Around the Corner

It’s not often that a conference can synthesize relevant technology and policy communities, but the O’Reilly Media Gov 2.0 Summit did just that. The most compelling example of synthesizing technology and policy was the rich dialogue at the close of day one between James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly and John Podesta, President and CEO of the Center for American Progress.

The dialogue between Fallows and Podesta revealed how each participant understood the role of new media in diplomacy and public policy. Like a hopeful prospector Podesta probed Fallows for evidence that new media was actively shaping public perception of US policy overseas. Fallows, who spent much of the last three years in China, maintained that new media has not yet become sufficiently mainstream to affect public perception. Based on Fallows’ observations, broadcast media, movies and music still play the fundamental role of shaping perception of America and Americans overseas.

Fallows engaged Podesta directly on health care reform. Podesta is optimistic that new media can effectively overcome institutional barriers inherent in traditional media by directly reaching a large enough demographic to influence the outcome.

The Pew Center's New Media Index shows evidence of interest in health care reform in the blogosphere. During the second week of August 24% of postings from bloggers were about health care. That same week on Twitter, however, only 3% of tweets pertained health care reform. The number one topic, at 16%, was Microsoft's support for Internet Explorer 6 through 2014. In fact, four of the top five topics on Twitter were technology-related, which could indicate the Twitter audience is more technology-oriented. However, blogging is more suited to analysis than Twitter's 140-character limit, so perhaps we should expect to find more policy discussions in the blogosphere.

Is new media sufficiently influential to affect diplomacy and policy outcomes? According to the dialogue between Fallows and Podesta as well as the New Media Index, there isn't enough evidence just yet, but health care is one key policy outcome to watch.

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I recently wrote about the SmartGrid. Did you know the US is not the only country planning a SmartGrid? The European Union (EU) is also planning a SmartGrid. In fact, the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, is taking some very important steps to update its electrical transmission and distribution systems. The European Commission sponsors the European Technology Platform for the Electricity Networks of the Future (ETPENF) and leading investors in ten EU member countries sponsor the Desertec Foundation.

When it comes to the production, transmission and distribution of electricity, sustainability matters. ETPENF aims to increase the efficiency, safety and reliability of EU transmission and distribution systems. Efficient, safe and reliable electrical systems means better managed systems. Desertec plans to harvest wind and solar energy from the deserts of North Africa for transmission and distribution to the EU. And for tomorrow, sustainability will require well managed electrical transmission and distribution systems supplied by renewable resources.

A nation's abililty to produce, transmit and distribute electricity has become recognized as part of its global competitiveness. You might remember I previously wrote about the World Economic Forum's (WEF) Global Competitiveness Report (GCR) and Global Information Technology Report (GITR). Both the GCR and GITR include electricity supply in their assessments. GCR in Institutions, Infrastructure where the US ranks 16th for quality and the GITR in Environment, Infrastructure where the US ranks 8th for production.

In July the WEF in partnership with Accenture released Accelerating SmartGrid Investments, a new report that nicely defines the SmartGrid and discusses barriers to implementation and their solutions. The report indicates that electricity production, transmission and distribution require better alignment of regulatory and policy frameworks. Today, the regulatory environment lacks incentives for private sector investment in carbon capture, reliability and security on electrical grids. Tomorrow, the regulatory environment will need to reward risk for investment in emerging technologies that help make the grid smart and distribute that risk among producers and consumers. SmartGrid investments under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act help to reduce that risk.

Cities will serve as as catalysts for SmartGrid investments too: Boulder, Colorado and Austin, Texas are already smart grid cities. And GSA's Public Building Service Office of Sustainable Design leads Federal agencies with investments in high performance green buildings that meet the LEED standard and incorporate sustainable design into Federal workplaces because Sustainability Matters.

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On the afternoon of Thursday August 14, 2003 some 50+ million people in eight states and the province of Ontario lost power. Known as the Northeast Blackout of 2003, this event was the largest blackout in North American history. According to Scientific American, the blackout caused 11 deaths and cost approximately $6 billion.

The events that caused the blackout have been investigated and we've learned that the electrical power grid on which we depend for necessities like lights and heat is really quite fragile. The grid barely meets our current needs and, because it is based on 20th century technologies, our ability to manage it is limited.

As a response to what we learned from events like the Notheast Blackout of 2003 and as a key step toward energy independence, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act contains funding for the SmartGrid Investment Grant Program under the Department of Energy's Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability. The SmartGrid is an update of the 20th century power grid with 21st century technology. Smart metering, reliable and secure transmission and clean energy generation are all part of the SmartGrid.

So how do we create the SmartGrid with updated 21st century technologies? As Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra remarked in his recent speech at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley, while there's a lot of work to be done, the government's most appropriate level of influence is to support a collaborative approach to standards that will ensure we have a level playing field to deliver game changing innovation.

Standards serve as both a mechanism to constrain costs and as a platform for innovation. Although this statement may seem to be a paradox, collaborative, or open, standards can achieve both by creating the right kind of competition. That is, competition based on delivering better features that give consumers choice in products as well as encouraging mobility and interoperability across producers. Broad participation by producers, both social and economic, as well as the transparent nature of an open standard drives game changing innovation. And open standards bodies remove or reduce barriers to entry (like membership fees) and publish standards openly so social producers can compete with economic producers on a level playing field.

Smart consumers will benefit from standards. IEEE 802.15.4-2003 is one such standard. It is used to specify the physical layer and media access control for low-rate wireless and personal area networks used in home automation devices. On the SmartGrid, home automation devices using smart metering based on IEEE 802.15.4-2003 will inform smart consumers when they can save money on their electrical bill. Imagine a consumer who uses their mobile phone to display smart metering information from their personal area network to avoid peak load costs. Smart!

As a CIO, standards are all around me. They are the DNA of our operations. When applied well, open standards allow Federal agencies to reduced costs and as a platform for innovation.

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Hey, I'm Rick Murphy. Casey's out and gave me a guest spot to share some thoughts on where we are with what some folks are calling Web 3.0 and what it might mean in our lives and our jobs.

Web 3.0 is really just the idea of a smart Web that helps people at home and work. Remember that Web 2.0 is a response to the perception that heavyweight planning and technologies were slowing us down. Our tools were too complex. We quickly put blogs, wikis and other social media utilities in place that shifted complexity away from our tools, but cause us to manage that complexity. For an excellent talk on this issue, see Ross Mayfield's All Things 2.0 Are Made of People, part of PARC's Beyond Web 2.0 series.

The success of Facebook and Twitter increase the information available to us. Now that we all have 500+ friends and Tweets streaming at us faster than we can read, how do we keep up? Our lifestreams are overrunning our lives. Whether we tag our family photos or search the Web, we expect to get all relevant results and exclude the ones that are irrelevant so we don't have to filter them ourselves. We need a smart Web that reduces the burden of the complexity that we've taken on ourselves. Web 3.0 is the idea that we can add some smarts, known as the Semantic Web, to Web 2.0. These smarts help us at home and work by reducing this complexity.

So where are we with Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web? Since the 2001 Scientific American article by Tim Berners-Lee, Jim Hendler and Ora Lassila, both skeptics and supporters have sought evidence that the Semantic Web has been adopted. The good news is that the favorable climate for innovation recently accelerated adoption of Semantic Web technologies. Most recognizably, both Google and Yahoo announced support through their Rich Snippets and Search Monkey offerings. The UK Government moved the London Gazette, a four hundred year old publication, to the Semantic Web. You can hear more in this podcast from my colleague John Sheridan, Head of e-Services, of the UK Government's Office of Public Sector Information. Datasets from data.gov are already available for the Semantic Web and our team has used Semantic Web technologies in our Enterprise Architecture practice.

Web 3.0 is the idea of a smart Web that helps people at home and work. Facebook will produce more meaningful information about relationships among family and friends. We might discover meaningful trends among Tweets. And we'll spend less time filtering inaccurate search results.

Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web are happening now, but they won't happen all at once. And there's no more appropriate time to recall the well known William Gibson quote: "As I've said many times: the future's already here, it's not just very evenly distributed."

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I wrote a few weeks ago about cloud computing and its promise to reduce energy consumption in data centers. That research got me thinking about other natural resources, and our quest to conserve and use those resources more efficiently. Take water, for instance, one of our most critical natural resources. Farming is the largest single consumer of water nationwide. I grew up on a farm and have been amazed to see how technically sophisticated every element of farming, including irrigation, has become. Technology innovations have radically reshaped the farm industry. Nowadays, farmers use GPS to create straight furrows and to tell them where to apply fertilizer. They harvest crops using highly mechanized methods that do the same work in a fraction of the time. And nowhere has there been more innovation that in the use of groundwater for irrigation.

For example, the state of the art 30 years ago was to flood the space between rows of crops, where most of the water was wasted due to evaporation. Later came sprinkler systems, coupled in 20-foot long sections of aluminum pipe along the ground, each with a sprinkler on the end. This method required unhooking each section, lifting and draining the water, moving it over 30 or so feet, and reattaching the sections before restarting the irrigation. This method was more efficient in conserving water but very labor intensive, to which I can personally attest!

If you have ever flown over farms in the Midwest you have no doubt seen green circles on the ground below, reflecting the modern circular pivot irrigation systems. Farmers today frequently grow their crops in circles and station a rolling sprinkler system in the center, which sweeps around the field like a minute hand on a watch. This method is even more efficient, because the sprinklers are just above the top of the plants and very little water flies through the air to be lost to evaporation. Each of these developments has meant that each bale of cotton or wheat is sent to market more efficiently than the one before, with less water required to produce it. And the innovation has not halted; many farmers today are installing tubes below the ground to run water directly to the crops’ root systems, reducing irrigation requirements even further.

Of course, like electricity, we may be conserving more at an individual level but overall consumption has not declined. The need for further innovation to get ahead of our consumption patterns is great. However, based on trends of the past few decades, it seems we can expect the innovation to continue in ways that we cannot predict today.

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I just returned from visiting Microsoft’s TechFest, an annual event in which Microsoft’s research labs come together to present their most promising new research findings. Microsoft has a big research program—over 850 researchers on six campuses worldwide.

I was interested to observe the progress being made in how people interface with and use computers. There are many alternatives arising to the traditional keyboard/mouse model, including greatly improved speech recognition and speech-to-text capabilities. One demonstration focused on computers that can respond to spoken commands while you are driving, recognizing human language to perform tasks such as sending/receiving SMS text messages, playing songs, and placing phone calls. Check out this video of a virtual receptionist that can recognize spoken requests for help. Another demonstration used a web camera to recognize letters and gestures written in the air, and translate those to text or computer actions.

My main interest, however, was in data center and network technologies. The old data center model, with its rigid topology and high fixed costs for cooling, power and management overhead, is rapidly being replaced by the cloud. Cloud computing is everyone’s favorite new buzzword, but it is not just hype, it represents a very different business and technical shift that is radically reshaping our industry. A paper from the University of California at Berkeley explains the value of cloud computing this way:

Cloud Computing, the long-held dream of computing as a utility, has the potential to transform a large part of the IT industry, making software even more attractive as a service and shaping the way IT hardware is designed and purchased. Developers with innovative ideas for new Internet services no longer require the large capital outlays in hardware to deploy their service or the human expense to operate it. They need not be concerned about overprovisioning for a service whose popularity does not meet their predictions, thus wasting costly resources, or underprovisioning for one that becomes wildly popular, thus missing potential customers and revenue. Moreover, companies with large batch-oriented tasks can get results as quickly as their programs can scale, since using 1000 servers for one hour costs no more than using one server for 1000 hours. This elasticity of resources, without paying a premium for large scale, is unprecedented in the history of IT.

At TechFest, I saw many new developments that will help realize the promise of cloud computing: cheaper, low-powered processors, computers that require significantly less cooling, greatly simplified networks within the data center. Other vendors, such as Sun Microsystems, are producing blackbox data centers, which are sealed, self-contained data centers in shipping containers. These “data centers in a box,” can be assembled like Legos to create larger data centers as needed. The result of all these and other advances will be data centers that run at a fraction of today’s costs, scale and shrink capacity on demand, and are resilient in times of disaster or continuity of operations situations.

We will need all these innovations to stay in front of the growing demand for electrical power supply to the data center. Today’s largest data centers can only be built in select geographical locations, because they draw so much power they must be situated near a large power source such as a hydroelectric power plant. Longer-term, our innovative capabilities will certainly be tested to solve this strategic challenge, but from what I observed this week, there is much reason for optimism.

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Did you know that Ward Cunningham created the first wiki in 1995 ? Why is it that it took more than ten years before the wiki became recognized as an icon for all things 2.0? What makes a technology useful today, that went unrecognized yesterday ?

As I've considered these questions, I've come to recognize both near term drivers and long term patterns of innovation. Today, our values drive technology adoption. We value participation over exclusion. And the availability of technologies like the wiki make everyone's participation possible at a reduced coordination cost. We demand a little less from a wiki than a traditional business application, in terms of rich function and features, but we value more the collaboration and participation that a wiki can provide.

Clay Shirky, in Institutions v. Collaboration, contrasts the effect of these near term drivers on patterns of innovation both within and outside institutions. Shirky explains why we value participation and how it shapes technology adoption today.

Over the longer term, there are recognizable patterns of innovation across industries and markets. Clayton Christensen, the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, provides insights into these patterns. In the Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution to the Healthcare Crisis, Christensen observes two patterns. First, a sustaining innovation pattern occurs in the market place when a market leader engages in either incremental investment or breakthroughs. Christensen describes a second pattern which he calls disruptive innovation that occurs when a new entrant undercuts the market leaders at lower cost while satisfying their needs, but with typically lower performance.

Today, wikis and many other 2.0 technologies indicate patterns of disruptive innovation. In parts of the software community where wikis were first developed, simplicity and collaboration became more highly valued than formal planning. Over the past few years the venture capital community has invested heavily in 2.0 technologies. Where do you see these innovation patterns fitting into your Agency?

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The week before last I attended the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Most of my time was at a set of breakout sessions for government attendees, but I spent half a day on the convention center showroom floor. Despite news reports that attendance was down this year, the place was packed and energetic. I could not discern any noticeable downturn.

You probably read or heard about the show; it generates a great deal of news coverage. From my observations, here are a couple of trends that I noticed:

1. Mobility continues to be a huge trend. A number of vendors were showing improved devices and user interfaces. There were displays for internet service in vehicles, which sounds interesting but also potentially hazardous!

2. Video and video conferencing continue to improve. Several vendors were showing OLED televisions, which are only a few millimeters thick. Another big innovation was 3-D television, although these are not yet available commercially. I saw Sony's version, but there were probably a dozen other companies showing 3-D. You still have to wear the funny glasses, but it does make the viewing experience really realistic.The developments in video and mobility may eventually prove helpful in supporting federal telework and COOP (continuity of operations) programs.

3. Solid-state media is going into EVERYTHING, including camcorders. There's a great article in the latest Fast Company about the rapid market expansion of solid state memory (below). We have also heard from industry that solid state is moving into the data center. I believe hard drive technology may eventually be overtaken by solid state, which is much faster, quieter, longer-lasting and uses significantly less electricity and cooling.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/131/have-a-solid-holiday.html

Two things I wanted to see but really did not were improvements in battery technology and high-definition radios. Maybe there were new innovations on display but I did not see or read about them

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