Author: J.J. Toothman

  • GOSCON and Portland

    I’m currently in Portland, Oregon attending the GOSCON conference where I gave a presentation titled “Open Source Community Principles for Organizational Change.”  The slides in my presentation can be found at the bottom of this post.  I’ve forgotten how wonderful a city Portland is.  I haven’t been here for about 13 years.  One of the…

  • Five albums Phish should consider covering for Halloween 2010

    I have no idea if Phish is actually going to keep up their Halloween tradition of covering an entire album.  But if they do, here’s 5 I’d hope they’d consider.  This isn’t a prediction list as much as it is a wishlist. Pavement – “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain” Boston (self titled) Wilco – “Yankee Hotel…

  • Speaking at GOSCON Next Week

    Quick note to mention that I’m headed to Portland, Oregon next week to speak at GOSCON – The Government Open Source Conference.  GOSCON is non-profit conference designed for government IT management. This years program focuses on the role of open source software and collaboration enabling leading Open Government and Transparency initiatives throughout the US. I’ll…

  • Test driving APPS.gov NOW

    After an intense week, I finally got around to taking APPS.gov NOW out for test drive.  It was at Tuesday’s FedTalks event that the GSA New Media Team announced that APPS.gov NOW was now available for government employees to sign up for and start using.  What this site aims to do is allow federal employees…

  • An Open Government Definition

    One of the first things I did when I started this blog was to start a series of posts establishing some foundational definitions for critical concepts.  Definitions I was using as the basis for how I approached my work at NASA.  But to this point, I have yet to establish a definition for Open Government. …

  • Only in Vermont

    Now these are the kinds of nuances that make Vermont unique. A TV station in Burlington has an official Phish correspondent.

  • Sustainability Base at NASA Ames

    Note: this post is part of Blog Action Day 2010: Water Recently, I listened to a presentation about a new building currently under construction at NASA Ames Research Center.  It’s called Sustainability Base and it aims to be a net zero energy building.  It’s been a long time since a new building went up here…

  • My war on junk mail

    About 6 months ago, I decided to I wanted to do something about the crap that was filling up my mailbox.  I’m not talking about my email inboxes.  Yes, there’s a lot of junk that finds its way in there, but unsubscribe links and filters are adequate ways to wage digital war on your email…

  • Movies I’ve been watching with Mason recently

    It’s pretty great that Mason is getting old enough so his taste in movies creeps closer to some of the films I enjoy watching over and over.  Kung Fu Panda is great, but after 137 viewings, I need some change.   Here’s what we’ve enjoyed together recently Ghostbusters – he actually started quoting lines from the…

  • A random list of things for October 9

    My friend Dave is fond of writing blog posts that have the line “here it is list form, because people like lists.”  That’s probably true, so I’m going to use that writing technique to revive my posting on this site.  Anyway, here’s a random list of thoughts for you. DVD Later – for adding movies…