A new study released Monday by a Michigan State University sociologist finds that cities’ size and location are waning as indicators of its economic prowess. Assistant professor Zachary Neal credits the growth of communication technologies and other networks for realigning economic hub zones from places like Detroit and Cleveland to Raleigh/Durham and Denver.
As part of an effort to reduce the State of Washington’s $3 billion budget gap, Governor Chris Gregoire recently closed the brainstorming and voting period for a Web-based crowdsourcing effort. Gov. Gregoire commented on some of the citizen-submitted ideas through a series of YouTube addresses last week. Website visitors submitted nearly 2,000 ideas, with 5,600 [...]
With passage of federal health insurance reform last March, the clock began ticking for states to begin work implementing the complex bill. For state leaders, Medicaid expansion and the logistics behind setting up health insurance exchanges pose some of the bill’s biggest challenges, says Jack Meyer, professor at the University of Maryland and principal at [...]
According to a new study compiled by Accenture, both public and private sector organizations are investing more heavily in open source software than they were two years ago. Additionally, survey respondents indicated a shift in perceived reliability and speed of OSS solutions, pushing demand higher in the future. In a comparison of five industries: financial [...]
A Florida health agency and a Texas-based Community College are both utilizing a simple and cost effective cloud-based solution to help them expand services, increase performance and better serve their constituents. Opening access to information, while reducing response time and personnel overhead, sits at the core of both their strategies. The Florida Department of Health, [...]
The International City/County Managers Association (ICMA) is looking for a few good local government administrators. According to a newsletter announcement, the group is asking interested US-based municipalities to join ICMA Latinoamérica in a partnership program designed to open money markets to sub-national governments in Latin America.
A little over a year ago CivSource first reported on the development of an open source, social media tool by Lockheed Martin called Eureka. Since then, the company has officially released the source code for Eureka Streams. According to two of the creators of the project, Streams is designed specifically to drive conversations around user [...]
Due to the lingering economic strain on state budgets, increased pressure has been added to the role of state chief information officers. Governors and legislatures have demanded that IT be used to streamline and save like never before, but according to a new survey of state CIOs, legislative changes are needed to enable CIOs to [...]
According to a request for proposal (RFP) issued earlier this month, the City of Memphis, Tennessee is looking to extend an outsourcing contract for its IT infrastructure and Application Maintenance and Support (AM&S) services. The deal could be worth more than $35 million over five years, with two one-year options. The five-year base contract could [...]
A report released today by the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) says the days of rapid revenue declines is nearing an end for most states, a little under two years since the fall of Lehman Brothers and the beginning of the Great Recession. NCSL joins a host of state and local government fiscal observers [...]
