Time to Reengineer Crop Insurance

I'm anxiously waiting for FCIC to adapt the strategy used in Kenya to insure crops--track seed and fertilizer purchases by cellphone to establish eligiblity, determine losses by geographic locale, and deposit indemnity payments to cellphone accounts.  See this post at the World Banks blog.  This would tie in neatly with the cellphone disaster reporting I mentioned in my previous post.

I'm in danger of having my tongue in cheek on these sort of posts, but the reality is that as phone become capable the potential for major changes in business processes grows. The only problem is that humans mostly don't like change.

The Productivity Explosion

We have a jobless recovery because productivity is up so much.  John Phipps meditates on the subject, and sees these three items for farming:

"The oncoming work force in agriculture takes far less time to learn new computing skills and applications, is more willing to experiment, and faces simpler ways to resolve the decreasing number of hangups. (We outlived Vista, for example). While we are only scratching the surface of what computers can do, we are far more likely to tap that potential with farmers who learned keyboarding early, as opposed to hunt-and-peck dinosaurs such as yours truly.

The second wave of productivity boost arises from connectivity.  Let's face it - we are the Borg. Our farms never have to pause to share information between brains.  (In fact, many of us are looking for ways to control the "sharing") From locating tools to sourcing parts to explaining how to unplug the header, farmers don't have to travel "there" first to solve the problem. The result is more experiential knowledge is available all the time and with ease.

The other big change for the better is technology is overcoming our aversion to writing. From e-mails to stored text messages, more of our communication is searchable, readable, and permanent. The gains for information leakage and loss are likely immense. "

Reinventing the Wheel

Federal Computer Week had a post on a site which: "allows aid organizations to post their needs and connect with would-be donors to get help in categories such as food, fuel, medical, telecom, and transport." 

Reminds me of the "Hay Net" site the FSA web manager put up a number of years ago.

One problem with smart people, we all think we are the first one to have an idea and/or we can implement things better than anyone else.

Data Sharing

Back in the day (i.e. 1992) when I was part of the Info-share project, we tried with some success to pull data from multiple databases of different agencies into one database that was accessible by farmers.  It weems some 17 years later, the federal government has reached the point where the data can be pulled on the fly--at least Mr. Kundra says, according to this Federal Computer Weekly piece,  Education and IRS will be able to support a new student aid application process by populating it with IRS data.

Asian Brains

From Google's competition for programmers:

Last year's champion, Lou Tiancheng of China, code-named ACRush, once again took top honors and the $5,000 grand prize. Qi Zichao of China won second place, and Iwata Yoichi of Japan came in third.

Grand Plans and Sad Realities

All too often people of my stripe get carried away by the brilliance of their own ideas. And sometimes they are able to convince others, convince enough others to get them implemented, at least in part. But when the idea meets the rude reality, the resulting heat is often enough to melt the best idea.

Prof. Negroponte of MIT had such an idea, a simple, tough laptop for the third world. Here's a progress report.

The Voice of the Market Is Slow, Tech-Wise

I was curious about the Wall Street Journals archive, so I surfed around their site. They've not updated the browsers supported from IE 7.0 and Firefox 2.5.

Thought for the Day

Via Marginal Revolution, Hal Varian (a Google man) on management and IT:

"Back in the early days of the Web, every document had at the bottom, “Copyright 1997. Do not redistribute.” Now every document has at the bottom, “Copyright 2008. Click here to send to your friends.” So there’s already been a big revolution in how we view intellectual property."

True enough, but it's still working its way through society.

The Most Important News of the Day

A small item in the NYTimes reports East Africa now has fiber optic connections to the Middle East and Europe.

Luddites at Work

The spirit of Nick Ludd has not fled the sceptred isles.

Some British believe it's better to run services through local post offices than on the Internet. Reason? It keeps the offices open.

They're fighting this:

The government’s Digital Britain strategy calls for a “digital switchover” for public services from 2012 that would make the internet the primary delivery route for many government departments.

To overcome the issue that more than a third of the population do not have internet access, the plan also aims to widen digital inclusion by introducing universal broadband. Gordon Brown has appointed Lastminute.com founder Martha Lane Fox to lead the drive to bring the digitally excluded online.

I'm sure many in FSA county offices have the same feelings.

FSA and Texting

Those forward-looking people at FSA are looking at Web 2.0. From a Nextgov post.

Jeff Kerby, Web manager for the Agriculture Department's Farm Service Agency, which provides loans and subsidy payments to farmers, said the agency recently has begun testing how social networking could be used. He and other technology managers at FSA are analyzing how the agency could text the latest crop prices to farmers every morning so they don't have to come into the county office to look up the information. "They're receptive," Kerby said. "It's a matter of getting them used to it."

IPhone a Model for Feds

Technology Review carries a piece suggesting that an electronic health record system, sponsored by the government, should be modeled on the IPhone:

Their approach is modeled on successful IT products outside of health care, including the iPhone and Facebook, which rely on innovative applications from third-party programmers. Mandl and Kohane propose what they call a platform approach, in which EHR vendors sell a flexible, basic platform that is designed to work with components from other vendors, much as the iPhone works with applications made by a myriad of third-party developers.

I'm really out of my depth here, but it seems just a little facile. I'm not clear that either Apple or Facebook started out with the idea they were doing a "platform"--they did something, they made it open, and the snowball started rolling. It's possible a software package that established identity, privacy, and security, sponsored by the government could work. Indeed, in systems terms we already have a government sponsored system for identity (i.e. birth certificates, drivers licenses, death certificates, green cards, etc.) which is the basis for most of commerce.

Offloading FSA Data into Your PC?

Here's a post on a test of allowing Medicare patients to offload their claim records into Google Health. So why not allow farmers to offload data from FSA to their PC?

One Cell to Rule Them All

The NYTimes has an article on the cellphone (i.e., Iphone) as a universal remote.

On its blog, there's a suggestion to convert cellphones into the SecurID device. As it says: "For those of you who don’t work for security-conscious corporations, a SecurID is a little LED display that goes in your wallet or on your keychain, that flashes a different six digit number every minute or so. You need to enter that number, along with a user name and password, to get into some computer systems."

A Sardonic Smile for Grants.gov

Turns out the Bush Administration didn't give grants.gov enough horsepower to handle all of the Obama Administration's activity. See this NextGov article and here.

I guess the smile's actually on me--I've harbored a sneaky suspicion that many government websites, such as grants.gov, are overhyped and under-used. So the good news would be if Obama can crash a whole string of sites.

Thundra and Kundra

Vivek Kundra is the new Chief Information Officer of the Federal government--here
and here. He'd been rumored for a while, so I guess the new, tighter vetting didn't turn up any dirt. Should be interesting as he runs into the entrenched Federal IT bureaucracy. See this for an example of transparency in DC.

IT People Are Human Too

Technology Review interviews the woman touted to be Obama's Chief Technology Officer, Padmasree Warrior, currently Cisco's CTO:

"TR: But can you get rid of skips in voice calls and jitters in streaming video?

PW: Quality of service continues to be important. One of the things we believe, that we've put a lot of effort into...

TR: Hello?

PW: (a minute later) Hi, sorry, I didn't plug in my cell phone last night!"

Some nominees forget to pay all their taxes, some forget their cell phones. The problems a new President faces. As an increasingly forgetful senior, I suggest a blanket amnesty for all memory lapses.

FSA Computers, Again

FSA announced a new IT officer, with these words:

This position has become an important element of FSA's Modernize and Innovate the Delivery of Agricultural Systems (MIDAS) project. Over $300 million will be invested in the coming years to upgrade existing technology and streamline the Commodity Credit Corporation's (CCC) program delivery business processes. Gwinn will manage 630 federal employees and contractors and will oversee the implementation of off-the-shelf software systems via web-enabled network access.

I worked with the previous CIO, once upon a time. MIDAS is one of OMB's high risk projects.

Innovation in DOD, Wikis Even

A piece at Nextgov describes DOD's use of wikis during the Russian/Georgian war.

The Four Thousand Dollar Cellphone

DOD/NSA is praising its new cellphone, which costs a mere four thousand dollars. Actually, allowing for price drops for quantity purchases, it may be a bargain (it handles both secure and non-secure internet sites, etc. etc.). Now if the FBI and Census would adopt it and get some competition going, we might have something. But I'm waiting for a populist to complain about the cost.