On Wednesday, Jan. 20, the Brookings Institution hosted a discussion on cloud computing including a keynote address from Brad Smith, senior vice president and general counsel of Microsoft Corp. Smith unveiled a policy proposal from Microsoft, which urged Congress to consider new legislation to regulate the cloud.

“We need a national conversation about how to build confidence in the cloud,” Smith said.

Defined simply, cloud computing is “computing delivered as a service over the Internet.” A national survey conducted for Microsoft by Penn, Schoen and Berland found that while 75 percent of Americans don’t know what cloud computing is, 90 percent use it.

Gmail and Google Apps are an example: the data does not reside on any one hard drive or tied to a single physical server. Instead, a user can access the data wherever, whenever, with an Internet connection. As more industries move data to the cloud, they are balancing the flexibility, reliability and choice of cloud computing with real concerns about privacy, security and legality.

The survey reflected that sentiment. While a majority of the general population and 86 percent of senior business leaders are “excited about the potential” of cloud computing, security and data privacy are concerns of more than 90 percent of those surveyed. And while there is growing confidence in the cloud (think about how many Americans use it for online banking, for example), there are also new inherent challenges.

The first is jurisdiction: Who is in charge? The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986 would seem to extend to the cloud, but the law is terribly out of date and has not been modernized to keep pace with the development of the Internet. As an example, ECPA extends greater privacy protections to e-mails stored for less than 180 days than those stored longer. Obviously this is a throwback to the early days of e-mail, when keeping the messages for long periods of time was burdensome and uncommon — but this is clearly not the norm today.

In the same vein, does the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which is protection from unreasonable search and seizure, extend to the cloud? Do users have a reasonable expectation of privacy or do they relinquish thEat when using a third party (i.e. the cloud) to store private date? Many insist that the courts must extend Fourth Amendment protections to the cloud, however they have not to date and there currently exists no legal precedent for such an argument.

While the U.S. courts may soon consider the issue of Constitutional protection, businesses that choose to host their data centers offshore raise the issue of international sovereignty and jurisdiction of the cloud. Smith says that Microsoft supports an international treaty defining access to the cloud but is cognizant that such an action in the near future is unlikely, and that in the interim it will be up to the private sector to make critical choices about the future of the cloud.

Vivek Kundra, the Obama administration’s chief information officer, has spoken about the potential of cloud computing to increase access to data within government by reducing time spent on procedure and increasing time spent on achieving an agency’s fundamental mission and goals. He has estimated that the cost savings could be as great as 1/10. In a speech last year, Kundra chided what he sees as the focus of government IT on infrastructure maintenance rather than deploying technical tools to achieve goals.

At its core, the promise of cloud computing comes in giving users greater choice and access, in giving businesses greater flexibility and connectivity and giving government greater efficiency and transparency. Microsoft recently proposed the Cloud Computing Advancement Act, which will continue a national conversation about the future of the cloud and the future of the Internet.

More reading:

• Huffington Post article by Brad Smith
• POLITICO, “Microsoft Urges Greater Oversight”

U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra announced the site, writing in a post on the White House Blog:

Apps.gov is an online storefront for federal agencies to quickly browse and purchase cloud-based IT services, for productivity, collaboration, and efficiency.

The social media tools not only carry the GSA’s blessing but will also be easy for agencies to deploy — two previously difficult-to-overcome barriers.

In the case of the Social Media Apps category — there are three other main categories on Apps.gov — the site serves more of a clearinghouse for agencies to “request” usage of the tools. Users are presented with a page that contains a link to each tool’s GSA Terms of Service and Agreement. This agreement was the big legal barrier that prevented so many of these tools from being available to agencies for so long.

In addition to the 21 tools that launched today, six other categories of tools will be launching in the future: Livecasting, Mashups, Opinions and product reviews, RSS and Other Syndicated Feeds, Virtual Worlds and Widget Creation.

In addition to the aforementioned document sharing services, integration with FriendFeed, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube also launched.

Notably absent is Twitter.

But my favorite service that launched is something called IdeaScale. IdeaScale is similar to Google Moderator, where agencies can crowdsource ideas. More popular ideas “bubble to the top,” its Web site says.

Sept. 15, 2009 will be a turning point in how government agencies use social media. Obviously, this site and its underlying regulatory approval took a while to develop. Keep up the good work.

In a related development, Google launched a government portal today. The popular Google Apps e-mail collaboration suite is set to launch next year for agencies.

P.S. Is it just me, or does Apps.gov seem to run on the slow side?

While the page is still new and largely devoid of content, it’s easy to see how this page could soon become a great resource for many agencies that use Facebook to communicate with citizens.

Could this hub be using the White House’s ambitious Facebook page as an example? When that page launched in the spring (it now has over 350,000 fans), it was followed shortly afterwards with a Facebook App, White House Live, which streams live events right in Facebook and allows for live comments from citizens.

It’s too early to tell how exactly this page will be used. But it does have an “Other Pages” tab, which includes popular agency pages like the State Department, EPA, NASA and Coast Guard.

All readers of this blog should become a fan of Facebook and Government — it will be interesting to see what’s coming. Could other social networks follow Facebook and create a similar portal?

In March, I wrote about best practices for government communication on Facebook.

Kundra in 2008. (David Clow - Maryland / Flickr)

Nevertheless, Kundra’s announcement is great news. He really likes the iPhone and Web 2.0.

“I believe the iPhone is the future for integrated voice, data and video,” Kundra told InfoWorld last year.

Perhaps he’ll convince President Obama to ditch his BlackBerry (or Sectera Edge) for an iPhone.

Obama now has one full time official to advance his technology agenda. Hopefully the CTO announcement will be coming soon, so this agenda can go full speed ahead.

“Vivek Kundra will bring a depth of experience in the technology arena and a commitment to lowering the cost of government operations to this position,” Obama said in a statement. “I have directed him to work to ensure that we are using the spirit of American innovation and the power of technology to improve performance and lower the cost of government operations. As Chief Information Officer, he will play a key role in making sure our government is running in the most secure, open, and efficient way possible.”

It appears that Kundra will work more to advance technology policy, while the CTO will work more to work on internal government operations. Nevertheless, the White House chose a very accomplished information technology expert to fill the CIO spot.

Congratulations, Vivek. We hope to see great things come from your White House tenure!

All About Vivek Kundra

Age: 34
Previous Jobs: CTO, Government of the District of Columbia; Assistant Secretary, Commerce and Technology, Commonwealth of Virginia; CEO of Creostar
Honors: 2008 InfoWorld Top 25 CTO
Education: Bachelor’s in Psychology and Biology, M.S. Information Technology — University of Maryland

[via The Washington Post, The White House, InfoWorld, D.C. Government]

Update: Saul Hansell of The New York Times has a great write-up about Kundra’s morning conference call. Most interesting:

Another initiative will be to create a new site, Data.gov, that will become a repository for all the information the government collects. He pointed to the benefits that have already come from publishing the data from the Human Genome Project by the National Institutes of Health as well as the information from military satellites that is now used in G.P.S. navigation devices.

D.C.’s Tech Chief to Become Federal Information Officer (by Kim Hart, The Washington Post)

The GSA posted a solicitation on FedBizOpps.gov Feb. 9 for a $2.5 million contract to conduct a “Citizen Engagement Survey.” One of the objectives of the survey is quite interesting:

…Do citizens really want to use Facebook and/or YouTube to get government information? Do citizens expect the government to use Facebook and/or YouTube to disseminate information?

The results of this survey should be interesting to see. Good luck, Bev.

[via Federal Computer Week]

The Web site currently allows users to electronically submit comments for pending regulations at various agencies. It also allows the user to read the actual regulation and, in many (but not all) cases, read the comments of other citizens who have submitted their two cents to that particular docket.

So basically, your comments submitted electronically through this Web site have the same exact bearing as comments submitted through U.S. Mail. That’s great, but this Web site allows for one-way communication only.

This needs to change.

Regulations.gov should introduce some form of a threaded discussion, like a forum, where average Americans can quickly post their thoughts and see what other people feel about it. A representative from whatever agency the rule originated in could and should participate in the discussion — whether they’re answering questions about it or defending the pending rule.

The Web site should also create a widget that would allow users passionate about a certain proposal to embed the widget in their blog or Web site and thus bring more people into the discussion. [Read more about widgets in this previous post.]

HTML versions of the proposals should become interactive. Links in various items can bring up explanations, documents, legislation and even videos of interest. Remember, these rules are written in legalese. Very few Americans understand legalese!

These are just a few suggestions. The possibilities to increase and enchance citizen engagement in the monotonous rule making process are endless and should be brought into the Web 2.0 era as soon as possible.

The page, written by USA.gov Director Bev Godwin, stated the following as one of a few “examples of government using social networks:”

“Many government agency networks and groups have sprung up on sites like Facebook. EPA’s Facebook network, for example, has over 750 members—anyone with an EPA e-mail address can become a member of the group. There are similar examples for most agencies.”

So let’s get this straight. Godwin believes that by using your government-issued e-mail address to add oneself to, say, the EPA’s Facebook network, it’s an example of the government using a social network?

It’s more like government employees using a social network for anything but business. The fact that the EPA’s Facebook network has over 750 members is great, but what good does that do for the EPA? If anything, I’d be nervous – that’s at least 750 EPA employees who have a possible workplace distraction at their desks!

I currently intern at a large newspaper, and am a member of their Facebook network. Does that mean I am adding to the newspaper’s social media presence? I think not.

However, Godwin did mention good examples of using Facebook for marketing purposes.

“USA.gov started a Facebook USAgov page in March 2008, for RSS feeds, videos, photos, and other news. The public is invited to become a ‘fan’ of that page,” she writes.

As of February 2, not many members of the public have been invited, apparently. The USA.gov Facebook page currently has 316 fans.

This page on social media for government Web content managers is a good start, but it merely scratches the surface of what the government should be doing: actively marketing and engaging the public in their activities.

Joining the EPA Facebook network is certainly no way to engage the public.