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Imagine you were a reporter and wanted to compare budgets for each of the 50 states.  Or, you wanted to compare the official schedules of governors in 20 states?  Dan Oblinger, Program Manager at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration) suggests that if there were a single cloud for state and local governments, possibly supported by the federal government, the release of data to reporters and the rest of the public could be modernized and streamlined. 
Journalists say now that when they ask for government records, often they get print outs of electronic documents with black marker used to redact certain sections.  These releases can be hundreds of pages long, and completely unsearchable electronically. This is taking place in a context where newspapers are closing and reporters are being laid off.  The number of employed investigative reporters is declining and therefore there are fewer people to keep government at all levels - national, state, local - accountable to the public.
For example, suppose all states kept their birth, marriage, and death certificates and their court and police records on this single cloud.  Whatever format any single state used for its data, the cloud could provide the support to convert it into other useful formats (I understand now that this kind of conversion perhaps is often too costly for any single locality or state to support).  For the public who wanted to use these data, they could access it in a format useful to them, not just in the format the state/local government uses.

By Robert Alderfer and Tom Peters

The explosive growth of mobile communication is fueling our economy, creating jobs and spurring innovation at lighting fast speeds. But, it is also taxing our nation’s spectrum.

Spectrum is the finite national resource that makes all forms of wireless communication possible. Data usage over wireless networks is rapidly increasing as more consumers surf the web, check email, and watch video on the go, and more mobile device such as smart phones and tablets enter the market. This new demand for mobile spectrum is rapidly pushing us towards the point of running out of open spectrum.

The National Broadband Plan put numbers on the looming spectrum crunch, and made it clear that the time to act is now. The plan recommended that 500 megahertz of new spectrum be made available for broadband, including 300 megahertz in the next five years. The President has issued a call to action for wireless broadband. Clearly, new spectrum for wireless broadband is important to ensuring that we lead the world in mobile.

Today, the FCC is releasing a white paper entitled, “Mobile Broadband: The Benefits of Additional Spectrum.” This technical and economic forecast of mobile broadband market trends sets forth future spectrum needs in a concrete, data-driven fashion.

To create lasting change in the dot gov atmosphere, its incumbent on us to build better websites on top of better architectures.
But too often, government agencies have struggled to keep pace with technological change at a fundamental level. Cloud computing environments haven't been within government agencies' grasp for very long. The reasons have been various — many of them well-founded and focused on keeping our nation's information, and our citizens, safe.
Thanks to clear vision and consistent execution from government leaders, agencies are increasingly empowered to leverage the benefits of cloud computing. Private sector innovation has moved at incredible speeds, and it's encouraging to see federal agencies — like the FCC — moving towards cutting-edge architectures in order to deliver quality services quickly to the citizens that depend on them.
As we continue to reimagine how FCC.gov can deliver dot com levels of service, getting cloud environments in the door and ready for implementation has been a primary focus. By hosting our new site in the cloud, we're equipping the developers and content creators in the Commission with leading-edge technology so we remain agile, responsive, and relevant to the consumers and industry groups that rely on FCC.gov.
We fully expect this move to pay dividends in the short and long terms. Starting now, we're able to wield highly-flexible sandboxes for our teams to innovate without bounds. And in out years, we save considerable costs — and mitigate impact to the environment — by hosting the new FCC.gov in the cloud instead of potentially inefficient and wasteful datacenters.

I just returned from a 36-hour trip to Georgia, during which I visited a great group of folk at the FCC’s field office in Duluth (which is overseen by our Enforcement Bureau). It was my first experience with one of our field offices, but interacting with our people on the ground – my hard-working colleagues outside of the bubble of Washington – was an invaluable experience for me…and one I intend to replicate soon.

Upon my arrival, I was picked up by Doug Miller, the District Director of the field office, in one of the FCC’s Mobile Direction Finding (MDF) vehicles. While it looks like a run-of-the-mill SUV on the outside, it contains state-of-the-art detection equipment that Doug and his team use to detect illegal (“pirated”) radio broadcasts. Armed with technology and experience, innumerable unauthorized radio broadcasts, which trespass into the airwaves of licensed programming as well as airplane/airport transmissions, have been located and shut down by the FCC’s Duluth team.

The field team also walked me through the technology and labor needed to detect and stop illegal cell phone jamming. This practice is increasingly prevalent throughout our prisons and schools, and my FCC colleagues showed me how jamming devices operate and how small and inconspicuous they can be.

Later in the evening, I met and spoke to the Federal Communications Bar Association’s Atlanta chapter. I saw some old friends and met many new ones, and listened to their feedback regarding what we’re doing in DC and what they’re doing in and around metropolitan Atlanta. I truly enjoy chatting with communications practitioners and attorneys throughout the country, as they offer so many insights that I don’t regularly hear in Washington.