Governmental spending transparency is catching on at the state level. Alaska is the latest of ten states to effectively throw its books wide open to anyone with Internet access. The state calls it Checkbook Online, and describes it as such:

The State of Alaska is publishing information from the statewide accounting system on the web. This is part of a national trend for governments to develop websites that allow constituents to view financial information in searchable formats. Such websites are widely considered to improve transparency into the financial operations of government.

Residents of “The Last Frontier” doubtless enjoy being able to see what elected officials are doing with their tax dollars. The rest of us should have it so good.

Ypulse, which touts daily news and commentary about Generation Y for media and marketing professionals, just concluded their College Mashup conference on Friday. The focus was on how to connect with today’s totally-wired college student. Something that may be of interest to marketers, sure, but should also be on the minds of employers, too. For employers trying to fill the void left by retiring Baby Boomers, recruiting IS marketing. So what messages work?

An event sponsor, Survey U, offered up some stats related to what these kids want in their advertising. So if you want their attention, check this:

60% of respondents said being truthful is extremely important, while only 15% gave the same importance to being stylish, and only 8% felt it was extremely important to exude cool. That’s great news.

Say you’re recruiting for a federal agency; it will be much easier to talk honestly about a job offering or agency in general than it will be to try to inject style or coolness into public service.

Honest language is more evergreen, too. Imagine trying to write messaging that exuded cool. Sure, I know there is a massive ad industry trying to do that very thing day in and day out, but they don’t sleep. When you try to exude cool, you risk your message being oh so not cool by the time it hits the audience.

Style and cool are two things that move very quickly and are hard to nail just right. But honesty? Hopefully that comes pretty easily.

Sometimes it’s when you experience something that affects how you experience it. Timing is everything, right?

Today my friend, a fellow new parent, sent me to Gever Tulley’s TED presentation titled 5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do. Obviously that was meant to be taken for what it was, an enlightening commentary on countering the ever-tightening safety regulations that, to paraphrase Tulley, are essentially stunting our children’s educational experiences. I couldn’t help taking more from it, due largely to when I watched it.

There’s been a lot of talk around Mind & Media lately, and in the press in general, about the impending retirement of baby boomers. The federal government in particular is facing huge a wave of boomer-based workforce retirement, with a younger generation that just doesn’t have the numbers to fill in. In response, we’ve had agencies turn to us, as far back as 2003, to help recruit job candidates and train existing workers. After a few years of navigating those waters, I couldn’t help draw some comparisons to Tulley’s talk.

As Tulley tells it, we are ever-increasing the safety measures around our children to the point of immobility. Society as a whole is so concerned with a bruise-free existence that experimentation and experiential learning are stifled, and real breakthroughs in understanding and education are missed. Secure, sure, but stunted.

Back to the fed. They need to recruit and train to tackle an impending disaster. Online media should be the cornerstone of those efforts, but all too often agencies are cocooned in safety and security and watch-dogging to the detriment of the effort.

No hard data to back up this claim, but I’m certain that folks who access federal agency websites or intranets actually use the public Internet as well. They’ve heard of YouTube, they’ve seen a Flash animation, and they’ve listened to streaming audio. To pound it home, do you think 20-something college graduates may be familiar with such things? Graduates who may consider employment in the federal workforce? They live it. They expect it. They want to be engaged. And yet use of, and access to, the so-called new media is often outside scope for federal agencies.

Some examples: I’ve come across folks within federal agencies who want us to stream media for their audience but can’t access the media while at work due to policies that forbid it. I’ve had folks request we use Flash animations to aid in training, only to find that they are unable to install Flash player on their agency computers. And I’ve seen just-in-time online training get mired in months of legal review. Not so just-in-time anymore, eh? What’s frustrating is that they are workers in those agencies who get it and who want to evolve the media that is coming out of those agencies. It’s just an uphill climb.

Perhaps federal agencies are scared of new media or dynamic websites, what with viruses, bandwidth constraints, employees watching streaming music videos, and what have you. Maybe they don’t know how to leverage the technology. I understand the gargantuan federal government isn’t nimble, but a systemic shift in thinking is necessary if they are to compete for recruits or are going to effectively train the workforce that remains after The Great Retirement. Static doesn’t do it anymore. Static content doesn’t attract, engage, or help retain. It sure as hell doesn’t compete. Agencies may consider it playing with fire, but, hell, if we can let our kids do it, how bad can it hurt?

It’s time to let folks get dirty, get a little banged up. This is no time to be timid.

I recently read about the legal action taken by the National Federation of the Blind against Target for having an inaccessible website. Web accessibility refers to the practice of making webpages understandable to people with disabilities. They have to use a wide range of user agent devices instead of standard Web browsers. This case has been with the California District Court for more than a year, and was recently granted class-action status.

The World Wide Web revolutionized how people get information—but it doesn’t always work well for everyone. As Communication Architects, we need to be sensitive to the needs of those with disabilities—and respond with various techniques that make our websites more accessible.

With our government clients, Web accessibility isn’t just an option—it’s the law.

In 1973, Congress passed the Rehabilitation Act, which guarantees:

No qualified individual with a disability in the United States…shall, solely by reason of her or his disability, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance or under any program or activity conducted by any Executive agency or by the United States Postal Service.

Section 508 is a 1998 amendment to the Workforce Rehabilitation Act of 1973 requiring electronic and information technology developed or purchased by the federal government be accessible by people with disabilities. This amendment created binding, enforceable standards that were incorporated into the Federal Procurement procedures complete with compliancy procedure and reporting requirements.

While accessibility tends to get attention in the government world—via Section 508—it should be on every organization’s mind.

The ruling by the California District Court has made it painfully obvious for Target! Making sites accessible takes more time and effort, effort that is often not seen in the final site, but is still important for all audiences.

What remains to be seen is how this case will affect the future of Web accessibility. Will accessibility get the attention it deserves in the corporate world, or will it go into settlement without a final court decision?

Let me know where you think this will go and what you think needs to be done to bring more attention to the world of Web accessibility and 508 compliancy.

Friday I spent most of the day at User Focus, the UPA DC metro chapter’s second annual conference. In their words, the conference was:

A one day exchange of ideas and experiences that demonstrate the value of usability in successful design.

It was that indeed. I really liked it. Small, close to home, and full of attendees working in the area. Understandably, it was good for networking, but it was also notable for the focus of the presentations.

Unlike national events in which you might hear top-tier media firms brag about pushing the limits of Web design and interactivity, the attendees and presenters were talking about issues facing organizations in this area, namely federal government and nonprofits.

How, for example, do you make the two-million-page Census.gov site easy to navigate? Can nonprofits better serve their members via well-designed online social networks? Topics maybe not have been sexy, but they are real and applicable to the folks I work with and the clients we serve.

I also have to give a shout to Ovo Studios, one of the few vendors set up at User Focus. Their usability testing suite was cool for sure. What impressed me is that they offer their software on a lease-to-own basis, Ovo by the Pound. That means small Web design/development companies can offer some pretty high-end usability testing and reporting without having to drop huge dollars up front on software and training. For those of us working fee-for-service, that’s awesome. We can write those services into our proposals and afford to execute them no matter how infrequently they’re purchased.

Music execs are still reeling from Radiohead’s figurative finger in their proverbial eye—essentially an industry end-run that lets listeners decide how much they want to pay for the band’s new release. The reasoning is sound. At the end of the day, the band will make as much, if not more, than what they would have pocketed had they trusted distribution to a major label.

Similarly, UC Berkeley has just put a free fall course catalog online as well—hundreds of lectures hosted on YouTube and ready for everyone’s edification. MIT also offers up free courses, giving anyone with online access the opportunity to indulge in their own Good Will Hunting moment. No tuition required.

Check out Physics for Future Presidents:

The quality of content available online runs the gamut from sublime to ridiculous, and while traditionalist critics are quick to claim that online outlets simply give hacks a larger audience, the Web is also clearly evolving into a great leveler—a means of education and entertainment courtesy of well-respected players who want people to experience their products and services. It’s an investment in awareness that offers tremendous benefits to Web citizenry and payback in visibility and credibility for purveyors.

We’re swamped. Everyone’s neck deep in information about a near-infinite number of subjects. How do we cope? By deluding ourselves into thinking we can assimilate everything.

But trying to process all that data from so many media streams is going to turn our brains into soup. We’re already seeing the impact it’s having on social skills (to say nothing of how people drive). Meeting and conversations are rarely in-the-moment events. Everyone is too busy text-messaging and thumbing email responses.

Such is the double-edged source of information and interconnectivity. We know more. We get more done. But are precise focus and valid feedback being compromised because we’re trying to see everything with a wide-angle lens?

43 Folders cites Stanley Bing’s assessment of what the informational deluge is doing to business leaders.

The author’s prediction:

I think one of the emerging leadership skills of the next five years will be learning how to do brilliant filtering—either programatically or by delegating information-sorting to others. To ultimately become someone whose system accounts for incoming data in smart ways and who never has to make excuses about too much stuff.

In a meeting this morning, our illustrious leader noted that he wades through dozens of marketing, communications, multimedia, and video e-newsletters weekly. Like most execs, he’s dedicated to keeping up with, if not outpacing, industry-specific innovations and insights. As information sources grow exponentially, he, like any top dog who wants to stay tuned in, is going to have to limit review to a few favorites and ask like-minded staff and trusted consultants to pick up the slack.

A recent article on Time.com is getting a lot of traction on Digg today:

Specialized credit/debit card kiosks are popping up in churches.

“Automatic checking account withdrawals are used by some churches, and more recently, ATM-like kiosks are now available in many church corridors and lobbies, where parishioners can swipe a card and receive a printed receipt, which they can either save for the IRS or plunk into the collection basket with a flourish, so pew mates will know they’re not spiritual freeloaders. “

Is it brilliant? Is it sacrilegious? One Digg comment added a Bible verse (Matthew 21:12,13) to the argument.

The driving reason for the appearance of ATMs in churches is a new IRS rule, but c’mon, you can’t tell me the churches aren’t simply loving the idea flat out. The church kiosk is brilliant because it makes an action easy. When something is easy, that in itself is added persuasion to execute the action. Now that’s good usability.

Let’s look at it out of the context of the church because that can be the only factor that’s muddying the waters: Whether you are a nonprofit or commercial entity, doesn’t it make sense to create an environment in which visitors/customers can do what they want to do, and what you want them to do, as easily as possible? If you run an association that relies on membership dues, would you ask website visitors to print out a form, fill it in, then write a check and finally mail it all in, stamp and all? No way. If it’s hard to do, fewer folks will do it. That’s why you make it easy with an online form. The visitor is happy because he or she can easily sign up, and you’re happy you’re getting new members.

What’s wrong with making it easy for church members to both make and track their donations? Churches have been asking for donations since the dawn of time. This news is simply an evolution. An evolution in recordkeeping, sure, but an evolution in usability design as well.

Marketers, writers, designers, programmers, even church administrators, whatever it is you are inspiring people to do, it’s no sin to make it easy.