Microsoft plans 'Gov 2.0 Kit' with integration of social networks |
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Editor's Note: Seattle-based investigative reporter and data journalist Daniel Lathrop, digital strategist for Investigate West and our former Seattle P-I colleague, is in Washington, D.C., this week for the Gov 2.0 Summit. He'll be filing periodic reports for TechFlash from the event.
Dean Halstead of Microsoft's "GovReady" team took a few minutes at the Government 2.0 happenings in D.C. to brief me on an announcement coming soon from One Microsoft Way.
Halstead, who blogs here, has been working for months on a suite of applications for state, local and federal agencies to set up plug-and-play Web 2.0 efforts on top of Microsoft Sharepoint, Exchange, etc.
The platform is being called Microsoft Government 2.0 Kit and will be open source. Halstead said he's pushing it to Microsoft's CodePlex open source project hosting site by the end of the month. The tool provides an internal social network, integration into Twitter and Facebook, public and private document sharing, workflows that allow review by public affairs and public relations types.
While it's aimed at government, the toolkit looks like something that could be the basis for any organization that wants a robust, internal social network connected to outside networks.
The CTO of the U.S., Aneesh Chopra, praised Microsoft's efforts in the space and said he expects many government agencies already using Microsoft systems to embrace Microsoft's various Gov 2.0 efforts to achieve "frictionless" sharing of information.
"I'm less interested in moving away from these (legacy) platforms and more interested in finding ways to share intellectual property," he said.
Full disclosure: Daniel Lathrop's book on Gov 2.0 is being published in January by O'Reilly Media, the conference organizer. Follow him on Twitter @lathropd and contact him at dlathrop@invw.org.
Todd Bishop is co-founder and managing editor of TechFlash. He has covered Microsoft and the technology industry for more than five years, most recently as a daily newspaper reporter and blogger based in Seattle.
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