Nov 14
Award Winner
I’m pleased to announce that the newsroom application I wrote for the Governor’s office won the 2008 eC3 Excellence Award in the category “Innovation in the use of social networking to enhance citizen involvement in government”.
Gov. Mike Beebe’s Information Network of Arkansas encourages citizens to help craft a positive vision for their state. Arkansas.gov offers numerous online services and an e-newsroom with audio/video, podcasts, four different electronic newsletters, listservs and RSS feeds.
I actually wrote this application for Gov. Mike Huckabee, then updated it a bit when Gov. Beebe entered office last year. Then we did a major enhancement earlier this year to integrate with content from Picasa and YouTube. Thanks to this application, Governor Huckabee became only the 2nd Governor in the U.S. to have Video podcasts in iTunes!
Of three awards given by the eC3 (National Electronic Commerce Coordinating Council) this year, Arkansas won two! We also won the award for “Innovation in protecting the privacy and integrity of citizen information” for a write up in which my friend and co-worker David described the security initiatives we have implemented.
