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Butler Is a Top Federal Employee |
by Allison Miller
For the past seven years, Federal Computer Week's
Federal 100 Award has been presented annually to 100
executives from government, industry, and academia. An
independent panel of judges selects those who have the
greatest impact on the government systems community in
the previous year.
For 1995 this prestigious honor was awarded to Michelle Butler, research programmer in NCSA's Computing and Communications Division (C&C), to recognize her leadership and hard work on the Electronic Town Meeting project (May 1-14, 1995). Butler helped design a scalable architecture to withstand the expected load of the national project, and she supported the system throughout the meeting.
A project of Vice President Al Gore's office, the Electronic Town Meeting sought to gather public opinion on the use of information technology by federal, state, tribal, and local governments to create an electronic government. The open meeting was conducted in cyberspace via national electronic networks. Those without electronic connections could participate at Public Access Sites--public and private organizations volunteering their facilities without charge.
NCSA took part in producing an open forum on the subject of "People and Their Governments in the Information Age,"the nation's first experiment using computing and communications technologies to engage citizens in participatory democracy.
Initially NCSA got involved with the project to act as a backup site if the federal site failed. As the expected load grew to include almost everyone in the nation, NCSA, SDSC, and the federal systems group became partners in sharing the meeting load.
"To do this," said Butler, "all sites had to read and update the same file system simultaneously--that meant using a distributed file system." The meeting used NCSA's Andrew File System servers for the file system, and NCSA's round-robin Domain Name Service (DNS) [see access, Spring 1995] to share the load among the three systems. NCSA's DNS server was used for the entire meeting.
"Among other responsiblities Michelle helped build a system that would handle the tremendous load associated with such a large-scale project. Michelle also kept her normal responsibilities at NCSA, working many extra hours to help the Electronic Town Meeting team," said Charlie Catlett, associate director for C&C.
Butler was recognized in a special supplement to the March 18 issue of Federal Computer Week and on April 2 went to a banquet in Washington, DC, to receive the award. "I was quite surprised and overwhelmed by all the nice notes and attention that I received," said Butler. "A lot of NCSA teamwork contributed to this project. It wasn't just me. But this is the way C&C works. Everyone pulls together to help each other."
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