Tracking how technology is transforming interaction between governments and citizens.
Beth Lovett
Beth Lovett oversees all Adobe outbound communication, demand generation, and overall marketing programs for Government.
Prior to Adobe, Beth spent nearly 15 years in consulting and solutions marketing roles at VeriSign, webMethods and Manugistics. Beth hold a Bachelor’s degree in Business Logistics and International Business from the Pennsylvania State University, including a semester studying European Community Law and Economics at the Universiteit Maastricht in the Netherlands. Beth is a Washington, D.C. area native now living in San Francisco.
We recently sat down with Arun Anantharaman, Adobe’s VP and GM of Adobe Connect, to get his perspective on Web conferencing and the Government market. This is the first segment of a three-part interview with Arun. In today’s video he discusses:
0:05 – His current role and background
0:50 – An overview of Adobe Connect
2:22 – The origins of the product
3:14 – Examples of Government usage of web conferencing
In parts two and three, which we’ll post yet this week, Arun covers:
Forum One Communications delivered the winning entry in Design for America’s (D4A) Visualizing Community Health Data category. The site, countysinrankings.org allows visitors to discover and compare their county’s health data to other counties by relating statistics to the 7 deadly sins. The entry was one of the more entertaining and humorous of the D4A submissions. For more details on how Forum One approached this project, take a look at the video below.
In the final installment of our series, Dave McAllistair, Adobe Director of Open Source and Standards, talks about open government, standards and open source.
GovFresh will be putting on their first local event on Sept 1 in San Francisco. Adobe is honored to host the event at our facilities in San Francisco. We asked Luke Fretwell of GovFresh to give us some context for the event. See the Q&A below.
Q: Thanks for spending a bit of time with us, Luke. Not that you need much of an introduction these days but can you give us a few sentences of background on yourself and GovFresh?
A: I grew up and worked in and around the Beltway. I studied Government & Politics and International Relations at George Mason University. I’m familiar with the Beltway culture how government operates.
I’ve spent much of the last 10 years in start-up environments and help entrepreneurs with their own ideas. I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to pursue my professional interests. During the dot-com bust, I helped re-work a VC-funded start-up into a government contractor and learned a lot about the business and procurement side of government.
GovFresh is the perfect storm of my Beltway past and Bay Area present. Having worked and lived in both has helped me understand how all this fits together.
Q: Talk a bit about the origins of the event you have coming up on Sept. 1. Where did the idea come from and what’s the purpose?
Recently, we sat down with Dave McAllister, Adobe Director of Open Source and Standards, to get his perspectives on “open” at Adobe. This is the first segment of a three part interview. In parts two and three, coming later this week, Dave will cover:
-Recent developments at Adobe re: open source and standards
-Discussion of PDF and Flash in terms of open
-Obama’s Open Government Initiative
-What’s next for Adobe in terms of open source and standards
Pitch Interactive ‘s submission was one of two tying winners of Sunlight Labs’ Design For America contest in the Visualization of Data from the Federal Budget and/or USASpending.gov category. Wesley Grubbs provides some insight into why Pitch Interactive entered the contest and their thinking behind the winning entry. Check out the Q & A below.
Q: Why did you decide to enter the Design for America contest?
A: We have a lot of respect for the Sunlight Foundation and their efforts in helping people better understand Government data that is increasingly becoming more open and complex. Our work uses visual metaphors and design theory in an attempt to captivate an audience and tell a story. This contest focused on exploring new ways to explore data focusing on design and artistic talents and we saw this as a great opportunity for us.
A Good Company was selected as the winner of Sunlight Labs’ Design For America contest in the Redesign of a .Gov Website category. The designers tackled the Internal Revenue Service site. Take a look at the current IRS.gov site and compare it to the redesigned site created by the two designers, Micah and Caroline. Pretty amazing transformation!
For insight into why the designers chose IRS and their thinking behind the redesign, check out the two videos below.
Matt McKenna and Eddie Elliott created WhoPaidThem.com, one of the two entries that tied for winner of Sunlight Labs’ Design for America contest in the Data Visualization of Sunlight Community Data category.
WhoPaidThem aims to challenge our individual and collective preconceptions about political funding through a series of interactive graphics. To hear more about the winning entry, check out Matt’s short video below.
The July/August issue of Harvard Business Review features the article titled “Empowered,” by Josh Bernoff and Ted Shadler – a great read on how some leading companies are empowering their employees to use social technologies to interact with customers and help solve their problems. One of the highlighted use cases is the U.S. State Department, which used Adobe Connect to create Co.Nx (pronounced “connex”) for presenting webchats with speakers ranging from President Obama, to the upcoming webchat with Curt Onalfo, head coach of D.C. United. With a strong presence on Facebook, Co.Nx has more than 100,000 fans and its webchats are viewed by tens of thousands throughout the world.
Read more about some of the cool ways companies are using Adobe Connect to connect with their employees and customers here.
but can you give us a few sentences of background on yourself and GovFresh?
