Some Worthwhile Reading Material We've Come Across

We spend more time reading and less time writing than we'd prefer, but one happy byproduct of all that scanning and skimming is that we can save you some time by passing along the best of what we've come across lately. Herewith, our list of interesting, important and/or valuable reads:

• A $150,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation will go toward helping the state’s cybersecurity defenses by funding an interdisciplinary team at Cal Poly that includes the California Cybersecurity Institute (CCI). The team will augment the work of the California Office of Emergency Services, the California Department of Technology, the California Highway Patrol and the California Army National Guard, which are the state’s primary cybersecurity defenders.
  
  
• How many people get into the tech sector because they’d rather deal with data than syntax, grammar and the other minutiae of composition? (An equally fair question: How many people go into journalism because they have an easier time dealing with words than data and math?) For those whose job descriptions include writing or contributing to RFPs, here’s a handy primer on writing the perfect proposal.
  
  
• Despite years of investments worth billions of dollars, government has not seen the kind of radical results it expected from technology. A key reason why: States and localities first need to fix their capacity problem, says Bill Bott, former deputy CIO of Missouri. In 2007, Bott was named Public Official of the Year by Governing magazine, and in 2008 was recognized by Government Technology as one of the Top 25 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers in the public sector.
  
  
• Kamala Harris' political pedigree is pure California — she was district attorney for San Francisco and then state attorney general before being elected to the U.S. Senate — and even as she serves in the Senate and has entered the race for the presidency, she keeps an eye on IT in the Golden State. According to a story in Engadget, she wants to create a $15 million fund for state and local government technology projects. "She doesn't want to focus on routine IT maintenance," Engadget says, "but on making government services more accessible to the public. Hence, her proposed Digital Service Act of 2019.