CTO Archives

The State Department's Office of eDiplomacy hosted a conference Friday that sought to connect technology innovators with those interested in "diplomacy and development to enable 21st century statecraft." More than 300 people from federal agencies and the private sector attended Tech@State, held at the agency's Harry S. Truman Building in Washington. The focus was on open source software.

A few noteworthy items from the conference:

Chief Technology Officer of the United States Aneesh Chopra said all federal agencies now have Congressional authority to pursue prize-based challenges, such as those for developing new applications. "No general counsel can stand in the way of our movement [on] this philosophy," he said.

The White House is considering imposing some type of consistency standard for .gov websites, said White House New Media Director Macon Phillips. The administration wants to interject a little more rhyme and reason to the sites, Phillips said.

State will continue to consider open source technology where it makes the most sense, said Chief Information Officer Susan Swart. Specifically, the agency will look at internal applications that can be hosted using open-source software, she said.

Next week, the Health and Human Services Department will launch a HealthData.gov community on the U.S.'s open data site data.gov. It will be a one-stop resource for health data innovation, said Chief Technology Officer Todd Park. Part of the site will serve as a virtual apps expo, where Park expects people to find problems with the data the agency puts out, as HHS simply does not have enough manpower to check all of it.

Perhaps the best quote of the day came from Park, who said HHS wants to provide developers with the raw data and let them take the lead in creating the software and tools to use it. The agency wants to be a "data sugar daddy," he said to laughter.

The White House official overseeing the president's transparency initiative stepped down last week to return to her teaching post at New York Law School, Obama administration officials said Monday. A replacement has not been named.

The departure of Beth Noveck, deputy chief technology officer, coincides with the second anniversary of Obama's landmark open government memo. The guidance the president released one day after taking the oath of office called for agencies to institutionalize public participation in policymaking, collaboration with outside organizations and a default setting for disclosing information.

On Monday, Office of Science and Technology Policy spokesman Rick Weiss said this of Noveck:

Beth has been a tireless advocate for opening the federal government to greater collaboration and public participation. She has helped to develop significant advancements in the administration's efforts to utilize technology to break down the barriers between the American public and their government. We are sorry to see her go, and wish her all the best in her next endeavors.

Government transparency advocates have applauded agency efforts to create plans for fulfilling Obama's open government vision but criticized agencies' follow-through. They argue White House leaders aren't doing enough to hold agencies accountable for failing to be transparent. And questions have arisen about Obama's personal commitment to the movement.

But activists seem hopeful that the administration will keep Noveck's post and appoint someone capable of filling her big shoes. Already the blogosphere is abuzz with suggestions for replacements, like these from the social network GovLoop:

-Andrew Hoppin, New York State Senate chief information officer
-Dustin Haisler, CIO for the City of Manor, Texas
-Clay Johnson, former director of the Sunlight Foundation's software development division
-Bill Eggers, director of Deloitte research, public sector
-Lena Trudeau, vice president of the National Academy of Public Administration; founder of the Collaboration Project, an independent consortium working to apply web 2.0 tools to solve the government's problems.

A Christmas e-card that claimed to be from the White House spread something other than cheer this past holiday season. The card actually continued a virus that stole documents from the computers of unsuspecting users.

The card, sent to an unknown number of people, many believed to be in government, was signed from the Executive Office of the President. Recipients who clicked on the link and opened the card.zip file caught a Zeus Trojan virus that snatched documents and passwords and uploaded the data to a server in Belarus, Network World reported on Monday.

The spoof stole more than 2 gigabytes of documents in Microsoft Word, Excel and PDF format, according to security expert Brian Krebs in a blog post.

Krebs said one of the victims was an employee at the National Science Foundation's Office of Cyber Infrastructure and the documents collected included hundreds of NSF grant applications for new technologies and scientific approaches. Another victim was an intelligence analyst in the Massachusetts State Police, whose documents might have recently received top-secret clearance.
For those tech geeks out there, Network Forensics has the coding of the virus on its blog.

The White House's deputy chief technology officer, a former Google veteran, will leave his position Thursday to launch two startups, according to news reports.

Politico reported Wednesday that Andrew McLaughlin, who handled Internet policy issues in the White House, will announce his plans to launch one organization that fosters "low-cost, collaborative tech for state and local governments" and another to support new startups in developing countries.

According to Politico, McLaughlin was Google's head of global public policy and served on Obama's transition team before joining the White House.

In April, he was questioned over the legality of his use of Web-based e-mail to communicate with lobbyists at Google and high-ranking officials. Politico reported that it is unclear who will fill McLaughlin's role.

He is not the first Google official to leave the White House. In July, Katie Jacobs Stanton, a Google veteran who worked on new media strategies for Obama's 2008 campaign and served as White House director of citizen participation before joining the State Department to help the department use social media in international diplomacy and aid, left for Twitter, the Los Angeles Times reported.

A group of corporate technology executives has developed a plan that they say can reduce the federal deficit by $1 trillion during the next 10 years while enhancing citizen services.

The Technology CEO Council, led by IBM's Chairman Sam Palmisano and includes Dell Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell, presented the report to Obama economic officials on Thursday. They based their plan on how the private sector has increased productivity, and reduced unnecessary expenses, "areas where the government has failed," a news release said.

The recommendations by the council, whose member companies employ 700,000 people and generate $250 billion to $300 billion in annual sales, would require no new legislation, they said. The key to achieving the savings is leadership, "and it must come from all sectors of society," the report said.

Among the recommendations were to consolidate information technology infrastructure. The report estimated 20 to 30 percent of the $76 billion the government spends on supporting its IT assets can be eliminated by reducing overhead, consolidating data centers, eliminating redundant networks and standardizing applications.

"By harnessing major technological shifts and adopting best business practices, we cannot only make our government far more productive, but also foster greater innovation in areas ranging from health care to education and energy," the 10-page report said.

A series of new application programming interfaces - tools that facilitate interaction between datasets and other software programs - will make it easier for developers to play and interact with the content on Data.gov, the online repository of federal information and a cornerstone of the open government initiative.

But those are just the preliminary steps to establishing a self-running ecosystem that will convert raw government data into valuable content and interesting applications, a White House technology expert said last week at a government IT forum.

At a June 15 panel hosted by technology news platform Information Week, Eugene Huang, senior adviser to the chief technology officer at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, announced that API interfaces on Data.gov "will be rolled out over the next three to six months." Details are being finalized, he added.

"We hope this will make it easier for developers to access the raw data behind Data.gov and incorporate it into their applications," Huang said in an interview.

The real question that the Obama administration faces as it attempts to open up the government doesn't revolve around implementing the right tools, he said.

"The question is, how do you build a community of individuals who are not just the data geeks but more importantly, individuals who really want to do interesting things with the data and turn that into applications that can be used by the public, much more so than the apps that have already been done?" he said.

A mysterious formula of alchemy, serendipity and the right amount of will, perhaps?

Clay Johnson, the director of Sunlight Labs, an open source community of thousands that builds applications out of government data, said that his organization, the Sunlight Foundation, never had a "sophisticated plan" for moving forward. Growth was the result of making the right connections at the right time and allowing one thing to lead to another. In his own words, "serendipity."

A sustainable ecosystem of support, once given the first spark, will happen "in a snowball as it gets going," said Todd Park, chief technology officer at the Health and Human Services Department, which is rolling out a public-private effort to build a public data warehouse and portal and was recently approached by five private sector organizations that volunteered to publish their health data in the same format and metadata as HHS' datasets to make the work of developers easier.

Some members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are expected next week to announce the formation of a bipartisan congressional transparency caucus, co-chaired by Reps. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the panel's ranking member, and Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill.

The caucus will pursue a legislative agenda focused on free, online access to all government information, Issa aides said. The group also plans to conduct oversight of disclosures and educate lawmakers and citizens.

Specifically, legislative efforts will include mandating the release of data formats that any computer application can read and share with other apps and ensuring that bulk-downloadable documents are posted on permanent Web sites. The caucus also wants data-driven transparency incorporated into rulemaking, federal spending and agency performance.

The General Services Administration has approved universal sign-in applications for use on government Web sites, provided by Equifax, Google and Paypal, that will allow citizens who are securely logged in to one site to instantly and safely switch to another agency site without having to log in again.

The so-called Open Identity Exchange applications are expected to expedite access to government services by giving users a single ID credential that all privacy-protected federal sites will accept.

Watch Nextgov news for more details. . .

Do you know a federal manager who recently took risks to push through a bold idea, policy or program that uses technology to make government work better or improve public services? If so, we'd like to hear your story by nominating your colleague for a Nextgov Award.

The Nextgov Award program, developed in partnership with O'Reilly Media Inc. and TechWeb, will recognize government executives who stepped outside their comfortable confines to think and manage differently. They acted boldly to push through an innovative program, policy or new management practice that relied on technology to move government in a new direction, to challenge employees to think and work differently, and that ultimately improved the lives of citizens.

We know there are many managers who have done just that, and we want you to tell us about them by nominating them for a Nextgov Award. The deadline is March 12, but we suggest you don't wait. Visit the nomination page and spend just a few minutes filling out the form. We'll tell the stories of the winners later this spring on Nextgov.

A panel of respected judges will make choose the winners, who will be honored at a luncheon on May 27 at the Gov 2.0 Expo at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. The expo is co-sponsored by O'Reilly Media Inc. and TechWeb, and Nextgov is the premier media sponsor.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy on Wednesday announced the launch of its redesigned Web portal, which updates the old site's features and incorporates a few new ones.

Aside from an all-new aesthetic, which closely matches other White House blogs, OSTP's site now has a center column devoted to news items of interest. The Tweetoid of the Day, a science- or tech-based fact pulled from Twitter, also will appear on the main page.

OSTP still will maintain its blog, albeit on a new platform, along with pages dedicated to press, R&D budgets, the National Science and Technology Council and the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

The move from old to new isn't quite complete, according to Wednesday's blog post. While the snow-related shutdown slows progress, OSTP will be accepting feedback and document requests.