March 18 IT in Daejeon

After more than four weeks in Daejeon, I finally got to meet the City IT director—or Information Policy Officer, as he is called. Kim Su Cheon seems like a pretty sharp guy. His crew of 40 takes care of the technology needs of more than 2800 city staff. That sounds pretty difficult except that as I understand it, Daejeon does not do any application development. They get their systems handed to them from the central government in Seoul. So their main focus is desktop and network support, security, troubleshooting, and the usual headaches associated with all of those. Their network extends to a number of outlying facilities and they are implementing a network monitoring system. I hope to get back together with him in the next week or two to show some of the web-based GIS applications Seattle has implemented as well as to explore what they are doing or planning in the area of e-government.

I also managed to discover Seattle Park, one of the legacies of the sister city program. It is located next to a school, just a ten minute walk from my apartment. The cherry trees in the park are beginning to blossom, and a group of small boys was playing baseball. So now I’ve been to Seattle Park in Daejeon; someday I’ll have to visit Daejeon Park in Seattle.
There are other cultural connections as well. Daejeon residents seem to have a pretty good idea of the American diet: chicken, pizza, and donuts, washed down with a delicious cup of expensive coffee.