Arizona’s controversial ‘papers please,’ law will go before the Supreme Court this week on questions of whether the oversteps federal immigration statutes violating the federal supremacy clause. While significant, the challenge to Arizona’s law is just one of several developments happening on the immigration issue at all levels of government. Last week several other states [...]
Maryland is likely to become the first state to ban employers from requesting the user names and passwords of social media accounts for potential new hires. The bill follows a public uproar after a jobseeker spoke of the request by a potential employer igniting a controversy about privacy and the limits of what can be [...]
Utah is now accepting gold and silver as legal tender for transactions and to settle debts according to a bill recently signed into law by Governor Gary R. Herbert. Several other states have proposed similar measures in the wake of the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve and the decreasing value of paper money.
Health Information Technology continues to draw interest from big IT firms and venture capitalists seeking to get in on one of the more lucrative aspects of the health care boom. All aspects of health care are looking at ways to streamline care, handle a glut of medical data and manage shifting demographics, regulation and organizations. [...]
Code for America, a US-based, civic non-profit has launched a new initiative, a civic startup accelerator. The goal of the project is to provide a leg-up to civic technology companies and disrupt the $140 billion government IT market. The organization is known for its flagship program which recruits technologists to serve as civic coders for [...]
Some Florida cities are dropping out of the North Florida Broadband Authority citing concerns over the projects debt load and questions about its deployment timeline. The Authority was investigated by federal broadband officials last year over the same types of issues. The city council of Perry, Florida voted to end its involvement in the project. [...]
In March, Harvard wrapped up its 2012 Harvard College Innovation Challenge. The challenge is put on by the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard (TECH), part of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. This year, TECH and the Innovation Challenge launched a new award – the Public Sector Innovation Award – which looked for [...]
Social impact bonds have recently come into favor in the public sector as a means of financing projects that will impact communities where government funding is typically scarce. Social impact bonds allow governments to contract with a third party to fill gaps in available services, but unlike a standard procurement arrangement, these contracts are only [...]
In order to respond to growing threats, sprawling suburbs and complex interoperability challenges between legacy systems and new ones states and municipalities are deploying large infrastructure networks. These networks link up everything from traffic lights to homeland security systems and rely on censors, cameras and transmitters to report data back to officials about the overall [...]
