the VA. Read More »

The Department of Veterans Affairs is offering a $50,000 prize to a developer who successfully demonstrates the expansion of the use of the "Blue Button" application to enable veterans to download certain patient information from providers outside the VA. Read More »

A new book for software developers takes a lesson from architecture. Not the structures themselves, though--the learning process for the designers. Read More »