Recently in Good Practice Category

It turns out there are laws against stupid - or at least a policy - after all.  The Port of Seattle enforced its zero tolerance policy on inappropriate use of computing resources after an internal investigation.  The violations proved to be career defining for 19 workers in and around the survey team in the engineering department at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

The Port has not released the full report of an investigation but a one page press release announces the decision to fire 8 employees and terminate 4 contractors for trading e-mails and Internet links that included sexually-explicit photos, sexually-oriented jokes, and jokes about race, gender and national origin.  Another seven employees have been disciplined.

Harsh medicine?  Perhaps.  But these employees and contractors in particular should have known how investigations of inappropriate use end. Just last year, the Port was scandalized when a number of its police officers were caught and subsequently disciplined for sending e-mails the Port Commission called "sexually explicit, sexist and racist."

Despite the death rattle of legacy airlines, we -- as in Cathilea Robinett, Bob Feingold, Liza Lowery-Massey, Todd Sander and me -- have been traveling the country with a helpfully subversive idea for modernizing when you have no money.  It answers questions the Center gets all the time: (a) is anybody getting anything done?; and, what do we do now?

Our answer fits with the Zeitgeist in state and local government: larceny.  That is not to endorse the stealing of money or things (although that's been tried from time to time).  Instead, we are advocating that public agencies -- as this year's keynote title suggests -- Steal this Idea.  It digests dozens of ideas from hundreds of jurisdictions that have been used successfully to move forward in challenging times.

The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive.  The people who stay to talk share a sense that we are at another inflection point -- perhaps the most important one since the arrival of the commodity Internet in the mid-1990s.  Maybe that's why its called Web 2.0.  Actually, the story is bigger than a version number (which we will explore in greater detail in the months ahead.)

In the meantime, the official mascot of the Steal this Idea tour - a petty criminal named Hunter - has been blogging on the nuggets found in the good work of the public sector IT community from coast-to-coast.  You can follow the tour through his blog at www.govtechblogs.com/hunter.