IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

The clarification came Wednesday during a meeting of the West Virginia Broadband Council when Lee Fisher, a member from Braxton County who represents rural communities, mentioned that the 700,000 figure continues to be used.

State Commerce Department Secretary Kelley Goes, who chairs the council, said the state's federal grant application talks about connecting critical community anchor tenants.

The state's e-government services program provides an electronic system, such as a credit card or electronic funds transfer, for goods and services offered by state agencies, colleges, universities, boards and commissions.

'We actually had some nurses who were completely computer-illiterate. They didn't use a computer at work, and they had no use for it at home,' said Jerry Luck, director of facilities systems administration at the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources.

To see his patients, Dr. Drury Armistead sits down in front of his computer and opens a video feed.

Armistead, a dermatologist with the Louis A. Johnson VA Medical Center in Clarksburg, is part of the growing telehealth program that connects patients and doctors, no matter the distance.

Two days a week, Armistead virtually examines patients at the VA medical centers in Altoona and Erie, Pa. -- more than 100 miles away from his West Virginia office.

The WV.gov Portal Modernization Project was recently presented with the “Innovation in Service Delivery” award by the West Virginia Office of Technology 2009 Excellence in Information Technology Recognition Awards.

Since its inception in 2007, the Portal Modernization Project has saved the state of West Virginia more than $10 million dollars and has resulted in the launch of 26 online services and 21 new Web sites to date. The program currently has over 40 additional online services and Web sites in development that are scheduled to launch in upcoming months.

According to a recent statewide poll, more than nine out of 10 West Virginians feel it is important to have reliable and consistent cellular phone coverage in rural areas for personal and public safety, while nearly 80 percent experience dead zones, dropped calls or poor call quality. More than half also oppose Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposals that would diminish support for rural wireless by nearly 50 percent, jeopardizing public safety and economic development in smaller communities.

The county placed seventh in the 500,000 or more population category. The full list is at www.centerdigitalgov.com. The top-10 will be honored at NACo’s Annual Conference next month in Honolulu, Hawaii.

The following 10 North Carolina counties are now using the technology: Burke, Caldwell, Cleveland, Davidson, Forsyth, Iredell, Lincoln, McDowell, Polk and Rutherford. With the expansion of the biometric information sharing capability to these counties, ICE is now using it in 39 North Carolina jurisdictions. Across the country, ICE is using this capability in 544 jurisdictions in 27 states. ICE expects to make it available in jurisdictions nationwide by 2013.

The FCC selected Western North Carolina as the first U.S. region to get a grant under the Rural Health Care Pilot Program.

But what shouldn't go into the cloud?

Mark Forman is a partner with KPMG and former Administrator for E-Government and Information Technology at the Office of Management and Budget.

He said, in lieu of President Obama's Open Government Initiative, it is expected that many more federal applications will be made public, which means the mindset about data is changing.

That's why Garcia recently introduced an emergency motion to apply for Google's experimental "ultra high-speed" broadband network -- the Internet giant announced last week its plans to build and test the networks "in a small number of trial locations across the United States."

The FCC has launched a campaign to define exactly what constitutes "broadband" and providers of the high speed service may not like how it is defined and how the FCC views their delivery of broadband.

The Office of Management and Budget has advocated e-government as a cost-savings effort because agencies will be able to eliminate redundant systems.

Intranets have grown to be thousands and even millions of pages of content. Given their size and scope, they present challenges that are similar to those common in external sites. There has also been a tendency for intranets to become dumping grounds for obsolete and irrelevant content. The result can be unforeseen privacy and security risks, wasted employee productivity and unnecessary cost burdens.

One of the passengers, a Pakistani man, was arrested when his name showed up on the officer’s computer screen as having been indicted in New York on charges of trafficking in fraudulent immigration documents.