The process began with engaging real citizens first. Last October, FCC Managing Director Steven VanRoekel let users look under the hood and directly provide feedback for the design. Soliciting feedback right from the start was part of the key for success. Usability issues and other sticking points that had persisted on the old FCC.gov site for years were finally brought to task.

In addition to improving the usability and functionality, many of the latest Web 2.0 principles and technologies have been integrated into the new site, assuring this new FCC site can “keep up with the pace of the Internet.”

Reading some of the blogoshpere’s first reactions to the overhaul, you’ll see nothing but smiles on our faces:

• “FCC.gov reboots as an open government platform” by Alex Howard (aka @digiphile)
• “Miraculous makeover: using the new FCC.gov” by Matthew Lasar
• “Having Sat Out the Aughts, FCC.gov Steps into the Modern Age” by Nancy Scola

Unlocking the power of the FCC through smart design and engagement is just the beginning. We’re excited to see how the public takes advantage of the simpler design, open data, and powerful FCC toolkit.

And of course, if you haven’t checked it out yet, please do so and feel free to leave us a comment with your thoughts: http://beta.fcc.gov/

You can also contribute your feedback directly to the FCC.  Your thoughts and ideas about additional features, improving the user experience, and/or improving the functionality of the website will be considered in future releases and updates: http://fccdotgov.uservoice.com/forums/105541-a-new-fcc-gov-feedback

“A Single Drop of Water is an environmental awareness project that uses the arts, specifically photography, to document the journey of water. Our goal is to raise awareness about this importance resource, it’s scarcity in some communities, and water pollution. The project will provide photographers with a platform for sharing their images and stories. Winning entries shall be exhibited in New York City, and will be used in future Statement Arts education materials to teach students about water and inspire them to produce their own artistic work.”

The Photo Contest Sponsor, Statement Arts, chose the Votridea Contest Platform to run and effectively manage their online contest, including file uploads, voting, content moderation, analytics reports, and more. Contestants pay a small entry fee to submit their photo; the proceeds going towards the Statement Arts programs and the contest prizes.

Contestants who enter become eligible to win a $1500 Grand Prize and their photo exhibited in New York City as part of the World Water Day celebrations! Submissions are already underway, so the time to act is now!

To learn more about A Single Drop Of Water visit: http://www.asingledropofwater.org/

On September 25th, David Keener, a Solutions Architect for MetroStar System’s New Media Group, spoke at SunnyConf in Phoenix, Arizona. SunnyConf is Arizona’s first Ruby conference.

According to David Keener, “I’m pleased to be one of the inaugural speakers for what is shaping up to be a great annual technical conference for Arizona. It may be the first year of the conference, but they’ve assembled a great group of speakers. I’m excited to have been invited to be one of them.”

Taking advantage of his extensive social media experience at MetroStar, Dave presented “Leveraging Rails to Build Facebook Applications.” His talk builds on his experience with real-life clients, both commercial and government, who are increasingly clamoring for social features to be “baked into” business applications in order to communicate more effectively with customers.

Speakers at SunnyConf: Back Row: Blake Mizerany, creator of the Sinatra web framework; Jeremy Ashkenas, creator of the CoffeeScript language and lead developer for DocumentCloud; Les Hill, Hashrocket consultant, open source contributor and occasional host of the Ruby5 podcast; Charles Nutter, co-lead for the JRuby initiative; David Keener, Senior Solutions Architect for MetroStar Systems and co-found of the RubyNation conference; and Front Row: Brian Sam-Bodden, creator of the Trellis component framework; Jim Remsik, Haskrocket consultant and well-known open source contributor; Luigi Montanez. developer for Sunlight Labs.

Find out more about the conference at:
http://www.sunnyconf.com/

MetroStar Systems has implemented Microsoft’s Pivot technology to create a new way to search Supernova: Visually! If you haven’t checked it out yet, give it a try by clicking here and see what catches your eye!

What is Pivot? Put simply, it’s an interactive navigation system built by Microsoft (on top of Silverlight) to organize vast quantities of data in a way that’s both fun and easy. To learn more about the product, check out the Pivot website: http://getpivot.com/

What excites us most about this technology is the variety of ways our posts can be visualized: By Author, Category, Post Date, or even by Tag! This is the kind of navigation that you simply do not get with a traditional archive.

For those of you who are more technically oriented, you can check out Lee Kohn’s earlier blog post to see what code we implemented to get our new visual search up and running.

What are you waiting for? Scroll up and click on the friendly alien to give it a shot!

Nearly a year and a half (524 days to be precise) has passed since we released Supernova to the world, shedding light on the inner workings of MetroStar Systems. In that time we’ve experienced continuous expansion, enjoyed a wide spectrum of client projects, and made a positive impact in our local and global community.

But as things continue to heat up our blog has been getting denser and denser. Rather than let it collapse on itself, we took the initiative; choosing to put in the energy so Supernova could shine once again.

So what’s changed? Here are just a few of the major changes we’ve implemented:

1. A much, much simpler interface. In both the theme/layout and in the organization of the blog, we took every step to ensure that we ended up with a much cleaner, easier-to-navigate blog. We literally cut our categories down from 57 to 5! All of the widgets in the sidereel were re-organized into a better configuration. Search is now prominently featured at the top.

2. A whole bunch of behind-the-scenes: Not all of the work that was done is immediately visible on the front page. We went through a kind of “spring cleaning” phase: deleting old and unused media, evaluating and updating plugins, consolidating tags, that sort of thing.

3. A shift to WordPress 3 “Thelonious” of course! This is a powerful platform that gives us the flexibility we need to make a blog like Supernova. A huge thanks to the entire WordPress team for putting together this awesome package! We found the upgrade to be simple, and easy.

4. Visual Search functionality! Using Silverlight + Pivot we are now able to visually navigate Supernova posts and pages. If you haven’t seen it in action yet, check it out!

None of this would have been possible without a stellar team of marketers and designers to build it. Special thanks to Ali Manouchehri, Daniel Nguyen, Hector Portillo, AJ Shah, Monica Huie, and Patricia Joo!!

For your consideration: click here to see a screenshot of the old theme. We’d LOVE to hear your feedback on the new look and feel!

And finally, I’d like to thank Fritz Zwicky for coining the term “Supernova.”

To infinity and beyond!

-D

And MetroStar Systems will see you there!

Janis Hall, Ricardo Palhano, and Mostafa Elzhogbi will all be flying up to the Big Apple this year to talk SharePoint and, as speakers, cover a SharePoint-specific topic. Mostafa, a Microsoft C# MVP since 2006, will be giving a tech-oriented talk on SharePoint Sandbox solutions and demoing its applications and limitations. Janis Hall and Ricardo Palhano, on the other hand, will be holding a higher level session on SharePoint Governance.

“I’m very excited to meet up with the other speakers, many of us only see each other at these types of events. I’m also looking forward to dialogue and interactions with others attending the event. Being in the presence of other enthusiasts is exhilarating and I always leave these events with new inspiration and ideas. I must say that I’m also really looking forward to a visit we’re planning to the nearby cupcake shop. From the online pictures, it looks like chocolate for days…” said Janis Hall, Lead SharePoint Instructor.

You can also attend the event virtually via Twitter using the hashtag: #SPSNY or simply by following Janis and Mostafa. Janis Hall and Ricardo Palhano will also be giving their SharePoint Governance presentation in DC on August 12th with the SharePoint User Group of Washington, DC.

This is shaping up to be an amazing event and we hope you’ll join us! Break a leg, Janis, Ricardo, and Mostafa!

Click to find out more about this event

]]> http://blog.metrostarsystems.com/2010/07/22/sharepoint-saturday-ny/feed/ 2 http://blog.metrostarsystems.com/2010/06/10/sharepoint-saturday-dc/ http://blog.metrostarsystems.com/2010/06/10/sharepoint-saturday-dc/#comments Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:20:46 +0000 Derek Yale http://blog.metrostarsystems.com/?p=2968 ... ]]> Sharepoint Saturday, Washington DC was held on May 15th this year. The event, at no charge to registrants, offers a full day of knowledge sharing, networking and seminars.

MetroStar Systems was delighted to attend and support SPSDC. Our very own SharePoint experts, Janis Hall and Ricardo Palhano, presented on SharePoint Governance, specifically covering details on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) and SharePoint 2010.

Mark Miller, Bill English, Dux Raymond, Dan Usher, Dan Lewis, Joy Earles, Fabian Williams, Deff Deverter, and Marcy Kellar were among the prominent SharePoint leaders in attendance, as well as a number of MVPs. With such a stellar cast of SharePoint experts, we took the opportunity to ask some of the speakers their thoughts on where women stood in the tech-industry. The responses were intriguing, but you’ll have to check out the video below to hear them…

The next SharePoint Saturday will be held July 31st in New York City.  Mostafa Elzoghbi, Ricardo Palhano and Janis Hall will be attending and representing MetroStar System’s skills and offerings. We hope you’ll join us!

Click to find out more about this event

This year’s RubyNation conference will take place on Friday April 9th and Saturday April 10th at the Sheraton Reston Hotel in Reston, Virginia.  In its 3rd year, RubyNation is a two-day conference presented by the Washington, DC area Ruby community that “features debate and discussions of the latest trends, techniques, and tools in Ruby development, design, deployment, business and marketing.”  This year’s speakers include Dave Thomas (Co-Author of Agile Manifesto and Author of The Pragmatic Programmer, Agile Web Development with Rails and Programming Ruby), Jeff Barr (Amazon Web Services), and MetroStar Systems‘ very own Dave McVicar and David Keener (shameless plug). Click on the list of speakers and agenda for complete details and info.

MetroStar Sytems is proud to be a diamond sponsor for this event and happy to support the Washington DC area Ruby Community.  Members of our team will be attending, volunteering, filming, and presenting at RubyNation, so please leave us a comment below if you plan to come.  We will also be hosting the “Ruby-B-Q” at our headquarters on Friday evening (after RubyNation Day 1) featuring food and drinks.  Registration for the conference is still open, but get your tickets soon before the event sells out: http://rubynation.org/registration

Today, X-Life Games launches the “Who Am I?” Poetry Contest.  The contest encourages you to use poetry to describe yourself on a global level while sharing ideas of tolerance and respect for other cultures, societies, and environments around the world.

“X-Life Games has been such a fun and educational experience thus far for everybody involved, and we wanted to figure out a way to celebrate this success,” said Daniel Nguyen, Community Manager of X-Life Games. “By coordinating the Poetry Contest, we reward our fans with a challenge that yields fun and exciting prizes, as well as continues promoting cultural unification and understanding through the X-Life Games modules.”

Submissions for the contest will be accepted until midnight on Sunday October 4th.  The VIP Judging panel, featuring MetroStar Systems executives and two professors from Georgetown University, will select finalists.  Then there will be a public voting period beginning Tuesday, October 13 that will ultimately decide the winners.

Prizes:

• 1^st Prize:          Apple iTouch for 1^st place winner & $1,000.00 USD donated on behalf of the winner to a charity of the winner’s choice*

• 2^nd Prize:          Apple iPod Nano for 2^nd place winner & $500.00 USD donated on behalf of the winner to a charity of the winner’s choice*

• 3^rd Prize:          Apple iPod Shuffle for 3^rd place winner & $250.00 USD donated on behalf of the winner to a charity of the winner’s choice*

*MetroStar Systems will provide a list of acceptable charities that the winners can select from to have the respective prize donation donated on the winner’s behalf

The contest will use Wildfire App‘s Promotions application and will be hosted on the X-Life Games fanpage on Facebook.  Please visit http://www.facebook.com/xlifegames.community for complete details, rules, and to enter the contest.

Article Source: Smart Planet.com

More about Smart Planet:

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Try e-diplomacy out for yourself:

Download the free mobile game at the recently revamped X-Life Games.com website. To join the X-Life Games Community become a Fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @xlifegames.