….::: VOX POPULI :::….

What Matters in Cloud Telephony

Posted by Mark Headd under News, Standards, Tropo, VoIP

The landscape of cloud telephony continues to change.

I was heartened this week to see some of the sharpest minds I know in cloud telephony and unified communications get together with the acquisition of Teleku by Voxeo. Teleku and Voxeo’s Tropo service are complimentary ones that offer lots of goodies for developers, and I’m anxious to see what these guys will be cooking up now that they have joined forces. Congrats to all involved!

While there is lots of discussion about what this acquisition means for the constantly changing landscape of cloud telephony, this move validates (in my mind) some of the important trends that will determine which cloud telephony companies will be around for the long-term and how developers will use their services.

None of this is new - I’ve said it all before. It is worth noting, however, that all of the trends that I’ve observed before that are going to make the difference in the cloud telephony space are ones that both Tropo and Teleku do very well.

Portability - underscored not only by Teleku’s support for the open standard VoiceXML, but also the Tropo crew’s involvement in the Asterisk world, and the defacto standard for building Asterisk apps in Ruby - Adhearsion.

SIP integration - remember this kids: true cloud telephony has SIP baked in - the rest is just marketing fluff. Both Tropo and Teleku support SIP interoperability and make it very easy for developers to use SIP as part of their applications.

Multi-channel / multi-modality - Both Tropo and Teleku have big multi-modal chops. Being able to interact with users on multiple communication channels from one code base is a key tenet of unified communications and cloud telephony, and this will become increasingly important in the future.

Speech recognition - cloud telephony isn’t your grandfather’s way to build a phone app, so why should users be restricted to their grandfather’s way of interacting with a phone app? Speech recognition is fully supported in both Tropo and Teleku, and this will matter more and more to cloud telephony developers going forward.

So if you’re wondering what the next change in the cloud telephony landscape will be, you can bet that one of these trends will dictate the change.

Until then, I’ll be hacking on some cloud-based, speech rec enabled UC apps.

How Not to do a State Website Makeover

Posted by Mark Headd under News, Open Government

The Twitters have been abuzz lately with news of lots of state government websites being updated. California, Texas and Massachusetts have all made dramatic changes to their state websites to better serve citizens.

One recent state website overhaul was of particular interest to me - that of my current state of Delaware.

Before I offer my critique and tell you what I like and don’t like about the new Delaware.gov website, I should say that my opinion is somewhat biased. I was the Director of the Delaware Government Information Center during a previous Administration and the project manager of the effort to overhaul the old Gov 1.0 state web site and create a new citizen-focused web portal. The project I oversaw resulted in the first Delaware state web site to use the “delaware.gov” domain name.

The project I worked on was difficult - it took a lot of effort to get buy-in from agencies and agreement from them to relinquish some of the control they had over their old stovepiped web sites and work to incorporate their information into a centralized portal. For it’s time, it was a dramatic step forward and the state received national recognition for its efforts. The project had strong support from almost every elected official in the state. In particular, the effort was spearheaded by then State Treasurer Jack Markell - the man who is now Governor.

It should come as no surprise then that I have strong feelings about how the Delaware web site is designed, and how well it serves the citizens of Delaware. In my opinion, the new site design has a number of issues, and lags far behind some of the advances being adopted in other states.

Lack of Mobility and Accessibility

Right of the bat, the site runs into issues with mobile devices like the iPad and iPhone. How ironic is it that there is a graphic in the site header of a woman looking into a mobile device…

The iframes that occupy most of the real estate on the new site cause all sorts of problems with these devices, and the state should have explored other ways of displaying the information in these frames if it deemed it critical. Sadly, that is not the only issue caused by the use of iframes on the site.

When you use the site’s translation feature (located at the very bottom), you see that most of the content in these iframes resists translation to different languages, making it useless to non-English speakers. This problem is particularly acute because the non-translatable portions occupy such a large percentage of the real estate on the main page. What is the state trying to say here? Our social media content is so important we need to use the majority of our homepage to display it, but pay no mind if you speak Spanish?

Additionally, the site has some basic accessibility issues that can cause problems for people with disabilities. These issues are easy to fix, and its kind of embarassing that they were overlooked before the changes went live.

It’s troubling to see Delaware take steps backward in disability access and language translation on its official state web site.

Social Media or Propaganda

The social media content that is so prominently displayed on the main page is intrusive and crowds out much of the useful content. People use a state web site because they have a transaction they need to conduct, or information they need to find. There is a shockingly small amount of real estate devoted to things that typically bring most people to a government web site (and that’s the opinion of a social media fan).

In addition, all of the social media content that occupies the bulk of the site’s main page looks to be of the propaganda variety. Most of it looks to be recycled RSS feeds from agencies. (Note to other governments that may be watching, this is how not to do engagement via social networking.)

Show me the Data!

When I look at the new Texas and California web sites, here’s what I like. Both have ample links to their social media directories, but they don’t shove it down your throat like Delaware does - implicit recognition that people typically come to a government web site because they have a problem or need to conduct a transaction with government.

In addition, both have prominently displayed links to their government data catalogs. Both Texas and California recognize that a central element of Gov 2.0 websites is data.

It’s somewhat alarming to see Delaware falling so far behind this trend that is being embraced in so many other parts of the country. A lot of effort and time went into the redesign of the delaware.gov site and not a single open data set is to be found anywhere.

Sad.

What’s Old is New: How Citizens Communicate with Government

Posted by Mark Headd under Cell Phones, News, Open Government

Social media enthusiasts (myself included) let out a big huzzah recently at the results of a study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project entitled Government Online.

The report, like a similar one several years ago, looks at how citizens communicate and interact with their government. This study focused specifically on online contact with government, the use of social media to interact with government and citizen use of open government data.

Open Government Data and Social Media Take Hold

For social media and open government proponents, the findings are exciting:

Efforts by government agencies to post their data online are resonating with citizens. Fully 40% of online adults went online in the preceding year to access data and information about government (for instance, by looking up stimulus spending, political campaign contributions or the text of legislation).

Citizen interactions with government are moving beyond the website. Nearly one third (31%) of online adults use online platforms such as blogs, social networking sites, email, online video or text messaging to get government information.

This is great stuff. It means that efforts to open up government data sets and provide them to citizens in easily consumable formats is starting to pay off. It also means that government takeup of social media tools is providing people with more options, and more opportunities to connect with their government.

Phones Still Reign Supreme

But perhaps the most important piece of information in this report (at least in my mind) is less obvious. Tucked into the introductory section, which many people probably jump right past to get to the findings, is this little nugget of information:

As we found in our last survey of e-government in August 2003, telephone contact is the overall most preferred contact method when people have a problem, question or task involving the government. Currently, 35% of Americans say they prefer using the telephone in these circumstances, a figure that is relatively unchanged from the 38% who said so in 2003.

That’s right. Most people prefer to contact their government using the plain old telephone - more than using a website, or sending an e-mail or even going to a government office in person. The granddaddy of communication technologies still outpaces all others when it comes to citizen interaction with government. And that preference hasn’t changed during the time since the first tweet or since Facebook left the dorm room and went mainstream.

These results are impacted somewhat by the inclusion of both people who are regular online user and those who are not. Looking only at Internet users and those who access the mobile web does show a preference for online communication with government over the telephone, but not by much. And even for those who are regular Internet users with broadband connections and access to the mobile web, the ordinary telephone is still the hotness:

…it is notable that the telephone remains relatively popular even among the technologically proficient, as one-third of home broadband (32%) and wireless internet users (32%) say that the telephone is their favorite means of contact when they need to get in touch with government.

The Takeaway for Open Government and Social Media Advocates

It might be natural for those advocating for the release of more open government data (to build more open government apps) and the use of social media by government to be discouraged by these findings. But I think that citizen preference for using the telephone to contact their government presents some unique opportunities for the Gov 2.0 movement.

As I’ve said many times before, open government data and APIs make a wonderful foundation for cutting edge telephone applications. This was the philosophy behind the application I built last year that uses the Open Leg API from the NY Senate. This application is available through multiple channels, including the plain old telephone - the phone channel for this application is available in both English and Spanish.

The platforms available for building telephone applications are enormously more sophisticated than they were just a few years ago. With tools like Voxeo’s Tropo platform, its relatively easy to build sophisticated applications that serve multiple communications channels from a single code base. It’s never been easier or less expensive to build telephone applications. Ever.

The volumes of open government data and APIs that are now available make the case for building cool telephone applications that much more compelling. More open government data = more cool applications.

Additionally, as the worlds of telephony and social media converge, opportunities for what I call “cascading modality” will continue to present themselves. Take the case of Internet users discussed above who are comfortable with the mobile web. Even those people may still find the telephone a convenient way to connect with their government. These people are prime candidates for cascading modality.

Imagine a citizen out for a leisurely stroll with their dog in their neighborhood when they notice some graffiti on a sidewalk. One day soon that citizen mightwill be able to send out a short tweet to a twitter application like so:

@twitterbot #graffiti 999-555-1212

Their tweet would have their location embedded in it, and would initiate a phone call to 999-555-1212. The Twitter application would connect the citizen with a government call center and use CTI to pass on the type of incident and the location to the operator. The citizen would then talk to the operator and give other relevant details to start a service request.

At the end of the day, one of the primary justifications for open government and Gov 2.0 is to make it more efficient for people to find out about how their government works and easier to interact with government officials.

The importance of the telephone in citizen communication with government must help guide the kinds of data and APIs that governments make available to citizens and developers. Additionally, as governments continue to look at social media as a way to engage and interact with citizens, they must carefully consider how telephone communication fits into this strategy.

The ordinary telephone has been with us for over 130 years. If the findings of the latest Pew Internet report are any indication, it’s not going away any time soon.

Delaware Government on YouTube

Posted by Mark Headd under News, Open Government

I think it’s great the Delaware Government has an official channel on YouTube, I just can’t find anything to watch on it.

The most obvious omission from the Delaware Government YouTube Channel seems to be any coverage of official government business (unless I’m missing something). I want to see committee meetings, legislative and executive hearings, courtroom drama, etc.

Delaware should take a hint from New York, where the State Senate has launched a significantly more advanced site devoted to live video streaming of Senate sessions and a beefy library of committee hearings and other important content. Hell, even the recent coup in the Senate, which was orchestrated by Republicans and two breakaway Democrats, was streamed live and available for viewing later.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s nice that Delaware government has its toe in the water on video coverage of state government - now its time to jump in with both feet.

Automatic for the People

Posted by Mark Headd under News, Twitter

Like lots of others, I think its worth noting San Francisco’s innovative use of Twitter. San Francisco residents can now use Twitter to send a message to an operator at the City’s 311 call center and receive a Tweet back.

This is exactly the type of interactive use of Twitter by governments I had in mind when I wrote about Twitter 2.0 for the public sector a few months ago. Still, now that I see an actual use of Twitter by a government to interact with citizens, I’m wondering if this approach can be improved upon, to make it more efficient for governments and still user friendly for citizens.

While San Francisco’s use of Twitter is indeed convenient for citizens, it has many of the same cost implications for government. Tweets to 311 operators must still be processed “manually” - someone has to read the content of a Tweet (even if its prefiltered based on message content) and assign a follow up action, or respond directly if its been assigned to them. And even though San Francisco is reportedly using the very interesting Twitter-CRM product CoTweet to make this process more efficient, I wonder if there isn’t a better way to do this.

I think this would be a perfect scenario to deploy an interactive IM/SMS BOT. Citizens could interact with an application to report common 311 service requests - potholes, traffic-light outages, abandoned vehicles, etc. As long as certain keywords / hashtags are used in the message content (something that probably needs to be done if Twitter is used instead anyway) it should be pretty easy to process reliably in an automatic way. Moreover, using an IM/SMS BOT would allow the process to have multiple steps, where the application and the citizen could exchange information successively.

For example, a citizen using a BOT to report a traffic signal outage could receive a an automated response asking if there are any noticeable power outages in the vicinity, or telling them to send a follow up message when the repair crew arrives (to audit response times). The possibilities are enormous.

Requests that could not be processed automatically could be routed to a live operator and handled the traditional way. This would more efficiently allocate the finite resource of 311 operators — human operators would only intervene in the processing of 311 service requests when they could not be processed automatically.

Here’s hoping that someday very soon, we’ll see a government go “automatic for the people” with 311 service requests.

Data.gov

Posted by Mark Headd under News, Open Government

…is here !!

Voxeo Announces New Tropo Hotness: COBOL!

Posted by Mark Headd under Development Tools, News

Several weeks ago, Voxeo rocked the voice application development world by introducing Tropo, a new platform that allows developers to build voice applications in a variety of different languages.

Tropo lets developers build voice applications in JavaScript, Ruby, Python, PHP and more. I mentioned Tropo briefly in my last post, where I describe a voice application I built using VoiceXML/PHP — I’ll be porting this app to Tropo shortly so that it will be close to 100% PHP and running on the Tropo platform.

Voxeo announced today that they are adding support for yet another development language to Tropo — COBOL. This is big - it brings the total number of languages supported to a half dozen. I can’t wait to see what Voxeo has in store for Tropo next!

Let me tell you something - you go into a bar and drop some hints that you are coding your Tropo app in COBOL and you will not be leaving alone.

I guarantee it!

Facebook Drama in Maryland

Posted by Mark Headd under News

Seems the Maryland Legislature will once again have access to Facebook:

Five days after sparking protests from lawmakers over his decision to block access to the popular networking site from legislative computers, the head of the assembly’s information technology office said yesterday that he will reopen access to Facebook in the next day or two.

It seems concerns over viruses and malware prompted the ban in the first place. The Director of the Maryland Legislature’s Information Services, Mike Gaudiello, now says that his office has “put in place tools to scan legislative computers for the viruses and harmful software that prompted the block…”.

That raised my eyebrows a bit - while Facebook can be (and has been) used to propagate viruses, the biggest threat to government computers is undoubtedly still regular old e-mail. If you’ve got safeguards in place to protect state computers from e-mail propagated viruses, I’m guessing that you’re probably covered as far as Facebook is concerned.

As social networking tools become more integral to the communications between elected officials and their constituents, a host of thorny issues are likely to arise. I’m curious to see how governments will address these issues:

• Are the direct messages that people can send via Facebook and Twitter subject to public record requirements?
• Are direct messages that people can send via Facebook and Twitter FOIA-able?
• Do status updates in Facebook or Tweets meet the requirements for public meeting notices?

It will be interesting to watch as this continues to develop.

BTW, Hats off to @mmahaffie for the link to the article.

Verizon Launches Hosted VoiceXML Platform

Posted by Mark Headd under News

A friend just sent this to me:

Verizon Business today launched Open Hosted Speech Services (OHSS), a speech platform that allows customers to create and host their own speech applications…[the platform includes] a hosted IVR application, a VoiceXML interpreter, text-to-speech capabilities, and a speaker verification application.

Hey, Verizon… 2001 called for you. Its wants its idea back.

Companies like Voxeo, BeVocal (now owned by Nuance) and TellMe (now owned by Microsoft) have been doing this for a long time.

A Look at Google’s FCC Auction Strategy

Posted by Mark Headd under News

The NY Times has a really interesting article detailing the strategy of Google executives bidding on wireless spectrum in the recent FCC auction.

Google’s legacy from this historic auction is that it helped ensure that a portion of the spectrum purchased would be subject to specific requirements of openness. The “C Block” of spectrum that the FCC will require be managed under the tenants of openness was ultimately won by Verizon Wireless.

Even though Google didn’t “win” the auction for the C Block outright, there are those that believe that their strategy of opening up the world of wireless communication may have been served nonetheless:

“If Google had won a license, there was only downside risk for them,” said Gregory L. Rosston, a former F.C.C. official and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. “Now they can just spend $1 million a year on a law firm to ensure Verizon lives up to the openness requirements.”