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Digital Communities Initiative Has Street Smarts

The Digital Communities initiative has the potential, the street smarts and the industry backing to help cities, counties and regions take the next steps beyond "e-government" and "hot zones" and to engage information technology in the task of building the truly connected and prosperous communities we have envisioned.

I recently attended the Accela user conference in San Diego. At a number of sessions, Intel, Cisco, Accela and other companies discussed the new Digital Communities initiative http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20050818comp.htm and the Web site http://www.govtech.net/digitalcommunities being developed with Government Technology that will go live this coming week. We’ve been writing about "e-government" for years, and I was hoping Digital Communities would offer something new — a step beyond Web sites, URLs and hot zones.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Intel and its partners are doing some important work in cities and counties to bring to the streets the applications we’ve known could transform government, and improve cities and civic life.

For example, remember CAMEO ("Computer Aided Management of Emergency Operations")? I covered it as something fairly new back in 1989 when I first started with Government Technology magazine. I found out that CAMEO is still being used by emergency responders who face chemical hazards, but primarily as a reference manual for toxic substances, and a plume-tracking and mapping application. Originally, the idea was to map building interiors to show first responders where chemicals were stored. That proved to be too big a job for software running on a 1980s-era Macintosh, especially in large cities with hundreds of large buildings. But as I found out at the Accela conference, incident responders are now using wireless devices to tap into files at that level of detail for the buildings they are entering.

By Wayne Hanson

Full Story: http://www.govtech.net/magazine/channel_story.php/96532

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