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November / December 2009
Volume 21, Number 6

News you can use

TAC Tech Conference to Explore Web 2.0 with Expert Speakers

Whether you’re interested in Twitter and Facebook but don’t know where or how to start or can’t get enough Tweets to satisfy the addiction, TAC’s Court and Local Government Technology Conference will offer attendees a chance to see first-hand how today’s social networking tools can be used for business purposes.

This year’s Courts and Local Government Technology Conference (dubbed CoLoGo) will have its own Facebook page and Twitter account. All county elected officials and interested staff members, whether attending the conference in-person or not, are encouraged to sign up for TAC’s pilot run with the tools.

The conference will be held Jan. 26-28 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel
in Austin.

While Web 2.0 — as the collective social networking tools are called — is one aspect of the technology conference, it’s not the only draw for county officials. The conference will also discuss how to use technology to reduce government costs, emergency management and new laws related to the use of new technologies.
In addition to tracks for IT personnel, municipal court personnel, justices of the peace, county judges, and a general track for auditors, treasurers, and court administrators, the conference will include a special track for peace officers and administrators. Topics will include law enforcement technology, the legal aspects of mobile videotaping and computer forensics.

The sessions will feature expert advice from a nationwide pool of speakers,
including Jon Fullinwider, the former IT director for Los Angeles County. They will also highlight several Texas county programs — the Bexar County Center for Legal and Court Technology — and familiar faces, including former Harris County CIO Steve Jennings. Jennings recently received the first-ever Technologist Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Association of Counties.

And, keynote speaker Kelli Vrla will share her humorous take on handling and implementing change. “I need to figure out, if this is stressing me out, is the battle worth fighting? Am I arguing with you about what’s right, or who’s right?” Vrla says in one of her popular presentations. “I love being Greek, though, because I have a lot of unique cousins, like, okay, Aristotle. Very distant, very distant cousin, and he used to say, ‘to know and not to do is the same as not knowing.”

The CoLoGo Technology Conference is co-sponsored by the Texas Municipal Courts Education Center, the Texas Center for the Judiciary, the Texas Justice Court Training Center, the Judicial Committee on Information Technology, the Texas Judicial Academy and the Texas Association of Counties County Information
Resources Agency. Go to the TAC Web site for more information or to register.