Just a few hours before the State of the Union address, President Obama signed an executive order authorizing new policies to protect U.S. critical infrastructure cybersecurity. Following several failed attempts by Congress to legislation in this area, the president addressed the important issue of "repeated intrusions into critical infrastructure." During...

Last year was my grandmother's final Thanksgiving. She died in the spring of 2012 at the age of 98. Her cinnamon rolls will forever be a part of Thanksgiving memories for me for the rest of my life, as will her kindness and all of the hard work she put...

After working for a decade in the area of campaigning online, I've had the opportunity to observe the evolution of many tools and techniques used at varying degrees of success at all levels, from local to national. The 2012 election of course heralds the latest and greatest of mobile technology...

In the wake of President Obama's major jobs address to the joint session of Congress, the president and key members of the administration have been speaking around the country to convey the importance of the American Jobs Act. Obama's trusted senior advisor, Valerie Jarrett, traveled to San Francisco...

The Obama Administration has been working on ways to use the web for engaging the people in policy discussions since before the president took office. Not an easy task, they have been criticized from several angles for their various efforts at crowd sourcing ideas from citizens. Still, their efforts have...

San Francisco has been a leading city in efforts to open government through technology, data sharing and new media over the past few years, including their version of Data.gov at DATAsf.org, providing detailed information sets about parking, crime, housing, environmental issues and more. It has spawned...

The next Osama bin Laden may not be one bearded man hiding in a walled fortress but instead a group of highly skilled, faceless men behind computers. Cyberterrorism, while still largely science fiction, lurks around the corner as growing accounts of logic bombs in U.S. networks and cases of software...

Katie Jacobs Stanton didn't get a job at the White House by being shy. So when the opportunity to meet Donald Trump at Saturday's annual White House Correspondents Dinner came up, she hatched a plan: to find him and get his autograph on a copy of President Obama's long form...

Each time campaign season heats up, the public is on alert. They say most people vote more on character, perception, or gut feeling, i.e. who they like, than based on facts, experience, policy ideas, or other more wonky stuff. As one who's been on the outside and inside of campaigns...

Innovation, leadership, social impact. These three areas were the foci of the annual Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Awards May 12th in Santa Clara, California. Three women took the stage to receive awards in each of these areas, and each is highly deserving in achievement - not...

Layne Gray isn't your typical investigative journalist. Philanthropist and founder of Vivanista, her mission is to empower women to be better fundraisers, organizers and volunteers. Yet when she poked around, she discovered that billionaire Meg Whitman may not be walking her talk with her foundation. While...

Sunday I sat down with a small group at the Government 2.0 Camp LA to pow-wow about how to get more women involved in the movement that has many names: e-government, open government, government transparency, and finally government 2.0. While the conference took on many forms, one of...

The 2010 Winter Olympics commence in nearly two months, and the 2010 election is just under a year away. Recently, I've been contemplating the parallels between the two, particularly regarding what political candidates and Olympic athletes must endure on their quests through qualifying events and life long endeavors. Both...

As President Obama spoke at an unprecedented Town Hall in China, he fielded questions from students in the room and from submissions sent online, opening up on his thoughts on everything from terrorism to what it takes to affect global change. One question stood above the others in its meaning...

I moved to California in 1995. Within a few months, I was versed in some of the problems in the state, such as homelessness in Berkeley, tight budgets in the University of California system, and soaring real estate prices vs. rent control problems.

One day, I was driving across...

For a while now, cybersecurity has been a buzzword used in hopes of making national computer network security sound sexy, but there's been little legislative backbone behind measures to support federal departmental efforts. The position touted as Cybersecurity Czar has been fraught with problems in both the recent Bush administration...

I recently read the book Womenomics, by Claire Shipman and Katty Kay, which focuses on how women can take charge in the workplace and negotiate for more intangibles that we need in order to balance our busy lives. I was excited to see what these two seasoned reporters would...

President Obama announced the creation of the White House Council on Women and Girls on Wednesday, to "provide a coordinated federal response to the challenges confronted by women and girls." It's a great step, recreating an office that existed during the Clinton administration but was dissolved under Bush. But the...

As the tech community poured over the new whitehouse.gov site, one of the first subterranean changes noted was that of a file most people would never notice called robots.txt. This file serves as a notice to search robots informing them of what files they should or shouldn't survey....

Since Howard Dean's unprecedented fundraising success online in 2003, a lot of speculation has gone into how the technology of the Internet might transform politics and when we might have our first "Internet President." Over the course of the 2008 election, we witnessed a phenomenon that could never have occurred...