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I was just reading a great post on O'reilly Radar called
The Future of Our Cities: Open, Crowdsourced, and Participatory, and it got my brain flowing in a direction I have already been thinking about.
I am really obsessed with Cloud Computing right now and the power it puts in my hand as the VP of Technology @ WebEvents Global. I am able to scale and grow our infrastructure as needed, and in the event industry this is very important. We used to either over-allocate or under-allocate server, bandwidth and storage needs because it is very hard to justify the budget to buy the amount of servers needed to support our peak points.
Cloud Computing has revolutionized my approach to meeting the needs of our customers. So I am constantly reading about other cloud initiatives by other players in the game, companies and recently the vision of Vivek Kundra who is Obama's chief CIO. He has some serious vision regarding implementation of Cloud Computing for the federal government.
So reading the O'Reilly article I start getting an idea for how much computing power city and state governments are going to need to begin sharing the load with their constituents.
The best way these governments can start saving money is to take a look at private, public or a hybrid cloud initiative. If they just look at the IaaS layer of cloud computing they can get their foot in the door. Then later they can start employing SaaS and PaaS layers and really start embracing some 2.0 concepts in getting their consitutents involved.
I have been saying for years I don't mind paying taxes, I just want a web-based form I can go to and select the parts of the city, county, state and federal budget I want my money to go to. Everyone tells me I am crazy. I understand that we are nowwhere near to this being possible.
Cloud Computing adoption by city, state, and federal government would be a start.
