**BLM National Web Conference**

Thursday, October 8

Afternoon Session

**A Telecast Originating from**

**the BLM National Training Center**

**October 7-9, 1998**

This transcript is from the closed-captioning file produced during the
telecast.

It may contain errors and omissions in transcription.

Session Four: Innovative Web Technology

Tom Patterson, National Park Service

Mary Lou West

Session Five: Policy on the Web

Glenn Schlarman, Office of Management and Budget

Announcer: the Bureau of Land Management Satellite Network Presents from
the BLM National Training Center in Phoenix, Arizona, Live Coverage of
the National BLM Web Conference. Now, Your Program Hosts, Tony Garrett
and Tina Gromo.

Garrett: Good Afternoon and Welcome Back to NTC\'s Live Coverage of the
BLM National Web Conference.

Gromo: Before the Conference Resumes Let\'s Go Upstairs to Talk with One
of People Who Worked So Hard to Make the Conference a Success, Bev
Gorney Is Standing by with Yvonne Kinney from the Headquarters Office in
Washington D.c. Hi, Bev.

Gorney: Now, to You in the Studio and Everyone Watch Us out In the
Field. I Standing Here with Yvonne Kinney. Wonderful Conferences Don\'t
Get Put Together Overnight. Would You like to Tell Us What You\'ve Been
Doing.

Kinney: for the past Seven Months I\'ve Been Working with Various
Members of the Organization in Each State Office. We\'ve Been Focusing
on Three Focus Areas, Communication, Technology and Business Practices
and Basically We Wanted to Identify an Audience That Would Cover Those
Areas. Basically We\'ve Had a Very Good Team and Have Worked Diligently
For the Last Several Months to Pull the Conference off and One Thing I
Wanted to Emphasize Is That We Basically Also Wanted to Show Different
Examples of Technology and How That Could Be Utilized on the Web. We\'ve
Had Various Pilot Sites in Each State Office Demonstrating Web
Technology. And Basically We Have an Exhibit of 20 Initiatives from the
Various State Offices. We Also Have Members of Other Agencies Such as
the Forest Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service Here with Us to
Share Ideas. We\'ve Also Included Our Customers and We Included Our
Customers And They Have Given Us New Requirements That We Need to Focus
on And Looking at Other Industry as Well as Other Government Agencies,
Seeing What They\'re Doing and Benchmarking Those Ideas So We Can Put
Together an Action Plan and on Friday, We\'re Going To Focus on
Developing an Action Plan, Looking at the Various Issues and We Have a
Focus Group That Will Meet about 30 Months From Now and Put Together a
Report for the Director.

Gorney: from this Will Come from the Future of What the Web Is Going to
Be like in the BLM.

Kinney: Yes, We\'ll Have Short‑term Implementation Plans as Well as
Long‑term Plans for Web Technology.

Gorney: about How Many People Were on the Team with You to Set up this
Wonderful Conference?

Kinney: We Had a Team of about 20 People Which Included as I Mentioned
the Various Disciplines and What We Wanted to Emphasize, to Emphasize
Business Practices and Using Web as a Tool for Technology. So We\'ve Had
Managers, Irm Technologists, Web Masters, Public Affairs Specialists.
So, a Variety of People from Different Backgrounds Who Could Interact
and Look at the Way BLM Looks at Their Businesses and Then Use the Web
Technology to Increase Communications to Serve Our Public Efficiently.

Gorney: I\'ve Noticed by Look at the Sessions it Is Not Just a Pure
Technology Conference but Indeed a Lot of Content Has Been Discussed
Here as Well.

Kinney: That Is Correct. We Wanted to Emphasize the Best Way to
Communicate with Our Customers, Stakeholders, as Well as Internal
Customers and Our Partners So We Basically Have Included a Session on
Communications Looking at the Design of the Web, Some Best Practices,
Some Dos and Don\'ts of What We Can Take Back to Our Own Offices and
Utilize. We Have Emphasized the Fact That We Have New Policies Looking
at The Design of the Web and Want to Incorporate That into Day to Day
Operations of Web Design.

Gorney: in Fact, Isn\'t There a Session this Afternoon Talking About
Something about Policy?

Kinney: Yes, We Have Glen Schlarman from the Office of Management and
Budget Who Will Be Emphasizing Agencywide Web Policy. It this Afternoon,
We Also Have a Very New Initiative Where We Basically Are Looking at
Fire Management with the National Parks Service and How They Communicate
Fire Management on Using Web Technology.

Gorney: Well, So Far It\'s Been Very Informative and I Hope It\'s Been
Very Informative for Everyone at Home as Well. Yvonne, Thanks for
Joining Us at this Time and Back to You in The Studio.

Gromo: Thanks Bev and Yvonne Very Much.

Garrett: I Wonder If We Could Pose a Question to Yvonne Through Bev.
Bev, We Heard Yvonne Talk about Long‑range Planning. I Wonder That\'s a
Much Dicier Prospect When You\'re Talking about Technology, the Changes
in a Period of Years Advances. How Do You Do Long‑range Planning Yvonne
When the Ground Seems To Shift Beneath Your Feet in Terms of
Technological Advancement, Very, Very Rapidly.

Gorney: Tony Is Asking How Do We Do Long‑range Planning When The
Technology Is Shifting So Rapidly?

Kinney: We Have to Look at Small Pilots, the Initiatives and Long‑term
Future Plans for Our Business Practices, Incorporating The Pilots in
Small Initiatives Then Transferring the Technology To Other States.

Gorney: Also I\'m Assuming That\'s Partly What the Group Is Going to Do
at the End of the Conference, Gather Information Together from the Work
Groups.

Kinney: That\'s Correct. We\'re Going to Do ‑‑ Identify Some Short‑term
Goals Then Also Some Long‑term Plans Looking at What Other Agencies Have
Implemented and Include That into Our Web Strategic Plan.

Gorney: Ok. Tony?

Garrett: Ok. Bev and Yvonne, Thanks Very Much. I Think We Were Fortunate
to Have Some of the Outstanding Programs That Are Either in Practical
Application Now in the BLM Showcased with Some of the Interviews We\'ve
Done Here in the Studio. When We Talk about the Pilot Projects, the One
That Comes to Mind this Morning Was Tom Patterson and His Pilot Project
for Mapping and Tracking the State in Advancement of Wildland Fires
Through the Technology That He\'s Taken off the Shelf and Put Together
the Gps and the Laptop and the Cam Ha O Ra and the Whole Thing. I Think
That\'s Added a Lot. Hopefully That\'s Added Some Elaboration to the
Points That Are Addressed in the Conference Sessions and Added Color to
Them for The Benefit of Our Viewers.

Gromo: Yesterday We Saw the Wild Horse and Burro Internet Adoption Site.
They\'ve Done a Couple of Pilots There and They\'re Having Great
Success. Now it Sounds like the Folks Are Look at the next Steps. Where
Are We Going to Go with the Implications.

Garrett: Yvonne Was Talking about the Best Practices Exercise Which Is
Evident in this Conference. If You Look at the Presentation That Tony
Stated and Mary Lou West Did, Just in a Period of Minutes, the Viewers
Had an Opportunity to See What Everybody Else in the Bureau Is Doing at
Least in Terms of Their Initial Web Site and Home Page and it Is That
Kind of Exchange of Information Really That Is the Central Purpose of a
Conference like this. So That We See What Are the Best Practices That
Are Going on out There in the Bureau and How Are People Benefitting from
Those And How Can Maybe the State of Montana or the State of Arizona
Look at What\'s Going on in California or the Dakotas or Oregon And
Adapt or Change and Utilize Those Best Practices to Suit Your Own Needs
and Your Own State. So, I Think from That Standpoint Alone, Certainly
the Conference Has Been a Valuable Experience for the Participants Here
in the Studio and for Us in the Studio and the Participants Upstairs in
Washington and the Viewers Throughout the BLM.

Gromo: it Does Appear Once Again Things Are about to Get Started up in
the Washington Room.

Garrett: Let\'s Take You Back Upstairs to the Conference Room Where
Larry Hamilton Is about to Introduce the next Session on Innovative Web
Technology.

Hamilton: Thanks, Tony. Did Everybody Have a Good Lunch. We\'re Going to
Take a Siesta at 5:00. So You\'ll Have a 30 Minute Break Between When We
Get Done this Afternoon and the Banquet So I\'ll Give You Something to
Look Forward To. I Think You\'ve Noticed as We\'ve Gone Through this
Conference Flexibility Kind of Has Been Our Middle Name Here. But I\'ve
Been Going Through Some of These Favorite Quotations of Mine and It\'s
Always Amazing to Me When You Have a List of Quotation How Much Germane
a Quotation Can Become When You Get In a Certain Situation. And Let\'s
See If this Applies or If You Think it Applies. Confidence Is
Preparation. Everything Else Is Beyond Your Control. Confidence Is
Preparation, Everything Else Is Beyond Your Control. That Really Played
Well for Me with the Communications Panel That We Had Here. And a
Message That We Keep Hearing from Folks Throughout All of These
Presentations Is the Amount of Work That it Takes in Order To Bring up a
Web Page, Put a Web Page Together, Have it Interlink, Have the Hot
Buttons. What\'s Been Interesting to Me Is to Have People from Montana
That Are Already Coming up and Said the next Time We Have the Web
Conference, Montana and the Dakotas Will Be Number One. So, That\'s the
Kind of Enthusiasm That I like to Hear and the Way I\'ve Got Figured If
We Could Just Get Our Hands on Some of Oregon\'s Money, We Could Go a
Long Ways. At this Point I Think We\'re Going to Have a Surprise Caller.
That\'s Going to Be Director Pat Shea Who\'s Going to Be Joining Us from
Washington D.c. And They\'re Trying to Capture That Phone Call and Then
Put it up Here So We\'ll Just Wait for a Couple of Seconds and See If
That Is Going to Come Up. Last Time We Had Technical Difficulties and at
the Debriefing Last Night, There Was a Lot of Concern on My Part as to
Why That Didn\'t Work. And Then I Was Just Elated to Find out That the
Reason it Didn\'t Work Is That I Had Turned off My Microphone and He
Couldn\'t Hear Me. And it Was Another Good Example of Where the Training
Wasn\'t Complete. I Want You to Relate to this. You May Be up Here Some
Day. You May Have the Benefit of All of My Mistakes Before this Is Over
with. But I Was Told the Day Before When We Went Through the Debriefing
Is When You Get over Here in Front of These Mics, You Need to Turn Yours
off Otherwise We\'re Going to Get this Horrendous Feedback and You\'re
Probably Going to Be Deaf in Your Right Ear. That Got My Attention and
So I Did Exactly What I Was Told. If They Would Have Told Me to Turn it
on When I Got Back up Here, it Wouldn\'t Have Been My Fault. They\'re
Not Buying That. All Right, Pat, Are You with Us?

Larry?

Hamilton: Good Afternoon, Pat.

How Are You?

Hamilton: We\'re Doing Great Here. We\'re Learning a Lot since We Talked
to You Last. We Had a Couple of Really Good Sessions with Some of Our
Customers That Have Given Us a Lot of Insight. Right Before Lunch We Had
Some Communications Experts That Really Gave Us Some Outstanding
Creative Ideas on Ways That We Can Improve Our Web Technology and BLM.
So There Was a Lot of Buzz Going on Here at Lunch and You May See Some
of Web Pages Changing by the End of next Week. We\'ve Gotten the
Critical Mass Generated Here and We\'re Ready to Take off. But We
Appreciate You Joining Us and I Understand You Have Some Words for Us
Here this Afternoon.

Well, I Have Heard from a Number of Different People That I Have Been
Pulling out of the Conference to Deal with Different Problems That Have
Arisen That it Is Truly an Enthusiastic and Informative Conference So
That There\'s a Lot of Useful Information. I Have Heard That ‑‑ There
Are Some ‑‑ Can You Hear Me All Right, Larry?

Hamilton: I Can Hear You.

Ok. There\'s a Feedback on the Mic. But I Wanted ‑‑ I Understand
There\'s Some Concern That There\'s Nobody from the Fifth Floor Corridor
out There and I Wanted Two People to Be Recognized. Beverly Jackson and
Claudia Washington Are Two of the Very Best And Brightest People That We
Have and They\'re There and Beverly Sort of Directs Me at Different
Times So I Want Everyone to Recognize Her and Claudia and If You\'ve Got
Specific Messages You Want to Get Back to Me, They\'re Very Good at
Making Sure I Get the Message and I Follow Through. Around I Think Their
Being There Represents a Deep Commitment on Washington to Follow Through
on Some of the Innovations That Are Being Suggested at That Conference
on the Internet. More Particularly, I Think Consistent with the BLM\'s
Tradition Though, a Lot of the Innovation and a Lot of the Pushing of
the Envelope to Use the Internet Is Going to Come from People Who Are
Attending it and Who Will Go Back to Their State or District Office and
Say Why Don\'t We Try it this Way and Once They Succeed, Replicating it
in Other Locations Throughout the Bureau\'s Organization. So, Beverly
and Claudia, You\'re Missed Back Here but I Will Await Your Instructions
When You Return to Washington. All Right?

Hamilton: They\'re Shake Their Head Yes.

I Did Want to Tell Everybody to Have a Good Dinner Tonight And I Am Most
Anxious to Hear from Larry and Others about What Prizes We\'ll Give out
to Purchase Equipment and Then What We Can Do in Another Six Months as
Well.

Hamilton: We Really Appreciate the Phone Call and We Guarantee That
You\'ll Be Hearing from Us.

Believe Me, If There Was Any Way I Could Be There, this Is One
Conference I Did Want to Attend. Sort of Symptomatic Why I Don\'t Get to
Do What I Want to Do Very Often as There Are Always These Little Matters
with Congress.

Hamilton: We Did Always Enjoy When You First Came to the Bureau That You
Were Going to Be Able to Control Your Travel. I Guess at this Point
Maybe We Can Say We Told You So.

I Do Remember Each Trip to Different States Being Told There Was No Way
That Was Going to Happen. Right Now We\'re Waiting until Tomorrow to
Hear Whether Congress Gives Us a 48‑hour Continuing Resolution Which
Would Get Us Through Monday or Whether They\'re Going to Actually
Perhaps Give Us a Year‑long Continuing Resolution and Everybody Could
Leave Here. So, it Is Unfortunate it Didn\'t Happen Last Week. Do Have a
Good Dinner Tonight and Again, I Hope You\'ll Carry the Message Forward.

Hamilton: We Really Appreciate the Phone Call, Pat. And We\'ll Look
Forward to Seeing You Here Soon.

Thanks, Larry.

Hamilton: Ok. I Think We\'re Probably Ready at this Point to Go into One
of the Demonstrations. We\'ve All Been Looking Forward To. This One
Definitely Comes with Some Bells and Whistles! So Gary, If You Would
Join Us Again Here at the Podium and We\'ll Get the Afternoon Kicked
off. It\'s Ok. We Can Give Gary Another Hand. He\'s Working Hard.

Tom Patterson and MaryLou West
\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*

Haase: I Can\'t Believe it Christmas in October and Now We\'re Going to
Have One of the Hottest Presentations We\'ve Ever Had Here at the
Conference. Two of Most Contagious People Here, I Mean Good. We Have
Mary Lou West from California. She\'s in the External Affairs Staff and
I Can\'t Believe Everything That Mary Lou Can Do You Know and Still Come
Here to The Conference. She Develops and Implements Policy Procedures
for 17 Web Sites F That\'s Not Enough, She Reviews, Designs, Approves
Web Sites Before Publishing on the Web and She Still Has Time to Work
with Tom Patterson. Unbelievable! Then Tom, He\'s Been Working Jointly
with BLM and the National Park Service since 1990. He Began His Career
as a Park Ranger in 1976. Holds a Bachelor\'s Degree in Administration
of Justice from Virginia Commonwealth University. And He\'s Another Busy
One. Responsible for Law Enforcement, Search and Rescue, Emergency,
Medical Services, Fire Suppression, Other Ranger Duties. And Then 10
Months Ago, What\'s Tony\'s State Do? , He Turns Everything Upside‑down
for Tom. His Life Is Changed Forever. This F Project, the Pilot Program
Using the Internet, Gps and Other Technologies and On‑line Reporting,
Mapping and Tracking Of Wilderness Fires Is Just Unbelievable. So Tom Is
Going to Show Us How this Technology Truly Allows Him To Get out of the
Office, Get on the Ground like All of Our Managers Want Us to Do with
this Technology. He\'s Not Going to Be Handcuffed or Chained to That
Computer Within That Cubicle. He\'s Going to Be on the Ground, in His
New Environment Which Is The Field. Tom Patterson. Mary Lou.

West: I Have a Little Story to Tell about Tom. Last Year His Passion Was
Fire and Foam. Then He Got a Notebook and a Little Bit of Software and
it Has Just Grown from There. And Monday, He Called Me Driving Here from
California and He Said I\'m on My Way to the Training Center. He Was So
Excited. Well, I Showed up the next Day and Said Well, Tom, Are You
Having a Good Time? He Said I Cannot Believe this Place. I Have Died and
Gone to Technology Heaven.

Patterson: How Can I Tell If It\'s on the Monitor?

West: Last Summer, We Talked a Lot about Putting Ongoing Fire
Information up on the Web. And at the Same Time, We Met with Our Gis
Folks and Our Basic Interest Was How Do We Use Our Gis Data and Get Maps
up Quick When a Fire Is Happening. Well, as I Understand It, Gis Data
Has to Go Through Several Conversions and It\'s Not Something That
Happens Quickly. And Then about December, Tom Came into the Office with
His Computer and I Have Something to Show You. I Have Something to Show
You. And So He Sat down and Demoed Tactical Mapping System for Us. We
Called Our Fire Staff Back in and Gis Staff Back in and Everybody Said
this Makes Sense. This Should Work. So, Then We Got Together a Plan and
That\'s Where We Are Today. We Want to Tell You What Happened. We\'re
Going to Talk about the F Project Today and Basically Share with You
What it Is. We\'re Going to Share with You Our Banner Queen Pilot. Cover
Some of the News Media That Covered That Fire. We\'re Going to Talk
about What Worked During the Pilot, What Didn\'t Work, Tactical Mapping
System and Then We\'re Going to Cover the Stonewall Pilot. The Proposal
Was to Conduct Three Pilots During the Summer of 1998 and the Pilots
Would Involve Fire and External Affairs Staff from Both BLM and National
Parks Service. The Objective of the Pilot Was to Share Ongoing Fire
Information With the News Media and the Public. And in Addition to
Traditional Methods of Disseminating Information, There Was a New Tool
That Had Yet to Be Used with Ongoing Fire ‑‑ with Reporting Ongoing
Fires and That Was the World Wide Web. You Might Ask Why Used Web. And
Our First Reason Was to Share Accurate Information on Fire Incidents.
And We Believe That If it Was Successful with Fire, Certainly We Could
Extend it to Other Program Areas in BLM. And We Also Realize That a
Homeowner Would Be Interested in Knowing If Their Home Was Burning for
the Fire Path Was Going in That Direction. And They Also Might Be
Interested in Our Site. And Finally, Our Agency Managers Really Want to
Know What\'s Happening on the Ground. They\'re Constantly after the Fire
Staff. I Need a Map. And Where Is it Going? There Were Five Key Steps to
Building Our Web Site. We Need to Recon the Fire from the Air or the
Ground. We Needed to Gather Our Digital Videos and Images. We Need to
Prepare Our Maps and We Needed to Obtain Incident Commander Approval
Before Posting it on the Web. Some of the Essential Information to
Gather Were the Statistics And the Narrative, the Maps, Digital Photos,
and Digital Video. And an Excellent Way to Gather Information about What
it Happening with the Fire Is to Listen to Your Incident Commander Or,
in this Case, We\'ve Got a Report from the Operations Chief.

Good Afternoon, I\'m on the Fire. It Is Presently Located on Highway
178. Fire Has Burned Approximately 5,700 Acres and Two Structures Have
Been Lost. We\'ve Got 300 Fire Fighters on the Line. Approximately 125
Fighters on Order. Four Air Tankers, Six Helicopters, and Several Dozers
Are Assigned to the Fire. The Present Containment of the Fire Is 30%.
Full Containment Is Expected at 8‑30 of \'97. We Have Resident Traffic
Only and Chp Will Be There to Ebb Force That. ‑‑ to Enforce That.

West: this Is the Proposal We Would like to Share with You What Actually
Took Place this Summer. The Banner Queen Prescribed Burn Was Selected
for Our First Pilot. And the Incident Far Exceeded Our Expectations and
Unexpectedly Supported Why Internet Technology Will Help the Public to
Understand Complexity, Danger and the Benefit of Fire.

West: in April, BLM Conducted a Perimeter Burn. The Web Site Was
Developed and in July, the Prescribed Burn Took Place. Due to an
Overabundant Growth of Annual Grasses, the Fire Behavior Was Deceptive
and the Fire Escaped the Perimeter Burn And Was Declared a Wildland
Fire. After the Fire Escaped the Prescribed Boundaries, the California
Department of Forestry Assumed Command and the Responsibility For
Disseminating Information Was Transferred to Them. Due to the Unexpected
Switch of Command, We Had to Discontinue Updating Our Web Site. The Fire
Was Contained Within Four Days and No Property Loss or Personal
Injuries. I Would like to Show You Quickly Now What the Web Site Looked
Like.

West: We Just Did a Very Basic Design and Put up Basic Information. We
Wanted Them to Know When the Page Was Last Updated and What The Status
Was. We Put That up at the Very Front and Unfortunately We Did Not Keep
the Old Status. It Would Have Been Nice to Have a Historical Account of
this and If We Do this Again in the Future, I Would Certainly Keep That
In Mind. We\'ve Got up Here the Objectives of the Fire of the Burn. And
They Provided Some Maps and Video. We Gave Some Information about the
Perimeter Burn Summary. And the Actual Fire Burn Summary. And Then
We\'ve Got Links Here to Our Cooperating Agencies. The First Thing That
Went up on this Web Site Were the Digital Images. The First
Transmissions We Received from the Field. I Think Tom Has a Lot of Stuff
on His Little Notebook Here. Shortly after the Digital Images, We
Started Receiving Some of The Maps. Now, this Vicinity Map ‑‑ I Think
this Was Actually Prepared Prior to the Fire. That Gives the News Media
and the Public an Idea of Where the Fire Was Going to Take Place. Then
We Provided a Map of Our Planned Burned Area.

West: We Also Prepared a 3‑d Model of the Canyon. That Gives

Little Overflight Visual of Where the Fire Was Going to Take Place. We
Captured the Morning Fire Briefing, the First Time We Rendered It, We
Just Captured the Audio and So We Tried it Again And Then We Received
the Full Briefing.

Let\'s Go to ‑‑ My Name\'s Barry. I\'m the Prescribed Burn Boss for this
Fire and Dick Franklin Is The BLM Prescribed Fire Manager If There\'s
Any Problems on the Fire. This Is Going to Be Kind of Complicated Burn.
But It\'s Going to Be Pretty Exciting. One of the First Times There\'s
Been this Kind of Cooperation Between a Private Contractor, BLM and the
Forest Service, All in One Big Lump So There\'s Going to Be Some
Complications with That But We Hope That We\'ve Got Things Figured out
Well Enough That Everything Will Move Smoothly. The Burn Today Is about
640 Acres and It\'s Going to Be a Kind of Complicated Burn. It Has
Different Aspects and Going to Be Some Different Things We Have to Do to
Make this Thing Burn. Essentially the Eastern and Southeastern Line Runs
Across the Ridge Top Right up Here and the Road You All Came in On,
That\'s Part of the Line and on the Far Side Is Some Tractor Line Work.
We\'ve Broken the Fire up into Two Divisions and We\'re Located Right
out Here Where the B Is on the Map and the Division a Is Over Here. On
the Opposite Side of the Hill. Division B Is on this Side. Division a
Supervisor Is Steve Wright. Steve, Where You Are? Over Here, Steve
Wright. With Steve Today over on That Side Is the BLM Engines and North
Tree Engines on That Side. On this Side Is Jerry Ortega. And on this
Side, There\'s Three North Tree Engines and the Two Forest Service
Engines Will Be Working on this Side.

West: since this Was a Pilot, We Did Not Tell Anyone this Web Site Was
Up. It Was for Internal Use Only. After the Fire Was Over, We Started
Gathering News Media Coverage and the News Media Coverage Was Quite
Extensive. Three Major Networks Covered the Fire over a Five‑day Period
and Major Metropolitan Areas in California. There Were over 100 Tv Media
Clips Aired and That Is Not Accounting for Radio or Print. The Benefits
of Prescribed Fire Were Delivered by a Miner on the Third Day of
Coverage and That Was Something That We Thought Had We Had That
Information on Our Web Site and Advertised Our Web Site We Could Have
Got That Word out There a Lot Sooner. To Our Delight, the Pilot Was a
Great Success. Digital Images Were Easily Captured and Ftp to the Server
and The Video Was Also a Success Although the Quality at First Was Not
Quite What We Had Hoped for.

Patterson: One Thing I Would like to Say about the Video. We Were Having
a Few Problems as Far as Capturing the Video Around We\'ll Talk about
That in the next Slide. We Decided That the Cell Phone Connection ‑‑ it
Worked. I Could Get Mary Lou the Images She Needed but We Were Only
Connecting at 9600 Bps and We Were in a Fringe Area So If We Moved Very
Far, We Would Lose Our Cell Phone Connection and There Were Several
Times We Had to Move. There Was this Big Flaming Front Toward Us and I
Already Burnt Out One Suburban on a Fire. What We Decided to Do Was We
Went to Our Satellite Transmissions. I\'ve Got a Satellite Transceiver
That a Joint Radio Telephone Combination. Maps That We Had, I Can Map
the Fire and the Notebook Computer, I Can Send it Through the Satellite
Transceiver. If You Look on the Back of My Expedition, There Is a Little
Mini Awacs Antenna and it Transmits a Signal Straight up to the
Satellite and Brings it down about 22,000 Miles to the Satellite
Receiver. In Ruston, Virginia. From Ruston, Virginia, it Will Go Through
the Normal Telephone Lines to the Web Server and Then it Can Be
Displayed. I Can Send it on E‑mail or I Can Send it out on a Fax If I
Have To in Full Color. Our Hardware Limitations We Talked About, We Were
Using a Standard Pc Card from Toshiba but We Were Using the Adobe
Premier 4.2 Program to Do the Editing and it Needed to Be Captured in 16
to 24 Bit. So, That Didn\'t Work Very Well. That\'s Why We Got Great
Audio but the Video Was Kind of Weak. We Call the Toshiba Engineers. I
Sent Them an E‑mail from the Fire Line. They Replied Within about an
Hour and They Referred to Us to Adapt Tech Who Had Just Come out with a
Prototype for ‑‑ We\'re Using Digital Video and They Sent it to Us and
We Used it on the Next Pilot and it Worked Great. It Wasn\'t Even Beta
Versioned Yet. So We Were the First Ones to Get to Use it and it Worked.
Then We Were Using a Limited Edition of File Transfer Protocol Software
Program and We Could Only Send Two Files at a Time to Mary Lou. And Even
at 9600 Bps, it Took a While. So this Is Not Real Time. We Need to Get
These Images up to Sacramento a Lot Faster. So We Found a Restaurant in
Julian about Nine Miles Away and Once We Connected into Their Phone
Line, it Was a Lightning 28.8 Speed and We Could Get the Images up
Faster but Unfortunately We Had to Unplug Their Cash Register. It Was
During the Lunch Hour and We Left Them a Big Tip Though. They Lost Some
Business.

West: When the Fire Escaped, Our Managers Became Real Interested in
Where this Fire Was at That Time. And it Was Heading in a Direction
Where Some State Lands and They Wanted to Coordinate with Our State
Partners. Because of the Transmission Speeds There Were Some Delay.
Sometimes Our Maps and Images Weren\'t Getting up for about an Hour. And
Boy, When We Had Word, I Had Our State Director Right Behind Me. What Is
it Doing? I Want to See the Web Site. We Realize the Value of Real‑time
at That Point. As I Said, this Was a BLM Fire and a BLM Prescribed Burn.
We Were ‑‑ the Fire Information Officer and Had Command. We Didn\'t
Expect it to Escape. And Therefore, We Hadn\'t Done Our Interagency
Coordination. It Was a Shame That We Didn\'t Preplan That and Were Able
to Continue Our Web Site. So, What You Saw on the Web Site Was up until
We Switched Command. We Told You a Little Bit about the Pilot and What
Took Place. Now I Would like for Tom to Show You the Tactical Mapping
System And Tell Us How He Mapped Some of These from the Field.

Patterson: Tactical Mapping System Is a Very Easy to Use Application. If
You Can Use Windows 95, You Can Point and Click, You Can Use A Tactical
Mapping System. That\'s What I Was Looking for Was Something That I
Could Give to My Entry Level Fire Fighters and My Engine Captain,
Hotshot Superintendents, They\'re Trainable. We Could Get Away ‑‑ Get a
Way in Which We Can Map out a Fire And See Where Is the Fire Now.
What\'s in Front of it and Where Is it Going and I Saw an Advertisement
in Search and Rescue Magazine for this Tactical Mapping System Software.
So, this Time a Year Ago, I Was on the City Creek Fire on the San
Bernadino National Forest, First Time I Had Used the System. They Ask
You to Call Them up When You First Get the Program and They Talk You
Through it on the Phone. Within an Hour or Two I Was Drawing Fire
Perimeter Maps but it Comes on a Cd‑rom and this Has Eliminated the Need
for Me to Carry Boxes and Boxes of Paper Maps and I\'ll Show You in a
Minute. It Is the Same Maps We\'ve Always Used and They\'re All
Digitized. Just the One to 24,000 Topographic Maps We\'ve Been Using on
Fires. It Also Has Different Scales. This Is the Map That I\'ve
Routinely Used at Joshua Tree. Now, Back in 1994 When the Bureau of Land
Management and the National Parks Service Combined Their Fire Resources,
I Became Responsible for Fire Suppression Not Only in Joshua Tree
National Park but My Jurisdiction Extends All the Way to the Mexican
Border and with this One Cd, I\'ve Got to Map Scale Everything You See
Here in Red Is 1 to 24,000 Scale. Everything Within the Blue Line Is 1
to 100,000 Scale Map Data. Everything Within the Yellow Is 1 to 250,000
Scale and These Are All Usgs Maps. Everything Within the Blue Area Here
Is a Map Coverage of the Land Ownership, the Land Status of Southern
California Which Is Real Important to Me on a Fire Because I Need to
Know Whose Property Am I on When I\'m Suppressing Fires Because That\'s
Going To Determine Who\'s Going to Pay for It. Everything Within the
White Is the Whole Country Around 1 to 22,000 and Then We Have a 1 to 2
Million Scale in There, Also. These Are Some of Other Key Features of
Program That Allows You To Do Tracking of Your Resources Through Radio
or Satellite Telemetry. You Can Do a Search and it Has a Database of All
of the Geologic Features in California Because That\'s What I Asked for
but He\'s Got it for the Whole Country. If There\'s Something ‑‑ If
There\'s a Name You Want to Look For, Any Mountain Peak, I\'ll Somehow
You an Example of Where You Can Type in a Name and it Comes Up. It Has a
Drawing Feature. It Has All of the Common Symbols We Use and it Is
Mission Specific. By That, it Means I Can Use the Same Map and Just Put
Different Layers on It. Electronic Layers and Just like on a Paper Map,
You Don\'t Ever Draw Right on Your Original Paper Map but You Put These
Mylar Layers On. We Do the Same Thing in Tactical Mapping System. It
Requires Laptop Computer. Minimum of a Pentium 133. I Have Used it with
a 133 and it Worked Fine. Gps Equipment, I\'ve Got a Little ‑‑ this Is
Just a Scoutmaster Gps Receiver Made by Trimble. You Can Get it at Any
Mountaineering Store, Rei. None of this Equipment Is Specialized. It Is
Commercially Available Components Right off the Shelf. It Works Very
Well. Now, When I\'m Not ‑‑ Some of the Gis Specialists ‑‑ Do Any of You
Deal Routinely with Gis Specialists? Do You? Are You? You Could Probably
Confirm this. Gis Specialists Come from a Special Breed Farm. And They
Are Genetically Engineered for Perfection. And When I Showed Them That
I\'m Using a Little \$400 Trimble Scoutmaster Gps Receiver Some Said
That\'s Great for Your Needs But it Would Be Good If You Could Share
Your Data with Us So We Could Use it for Archival and in Our Databases
but We Deal in Submeter Accuracy. It Is Good for plus or minus 100
Meters Because of the Selective Availability That Military Uses. So, I
Got a Military Gps Receiver. \[ Laughter \] And I Talked to ‑‑ as a
Direct Result, of the F Project, Talking To the Engineers at Erm, by the
Way Those Guys Are Great to Work With. I\'ve Developed a Good Working
Relationship with Them. I Say Hey, They Want Me to Be Able to Take Your
Map Data and Use It in the Industry Standard for the Government
Agencies. And Within a Week, He Had Written a Code in and Now I Can Take
a File from Tactical Mapping System and Send it Through My Cell Phone up
to Sacramento and Their Gps Specialists up There Can Use My Map Data for
Their Needs and it Will Import Directly into Arc View. We Have Digital
Cameras. I\'ve Been Having So Much Fun Here. Looking at Shelley\'s
Camera the Other Day, He Carries this 28 Pound Beta Cam. It Has a Tape
That Will Last a Half Hour. The Tape Is 20 Minutes. He Only Gets a Half
Hour on His Battery. When I\'m on the Fire Line, this Is My Digital
Camera. When I Fly the Perimeter, it Clips into the Display There and I
Can Map the Fire and Also Record it at the Same Time. Now, the Mobile
Office Concept. I Really Enjoy the Freedom That I Have by Taking All of
My Information with Me. About a Year and a Half Ago, They Flew Us All up
to the National Fire Center in Boise. It Was All of the Fire Management
Officers in the National Park Service and They Said Ok, We\'re Going to
Issue the Laptop Computers. You\'re Going to Go Forth and Fight Fire and
Save Lives. I Thought Oh, That\'s Wonderful. How Do You Turn it On? And
So They Showed Me Where it Turns on and I Looked at It. At First I Was
Hesitant Because I Was Intimidated by this Technology. I Thought If
Nothing Else, this Would Make One Heck of a Scraping Tool Because Let Me
Tell You, All of this Stuff Is Great but it Will Never Replace the
Shovel When it Comes to Fire Suppression. I\'ll Share this Story with
You. One of the Computer Specialists up at Nefsy Called Me and Asked Do
I Have ‑‑ Is it Equipped with a Keyboard and a Modem Because He Was
Responding ‑‑ Responding to a Legitimate Question That I Had. I Wanted
to Know Is There a Way That I Can Post the Digital Images and the Map
Data Directly on to the Web Site in Sacramento Because Right Now I Have
to Send it Through the File Transfer Protocol and it Would Save Time If
I Could Do it Myself After I Get the Instant Commander\'s Approval. He
Didn\'t Take Me Serious and Then I Was up There Last Week and He Said
Oh, Yeah, I See You\'re Never More than an Arm\'s Length Away from Your
Keyboard and Modem. When You Fly the Perimeter, it Is Important That You
Let Your Gis Folks Know If It\'s Raw Data or Corrected Data. Using the
Little Commercially Available Backpacker\'s Gps Receiver, it Will Draw a
Line on a Map for You but it Could Be Accurate to Within 10 Feet. It
Could Be Accurate to Within 300 Feet. It Depends on Where the Satellites
Are Positioned and the Time Of Day. That\'s Why We Decided to Go with
the Rockwell Plugger and What You See Is What You Get. It Is Right Where
You Are Because It\'s Using Their Y Code. We Were Lucky to Get a Hold of
That. The Maps Are Seamless, They\'re Full Color. They Can Be Printed in
Color. I Have a Little Ink Jet. It Fits in the Front Seat of the Ford
with Me. What\'s Nice about it Is it Has an Infrared Port. I Don\'t Have
to Connect ‑‑ it Is Battery Operated. This Is a Map That I Printed out
of the National Training Center. Everybody\'s Been Giving out Urls. I
Give out Latitude and Longitude. We\'re at 3334, 33.84, 35.21. You Are
Here. And this Is Where the Map Looks like When You Draw on It. Here Is
the Same Map Data That Was Imported into Arc View.

West: Let\'s Go Back to That Just for a Second. I Wanted to Share with
You That this Is Where the Actual Fire Burned. This Map Was Not
Authorized to Go up on the Web Site. But Tom Immediately Gathered It,
Sent it to Us Through the Cell Phone. We Were Printing out a Hard Copy
for the State Director and Associate State Director and They Were Happy.

Patterson: Except for the Fact That We Burned One Acre Within The Burn
Unit and 2,104 Outside the Burn Unit. We Actually Did Have Part of the
California State Park ‑‑ the Resource Folks Thanked Us Because Now They
Don\'t Have to Write a Burn Plan. Ok. This Is the Lay They\'re Comes on
the Cd. You Tell Them What Part of the Country That You Work out of and
He Will Customize it for You. And I Told Them I Needed to Know Land
Ownership Status So All of The Little Yellow Squares Are BLM Property.
And There\'s the Purple Which Is in Joshua Tree. Green Is Forest
Service. This I Can Understand. You Can Also Show a Split Screen Image
of the Fire and Have a Detailed Side Where You Draw on and Then You Can
Show an Ownership Side of Whose Property Owned Up. You Can Import Data
from Any of the Commonly Used Gps Receivers With It. And You Can Convert
the Data to Permanent Layer Objects Which Means You Have an Historic
Archive So That after They Don\'t Invite You Back to the next Prescribed
Fire, at Least They\'ll Have a Record as to Why You\'re Not Invited
Back. Now, this Is What I Feel Is the Best Feature of the Program. It
Displays a Little Icon When You Plug Your Gps Receiver in the Back,
Right into the Serial Port into Your Laptop, Turn on Your Gps Receiver
and it Takes All the Guesswork out of Where You Are And a Little Icon
Comes up and You Can See 3606 Is My Radio Call Sign. It Shows Me Driving
Through Yosemite National Park and I\'m at 36.2 Miles per Hour, Well
Within the Speed Limit. I\'m Heading at 125 Degrees and it Leaves a
Little Snail Trail Behind. And Every Second it Downloads Your
Coordinates and You Can Have It Display it in Latitude and Longitude
Which Is What the Fire Community Uses but the Gis Folks Want Everything
in Utm So You Can Show it in Utm as Well. You Can Track Equipment and
Personnel. Earlier Today, When I Was Talking to Tina. I Mentioned That
the Mill Fairy, They Do Have Lapel Mounted Gps Transceiver So They Can
Keep Track of Troop Movements So Think Of the Possibilities There. You
Could Be an Instant Commander on a Fire and You Can Look at Your Screen
and You Can Tell Where All of Your Resources Are Located. Would That Be
Useful? Sure. You Can Access this Data Through a Satellite by Dialing in
a 1‑800 Number and Then it Is Displayed on Your Remote Computer And You
Can See All of Your Resources Responding, the Little Icons Come up and
it Is Moving Across the Screen. You Can See What Direction They\'re
Coming. You Can Get an Estimate as to What the Time of Arrival Would Be
And You Can Base Your Tactics on a Graphic Image on a Laptop Computer.
And You Can Access this to a Cell Phone or Satellite Transceiver. You
Can Attach Graphic Files Such as Digital Images and If You Look Right
Here, Here Is the Block Rock Interagency Fire Center. There Is the Ics
Symbol for it and If You Lick on That, an Add Image Will Come up and it
Shows the Personnel and Apparatus Assigned Back in Our Park. You Can
Also Track Aircraft as Well as Your Ground Troops. You Can Have up to 50
Different Icons Represented at One Time Then the Little Snail Trails
Tend to Get Confusing. But You Can Turn Them off. You Can Turn off the
Ones You Don\'t Want to See. This Is a Great Feature Also. It Has a
Great Ta Base F I Get Called at 2:00 or 3:00 in the Morning and a
Dispatcher Wants to Know How Many Division Supervisors Do I Have That\'s
Available to Go on a Fire Assignment up to Montana? Or We Need Your
Engine Right Now. How Many Emts Would Be Available in Case They\'re
Reassigned to The Medical Unit. So, Because My Modem and My Keyboard Is
Always Within Arm\'s Reach, I Can Reach down Beside the Bed and Turn it
on and Then I Can Access the Database Which Shows Not Only the Ics
Qualifications of All of the Personnel I\'m Responsible for but I Can
Show Their Cell Phone Numbers, Any Data You Want to Enter. It Uses Excel
Database or It\'s Own. It\'s Got an Extensive City Base of Names and
Locations. Here Is the Geologic Feature That I Typed In. I Want to See
All of the Mountain Peaks in California. I Typed in Whitney. Before I
Got to the. It Shows the Coordinates of Mount Whitney and Display it
Graphically on a Map. The Drawing Feature Is Real Easy to Use. You Drag
and Drop the Ics Symbol You Want to Use. Of the Measuring Tool Is Really
Nice Because Any Line That You Draw on the Map You Can Measure. Such as
the Perimeter of a Wildfire. You Can Measure it in Feet, Meters, the
Fire Service, We Use Archaic Measuring Term Called Chains, 66 Feet. If
You\'re on a Fire up in Canada, You Can Do it in Metric and Kilometers.
If You\'re in Canada, You Can Measure it in Hectares. This Is the First
Fire I Did this Time Last Year. Now I\'m at the National Training
Center. You Can See Symbols for Your Hot Spots. I\'ll Show You That in a
Minute. I\'ll Just Show it to Them. I Can Launch the Program and it Is
Launching and Here it Comes. It Is Loading and Then the Disclaimers Come
up That Says If You Get Lost, Don\'t Blame Guy. Here\'s the Map I Used
for the Banner Queen Fire. I Want to Share Something with You Right Now.
First of All, I\'ll Turn on the Drawing Layer and It\'s Real Easy To Do.
I Click the Little Button That Says Draw and I Can Figure this Out. I
Bought ‑‑ I Got Tactical Mapping System Put on the Compute at The Fire
Station. All of the Fire Stations in California ‑‑ by the Way, I Gotta
Give Bob a Plug. He\'s Progressive in His Thinking. He Was the Person
That Ramrodded Getting Gps Receivers in the Engines. We Got Computers in
All of Our Fire Stations. Since We\'ve Started Using Gps, the Accuracy
of Our Fire Maps Have Improved 200% and I Got Tactical Mapping System
for Fire Crew Thinking Ok, Maybe One or Two Guys Would Be Interested So
But ‑‑ but They\'re So Sophisticated Now They Were Brought up With
Computer Technology in the High Schools. Every Fire Map I Get from the
Fire Crew Has a Full Color Map of The Fire Perimeter on it Now. And the
Way They Do It, They Don\'t Carry a Laptop Computer with Them. They
Carry the Half Pound Gps Receiver on the Line and Get Back To the Fire
Station and Download It. They Could Even Fax it to Me from the Station.
That\'s a Useful Tool. But Let Me Show You Another Useful Tool. Did You
Guys See this Earlier? You Click and Point. I Get a Call from Guy ‑‑ He
Said I Just Updated the Program. He Wrote the Code in the Tactical
Mapping System. He Said We Can Do That, Too. Like I Said, He\'s Very
Responsive to the Needs of People in the Field Because He\'s Got 20
Years of Experience on a Type I Overhead Team. He Wants Us to Be as User
Friendly as Possible. So, Here\'s What He Sent Me.

Hey, Guy.

You\'re Recording?

Patterson: Yeah.

How Did You Do That?

Patterson: I\'m Eastbound on Interstate 10 and I\'m Downloading The
Latest Upgrade and Could You Explain to Your National Viewing Audience
Just What the Latest Upgrade Is Capable of Doing?

I See What You\'re Doing. Ok. The Latest Upgrade Is Capable of Linking
Hot Linking I Guess Is What You Would Call it Excel Files, Image Files,
it Can Link Video Files, Text Files, Documents, Those Sorts of Things to
Each Point on the Screen That the User Draws.

Patterson: Pretty Great. I Crossed the State Line Back at Blithe a Few
Minutes Ago and Only Got 18 Minutes Left to Download. And I Have
Calculated it out That Was a 4800 Baud Connection. I\'m Getting about
2.2 Megabytes per Gallon. That Upgrade Is What Made it Available for Me
to Attach That File to That Point. If You Come down Here, There Is
Another Point I Put on Here. That Wasn\'t the Best Video I\'ve Ever
Made. I Only Had One Hand to Do It. But Let Me Show You. You Can Attach
Multiple Points. Oops, Wrong Button. You Can Attach Multiple Points to
the Same Place. I Saw Somebody in the Back Asleep. Late Wake Him Up. \[
Sirens \] Let Me Show You Another Thing You Can Do. You\'ve Seen an Avi
File. This Was a ‑‑ Here Is a J Peg Image That Was Taken at the Exact
Location During the Banner Queen Fire. And See this Guy Here with the
Camera. That\'s Jim Pickering, My Idol. He\'s out There with His Brand
New Sony Digital \$10,000 Camcorder And He\'s Getting Some Really
Spectacular Footage That You Saw That Mary Lou Shared with You Earlier.
And If You Look a Little Bit More, You See My Backup Lights Are On. I\'m
Getting out of There. And Jim\'s Lens Cap Is Starting to Melt but We Got
Some Great Footage. Then When We Moved, He Lost the Signal. Had to Go
Through Satellite Imaging. Let\'s Move along Here. I Want to Show You a
Feature. Ok, Let\'s Find a City, Little Small City Called Plains,
Montana. There it Is. It Came Up. Now ‑‑ this Is Plains, Montana. I
Called Erm and I Said Hey, I\'m Getting Dispatched to a Fire up In
Montana. Can You Give Me the Map Data for it So He Says I Can Get You
Probably 27 Megabyte File in 1 to 100,000 K Real Fast. So, You Can Be
Driving to the Fire Downloading the Map Data You Can Need ‑‑ You Need
for the Fire You\'re Responding to So like I Say We Can Take the Office
into the Field with Us. This Has Already Got the Drawing Layer on It.
What I Want to Show You Is after I Map the Fire Perimeter, I Got To Work
with the Gis Specialist on an Ongoing Fire. This Was a Thrill for Me
Because Normally You See the Maps That They Produce after the Fact. But
I Went Back and the District Office Wasn\'t Too Far Away from The
Command Post and the Program Allows You to Launch Arc View From Within
Tactical Mapping System. So, I\'m Going to Open up the File Here. Now,
Arc View Is a Wonderful Program. It Is Great for What it Produces. This
Is My Personal Opinion after Working with it During the F Project, I
Believe That Tactical Mapping System Compliments Arc View Very Well. I
Can Make Maps Before I Even Land in the Helicopter. During the City
Creek Fire, I Asked the Pilot If I Fax this Map Back to the Command Post
from My ‑‑ with My Cell Phone Interview With the Avionics. He Said It\'s
a Different Bandwidth. So Before the Helicopter Landed, I Faxed it Back
in Tactical Mapping Working with the Gis Specialist, the Map That We
Produced. Here Is the Same File I Had in Tactical Mapping. To Find All
of Layers Needed in Order to Make a Pretty Nice Looking Map, it Took Us
Two Days to Get Them All Because They Were Spread out in Different
Projects. Here Is the Land Ownership. So, it Was a Great Map and I Can
Show You after We Produced These ‑‑ Isn\'t That a Pretty Map? That\'s a
Great Map. There Are Two of These Maps That Are in the Montana State
Governor\'s Office Now Because Part of the Fire Was on State Lands and
it Cost \$3 Million to Suppress. So, He Got a Couple of Maps out of It.
Everybody That Came Through the Unit, They All Wanted the Map Its in
Tactical Mapping System Because the Map from Tactical Mapping Was Small,
8 1/2 X 11. It Was Easy to Use and They Could Write on it out in the
Field. It Serves Two Different Purposes. When I Got There, All of the
Structures ‑‑ I Was Division Supervisor down in Division B, and You See,
All of These Little Yellow Dots Are the Structures We Had. There Is Some
Expensive Real Estate up There. There Is a House a Guy Didn\'t Even
Finish Building. Here Is One Right Here. This Is a Nice One.

Communications.

on the Vehicle ‑‑ Find out If It\'s Just a Minor Leak or Is He Going to
‑‑ Can He Get into Camp?

I Copy. Stand By.

Ok. Here We Are in Division B. And My Mission Which I Have Chosen to
Accept, Is to Record the Locations of All of the Structures That We
Protected During the Boyer Fire. You\'re Looking at My Little Cheapo
\$400 Trimble Scoutmaster Gps Receiver and the Forest Service Has
Graciously Provided Me with Their \$2400 Go Explorer Also Made by
Trimble and I\'m Going to Record the Location of this Spacious Plains,
Montana Condominium Here That We Saved During the Fire.

Patterson: Ok. Let Me Show You One More Thing While We\'re at That Page.
I Never Had Been on a Montana Fire Before. And Larry, Maybe You Can
Explain this to Me but I Asked for a Strike Team of Type Three Engines
with Compressed Air Phone Capability to Protect the Homes from Southern
California. And They Said Where Do You Think You Are? So What Have You
Got? We\'ve Got the Engines Coming in from Washington State. At this
Point There Was Several Major Fires Going On. And the They Contract a
Lot of Engines from Rural Fire Departments up There. And Let Me Show You
the Engine That ‑‑ this Is My Favorite One. These Are Some Beautiful
Rigs. I Made Him Start the Pump Just to Make Sure it Worked and He Did.
Look at That. Isn\'t That Beautiful? That\'s a 1960 Dodge. I\'ve Seen
Those in Parades. And It\'s in Great Shape up There.

Patterson: So Anyway, Those Are Some of the Things You Learn When You
Work on the F‑project. Let Me Turn this off. They Also Had Something
There Called ‑‑ It\'s a Rubber Tire Skidder That Was Modified for ‑‑ it
Was a Logging Skidder Modified for Fire Suppression. Ok. Next. Ok.
You\'re Ready.

West: Good. We Want to Take You Back to ‑‑ Back to Some of the Media
Coverage for the Banner Queen Fire and Just Give

Little Sample of What Actually Took Place.

You May See a Lot of Thick Black Smoke in the East County. The Bureau of
Land Management Will Be Setting a Controlled Fire In the Chariot Canyon
Area about Four Miles Southeast of Julian. Jason, over the Situation in
Chopper 8. Jason?

Don and Judy, this Is What Happens When a Controlled Burn Gets out of
Control. Blaze Was Set Intentionally at 12:30 this Afternoon. By 1:30,
this Was out of Control. Over 100 Acres So Far. At about Midday, this
Started as a Controlled Burn. Quickly Got out of Control. By 1:30, They
Were Calling out the California Department of Forestry Big Guns. We Have
No less than Three Helicopters Working in this Area and Over 300. We
Have Trouble on Our Local Freeways Though.

it Doesn\'t Look Good Now.

When Barbara Bond First Saw Smoke, She Made a Plan.

How Do I Feel about it Now? I Think I\'ll Get Ready to Go and Turn My
Car Around. If it Comes over That Hill There, It\'s Going to Catch All
of That Dry Brush.

We Probably Have More Equipment and Manpower on this Fire Than We Would
Have on the Equivalent Wildfire.

by 3:00, Fire Had Crossed Line. Reserved Fire Fighters Went to Work.

Saul of the Trucks Was Here this Morning. And They All Went Up.

Reporter: the People in the Valley Were Not Surprised.

No, Not When It\'s this Hot and Dry and the Wind Has Been Blowing.

Reporter: They Got Ready to Leave as the Smoke Got Thicker. Wildfire in
the Middle of Nowhere. It Was Supposed to Be a Controlled Fire to Help
Protect the Folks Who Live in and Around Julian but Instead it Went out
of Julian. Wildfire Was Intentionally Set by Fire Fighters. It Was
Supposed to Be a Controlled Burn.

this Is the Area in the Dark Shade Here on the Map Is the Intended Area,
about 650 Acres Where a Fire Line Has Been Constructed over the past Two
Years.

Reporter: Fire Crews Sparked the Blaze in the Southeast Corner of the
Canyon but Strong Winds Caused to Jump the Fire Line. It Was Going the
Wrong Way Heading East Here into Rodriguez Canyon. Fire Fighters Say the
Brush Is Deceiving. This Blooming Bush Extracts a Natural Oil That When
Mixed with Fire Burns up Just like a Christmas Tree. Because of El Nino,
Fire Fighters Say the Vegetation out Here Is Bad.

There Is More of the Annual Grasses That Have Grown Taller Just Because
of More Moisture Being Available for a Longer Period.

Reporter: Dozens of Fire Fighters Were Brought in along with Helicopters
and Air Tankers. All Trying Desperately to Get Control of the Wildfire
They Had Set Ablaze. With Wind Swept Flames Burning out of Control less
than a Mile Away, Animal Workers at the Julian Wolf Preserve Were
Scrambling Ton.

We\'re Extremely Concerned. We Have Endangered Species Here.

We Ask That You Could Be Ready Throughout the Night and Morning in Case
the Winds Should Change.

Reporter: Trying to Reach Volunteers by Phone and Trying to Come up with
a Way to Evacuate Nearly Two Dozen Wild Wolves.

We Very Much Would like to Save the Wolves but We\'ve Kept the Wolves
Here Which Means They\'re Not Socialized. We Can\'t Put a Leash on Them
and Walk Them out to Actually Net And Kennel Them and Get Them out of
Here Could Take 20 Hours.

Reporter: If the Fire Reaches the Property, the Owners Would Have to Get
the Three Endangered Mexican Wolves in the Kennels And Leave the Rest.

That\'s Why We\'re So Concerned. Fire Comes up the Hill. We Have to Let
Nature Take its Course Which Would Be Difficult For Us.

Reporter: Especially since the Wolf Preserve Had No Warning The BLM Was
Planning to Set a Controlled Fire Nearby. When They Found Out, Pat
Valentino Says ‑‑\'S with You Asked Them Not to Do this Fire Niece Kind
of Conditions with the Strong Winds. We Also Have Other Wolves, Alaskan
Wolves and We\'re All in Danger Now Because of the Fire That\'s Burning
over the Hill.

Reporter: a Fire That Was Intentionally Set near Julian to Prevent
Wildfires Rages out of Control Tonight. Good Evening. I\'m Kimberly
Hunt. Air Tanker Pilots in about 350 Fire Fighters Are Main on the
Ground Tonight. They\'re Battling the Flames Burning on Chariot Mountain
near Highway 78 and the Banner Queen Mine. Fire Was Started this
Afternoon by U.s. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management Crews.
The Prescribed Burn Was Set to Get Rid of about 500 Acres of Old Brush
but the Flames Spread Beyond the Fire Lines and So Far, More than 500
Acres Have Burned. But No Structures Are Threatened and No One Has Been
Hurt. Fire Officials Say Full Containment Is Expected by 6:00 P.m.
Tomorrow.

West: There Is Probably Five More Minutes of this. It Goes on to
Interview the Miner Who Says That Prescribed Fire Is Essential to
Prevent Wildfires from Just Coming in and Destroying the Whole Area and
Then They Wrap it up by Describing In Another Interview the Benefits of
Fire. It Was Unfortunate That it Took Several Days for Them to Finally
Pick That Up. So, the News Media Coverage Speaks for Itself and We Can
Spend All Day Discussing and Analyzing Coverage. The Key Point Is That
Communication Is Essential to Consistent And Accurate News Media
Coverage. And We Feel That Providing Ongoing Updates on the Internet
That We\'re Making That Communication Connection. And There Are Many
Reasons Why Internet Technology Beats Tv in Reporting These Types of
Events. We Also Believe That Web Sites Are the Future for Communication
Innovations and for Reporting Ongoing Fire Information and Other
Emergency Incidents. Our Second Pilot Was the Stonewall Fire. It Started
on August 3rd and Was Caused by a Power Line. It Began in the Pinnacles
National Monument. This Fire Came under the Jurisdiction of the National
Park Service Who Authorized the Web Site and under the Command of Cdf So
Right Up‑front, We Had Permission to Put this out on the Web. Since this
Was an Area That Received Lots of Visitors, the Web Site Became More
Useful. Web Site Crew Was Placed under the Command of the Fire
Information Officer. This Was Good in That We Received Faster and More
Frequent Updates on the Status. However, Because the Fire Information
Office Was Located 30 Minutes Away from the Fire, We Didn\'t Have
Immediate Access to The Digital Photos and the Video. The Web Address
Was Posted. As the Media Calls Came In, the Media Was Referred to the
Web Site. Approximately 40 Media Calls Were Coming in per Hour and Once
They Gave the Web Address Out, it Was Reduced to 2 per Hour. And Two
Fire Information Officers Were Released from this Fire. Let\'s Go out
Quickly and Visit the Stonewall Web Site. The Format Looks Much the
Same. I Want to Give Lois Credit for Updating this. She Was the One That
Kept this Fire Web Page Going. It Has a Fire Perimeter Map. We Have an
Incident Commander Message and Incident Commander Updates. Gary Tells Me
I Won\'t Be Able to Play These for You. We Did Receive Two Digital
Images Whenever Tom Flew over the Fire. Then Our Cooperating Agencies.
Two More Minutes. We Ran out of Time and We Didn\'t Cover Pilot Three
this Summer. However Banner Queen Prescribed Fire in the Stonewall
Wildland Fire as I Said Earlier Far Exceeded Our Expectations. And We
Feel That the Results of this Pilot Will Change Forever Our
Communication Programs from Here on out. Finally, I Want to Leave with
You a Quote from Mike Warren Who Is a Retired Fire Management Officer
and after He Reviewed These Two Web Sites, He Said \"I Don\'t Know
Whether to Be Happy or Scared about the March of Technology. I Don\'t
Think We Have Any Choice, the Systems Are There and Are Going Are Going
to Be Used. We Can Use Them to Our Benefit or Be Dragged along Kicking
and Screaming by Everyone Else.\"

Hamilton: We Have Tough for Roughly Two Questions Here. We Got a Really
Hot Topic Here. If Anyone Has Any Questions to Ask to Tom or Mary Lou at
this Time.

Patterson: Is Tony Around? Mary Lou, I\'ve Got to Say to You That
Working with You and Tony In the Last Ten Months Has Been the Highlight
of My Career. And I Wanted to Get You Something to Show My Appreciation
for Allowing Me to Come Here. And Would You Make Sure That Tony Gets One
of These. I Wanted to Get You Something Significant That You Didn\'t
Have And Can We Get a Tight Shot of this When She Opens It, Please.

West: I\'m Afraid. It\'s Wrapped Here in a Map in Case You Can\'t See
It. Thank You So Much.

Hamilton: We Have a Question. We Have Time for a Question Here.

It\'s Not a Question. It Is a Comment. Working with Gps as My Prime
Tool, I Would Just like to Put out Some Information That May Save Some
Resource People and Other People Who Wish to Use this Technology Further
That Their Prime Source for Knowledge of this Product Are Your Geologist
in Your State. Contact These People. They May Save You a Lot of Time in
Researching What Equipment Might Be Best for Your Product. Or for Your
Project. For Example, There Are Some Security Issues with the Plugger
Unit. That Have to Be Addressed Because They Are a Military Product.
Whereas Your Commercial Products like Trimble and Some Other Commercial
Products That You Can Buy Don\'t Have Quite the Restrictions That You
Would Run into. So You Need ‑‑ Contact These People. They\'re a Wealth
of Information. I Do Have Some Contacts in Arizona. And Throughout the
Different Parts of the Country. We Can Help You out with Your Research
Projects or Resource Gathering Information with Gps.

Patterson: Thank You.

Hamilton: Ok. Thanks Again, Tom and Mary Lou. Tom, Where Is That Button
up Here That You Push Where You Get The Siren? I Think the Training
Center Could Use That ‑‑

Hamilton: Yeah, Where Is That? Let\'s Find That Again. Other Thick Was I
Was Delighted That Julian Fire Was in California. That Demonstrates the
Kind of Media Coverage We Get. Every Time We Do a Prescribed Fire,
That\'s an Excellent Time for The State Director to Leave the State
Because We Don\'t Have That Down to a Fine Science. This Really
Demonstrates It. If this Is Going to Take All Afternoon, We Can Probably
Pass. Oh, He Found It. \[ Sirens \]

Hamilton: Tony, We\'ll Go Back down to the Studio but Eat Your Heart
out. You Don\'t Come Anywhere Close to Having That Kind of Technology
Downstairs. We\'re Going to Take a Break at this Point. Like You Back in
Here at 3:00 Please. Thank You Very Much.

Announcer: You\'re Watching the National Training Center\'s Live
Coverage of the Bureau of Land Management\'s National Web Conference in
Phoenix, Arizona. Now, Your Program Hosts, Tony Garrett and Tina Gromo.

Garrett: Larry, I Heard That Siren and Saw Your Face and I Thought We
Flipped over to America\'s Scariest Police Chases for A Moment. Thanks
for Joining Us Back in the Studio. With Us Here Is Allan Hoffmeister
from the Coos Bay Oregon District Where They\'re Using the Internet to
Post All Planning And Nepa Documents and All Sorts of Public
Information. Welcome, Allan.

Gromo: Allan, Why Don\'t You Talk to Us about Your Web Site.

Hoffmeister: I Might Give You an Idea of How I Got Excited About this.
It Was Almost Three Years Ago I Was First Learning about the Internet.
And How Things Worked and I Started Exploring and All of a Sudden I
Found People Talking about BLM. Talking about Our Timber Sale Program in
Western Oregon and What We Were Doing and I must Say Some of the Reports
Weren\'t Very Flattering. They Could Be Called One‑sided. I Said Gee
Whiz, We Really Need Information out There about What We\'re Doing. So
We Got Involved in Developing a Web Site and to Make a Long Story Short,
Coos Bay District Got Targeted as a Pilot District In Organize on Take a
Look at How We Put Planning ‑‑ or How We Could Put Planning Documents on
Line for the Public So You Want To Take a Look at It?

Garrett: Let\'s Do It.

Hoffmeister: on Our Home Page, We Have a Link Direct to Planning Because
We Know That\'s What a Lot of Our Users Are Interested In. And We Run
from the Northwest Forest Plan Which Is Our Big Umbrella Plan down to
the Coos Bay District Rmp and a Wide Variety of Things but Let\'s Take a
Look at Environmental Assessments. That\'s the Day to Day Work That We
Get into. And for the Last Year, We\'ve Been Posting Just about
Everything That Goes to the Public in Any Form Goes on Our Web Site. And
We\'ve Developed Quite a List Here of Environmental Assessments in
Chronological Order with That Stuff on Top. If the Public Finds They\'re
Interested in a Particular Document, They Can Click on That. In this
Case, this Is a Timber Sale, Environmental Assessment That Was Recently
Revised for Cedar House. We Provide a Little Bit of Information about
What We\'re Talking About. Why the Environmental Assessment Was Revised.
And Then at the Bottom of the Page We Have Links to the Very Specific
Information. From Decision Documentation, What the Decision Is and Why.
The Fonsi, the Finding of No Significant Impact. The Most Difficult Job
Was this What Do We Do with Environmental Assessments. What We Decided
to Do after Experimentation Was Use this Adobe Acrobat Pdf Process. What
I\'ve Done, I\'ve Just Clicked on the Link. We\'ve Got a New Toolbar
Here in Netscape. That\'s the Adobe Acrobat Plug‑in Which Gives Us a Lot
of Opportunities. We Have the Cedar House Environmental Assessment. Page
for Page, Looks Just like the Paper Document. This Is Something That Was
Important to Particularly Our Planners That When Someone On‑line Looked
at Page Four, it Was The Same as Page Four on the Paper. You Can See
That in a Variety of Views.

Garrett: Allan, How Has the Effort Been Received by the Customers Who
Need Information from Your District?

Hoffmeister: What We\'re Hearing from Users Is That this Is a Pretty
Valuable Tool. It Provides this One Stop Shopping So to Speak of What\'s
Going On in the Coos Bay District. They Seem to Really Appreciate It.

Gromo: Can You Talk to Us a Little Bit about Balancing Costs With the
Benefits?

Hoffmeister: That\'s a Common Question. Is it Worth All of the Effort?
I\'m Convinced it Is. It Is a Difficult Thing to Quantify. I Know It\'s
Important Four Me as a Public Affairs Officer to Have ‑‑ for Me as a
Public Affairs Officer to Have this Information. One Criteria Was Let\'s
Try to Keep it as Simple and as ‑‑ Provide as Little Work as Possible
for Our Staff. The Pdf Format Gave Us a Way to Make it Quick and Easy to
‑‑ Easy to Put Things on the Web.

Garrett: You Have Seen Benefits in Terms of Increased Public Trust and
Confidence, Not Just in the Data but in the Agency in The BLMers Who
Provided this Information?

Hoffmeister: I Think There\'s Two Things That Are Happening. We\'re
Hearing Confidence from the People That View this. They like It. They
Give Us a Lot of Positive Feedback about That. But One of the Things ‑‑
It\'s Maybe a Chicken and the Egg Thing But I\'m Hearing from Other
Folks That We Do a Really Good Job of Planning in the Coos Bay District
and I Think a Lot of That Is Because We Know That Whatever We Write Is
Going to Be out There On the Internet for Anybody to Read and You Know,
That Helps Provide Some Quality Control So We Do a Really Good Quality
Job.

Gromo: along the Lines of it Being on the Internet, Yesterday There Was
a Presentation Made by Tony Around Mary Lou West and They Talked about
Myths. One Was You Start Putting These Documents on the Net and We\'ll
Be Completely Bombard Public Comment and Thousands of People Wanting to
Respond to Our Material and They Really Maybe Aren\'t Of the ‑‑ the
Comments Aren\'t of Value. Can You Respond to That Concern?

Hoffmeister: That Was a Very Common Concern When We Got into That We\'re
Shooting Ourselves in the Foot. This Is Going to Create a Lot of Work
We\'ll Have to Deal with But We Did it Anyway. What We Found Is That No,
We Didn\'t Get a Lot More Comments. We Seem to Get a Lot More Comments
When Other Folks Are Writing About Us on the Internet Talking about What
We\'re Doing. We Don\'t Think It\'s from Our Page. In Fact, We\'re
Really Seeing That We\'re Getting Fewer Comments Than a Lot of the Other
Neighboring Districts and I Can\'t Say It\'s 100% Because We\'ve Got
Everything out There on the Web and They\'re Are You Viewing It. I
Don\'t Know. I Don\'t Have That Information. We\'re Convinced it Is a
Good Thing to Do at this Point.

Garrett: What Percent of District Offices Is Engaging in Some Level of
this Kind of Posting of Public Documents on the Internet?

Hoffmeister: It\'s Scattered in Bits and Pieces. Of a Lot of the Offices
Are Moving Towards ‑‑ it Goes by Many Names but a Register of
Environmental Documents So There Is a Place to Go to Find out What\'s
Happening, What the Schedule Is, What Documents Are Open for Public
Review, Who to Contact to Get The Documents. But There Aren\'t Many of
Us Yet That Are Posting Everything on The Web.

Gromo: Do You Find That Maybe Other Organizations Are Linking To Some of
Your Sites and Telling Their Viewers Here Is a Place Where You Can Click
on Here and Go to the BLM\'s Nepa Information For Example?

Hoffmeister: I\'ve a Few Examples Where We\'re in Very Mixed Company and
That Other Links Category on Some Web Pages Particularly from
Environmental Groups That List Some Pretty Radical Organizations Then
the BLM Coos Bay District Has Information about Timber Sales and Then
Goes on to Other Things. So, Yeah, We Are Networking with Other Groups
and I Hope Providing a Good Source of Information.

Gromo: Allan, Thanks for Joining Us this Afternoon down Here In the
Studio and Taking Yourself Away from the Conference. Now We\'re Going to
Go Upstairs to Bev Gorney in the Washington Room. She Has a Real Live
Web Master Wither, Pam Dandrea from Montana.

Gorney: Not Only Is She a Web Master but She Wears Many Other Hats and
She\'s Also a Records Administrator. Pam, We\'ve Been Learning Things
about New Technologies. Why Don\'t You Tell Us a Little Bit about What
You\'re Doing in Montana.

Dandrea: I Guess it Would Help to Start Kind of Where We Started Which
Was That it Was Just Pretty Much Me on the Web Team. And Then it Ended
up We Basically Just Took People Who Were Interested in Putting Their
Information on the Internet and Kind Of Went with That. Until the Bureau
Policy Came out and the Bureau Policy Basically Sort of Forced Us into a
Get it on Everybody\'s Web Page. Get Everybody up and Running. That
Worked out Pretty Well Because We Sent out a Directive That Said this Is
What We\'re Required to Do. Give Us Some Ideas of How You Want to Get
this Done and We Got Some Representatives from Each Office and We Pulled
30 of Them In and Trained Them in Html Editing. And We Just Kind of
Tried to Get Things Moving from a Technical Standpoint, We\'ve Gotten
People Trained to Do Html Editing but We\'re Still Trying to Get the
Management Team On‑line to Try to Understand Where We\'re Going with
this. We\'ve Learned a Lot During the Conference. I Think We\'ve Also
Learned Enough to Know That We Probably Need To Rethink Where We Are
Today. And Where We Want to Go.

Gorney: Is There Something Specific That You Picked up from The
Conference That You\'re Going to Try to Implement Right Away?

Dandrea: One Thing We Did Pick up Was Yesterday We Had the Person from
Devereaux Associates Said That Our Design Was the One That Needed the
Most Improvement. Which Was Ironic Because We Used the Bureau\'s Design
So it Was Kind of Bizarre. But So We Kind of Have a Platform to Start
from. And I Guess We Thought We Were Starting Higher than That but
Evidently We\'re Not. So, We Have Some Work to Do and I Think Having Our
Managers Here, We\'ve Got Trudy Olson Here, the Chief Firm External
Affairs, Our State Director Larry Hamilton Here. That Really Helps a Lot
in Sort of Promoting Our Cause.

Gorney: I Think That\'s Probably Common in Most States That Everybody Is
in a Building Mode and Learning New Technology. This Is a Great Way for
Us to Learn New Things and Share Good Ideas. Back to You in the Studio.

Garrett: Certain Amount of Coordination for People Who Want To Put as
Much out There on the Internet and Web Page as Possible for the Public
Benefit and Public Service and Then You\'ve Got Other People like the
Web Masters Who Are Saying Here\'s What Possible. And Sometimes What Is
Possible Doesn\'t Meet All of the Demands Of the Public or Maybe All of
the Needs and Interests of the Staff. You Coordinate with Your Web
Master and Say 300 Page Nepa Document, How Soon Can We Get this on the
Net?

Hoffmeister: I Am the Web Master for Coos Bay. But it Really Is a Team
Effort. We Can\'t Do it Unless the Planners Are Working on it and
Putting Documents Together in the Right Formats for Us. It Takes a
Little Working Together for Sure.

Garrett: Thanks Allan for Joining Us. This Concludes Today\'s Broadcast
Coverage of the BLM National Web Conference. We\'ll Be Back Again
Tomorrow to Provide Coverage of Keynote Speaker Scott Bounds of the
Microsoft Corporation.

Gromo: Our Coverage Begins with a Test Signal at 7:45 Pacific Daylight
Time. We Would like to Remind Everyone Tomorrow We\'ll Be Broadcasting
On Satellite Telstar 5, Transponder 7 Vertical. So, until Tomorrow, So
Long from Phoenix.

Announcer: to Help Your Office Participate in Future Telecasts, See the
BLM Satellite Downlink Guide and Visit the NTC Home Page on the World
Wide Web. NTC\'s Internet Address Is www.ntc.blm.gov. Transcripts of
this Program and Other NTC Broadcasts Are Available on the Home Page.
For More Information on Upcoming Distance Learning Events as Well as
Traditional Courses Call the Training Center at 602‑906‑5500 or Visit
the Home Page. This Broadcast Has Been a Production of the BLM National
Training Center.

Glen Schlarman
\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*

Hamilton: this Afternoon We\'re Going to Learn about the Policy and Some
Ethical Concerns on Using the Internet Especially in a Federal
Government Setting and Marilyn Legnini Who Has Been on the Planning
Committee Just Won a Can, a Canister of Pistachio Nuts So She Just
Doubled Her Pleasure and Hopefully She\'s Going to Double Our Fun Here
this Afternoon. So Marilyn If You Would Join Me at the Podium and
Introduce the Speaker for this Afternoon. Let\'s Give Marilyn a Nice
Round of Applause.

Legnini: I\'m Happy to Introduce Glen Schlarman from the Office of
Information and Regulatory Affairs. Glen Will Speak to Us on Web Policy
and Web Strategy and Criteria to Consider When Developing Web Sites.
Glen Is a Senior Policy Analyst and Is Responsible for Such Policy as
Federal Agency Use of the World Wide Web, Information Access to
Semination, Information Technology and Investments, Security of
Information Systems and National Information Infrastructure. And We\'re
Grateful He Pulled Himself Away from All of That Policy Development to
Be with Us Here Today.

Schlarman: Thank You, Marilyn. Why\'s Yvonne? I Want to Thank Yvonne for
Arranging for Me to Be Here and Denise Meredith for Just Introducing
Herself to Me So I Wouldn\'t Feel So Bad Poking Fun at an Anonymous
Letter Here in the Agenda. Her Little Note, the Third Paragraph Says
Cookies and Spam Used To Be Things We Ate. I Never Ate Spam and I Ate
Cookies but the Spam Is Something That Some of You May Have Eaten but
Not Myself. So Speak for Yourself, Denise. I Also Have a Couple of
Announcements. One Is this Is the First Web Conference I\'ve Ever Been
to Where A Speaker Brought Their Own Shovel. And Most of Time They\'re
Needed but this Is the First Guy That Ever Had the Guts to Bring His Own
Shovel. That Was a Fabulous Presentation. That\'s What Using the Web Is
All about as Far as I\'m Concerned. Thank You, Tom. That Is Going to Be
a Tough Act to Follow but I Have a Cigarette Lighter. I\'m Going to Burn
Papers or Something, I Don\'t Know. I Guess Something in the it World a
Lot of Us Know When We\'re Building a System or Trying to Implement a
New System Development Even Acquisition as the Intended Consequences
Occur. Unintended Ones Always Occur. Even in the Fire Business That
Obviously Is the Case Although in The it Business, We Don\'t Get Media
Coverage That Extensive. A Copy of My Handouts Were in Your Chair. A
Copy of My Slides That Is and Also Is a Draft Memorandum, Omb\'s
Principles for Use of the Policies. It Is Still a Draft Which Makes it
less Binding. A Little over Two Years Ago, Actually Quite a Bit Longer
than Two Years Ago I Was Asked to Develop Some Policy for Agency Use Of
the Web and My First Response Was We Don\'t Need No Stinking Policy and
but Then the More I Looked at the Paper World and What the Laws Said and
Tried Not to Apply Them to the Electronic World, I Finally Realize We Do
Need a Stinking Policy and We\'re Going to Give it to You. The Title My
Program Is That We\'re Trying to Fence the Prairie. A Lot of People Do
Feel That Way but If You Hear Me Out, it Won\'t Be as Bitter a Pill to
Swallow as for BLM Anyway Because I Can See from this Conference That
You Guys, You\'ve Gotten It. This Is Not the Responsibility of a Single
Individual. The Web Master Can\'t Do this Alone. And It\'s Not Fair to
That Individual and I Don\'t Know Any Individual That Serves as a Web
Master Unless They\'ve Had 40 Years Government Experience That Possibly
Could Know All of the Ramifications of What They Do. And So That the
Team and Pretty Much the Team We Think That Is Required, Private
Officers, Public Affairs, Cios, the Mission Folks of the Agency, I
Believe They\'re All Represented Here in One Way or Another. Around That
Speaks Very Well for BLM ‑‑ and That Speaks Very Well for BLM and How
They\'ve Viewed the Importance of Their First Web Conference. The Policy
Framework, the Way ‑‑ I Look at the Use of the Internet and the Web Is
That While It\'s Exciting and it Certainly Can Be, it Is Not an End in
Itself. It Has to Be Built into the Business Line, the Product Line, the
Mission. There Has to Be Some Purpose for It. It\'s Not ‑‑ it Doesn\'t
Exist in a Vacuum. And It\'s Not Free. I\'m from Omb. I Had to Say That.
That\'s the One Thing They Require Us to Say. It\'s Not Free. Gao
Recognizes this a Year and a Half Ago, Gao Did a Study, Not A Real
Scientific One and it Wasn\'t Very Structured. But it Was on Agency
Expenditures on Desktop Access by Employees To the Internet and Agency
Presence on the Internet. They Estimated as Best They Could They Did
Some Surveys and What Have You. But Think They Came up with \$355
Million Had Been Spent over a Three‑year Period with \$200 of That in
the Last of the Three Years So it Is Rising Very Quickly. We Had a
Budget Request this Year from an Agency That Will Go Unnamed Although I
Really Would like to but They Wanted \$30 Million for a Web Initiative.
And the Justification Was a Full Two Pages Long. We like to See a Little
Bit More Meat on the Bones for \$30 Million. We like to See More Meat on
the Bones for \$1 Million for That Matter. So, Anyway, Just Briefly,
There Are Three Slides That this Is Your Recommended Reading List of
Statutes That Exist That Most Of Them Are Very New, Relatively New That
Do Apply to Agency Use Of the Web. It Is Just a Recommended Reading
List. There Are No Requirements until We Get to the Last Page Because
That Is Right in the Middle. Omb Circular A‑130 Is Probably the Most
Interesting Document You\'ll Ever Read. It Distills Most of the Concepts
and the Statutes and Implements Them and Some People Say You Need
Distilled Spirits Before Reading That but I\'m Not Going There. In 1996
We Decided ‑‑ They Decided for Me I Would Put Some Policies Together and
One of the Things We Found Is That Agencies Weren\'t Managing. ‑‑
Weren\'t Managing the Use of the Internet. Enthusiastic Employees Were.
And There Was ‑‑ it Never Rose to the Level of a Cio or an Executive.
They Didn\'t Care. It Was Just Hey, Everybody\'s Got a Web Site. Get Us
One. I Don\'t Care What it Does, Just Get Us on the Internet. For a Lot
of Agencies, That\'s Still the Way They Are Operating. And It\'s
Disappointing and after All this Time. We Came up with Five Principles.
For Using the Web. They Meld All of the Statutes and Issuances That Are
on the List There. And You Can Read for Yourself What They Say. But
Before I Go Any Further There, Let Me Read a Couple of Articles ‑‑ Just
a Few Things from the Newspaper That I Read on The Way out Here Today.
First All in the \"Washington Post\", the Ad Blitz on Internet Privacy.
Some of Them Plan to Flood the Internet with Messages about Privacy
Protection in a Campaign to Convince Computer Users They Can Safely
Share Personal Information On‑line. Well, Sometimes You Can Safely Share
it and Sometimes You Can\'t. But the Point Is Here That the
Administration Has Been Placing a Lot of Pressure on the Private Sector
to Protect Personal Information and Not to Sell It, Not to Accumulate
Humongous Databases Then Use it as Marketing Tools and What Have You. We
Want it to Be Self‑regulating. We Don\'t Want to Force Regulation on the
Private Sector but They Haven\'t Been Doing a Great Job. To Head off or
Circumvent Government Regulation of the Private Sector, the Private
Sector Is Trying to Do Something for Themselves. Well, from My
Perspective, We Need to Lead by Example. The Federal Government, What We
Do and We Have a Statutory Reason but More Importantly, There\'s a Lot
of Uneasiness out There on the Part of the American People of What
Information Is Being Collected about Us and That Is Information That We
Have to Either Use On‑line or Exchange with the Credit Card Company or
Something. But Also That Electronic Information That We\'re Really Not
Sure What the Mouse Trails Are as We Go Browsing the Web. So, Our Job
Should Be to Make the Folks More Easy When Interacting with the
Government. Do Not Add to Their Uneasiness. That\'s One Thing. Another
Is ‑‑ Goes to the Point That Use of the Web Is Exciting But It\'s Not an
End in Itself. And That Is in the \"Wall Street Journal\" the Latest
Odyssey ‑‑ It\'s a Respected San Francisco Research Firm Has Shown That
After Two Decades ‑‑ Two Decades of Selling Them. After Only Two
Decades, 45% of U.s. Homes Have a Pc. And That Relatively Few Pcs Are
Being Sold to New Households. Despite a Stunning Drop in Prices and
Strong Economy. In Addition, I Think this Is a Far More Significant
Statistic. If It\'s Accurate. In Addition, Only about 27% of American
Homes Are On‑line. So, You Will See If It\'s Not in One of My Slides, it
Is in the Cover Memo of the Draft Principles That for the Time Being and
I Don\'t Know How Long That Time Is. Until the Transition Period Is
Over, We Can\'t Just Do it on the Web. 75% According to this Figure, 73%
of the American People Want No Stinking Web Connection. So, We Have ‑‑
the Paper World Rules, Dude. And it Is Something That We Have to Show
Equitable, Not Equal Necessarily but Equitable Service Delivery and
Information Delivery to Those Without Electronic Access. And Equitable
‑‑ it Doesn\'t Mean Because Responding to a Request Takes a Week in the
Mail You Have to Slow Your Web Connection Down to 2400 Baud or
Something. But Equitable, You Just Have to Have a Program in Place That
Addresses the Electronic World and the Paper World and for the Time
Being, That\'s the Way it Is. Now, That Speaks to Public Access. You
Have a Specific User Community That You Can Tailor Your Product To. If
They Don\'t Need Paper Anymore, Then You Don\'t Have to Worry About
That. But I\'m Speaking in a General Sense. So, the Point in Our
Principles Are Just to Remind Agencies That There Is Another World out
There. That Laws Exist. Regulations Exist. And as Painful as it May Be,
the Agency Has to Consider All of These Things as it Puts a Web Site up
and Uses It. The First Principle of Strategic Planning Is Simply Says
That The Web Is Not Just for Breakfast Anymore. And it Is an Investment.
You Need Come up with a Performance Measure. What Is Your Return on Your
Investment? Certainly Property ‑‑ Saving Property from Additional Loss,
the Lives of Fire Fighters Is a Very Clear Performance Measure That You
Can Use. On the Public Affairs in General Is an Acceptable Performance
Measure up to Some Threshold, Why Set That Threshold but There Is a
Threshold at Which You Can\'t Justify Spending More Money on A Public
Affairs Type Web Site but You Have to Have Something in Mind That How Do
You Know When You\'re Winning? How Do You Know When Your Investment Is
Paying off? Whether You Should Pull the Plug on It. You Shouldn\'t Be
Afraid of Pulling the Plug on a Bad Investment. Our Most Recent past
Director, Frank Raines Had a Saying Keeping The Zombie like Systems on
Life Support Has Got to Stop. We Are Spending \$25 Billion a Year on it
Investments for the Government and Buy in ‑‑ and by in Large, on a
Governmentwide Basis, There Is No Productivity Increase. You\'ll Have
Spikes Here and There but There Are Downstream Bottlenecks and Overall
We Haven\'t Seen a \$25 Billion per Year Productivity Increase. So, You
Have to Account for That. There Is Some Wisdom at Omb That Says When You
Discover You\'re Riding a Dead Horse, the Best Strategy Is to Dismount.
No Offense to the Agencies. Some Agencies Have a List of Things They
Would Prefer Doing First. One Is Buying a Stronger Whip. Two Is Changing
Riders. And Some Say Things like Well, That\'s the Way We\'ve Always
Ridden this Horse. One Good Thing Is Holding Conferences and Appointing
Committees To Study the Horse. Appointing a Tiger Team to Review the
Horse. Pointing a Tiger Team to Revive the Horse. Appointing a Tiger
Team to Review the Problems with the Rider. Change the Requirements
Declaring That the Horse Is Not Dead. I Mean Anyway the List Goes On.
You Can of Course Outsource the Dead Horse. But Anyway, There Are Just
‑‑ There Is a Limit to What We Can Do. We Just Can\'t Keep Throwing
Money out. If You Establish Your Performance Measure Up‑front and Watch
it And Watch the Return, Sometimes You\'re Going to Have to Spend It.
You Always Have to Spend it When You Come to Omb for Your Budget Hearing
but Anyway, Sometimes the Things Are Very Obvious. Other Times They\'re
More Subtle and Require a Lot of Hard Work But it Still Is Something
You\'ve Got to Do. Once You Make the Investment You Also ‑‑ You Plan for
the Long‑term Maintenance of It. There\'s Nothing Worse as Stale
Information or Dead Links or Something like That or Just Nobody\'s
Interested Anymore. Well, There Are a Lot of Agencies Web Sites out
There like That. That\'s Something That You Really, If You\'re Going to
Get into It, Stick with It. Get the Management Support. Get the Team
Support to Stick with It. This Is Something That\'s Worth it and We\'re
Going to Stick with It until We Find We\'re Not Getting a Return. Don\'t
Be Afraid to Pull the Plug. There Are Some Other Problems with Pulling
the Plug Too Quickly If Some Segments of the Public Have Come to Depend
on the Product. That\'s Something to Think about as Well. You Don\'t Do
it Overnight. But Anyway, You Plan for the Sustainability and
Maintainability Of What You Want. Service Delivery Principle. Most of
this I Said Up‑front. There Is ‑‑ it Is a Supplemental Service and
Information Delivery Tool. You Accommodate the Needs of Those Without
Access. Equitable Terms Not Necessarily Equal. The Last Bullet Here on
this Principle Is One of the Most Frequently Asked Questions I Get. Is
it Ok to Link to Nongovernmental Sources? What Nongovernmental Sources
Can I Link To? Well, the Answer Is Yes, It\'s Ok. Link to All of Them If
the Agency, Not You Personally, the Agency Can Make a Defensible
Business Case for It. What\'s Appropriate for the Arizona Division of
BLM May Not Be Appropriate for the Washington Office. What\'s
Appropriate for Dod May Not Be Appropriate for Small Business
Administration or Vice Versa. You Could Make a Case That Sba Because of
Their Mission, They\'re To Promote Commercial Enterprises and They
Wouldn\'t Link to Help A Commercial Small Business Get off the Ground or
Something like That. Dod, They Have 18,000 Contractors That They Link to
All of Them. So, It\'s a Case by Case Basis. This Goes Back to Why
We\'re Contemplating Principles Not Policy. If We Came up with a Strict
Policy, Two Things Would Happen. You All Would Ignore It. And Then it
Would Be Out‑of‑date or it Would Be Out‑of‑date and You Would Ignore It.
One Size Doesn\'t Fit All Here. One Policy Doesn\'t but the Principle Is
Just Think about What You Do Before You Do It. If You Can Defend It,
Then Go for It. If You Want to Link Ft. Huachuca, Arizona, it Would Make
Perfect Sense. Commercial Day Care Centers. Doing the Same Thing from
the Pentagon Wouldn\'t Because There Are Millions of Day Care Centers in
the Washington Area. So, You Think about What the Case ‑‑ What Case You
Could Make For That. Public Access and Dissemination Principle. You
Strive for Accuracy, Relevance, Timeliness and Completeness Of
Information. Operative Word Here Is Strive. Absolute Version Control of
Information Isn\'t There Yet. Anything Can Happen as the Bits Are
Uploaded. Hopefully It\'s Not Going to Happen to a Map. But Things
Happen. Bad Things Happen. So We Strive for It. We Try Our Best. I
Personally Don\'t Care for Disclaimers on Web Sites and I Don\'t Know If
BLM Has One, I Know Some Do. You May like the Information but Don\'t
Trust It. But That\'s Kind of Shabby Looking in My Opinion. If You Could
Perhaps Spin That to the Way That If You Are Taking Specific Contractual
or Making a Contractual Obligation Based on This Information, Please
Call Our Contracting Office or Something That Gives People the
Alternative to Just Not Using What They See in Front of Them Because the
Point in Having it up There Is for Them to Use Did. So Just Having a
Closed in Disclaimer Serves a Purpose but I Don\'t Think it Follows All
the Way Through to Good, Full Customer Service. So, Anyway, That Is the
Essential Point There. Cost Free Access When Practicable. But You Can
Charge for Things under Certain Circumstances. Communicate Regularly
with the Public Through the Federal Register, the Official Federal
Register Is a Leather Bound Paper Book Produced by the Government
Printing Office and Even Though There Is a Cd‑rom Version and
Everything, That Is Not the Official Version. The Official Version Is
Paper. Paper, Paper. We Have to Publish in the Federal Register When
We\'re Making Significant Changes to Our Information Dissemination
Services And Products. That\'s Why You Can\'t Just Even When You\'ve
Made a Bad Investment On a Web Site, You Can\'t Just Pull the Plug. If
People Have Come to Depend on It, You Have to Consult with Your Users,
Consult with the Customers Because You\'re Pulling The Plug on a ‑‑ That
Is a Significant Information Dissemination Service, the Web Site. And If
a Product Within That Web Site or on That Web Site Is the Same Holds
True. That\'s Why You Really Want to Read A‑1030 after You\'ve Consumed
Your Distilled ‑‑ Your A‑130 after You\'ve Consumed Your Distilled
Spirits. After You Link to Your Old Stuff, You\'re Going to Have a
Database Somewhere. It Will Take up Some Space but It\'s Better than
Getting Yourself In Trouble. Let Me Say on the Paper Thing, I Did Have
‑‑ Oh, There Is a New Technology That\'s Introducing the New Bio‑optic
Organized Device, Trade Name Book, Book Is a Revolutionary Break Through
In Technology. No Wires, No Batteries. Nothing to Be Connected to or
Switched On. So Easy to Use Even a Child Can Operate It. Compact and
Portable it Can Be Used Anywhere Even Sitting in an Armchair by the
Fire. Powerful to Hold as Much Information as a Cd‑rom. Book Is
Constructed of Sequentially Numbered Cheats of Paper. Recyclable Each
Capable of Holding Thousands of Bits of Information. Pages Are Locked
Together with a Custom Fit Device Called a Binder Which Keeps Sheets in
Their Correct Sequence. Opaque Paper Technology Allows Manufacturers to
Use Both Sides Of the Paper. Doubling the Information Density.
Incredible. And Cutting Costs. Experts Are Divide on the Prospects for
Further Increases in Information Density Because You Can Just Add More
Pages to the Book. Each Sheet Is Scanned Optically. There Is No Mouse to
Mess with. Right into Your Brain a Flick of the Finger Takes You to the
Next Sheet. Book Never Crashes, Never Requires Rebooting. Though like
Other Devices it Can Become Damaged If Coffee Is Spilled on It. Browse
Feature Allows You to Move Instantly to Any Sheet and Move Forward and
Backward as You Wish. You Can Come to an Index Feature Which Point
Points the Exact Location. There Is a Plug in Bookmark That Can Be
Placed So You Can Instantly Return to Where You Last Read or You Can
Multiple Book Marks. You Can Use as Many as You Want. The Number Is
Limited Only by the Pages in the Book. You Can Make Personal Notes next
to the Book Text Using an Optional Programming Tool, the Portable
Erasable Neb Cryptic Interconnection Style Eye or Pencil. Book Is Hailed
as a Precursor of a New Entertainment Wave. Any Way, the Federal
Register Is the Book. The Last Point on the Public Information Acts ‑‑
Did I Just Mess Up My Make‑up? This Is a First for Me. There Was a
Shovel and Now Make‑up. My Wife Is Going to ‑‑ I Have to Launder My
Shirt Where I ‑‑ Before I Go Home.

Hamilton: Hang on a Second, Glen. He\'s Ready to Go.

Schlarman: Thank You. I Appreciate That. I Don\'t Think Any Questions on
this Slide. The Virtual Card Catalog That Early in the Administration,
Gils, This Was a Plan to Have Electronic and Paper Information Linked To
the Extent it Can Be. There Is a Requirement to Have Gils. Gils Is Not a
Service, it Is a Thing. Facility Is Not a Place. It Is a Thing, Too. But
Anyway, These Are Requirements That Read Omb\'s Bulletin. It Is as
Exciting as A‑130. The next Principle Information Collection and
Privacy. This Combines the Paperwork Reduction Act and the Privacy Act.
BLM\'s Sites Have Surveys on Them That One of the Few Agencies That Has
an Omb Clearance Number on It, Just Made Me Feel So Good. For Folks That
Want to Put Surveys Up, They Do Require Omb Clearance. Carol Smith Is
the Headquarters Clearance Officer. She Has an Arrangement with Our BLM
Desk Officer for Expedited Clearance of Generic Type Surveys for Web
Use. So, If Your Turnaround Time Would Be Far less than a Year and a
Half. \[ Laughter \] I Don\'t Know. He Said it Would ‑‑ Before I Came
out Here, I Asked Because I Knew I Would Get this Question from
Somebody, How Long Does it Take to Get a Clearance on a Survey and He
Said If it Fits Within His Already Approved Generic Type Format, You\'re
Talking About a Week. So, You Could Have it up on Your Site and Get
Approval Before Anybody Knew it Wasn\'t Approved. The Second Bullet up
Here Is the Point I Was Making Early on About the Angst Folks Are
Feeling. You Should Have a Privacy Statement on Your Web Site, on Your
Internet Site. I Understand You Have One on the Intranet Site but to Let
Folks Know What You\'re Doing with Their Information. If You Are
Accumulating it into a Database Retrievable and Retrieved by Personal
Identify Fire, Then You Have a System of Records and That Has its Own
Set of Rules. If You\'re Using Cookies, They\'re Fine Except They\'re
Annoying If You Have Your Browser Set to Alert You to the Fact That
Cookie Is Trying to Be Set. If You Have a Reason to Use Them, Use Them.
Just Let People Know What You\'re Doing with the Stuff. There Have Been
Numerous Articles and Op Ed ‑‑ Editorial Pieces In the New York Times,
the \"Washington Post\", \"L.a. Times\" and The Wall Street Journal
about the Fear of Cookies So It\'s Not Just My Paranoia. For Security,
You Need to Look at Your Web Logs and Monitor for Security Purposes.
You\'ll Have Hackers and What Have You but Keep in Mind That the Privacy
Act E‑7 of the Privacy Act Prohibits the Collection of Activity ‑‑ about
an Individual\'s Activities That Are Protected Under the First
Amendment. It Prohibits it Unless There Is an Authorized Law Enforcement
Investigation. Routine Security Monitoring Is Not an Authorized Law
Enforcement Investigation. So, If You Are Tracking the Browsing Habits
Based on a Domain, That\'s Fine. If You Get down into Ip Addresses or
You Have People Logging on And You Say Well, They like this Page and
Downloaded it Four Times. That\'s like Following Them Through a Library.
That\'s ‑‑ Just Keep in Mind ‑‑ There Are Criminal Penalties for Us
Doing Those Sorts of Things. So You Have to Be ‑‑ You Want to Strip off
Any Sort of Personal Identifying Information. Records Management
Principle. There Is a Federal Records Act. I Shutter to Think and I\'m
Not a Records Officer and I Don\'t Play One on Tv. Are There Any Records
Officers in Here? How Would You Have Handled the Tom Patterson
Presentation? Would You Just Take That Whole Thing and Say It\'s a
Record? He Was the Fire Thing.

the Only Thing That\'s Covered in this Type of Stuff Is ‑‑ \[ Inaudible
\]

Hello. Now I Have to Say What I Said Before. The Only Part of the
Presentation That I Had a Really Huge Problem with Was the Fact That
Mary Lou Said Well, I Really Wished We Would Have Kept the Last Version
of the Status Because Now We Don\'t Have a Record of What Happened on
That Fire. I\'m Assuming Those Records Are Someplace Else but She\'s
Telling Me That Maybe They\'re Not. And That Was the Only Record of That
and That\'s One Big Thing We Have ‑‑ One of the Things the Conference Is
Not Covering Is the Whole Records Issue of What Do We Do with All of
These Files on The Internet and We Make a Change to it and That\'s My
Concern Not His Little Presentation He Made up There.

Schlarman: No, I Meant What He Was Presenting about.

Yes. That\'s a Big Deal Because They\'re All Going from Electronic to
Electronic and Not Being Maintained Anyplace for Archival Purposes.

Schlarman: it Is a Rig Deal. If What We Do Is Important and I Think All
of Us like to Think So. Then There Should Be Some Documentation of it
for Future Generations. Or for the next Fire Fighter.

the Interesting Thing Is There Are No Agencies That Have Had Any
Internet Records Ever Scheduled. So It\'s Not Just BLM.

Schlarman: Oh, No. I Criticize All Agencies.

National Archives Has Not Seen ‑‑ I Appreciate That.

Schlarman: Equal Opportunity Here. Executive Office of the President Was
the Subject ‑‑ the Armstrong Lawsuit, Electronic Records Lawsuit, Every
E‑mail We Send Is Stored on Tape and We Have a Room this Big Full of
E‑mail. We Have to Be Really, Really, Really Careful about What We Put
In E‑mail. It Puts a Chilling Effect on What We Do. My Point Here Is Not
to Be Afraid of E‑mail but Do the Right Thing Now or You\'ll Be the
Subject of the next Lawsuit. And Then Everything You Do Is Going to Be
Kept Forever by ‑‑ as Bad as Omb Is or Some People Say Omb Is, a Federal
Judge Said in Policy Is a Lot Worse. One Thing That I like to Remind
Myself Is That with the Web, Video Is Not Invented T Has Existed Where
and Agencies Have Used It Before. The Web Is a Continuing Changing
Database. All of These Things If You Unplug the Piece Parts We\'ve
Address The Them Somewhere and We Just Need to Put That Together
Somehow. And Apply to the Web. The next Size ‑‑ it Really ‑‑ it Is Just
an Awful Sticky Wicked. It Is Just Terrible. And Archives Is Wrestling
with It. We Should Have Some Guidance Soon. I Think They Are Going to
Essentially Come Back with General Records Schedule 20 Which Shouldn\'t
Mean Anything to Anybody but A Records Officer. But it Is Just an Awful
Issue. These Are the Five Areas That You Need to Concentrate On.
They\'re Five Different Types of Web Sites or Five Different Types of
Things. One Is the Publishing Dissemination. Your Electronic Reading
Room Type Thing. This Would Be More the Public Affairs Web Site Where
You Take an Agency Document That Already Exists Whether it Is a Federal
Record or Not, Whether It\'s Permanent or Not, it Is Something That
Already Exists on Paper and You Just Publish it Also on the Web. In That
Circumstance, the Web Site must Not Be the Only Location For That.
That\'s Not Appropriate. The Record Copy, Denise\'s Spam Note Is a
Record Someplace. It Is Kept Someplace. There Is a Letterhead Version of
it Someplace. The Web Version Is Not the Official Version. When You\'re
Putting Other Information up There, on to Publication Dissemination Type
Web Site, You Do Need to Store it Somehow. To Preserve. If 2 Needs
Preserving Forever, You Need to Account for That. And this Is ‑‑ When
Your \>

\'S Doing That, You Need to Think Well, Gee, It\'s Fun to Have An Html
Document with Hyper Tech Linked Footnotes That Are Really Links to
External Sites. Like to Another Agency or Maybe to a State or Local or
Commercial Concern. He\'s Not a Good Idea at All. There You Have a
Government Publication but You Don\'t Even Have Control over the Thing.
You Have Lost Your Footnote. Your Footnote May Exist on Tuesday and
It\'s Gone on Wednesday. That Is No Longer Available for Historic
Preservation If 2 Rose To That Level of Need. But You Don\'t Have
Control over Your Whole Document. Interactive Web Sites, That\'s Kind of
What the Last Presentation Was. You\'re Creating Records on the Fly.
There Are Things Going on Here That Need Preservation. A Public Hearing,
Agencies Rule Making, a Lot of this Is Going On Now. These Are Records
Being Generated on the Fly. That Is Probably the Most Difficult One to
Get Your Arms Around Now Because You\'ll Have Folks Sitting in this Room
Talking about Something, Decisions Perhaps Being Made. You Have a Docket
Library Someplace with Paper. You Have this Entire Patchwork Quilt of
Inputs Coming into Agency Decision Making That Needs to Be on the Same
Thing That Needs to Be Collected Somehow. So We Know How We Arrive at
Our Important Decisions. Assuming the Decisions Are Important. Then
There Are Things That Are Unique to the Web Itself. Site Maps, Search
Engines, Those Aids, Those Interface and User Aids That They Don\'t Need
Exist Anywhere Else in the World. They\'re Just Pertinent to a Web Site.
Those Types of Things Need to Be Reviewed for Consideration as Records.
Transactional Information. Your Web Activity Logs, They Probably Are
Records. Maybe You Only Need to Keep Them for 30 Days or Something but
They\'re Probably Records. And Finally, All of That Paper That Had to Be
Put Together to Get You the Money, the Legal Clearance, the People to
Run a Web Site, All of the Memos to Be Generated Before You Ever Had a
Web Site, That\'s a Decision Making Function of the Agency. That\'s a
Fifth Element, the Program Management. Finally and I\'m Sure You\'re
Happy That I\'m about to Wrap up Here. Share Best Practices. This Is a
Great Way to Do It. Intraagency. You Need to Broaden That. There Are Two
Organizations. There\'s the Federal Web Consortium Which Is ‑‑ They Were
Originally Called the Internet Agency. Nasa Energy, Dod. Those Agencies
Putting Money into the Maintenance of the Internet in the Early Days,
They Working with National Science Foundation and University of
Illinois, They Have an Interagency Group That Have Guidelines on Their
Web Site. This Is One of the Ways That I Convinced My Bosses That We
Don\'t Need Policy. We Need Principles. If I Issue Principles All over
the Frequently Asked Questions With the Stupid Detail I\'m Giving You
Today Are Going into the Back End of Their Guidelines. And They Can
Update Them ‑‑ I Haven\'t Gotten Anything out in Two And a Half Years.
They Can Do If it in Probably Two and a Half Hours. So, They Can Get the
Detail That\'s Pertinent for That Day. I Can\'t Do That. As Much as I
Would like To. I Know I Have All of the Right Answers but I Can\'t Get
My Pos ‑‑ My Bosses to Sign off on It. The Other One Is Gsa\'s Webmaster
Forum. It Is less Sophisticated. I Don\'t Mean it in a Pejorative Sense.
It Is the Webmaster Community Much Larger Meetings. People Talk about
Everything from Java Script Html up to Privacy Issues and Things of That
Nature. More Interactive. So If You\'re Back in D.c., You Need to Get
Your Folks, Not Just Web People, You Need to Get Folks Plugged in this
Sort of Thing Then Book Marks. I Think They Should Be ‑‑ for My next
Presentation to Whoever it Is, I Will Have BLM on Here. I Do Have Three
Lessons Learned. My Three Lessons Learned for Developing Policy,
Particularly Web Policies. For Every Action, There Is an Equal and
Opposite Criticism. Actually There Are More. It\'s Not Equal. If it Were
Equal, it Would Be Ok. But the Criticism Is So Unfair. They Just Heap it
on Me Continually. The Second One I like and I Do Not Skydive. And the
Third Is Nothing I Have Said Today Is My Own Idea. And So You Go Back to
the First One, You Shouldn\'t Be Criticizing Me. Anyway. So, Thank You
All Very Much.

I\'m Georgia from Alaska. I Have a Couple of Questions. One Is One of
Our Field Offices Had Some Pages and Photographs That Were Plagiarized
by a Private Company Who Then Said That it Was Copyrighted by Them. What
Are We Supposed to Do in That Instance and Number Two, What Would Be an
Appropriate Disclaimer for One of Our Sites That\'s Conducting a Limit
of Acceptable Change on a River That Uses Maps That We Feel Shouldn\'t
Be Used for Any Unauthorized Use?

Schlarman: on the First One, I Don\'t Want to Get into Too Much
Technical Detail on the Copyright Because I Don\'t Have Any Technical
Knowledge. Government Cannot Copyright Anything That We Produce.
Employees or Agencies. We Just Can\'t. I Don\'t Know What Happens Then
If Somebody Takes Our Work and Copyrights It. I Just Don\'t Know. I Say
That It\'s Not Enforceable Because There Is a Fair Use by The Government
Having it in the First Place. You Can\'t Copy Right Something You Is
Have No Control over its Source. But You\'ll Have to Talk to Your
Copyright Lawyers Who I Couldn\'t Know ‑‑ I Don\'t Know Where They Are.
The Disclaimer Is Appropriate in the Map Case. But You\'re Not Saying
That this Map Is Not Accurate. That We ‑‑ What You\'re Saying Is the
Intended Purpose for this Is Boom. We Recommend That You Not Use it for
Any Other Purpose. So I\'m Not Saying Disclaimers Are Not ‑‑ Don\'t Have
Value. But There Shouldn\'t Be Blanket Disclaimers That We Take No
Responsibility for the Stuff on Our Web Site. There Are Some Agencies
That Actually Do That and it Smells Bad.

You Discussed Linking to Nongovernmental Sites. I Appreciate the
Conclusion Na the Determination Would Have to Be Made on a Case by Case
Basis. That Said I Was Wondering If I Could Get You to Offer Your
Opinion on One of Those Cases. Case Would Be this. A BLM Field Office
Linking to the Local Chamber of Commerce, the Business Case Being That
They\'re in the Business of Promoting Tourism. They Do So by Promoting
the Resources That Are Available on BLM Land. We\'re Much in the Same
Business. Additionally, I Can See Some Use to Our Customers to Advise
Click Here for More Information on Our Community and the Services
Offered by Local Businesses. Legitimate Business Case Or.

No ‑‑ Case or Not.

Schlarman: the Chamber of Commerce Is Made up of However Many Businesses
Within the Community If in a Small Community it May Not Be a Problem If
Each of the Businesses Said You Know, I Don\'t Want Anybody to Have to
Go Through the Chamber of Commerce. I Want Them Linked Directly to Me So
Then You Start Doing That. And at What Point Do You Turn it off. At Some
Point Do You Start Having to Judge Whether the Site Is Appropriate or
Not for the Government to Link To. And So Anyway, Yeah, the Chamber of
Commerce Sounds Great. My Answer Won\'t Be the Same Thing of Someone
Waning to Link to The Chamber of Phoenix in ‑‑ Chamber of Commerce in
Phoenix, Arizona. Last Time I Was Here, this Place Didn\'t Have Smog.
You Might Get an Ok but Somebody Else, They Better Stay Far, Far Away
from It.

I\'m Alex Clark from Fairbanks, Alaska. One of the Policies That Have
Come down from Our Office Is While It\'s Ok to Provide the Links to
External Sites, It\'s Not Ok to Use Their Logos. In Graphical Form on
Our Web Sites. In Assuming That the Use of the Logo Is Approved by the
Vendor Or the Commercial Entity, Can You Give Your Viewpoint on That And
That Apparent Inconsistency?

Schlarman: I Don\'t Know That It\'s an Inconsistency. You\'re Going
Beyond Just a Service. There\'s Gotta Be Service to the Agency, Not the
Service to the Vendor. And I\'m Not Sure What Logo this Is. This
Wouldn\'t Be Adobe? That\'s the First One Everybody Came up Three Years
Ago. Ok, So You Link to Microsoft. You Have to Link to Netscape and They
Only Control 89% of the Market So You Have to Link to the Other 1% If
You Can Find Them. ‑‑ to the Other 11% If You Can Find Them. I Don\'t
Know. Why? You Think Somebody Browsing by Doesn\'t Already Have a
Browser? I Mean I Don\'t Know Why ‑‑ What the Agency Needs to Do ‑‑ Why
The Agency Is Getting Something out of That. Adobe May Be Different.
Adobe Is a De Facto Standard Now. The Pdf. So That\'s a Little Bit
Different. That\'s One We Argued a Long Time Ago and That\'s Why We Said
If You Can Make a Case for It, If You Have a Whole Slew of Pdf
Documents, and You Went to Adobe, Big Deal. But Then Again If Somebody
Can\'t Figure out How to Get to Adobe Themselves, I Don\'t Know. I
Don\'t like Linking to Microsoft or Netscape. Because They Don\'t Need
it and I Don\'t Know What it Gets Us. I Bet the Department of Justice
Wouldn\'t Link to Them.

One More Question. This Is Gary Haase from Oregon. We Have a Case Where
We\'re Creating a Recreation ‑‑ a Publication for Our Wild Scenic River
So We Have the Printed Document. We Went Through the Approval Process.
Met All of the Requirements. We\'re Going to Create this as a Dynamic
Site Now When We Put it On the Internet So When the River Height
Changes, We\'re Going to Have Quick Time Movies So When They Change,
It\'s Attached to Usgs ‑‑ When the Water Level Falls, the Rapids That
Might Be a Level Five Early in the Summer Will Drop to a Level Three or
Two And We\'re Going to Show What That Looks like for Safety Reasons
Because We Had People That Drowned a Couple of Years Ago. How Would We
Create this Record for Our Records People with Something like this?

Schlarman: Could You Be a Little More Specific? No.

Haase: the River Changes. We\'re Going to Have an Image of the Rapids,
Springtime. It Will Show What it Looks like When You\'re Rafting over
Level Five, Level Four, Level Three, Level Two. So When the River Drops,
It\'s Going to Automatically Grab a Different Photo and Put in Place.
The Reason for this Is for Safety for Our Rafters So If Somebody Coming
from New Jersey out to Oregon and They\'re Going to Be There for Two or
Three Days to Scout out the River and They\'re Going to Raft It, They
Have a Pretty Good Idea When They Get There Come July 4th All of the
Rapids Will Be Level Four, Level Three.

Schlarman: People from New Jersey Don\'t Know from the Web ‑‑ I\'m from
New Jersey. What Would You Do If You Stood out There with a Video Camera
in The Old Days. I Don\'t Know. I Just Don\'t Know. What Would You Do?

We\'re Struggling with That Right Now N Fact We\'ve Already Been Asked
‑‑ I Also Do the Bureau ‑‑ I\'m Also the Bureau\'s Disposition
Specialist So One of Things I Do Is to Try to Figure Out How Long We
Should Be Keeping All of this Stuff. One of the Questions We\'ve Been
Asked Is the Idea of How Long Do You Keep Digital Photos. That Go on the
Internet. And along with the Idea of the Actual Internet Documents.
There\'s Just So Many Facets to It. One of Things We\'ve Talked about
Has to Do with How Do You Classify a Photo. How Do You Classify a
Digital Photo. It Could Be a Wyoming Just Told Me a Little While Ago
They\'re Using Digital Cameras to Document Trespass Cases. Well, That\'s
Law Enforcement Issues. That\'s a Law Enforcement Document. He\'s
Telling Me They\'re Doing it for Safety Reasons and They\'re Taking
Videos or Shots of the River for Safety Purposes. So, How Does That Fit
into the Whole ‑‑ the Idea You Can\'t Just Really Take an Internet
Record and Say It\'s an Internet Record.

Schlarman: No, I Don\'t Think it Is.

They\'re Still Looking for Lots ‑‑

Schlarman: in this Case, I Would like to Think ‑‑ I Would Try To Argue
That the Web Is Simply the Medium Here and You Are ‑‑ You Have ‑‑ You
Are Using Another ‑‑ You Are Putting Another Medium on the Web. It Is an
Overlay and We\'ve Addressed the Issue of the Videotape Around Stuff
Before.

That\'s What We\'re Assuming by What You Said. We\'re Assuming in Thank
in the Internet Arena Na the Internet Records in Most Cases, at Least
Right Now Today Are Reproductions of Some Other Media. But They\'re Not
Always. And in Those Kinds of Cases They\'re Already Starting to Be ‑‑
That\'s the Only Record There Is.

Schlarman: Things Weren\'t Cost Effective Anymore. This Might Be One of
Those Cases.

Then They Threw Schedule 20 out Which Says That You Go Dispose of
Electronic Records Anyway So We\'re Back at Square One Anyway.

Schlarman: That\'s a Judge. Setting Policy. Actually That Question Is
Still Open. The Lawsuit Isn\'t Settled Yet. It Is Coming Close. But
Anyway. I Have a Five Minute Sign. One More Question.

Patterson: the F Project Is a Good Example of How Technology Is Far
Ahead of Policy. And Besides Our Two Pilots, I Know of Two Other Web
Sites That Were Developed for Ongoing Fires and in One of Them, One of
the Evacuees Got a Phone Call While He Was in the Shelter from a
Relative in Another State Saying I Just Saw Your House on this Internet
Site. Is That a Matter of Public Record Because He Really Got Upset That
the Security of His Perimeter Fence Was Displayed for the Whole World to
See.

Schlarman: Security Is So Huge That You Need a Week Conference on It. If
You Have Web Sites That Are Intended to Be Puck ‑‑ Publicly Accessible.
Do Not under Any Circumstances Plug Them into a Mission Critical System
in Your Agency Unless You Are Willing to Pay Just a Huge Price for
Security Headaches. Putting Stuff up on the Web Is a Security Matter. I
Don\'t Know If You Read ‑‑ If You Read in the Paper a Couple of Weeks
Ago with Dod Has Done. They\'re Rolling Back a Lot of What They Had on
the Web Because For the Fist Time Ever All of this Stuff about Where
Commanding Officers and Their Family Live ‑‑ Not Just Commanding
Officers. Navy Had a Site Where Sailors Who Hadn\'t Seen Each Other in
20 Year Could Track Their Buddy Done That They Served on the U.s.s. Ohio
with 20 Years Ago or Something. That\'s Great Except Now Because of the
Internet, You Now Have Given Your Adversary Be it a Tactical Application
for Information. Say You Would Have to Release under Foia. Sure, You
Would but Look How Long it Takes. You Have to Accumulate Tons of Paper
Then You Have to Have the Patience to Analyze It. Now, You Have Search
Engines and What Have You That Gets You the Real Time Information.
That\'s Why in the Missile Attacks in Africa Why You Did Not Hear What
Ships the Missiles Were Fired from. We Always Had Video Cameras of it
Taking off from the Missouri Or the Deck of the U.s.s. Vinsons. This
Time You Didn\'t Hear That Because Just Days Before They Realized Oh,
Look What We Have Here. We\'re Going to Be Giving Them the Whereabouts
of the Commanding Officer\'s. So It\'s Another Point So Information
Wants to Be Free but Not All Information Should Be Free. I Don\'t Know
How You Address That Particular Situation Because What You Need it For,
You Need That Information. How You Can Control it past That Point, You
May Not Be Able to Control it So You\'re Going to Have to Balance it
Somewhere. I Don\'t Know. That\'s a Huge Issue. Security Is Just Scary.
Dangerous Place. Wrap it Up.

I\'m Pat Hope from the Washington Office. I Was Wondering Who Is
Responsible for Compliance with the Laws When You\'re Putting
Information up on the Net. Is it the Web Page Developer or Is it the
Systems Manager?

Schlarman: Yep. It Is Everybody in this Room. It Is the Agency, the
Agency Head. It Is Certainly Is the Chief Information Officer. It Gave
the Cio the Stick on That One. So, but It\'s Everybody in the Room.
It\'s Not Everybody\'s Responsibility to Try to Interpret the Law. But
Once They Know What They Have to Do, You\'ve Gotta Do It. That\'s Why
You Need a Team. You Can\'t Just Have ‑‑ of Course If You Have Lawyers,
You Won\'t Have a Web Site So What Difference Does it Make. Thank You
All.

Hamilton: Thank You Very Much, Glen. That Was a Super Presentation. And
I Was Glad to See That You Have the Same Kinds of Problems With Pam
Dandrea That We Have in Montana. And She Doesn\'t Treat You with Anymore
Respect than She Treats Me. So I\'m Feeling Better Already. How\'s That?
The Other Thing Is I\'m Going to Have to Modify My Stereotype of Omb
Senior Policy Analyst. I Never Realized You Guys Had a Sense of Humor.
It Is Absolutely Incredible. Applaud You for That.

Schlarman: it Came with My Plane Ticket.

Hamilton: I Also Want to Give

Tip Because I Know this Was Kind of Traumatic. It Has Been Traumatic for
Me When You\'re Getting Made up All the Time and They\'re Hitting with
You a Powder Puff and If You Wiped Your Nose, They\'re All over You. But
You Don\'t Want to Let Your Wife See You in Your Make‑up Because You\'ll
Have to Wear it Every Day after That.

Schlarman: I Will Keep That One in Mind.

Hamilton: All Right. Couple of Things. I Kind of Misspoke Earlier. When
I Said We Were Going to Be Able to Have the Video Streaming Up on the
Screen as Glen Spoke. Because We Just Don\'t Have the Technical
Capability of Doing That Because We Were Using That System to Actually
Capture It. What We Are Going to Be Able to Do Is Show it Now Unless
John Tells Me Something Else at this Point. I Just Made a Good
Assumption. We\'re Going to See That up on the Screen. Other Thing I
Wanted to Mention Is the Memo That Glen Mentioned, The Draft Memo Is in
Your Binders under His Tab. So, If You Haven\'t Seen That, You Want to
Look at It. It Is in There. And Then Please Don\'t Forget to Fill out
Your Evaluations Today. That Will Be Real Helpful to Us. Are We Ready to
Roll the Video Streaming?

We Began the Journey with Something Called the Network Provided by Time
Warner as a Part of Their Franchise. This Could Be a Real ‑‑ for
Community Life Because as I\'ve Described, the Question of Access Not
Just to Technology but the Access to Jobs. And the Access to the Skills
That Get You a Better Job. And I Just Want to End by Saying That You
Just Have to Imagine The Kind of Results That He Can with Produce. This
Is How to Reach Me. We Don\'t Have a Web Site ‑‑ Well, We Do but We
Don\'t Have One That Deals with this Topic. You Can Reach Me via E‑mail.
I Would Suggest That If You Have an Interest to Look at the Cornell Web
Site. We Have Someone Who\'s Coming to Cornell in a Week or So.

Hamilton: That Was a Good Example of What Went out Yesterday. The First
Part of That Was Actually Coming up on the System and What We Saw There
at the End Was Actually What Would Be Appearing on Computer Screens for
People Using Video Streaming. Ok. I Think this Group, Nancy Is Ready to
Go Back to Work. They\'ve Sat Here Very Patiently Today. We Really
Appreciate Your Patience. I Know These Are Long Arduous Days.