Lisa McKinney

by Kelly Samson-Rickert
Building a stronger workforce is a challenge for any state, but building and recruiting a workforce prepared to tackle a state’s information technology needs is a particularly complex challenge. In an effort to do just that, the Maine Office of Information Technology, or OIT, has developed a workforce development program—an effort to ensure that the state is equipped to provide the latest in information technology services not only today, but in the future as well.

The Zika epidemic has received extensive international attention since the current outbreak was first confirmed in Brazil in May 2015. Since then, active Zika transmissions have been documented in more than 30 countries across much of the Americas region, with the number of confirmed infections expected to grow in the months ahead. Leading health officials have warned that large swathes of the United States, particularly across much of the South, will be at risk of localized Zika outbreaks as temperatures rise through the summer.

The chaos that unfolded with the 2000 presidential election transformed election administration in the United States. Most jurisdictions used federal money to purchase new voting machines, and guidelines were created to make the voting process more reliable. But that was almost 16 years ago. Technology has advanced, and the machines purchased at that time continue to age. State and local governments across the country are trying to figure out how to get new equipment with little money.

It has been called the sharing economy, the peer-to-peer economy, the app-based economy, the gig economy. New platforms and businesses such as Uber and Airbnb allow individuals to make use of underutilized resources such as their cars and homes, keep their own hours, and pocket the earnings. But with these new platforms have come fundamental concerns about the changing nature of work that expose thorny questions not only for workers, consumers and the businesses themselves but for government at all levels, as well.