House Administration Elections Subcommittee ranking member Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Rep. Gregg Harper, R-Miss., unveiled draft legislation Thursday [see PDF here] designed to increase online voter registration services while preserving safeguards to protect against fraudulent registration tactics witnessed in past elections.
"Americans are increasingly enjoying the convenience of online services provided by both private and government entities and voter registration shouldn't be an exception," they said in a statement, acknowledging the bill is still a work in progress. "Providing states with incentives to implement online programs would not only assist registrants, but would also help state election administrators reduce costs, save time and increase accuracy," they said.
The draft bill would direct the Election Assistance Commission to reimburse states for the cost of creating Web-based voter registration programs. In order to qualify, a program would have to be operated through the Web site of the chief state election official. The state agency would also have to ensure the accuracy, integrity, and security of the information provided by an applicant. That includes flagging registration attempts originating from an automated source or multiple attempts by the same individual.
A high-tech trade group on Thursday is releasing a paper that explains the depth of IT problems that are preventing the Social Security Administration from making data more interoperable and easier to manage. The report from the Computer and Communications Industry Association comes as the SSA's tech advisory board begins a two day meeting to develop a roadmap for systems technology and electronic services to better carry out the agency's mission over the next five to 10 years.
More baby boomers are heading into a system, which is relying on technology that was cutting edge --- back when this generation was putting their children through college, CCIA said in a press release. The SSA has faced criticism from Congress and its inspector general about the accessibility and security of vital data and the agency was granted $500 million under the economic stimulus package to fix its aging IT infrastructure.
In the CCIA paper, "The Promise of Open IT at Social Security," industry analyst Jeffrey Gould recommends that SSA switch to open standards for citizens' data, and that critical citizens' data be stored in standardized data tables that can easily be read and used by any widely used relational database. He also writes that new versions of all critical applications should be translated to modern computer languages that are not tied to a particular hardware platform or operating system. Read more about the paper here.
The Republican transparency train rolls on with Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Wash., introducing legislation Wednesday that would require each of the 21 standing committees in the House to record votes on their Web sites within 48 hours. Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., sponsored a resolution last week calling for cameras to be installed in the House Rules Committee hearing room and freshman Rep. Lynn Jenkins, R-Kan., recently sponsored a measure to require committees to post the text of adopted bills and amendments online within 24 hours.
"The American people deserve to know how their representatives vote in all cases, and frankly, in the current information age it makes no sense that we're not already providing this service," Reichert said in a press release. "When we're debating a trillion-dollar health overhaul, constituents deserve to know how legislation takes shape - throughout the entire process." House Minority Leader John Boehner said Reichert's resolution "is a common-sense reform that should have been adopted a long time ago in Congress."
Defense Department Deputy Chief Information Officer David Wennergren on Tuesday issued the Pentagon's much-anticipated memorandum clarifying the use and development of open source software. The memo dated Oct. 16 notes that there are many open source programs in operational use by the department today, in both classified and unclassified environments, but there have been misconceptions and misinterpretations of the existing laws, policies and regulations that deal with the technology. Read the memo here (PDF).
There has been significant recent momentum for the increased adoption of open source solutions in the federal government, and the memo from DoD represents "a major tipping point," said David Thomas, principal at Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti and spokesman for Open Source for America. He said his group hopes Wennergren's action will help break down roadblocks for open source adoption in defense agencies and increase the DoD's contribution back to the open source community.
OSA's members include a range of interests including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Google, Mozilla Foundation, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and others. The group is dedicated to highlighting the many advantages open source -- particularly for government -- including security, lower total cost of ownership, rapid innovation, faster deployment and lack of vendor lock-in. In related news, the White House Web site recently switched to an open source code.
Lawmakers' Internet-based town hall meetings increase constituents' approval ratings for the politician, enhance citizen engagement in politics and ultimately impact the probability of participants voting for that member of Congress, according to a new Congressional Management Foundation report. CMF Executive Director Beverley Bell said online meetings offer lawmakers a flexible tool for communication in addition to traditional in-person meetings, tele-town halls and newsletters. "People like hearing from - and feeling heard by - their representatives in all formats, including online," she said Monday.
Researchers from CMF, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Northeastern University, Ohio State University, and the University of California-Riverside found that members who engaged in online town halls experienced an average net approval rating jump of 18 points with similar increases in trust and perceptions of personal qualities. Town hall meetings also attract people from demographics not traditionally engaged in politics as well as those frustrated with the political system. About 96 percent of those polled said they would like to be included in similar events in the future.
Among those taking part in the study were Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin and Reps. Earl Blumenauer, Michael Capuano, James Clyburn, Mike Conaway, Anna Eshoo, Jack Kingston, Zoe Lofgren, Don Manzullo, Jim Matheson, David Price, George Radanovich, and Dave Weldon. The town halls with the House members were conducted in the summer and fall of 2006, prior to the 2006 election, and the session with Levin was conducted in the summer of 2008.
Click here (PDF) to read the full CMF report.
More than 20 open government and high-tech watchdogs on Tuesday wrote to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader John Boehner, House Rules Chairwoman Louise Slaughter and Rules ranking member David Dreier calling for a Rules Committee hearing to explore the benefits of requiring that legislation be posted online for 72 hours prior to consideration. Along with the letter, the groups delivered a petition with 21,000 signatures of individuals who joined the Sunlight Foundation's Read the Bill campaign. They, too, want Congress post legislation and conference reports on the Web for 72 hours before debate begins.
"House and Senate leaders understand the importance of providing online access to legislation and have indicated some willingness to make health care legislation available prior to a vote. Those promises are appreciated, but an ad hoc approach to allowing the public to read the bill is not sufficient," Sunlight's Lisa Rosenberg wrote in a Wednesday blog post. "Members of Congress should be governed by a rule that ensures that all legislation is available to the public at specific online locations for a minimum number of hours." Reps. Brian Baird, D-Wash., and John Culberson, R-Texas, have introduced a 72-hour rule resolution.
Rep. Lynn Jenkins, R-Kan., introduced a resolution to change House rules and require committees to post the actual text of adopted bills and amendments online within 24 hours. She argued in a press release that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's pledge for an open and transparent Congress has fallen short and lawmakers have failed to require transparency for one of the most powerful components of Congress -- congressional committees. "The federal government functions best when it governs in the light of day," she said.
Over the past nine months, major bills have repeatedly been drafted, filed and then changed in the dark of night or behind closed-doors, Jenkins added. The freshman lawmaker argued that it happened with the economic stimulus package, the House Energy and Commerce energy bill, and the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee's healthcare overhaul legislation. "This is only my first year in Washington, but if this is 'business as usual,' then it's time for business to change," she said.
House Minority Leader John Boehner praised Jenkins saying that "the practice of secretly adding 'phantom amendments' to major bills after they pass committee is outrageous, and it should be banned." He argued that Senate HELP Democrats quietly made more than 70 changes to the healthcare bill after it was voted on in committee. Reps. Greg Walden, R-Ore., and John Culberson, R-Texas, have petitioned to change House rules to require all bills be posted online for at least 72 hours before being brought to a vote.
A prominent open government group on Wednesday unveiled its vision for a revamped FCC Web site after weeks of online public discussion and input from Commission officials and key stakeholders. What made the FCC redesign different from the Sunlight Foundation's previous efforts to show how federal sites can be easier to access was the dense content. "Most visitors find it difficult to understand the vast majority of the content for good reason: it can be highly-technical and the FCC's operations are foreign to most people," the group said in a blog post. Click here to read a detailed summary of the changes Sunlight proposes, plus screenshots of its FCC mock up.
The General Services Administration on Tuesday announced a new application that allows government employees to shorten their Web addresses. Go.USA.gov lets officials create short .gov URLs out of any .gov, .mil, or .si.edu URLs. As of 5:30 p.m., Go.USA.gov has shortened 249 URLs that have been clicked 14,299 times.
A handful of the most popular Go.USA.gov links:
• NASA satellite images of autumn foliage at Lake Superior and Lake Michigan
• Recovery.gov, the government's economic stimulus accountability Web site
• A 2009 flu prevention public service announcement contest
• U.S. earthquakes from the last seven days
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's healthcare public option page
In related Web news, the White House unveiled a new Spanish site and Twitter feed.
Legislation to make Congressional Research Service reports publicly available was introduced in the House on Thursday by freshmen Reps. Frank Kratovil, D-Md., and Leonard Lance, R-N.J. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Joseph Lieberman introduced a companion bill in April, restarting the perennial attempt by some lawmakers and open government advocates. Last Congress, he introduced a resolution with Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs ranking member Susan Collins that called for a more accessible system. Over the past decade, a series of bills requiring public access to CRS reports has made little progress, including a 2007 measure by former Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn.
Under the chairmanship of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., last Congress, the Rules Committee authorized CRS to create software to let senators place individual reports on their Web sites. Lieberman and his allies believe that didn't go far enough. As public debate becomes increasingly partisan and polarized, "it is more important than ever for citizens to have full access to the same neutral, unbiased information that many of us rely on to help us formulate important decisions," Kratovil said. Lance added that making taxpayer-funded research available to the American people is simply "good government."
In addition to piecemeal disclosures by lawmakers, CRS reports are made available through pay services and more intermittently at OpenCRS.com, a free Web database offered by the Center for Democracy and Technology.
The Justice Department has overhauled Justice.gov and signed on to four of the major social networks -- Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube, the Sunlight Foundation's Jake Brewer pointed out Thursday. The effort shows the agency "is making an effort to connect more strongly with the outside world" and as a result is becoming more transparent, he wrote on an open government listerv. The initiative "can only be helpful when it comes time for the department to determine where its future time and energy will go," he added.
After overcoming many challenges, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board launched its new and improved Recovery.gov Web site on Monday. Earl Devaney, who manages the site and oversees economic stimulus spending, explains in a video message [click here] how the site will provide citizens with accountability and transparency. Recipients start reporting quarterly on Thursday and by Oct. 15 the board will post all data associated with contract recipients. Grant and loan data will be posted by Oct. 30, he said. Read more in CongressDaily's PM Edition here (subscription required).
The General Services Administration and White House Office of Management and Budget on Tuesday will unveil a federal cloud computing initiative, the centerpiece of which will be a new Web site, Apps.gov -- an online storefront for agencies to acquire and purchase cloud computing services in an efficient, effective way. Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, GSA CIO Casey Coleman, and GSA Associate Administrator David McClure will brief reporters on the project during an afternoon teleconference.
Coleman spoke at an August conference about the potential of scalable and virtualized resources on the heels of a solicitation for cloud storage, Web hosting and virtual machine services. During her speech, she said agility is first and foremost about giving organizations the ability to rapidly and inexpensively change resources. Cost is greatly reduced since capital expenditures for IT are converted to operational expenses and, since systems are accessed using a Web browser, resources can be used anywhere, she said.
Furthermore, cloud computing improves reliability and security and is environmentally sensitive and energy efficient, Coleman said in prepared remarks at a business conference focused on customer relationship management. "The days of developing massive agency-focused IT infrastructure projects are long gone," she said. "We can try new things, and if they work, great. If not, lessons are learned. If there's an advantage to doing this in a government environment, it's that we are mission driven, not profit driven."
Cross-posted from NationalJournal.com's Health Care page:
Curious Americans are turning to the Internet to learn more about health care reform. In the past 90 days, Google searches for keywords like "healthcare reform bill," "House health bill" and "healthcare bill" have risen by more than 5,000 percent. Those words return a plethora of results -- blogs, news organizations, interest groups and government pages -- but if the White House wants to have the authoritative site on the debate, it needs to refine its strategy, experts warn.
For starters, the administration has struggled to debunk misinformation that other groups spread through viral e-mails and campaigns. The White House set up a "Reality Check" site, but it's unlikely you'll end up there after a simple Google search using the most popular health care-related keywords. "I don't think [the Reality Check site] is really well optimized and is helping the campaign," said Michael Fleischner, an expert on search engine optimization. "If we were to type in the most common terms that people are searching on, we would expect [that site] to come up, and [it's] not coming up."
The Obama administration is weeks away from unveiling a comprehensive open government directive to push agencies toward greater accountability and transparency, Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra said Wednesday at a high-tech conference. The directive will lay out a structured schedule for the release of data in a machine-readable format and institute reporting requirements for agencies to describe how they will involve the public in open government initiatives, Chopra said.
He also told the crowd at the Gov 2.0 summit that more interactive Web-based platforms are in the works. The Obama administration launched an Internet-based dashboard in June that provides details about every major federal IT project at a single location, including each initiative's goals, schedule, cost outlays, key personnel, and contractors used. The OMB also runs Data.gov, a service that provides the public raw feeds of government information. Read CongressDaily's story here for more details (subscription required).
Some recent stats provided by OMB:
• The IT dashboard has received 53 million hits since its launch on June 30.
• The dashboard displays data from 28 agencies, information on more than 7,000 federal IT investments and detailed data on more than 780 large projects.
• The Data.gov catalog which, as of September, has 110,865 data sets, allows the American people to find, use, and repackage data held and generated by the government.
NextGov's Gautham Nagesh reports that the Obama administration issued a solicitation in August for a contractor to archive the increasing amount of information published online that qualifies as presidential records. The White House wants an automated process to capture, extract and store information posted by employees in the Executive Office of the President on publicly accessible Web sites, including social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, according to the solicitation posted on FedBizOps and dated Aug. 21. The contractor will be responsible for archiving comments on pages the White House creates and messages sent to the office on those sites.
The notice specified the contract applies to offices subject to the 1978 Presidential Records Act, which requires the White House to preserve the president's records and communications. It notes that the White House already is capturing and restoring communications on several social networking sites, including MySpace and Vimeo. The system must be easy to organize and search captured information, and the contractor would be responsible for ensuring the records are transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration in an acceptable format. NARA did not respond to a request for comment by the time this story was posted. Read the full story here.
The Obama administration and watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington on Wednesday settled four ongoing cases regarding public access to White House visitor records. The most significant development, CREW said early Thursday, is the commitment by the administration to affirmatively post visitor records online on an ongoing basis, bringing a historic level of transparency to the White House. Visitor records are created by the Secret Service as part of its statutory responsibility to protect the president, vice president, their residences, and the White House generally.
"The Obama administration has proven its pledge to usher in a new era of government transparency was more than just a campaign promise," CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan said in a statement. "The Bush administration fought tooth and nail to keep secret the identities of those who visited the White House. In contrast, the Obama administration - by putting visitor records on the White House Web site - will have the most open White House in history." Because of the policy change, CREW dismissed its lawsuits, which were filed after the Bush and later the Obama administration refused to provide White House visitor records in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.
In the Bush era, CREW wanted to review the log of visits by Christian conservative leaders and lobbyist Stephen Payne. The administration argued the records were presidential records, not agency records of the Secret Service, and therefore exempt from the FOIA's mandatory disclosure requirements. U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth disagreed, ruling twice that the records are subject to the FOIA and not within any of the claimed exemptions. After Obama took office, CREW sought records of visits to the White House by health care and coal executives. The government initially refused to turn over those records.
The FCC is taking major strides to keep pace with the popularity of social networking Web sites like MySpace and Facebook by offering its employees an internal electronic forum for communicating about the Commission's priorities and activities. FCC Managing Director Steven VanRoekel, an ex-Microsoft executive, told commissioners at a Thursday meeting that a site -- reboot.fcc.gov -- is allowing hundreds of staffers engage in discussions about how to improve the agency and connect in "an organic way." The announcement came on the heels of the FCC's launch of a broadband blog and feed on the micro-blogging platform Twitter last week.
Working groups and task forces have been formed through the closed site to help find solutions to a range of challenges faced by the FCC without instructions or a directive from their superiors, he said. For example, employees last week formed an online committee to help the Commission become more eco-friendly. VanRoekel said the Web site will be opened up so external stakeholders can join in the conversations "in the very near future." "We want to ensure the experience the public has with the agency is consistent, innovative and evokes trust," he said.
For more news from the FCC's August meeting, read CongressDaily's article: "FCC Opens Investigation Into Wireless Issues" here (subscription required).
From NationalJournal.com's Under The Influence blog:
After individuals went on Fox News and took to the Internet last week complaining they'd received unsolicited e-mails from the White House, the administration said it would change how it collects addresses. That's a good idea, e-mail experts say, because the White House has plenty of room for improvement. "I would grade their e-mail collection process as an F," said Marco Marini, CEO of ClickMail Marketing, citing privacy and e-mail campaign effectiveness concerns.
The box at the top of WhiteHouse.gov allows anyone to subscribe by simply typing in an e-mail address and ZIP code. What's stopping my friend, or political opponent, from signing me up, Marini wondered? Adding an e-mail confirmation step would be "very easy to implement and would save a lot of headaches," he said. Most sites that users must register for -- from newspapers to banks to stores -- send a confirmation to the e-mail addresses provided before beginning to use the address to communicate with the user. Though the White House said it was changing its e-mail collection process, Marini's basic suggestion is not among the changes made.
"We are implementing measures to make subscribing to e-mails clearer, including preventing advocacy organizations from signing people up to our lists without permission when they deliver petition signatures and other messages on individual's behalf," White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said in a statement last week. The White House's online director, Macon Phillips, followed that up with a blog post reiterating their suspicion that outside groups were signing up individuals without their permission and saying that changes had been made.
GovernmentExecutive.com reports that it's unclear whether President Obama's campaign proposal to post copies of all government contracts online has the support of Congress or is even logistically viable. Kenneth Baer, communications director for the Office of Management and Budget, said Wednesday that Obama continues to support the principles of a bill he introduced while in the Senate that would have added vastly more information to USASpending.gov.
In June 2008, then-Sen. Obama and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., introduced a follow-up to their 2006 Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending Act, which created USASpending.gov. The 2008 legislation -- ballyhooed at the time because it was co-sponsored by Obama's Republican rival for the presidency, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. -- received high-level support but never moved out of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. An identical bill in the House also floundered.
A Senate Democratic source familiar with the legislation said in an e-mail that the bill failed to move because "OMB and others questioned whether it was possible to do everything that the bill tried to do, and Sens. Obama and Coburn didn't [or] couldn't address the concerns that were raised in time. "While many of the original sponsors continue to support the legislation's intentions, "there is no plan to reintroduce the bill," the source said.
Read the full story here.
Carole Jett, deputy chief of staff for the Department of Agriculture, on Wednesday became the first current Obama administration official to guest post on one of Google's corporate blogs. Jett's memo, which was featured on Google's enterprise blog and was cross-posted to its public policy blog, highlighted her department's use of an interactive Google map that provides detailed state-by-state information about economic stimulus package spending. The map makes it easy for people to find information about stimulus projects in their part of the country by department, program, or dollar amount.
A spokesman for Google, which has substantial ties to the Obama team, said there were no plans for a formal series of guest blog posts from administration officials but the company occasionally provides a platform for politicians and policy experts to speak their mind. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Robert Kennedy Jr., have recently written content for Google blogs. Similar to Wednesday's post by Jett, Bloomberg highlighted how a Google map can be used to explore the Big Apple. Kennedy, an environmental crusader, wrote about mountaintop removal in 2008.
The Obama administration's open government crusade appears to be contagious. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom on Wednesday announced the launch of DataSF.org, a Web site that will offer convenient access to city data that is relevant to the community. Much like Data.gov, a site spearheaded by federal CIO Vivek Kundra, the service provides the public raw feeds of government information. Newsom, who is also running for governor of California in the 2010 election, made the announcement about DataSF.org in a guest post on the popular technology blog TechCrunch.
"We imagine creative developers taking apartment listings and city crime data and mashing it up to help renters find their next home or an iPhone application that shows restaurant ratings based on health code violations," Newsom wrote. "The idea behind the site is to open up San Francisco government and tap into the creative expertise of our greatest resource - our residents." He said he hoped DataSF.org will "create a torrent of innovation similar to when the developer community was given access to the platforms behind popular technologies and devices like Facebook and Apple's iPhone."
Read Newsom's full blog post here.
GovernmentExecutive.com reports that the Defense Department on Monday unveiled a fresh look for its Web site, focused on increasing two-way communication. The redesigned site is hosted on the new URL Defense.gov and highlights social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter. The primary goal of the makeover, Pentagon officials said, is to engage the public, particularly 18 to 24 year olds. "If we just stick to the traditional ways of communicating, we leave out a huge portion of society," Price Floyd, principal deputy assistant secretary of Defense for public affairs, told the American Forces Press Service, the Defense Department's news service. Read the full story here.
FederalReporting.gov, a Web site that works in conjunction with Recovery.gov to provide a comprehensive solution for stimulus money recipient reporting and transparency launched Monday. Prime recipients and first-tier sub recipients of Recovery Act funds can begin reporting on their use of those funds. Reports entered into FederalReporting.gov will be replicated on Recovery.gov and available for viewing and downloading on Oct. 11, one day after the first round recipient reports are due.
White House New Media Director Macon Phillips provided an update late Monday on the White House's "Reality Check" Web site, saying the offering -- meant to provide facts about health reform -- has itself become "the target of fear-mongering and online rumors that are the tactics of choice for the defenders of the status quo." In a post on the official White House blog, Phillips provided an update on e-mail distribution issues and made a pitch for citizens to suggest new topics to be covered on the Reality Check site.
"It has come to our attention that some people may have been subscribed to our e-mail lists without their knowledge - likely as a result of efforts by outside groups of all political stripes- and we regret any inconvenience caused by receiving an unexpected message," he wrote, emphasizing the administration has not and will not add names from a commercial or political list to the White House list. Phillips pointed out there's a link to unsubscribe from e-mails at the bottom of each message and WhiteHouse.gov has boosted the security of its mailing list and will continue to safeguard users' information.
With respect to suggestions for topics to cover on the Reality Check site, Phillips said the administration has seen an "incredible response" from visitors who are using the tools provided on the site to share videos and other content. The e-mail address set up last week to solicit ideas is now closed (see earlier Tech Daily Dose post) and all feedback should be sent through: whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/contact. Read more of Phillips's blog post here.
The White House has closed down a short-lived electronic tip box -- flag@whitehouse.gov -- that was created to collect "fishy" claims about President Obama's healthcare plan after privacy concerns were raised. E-mails to that address now bounce back with an error message that reads: "The e-mail address you just sent a message to is no longer in service. We are now accepting your feedback about health insurance reform via http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck." Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, challenged the effort shortly after it was launched in early August even though the administration claimed it was not collecting any of the tipsters' names. He argued the White House had not made clear what steps were being taken to purge names, email addresses and other personal data.
The current White House policy on persistent Internet tracking cookies continues to apply to all federal agencies and to those agencies' use of third-party applications, whenever personal information is collected on the agency's behalf, two administration officials reaffirmed Tuesday in a blog post. OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Associate Director Michael Fitzpatrick and White House CIO Vivek Kundra used the White House's official blog to address the issue after some articles hinted the government is creating special exemptions for third-parties from existing privacy rules.
The administration is revisiting the ban on using persistent cookies on federal Web sites and has asked for feedback on the issue. "The policy won't change until we've read the public comments that have been submitted to ensure that we're considering all sides of the issue and are addressing privacy concerns appropriately," they wrote. "It is clear that protecting the privacy of citizens who visit government Web sites must be one of the top considerations in any new policy." Read the full blog post here.
The White House launched a new Web page Monday that "focuses on what reform really means for you and your family" and "debunks some common myths along the way," President Obama's New Media Director Macon Phillips wrote on the official White House blog. Click here to read more.
The U.S. government's contracts with Internet companies for video, photo sharing and other Web 2.0 services may have ignored key privacy obligations of federal agencies, according the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the group show that the General Services Administration moved ahead with the agreements even as guidance for President Obama's January open government and transparency directive was delayed.
Google, even after addressing privacy problems associated with the White House's use of embedded YouTube videos, is "still calling the shots on federal privacy policy," EPIC argued in an email. GSA's Google contract asserts that the "provider acknowledges that except as expressly set forth in this agreement Google uses persistent cookies in connection with the YouTube video player." It goes on to state: "To the extent any rules or guidelines exist prohibiting the use of persistent cookies in connection with provider content applies to Google, provider expressly waives those rules or guidelines as they may apply to Google."
In the GSA's contract with Yahoo, which owns photo sharing site Flickr, Yahoo acknowledged that the agency was obligated to follow various "laws and regulations," but there is nothing to indicate that Yahoo would be bound by those same laws and regulations, EPIC said. A review of the documents by EPIC's Lillie Coney, who pursued the FOIA request, also revealed a statement on federal policy banning Internet tracking cookies that mentions a waiver and adds that "policy may change." Further, it is unclear whether contracts signed by the GSA complied with the guidance prepared by the agency's general counsel on "GSA's ventures with social media tools," EPIC said.
Government transparency gurus at the Sunlight Foundation have embarked on a project to show what the FCC's Internet presence should look like in the Web 2.0 world. According to Archive.org, the FCC site last received a facelift in fall 2001. The watchdog will release a mock up of a re-imagined FCC.gov but unlike its previous redesign projects -- USA.gov, the EPA, the FEC, and the Supreme Court -- the group is asking for public input before putting pen to paper. Sunlight wants to know: What kinds of information are missing from the FCC's site? How should information be organized? How should it be presented? How should it be accessed and downloaded? To what extent should the site incorporate social media and how should it be used? The dialogue will take place online through open government discussion groups and at Sunlight Labs site. Click here for more information.
Public comments on whether the Obama administration should abolish or alter its policy barring federal Web sites from tracking users' Internet behavior are due Aug. 10, according to a notice published in the Federal Register on Monday. "The goal of this review is for the federal government to continue to protect the privacy of people who visit federal government Web sites while at the same time making these Web sites more user-friendly, providing better customer service, and allowing for enhanced Web analytics," the notice states. Feedback can be submitted at Regulations.gov and Whitehouse.gov/open or by e-mail at oira_submission@omb.eop.gov and fax (202) 395-7245.
The Office of Management and Budget is considering a three-tiered approach to the use of Web tracking technologies on government sites: (1) Single-session technologies, which track users over a single session and do not maintain tracking data over multiple sessions or visits. (2) Multi-session technologies for use in analytics, which track users over multiple sessions purely to gather data to analyze Web traffic statistics. (3) Multi-session technologies for use as persistent identifiers, which track users over multiple visits with the intent of remembering data, settings, or preferences unique to that visitor for purposes beyond what is needed for analytics.
NextGov reports that Bev Godwin, director of online resources and interagency development for the White House new media team, asked the public on Friday to weigh in on the decade-old federal policy that does not allow agencies to use persistent cookies on their Web sites. The reason has to do with privacy, but it makes it harder for agencies to create Web services like those in the private sector. The White House wants the public to tell them what they think. White House Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra and Michael Fitzpatrick, associate administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, provided details on the administration's Open Government blog and the Office of Science and Technology Policy's blog.
OMB is considering a three-tiered approach to the use of Web tracking technologies on government sites: (1) Single-session technologies, which track users over a single session and do not maintain tracking data over multiple sessions or visits. (2) Multi-session technologies for use in analytics, which track users over multiple sessions purely to gather data to analyze Web traffic statistics. (3) Multi-session technologies for use as persistent identifiers, which track users over multiple visits with the intent of remembering data, settings, or preferences unique to that visitor for purposes beyond what is needed for analytics. Comments submitted by Aug. 10 will be taken into consideration.
The number of datasets on Data.gov has increased from 47 to more than 100,000 - with new sets being added continuously, Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag announced Friday in a blog post. The Web site was launched in May by White House Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra to provide raw feeds of government information from a range of agencies and departments. Since its launch, Data.gov has received more than 18 million hits. "The early response has been very positive. Individuals and organizations are not only viewing the data, but are also improving upon our work by analyzing and repurposing the information," Orszag wrote.
He also gave a shout out to the Sunlight Foundation, which recently launched Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge to elicit from the public the most innovative applications based on the data available on Data.gov. One of the submissions is FlyOnTime.us -- a Web site that uses data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, available on Data.gov, to let consumers to see estimated versus actual arrival times for flights on major commercial carriers. Kundra has also been been working with state and local governments to encourage them to open the warehouses of public data. California, the District of Columbia and Utah have already taken up the challenge. Click here for more.
White House Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra believes a "huge, tectonic shift" is needed for government agencies to accept a new era of open government, which has become a major mission of the Obama administration. The bottom line, he told a high-tech conference on Tuesday, is that "at the end of the day we're stewards of taxpayer dollars and we need to be open and transparent around using that money." The latest project to launch in that space was in June when he unveiled a Web-based IT dashboard that sheds light on the performance of IT projects across government. As a result of that initiative, the Veterans Affairs Department said it was temporarily halting 45 projects that were found to be behind schedule or over budget.
"It's okay if a project is behind schedule as long as we understand what is causing the delay," Kundra said. "We need to understand the root cause so we can solve the problem." At the VA, the worst offender was 110 percent more expensive than planned and 17 months behind schedule. The agency plans to audit all the projects in question to determine whether additional resources or new management teams can get them back on track. "If we didn't highlight this and make data available, we would be continuing to plow good money after bad money," Kundra explained. Putting data out there through the IT dashboard and other initiatives forces agencies to take action and drive change across government, he said.
What about slowly aging Web offerings that predated the Obama era like FedBizOpps -- a contracting portal for commercial vendors and government buyers -- or the Federal Register's Web site? "We're looking at the lessons learned in investments from these platforms and making sure we can scale them," Kundra said. His team wants to ensure that the technology that supports those services is agile enough so the content can be repurposed. Similarly, legacy data systems used internally by agencies are being reviewed. "The key is to make sure we find those game-changing ideas and disrupt how we're thinking about the linear fashion in which we go out there and invest in technology," he said.
White House Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and Defense Department Deputy Chief Information Officer David Wennergren on Tuesday stressed the importance of agencies embracing transparency while maintaining a focus on network security. During speeches at an open government conference, the pair emphasized the goals are not mutually exclusive. "We cannot have an either-or scenario," Chopra said, citing several recent examples of federal projects that accomplish both objectives. Wennergren said that risk avoidance doesn't work in the Web 2.0 world since "relentlessly sharing is what the future is all about."
"The more you block access, the more secure you feel. The less bad stuff gets in, the less good stuff gets out," he said, calling such a scenario a self-inflicted denial of service attack. Chopra also spoke about the Obama administration's aim to fundamentally change the culture across government "not just by words and regulatory activities" but also by facilitating what he called "frictionless platform generation." Early examples of this include wikis, blogs, and peer review platforms already launched by a range of agencies. Additionally, Chopra lauded DoD's information portal DefenseSolutions.gov, calling it a case study in how agencies can embrace technology and their user communities.
Much of Chorpra's comments were focused on the big picture -- how the United States can remain an "innovation machine" amid increasing global competition and rapidly changing technologies. The upside, he said, was that venture capitalists have begun showing success again by churning out innovative new companies. The downside is that the U.S. rate of growth across a number of innovation indicators -- like higher education attainment and the number of highly skilled scientists and researchers -- lags behind other countries. He cited a recent analysis by Rob Atkinson at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation as proof.
The Veterans Affairs Department will temporarily halt 45 technology projects with a combined value of $200 million that are either behind schedule or over budget, the agency announced Friday. The worst offender was 110 percent more expensive than planned and 17 months behind schedule. During the coming weeks, the VA will audit all the projects to determine whether additional resources or new management teams can get them back on schedule. If they cannot be fixed, the projects will be canceled, officials said. The VA was able to catch the troubled contracts, in part, due to the Obama administration's new Web-based IT dashboard, which sheds light on the performance of projects across the federal government.
VA Secretary Eric Shinseki ordered a review of the department's 300 IT projects and implementation of an internal program designed to increase the accountability for technology initiatives agency-wide. "VA has a responsibility to the American people, who are investing millions of dollars in technology projects, to deliver quality results that adhere to a budget and are delivered on time." he said. "They need to have confidence that the dollars they are spending are being effectively used to improve the lives of our veterans." Read a blog post on the VA news by White House Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra here. The announcement is part of a broader administration effort to make the government more transparent, boost accountability and drive better performance, he wrote.
Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday commended the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board for enhancing the amount of information available about the distribution of economic stimulus funds on Recovery.gov. The Web site's new offerings -- a map that details how states are putting money to use and a series of maps that show how funds are moving out to contractors, grantees and loan recipients -- will provide citizens "an unprecedented look at their taxpayer dollars at work," Biden said in a statement. He said he looked forward to seeing the amount of content on the site grow as implementation of the stimulus continues because "unprecedented transparency has been one of the hallmarks of our implementation of the Recovery Act."
Meanwhile Earl Devaney, the man who oversees Recovery.gov, unveiled the "Chairman's Corner" on Thursday -- an online report to the American people about how things have gone and what to expect in the future. He said there's a central reporting system in the works for recipients of Recovery Act funds to submit quarterly reports on their use of the money. Under a separate contract, he's working on the next generation of Recovery.gov. Later this summer, he'll be ramping up accountability to more thoroughly review problems or allegations of impropriety (complete with electronic and telephone hotlines).
Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Joseph Lieberman and Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, slammed Grants.gov on Thursday on the heels of a new Government Accountability Office report (PDF) that shows the Web site designed to streamline the federal grant process is plagued by technical limitations, degraded performance and user difficulties. Lieberman urged the Office of Management and Budget to work with Congress and the stakeholder community to "strengthen both the management and technology behind Grants.gov, while streamlining and increasing transparency."
Voinovich, who is ranking member of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Government Management, the Federal Workforce and the District of Columbia, said he was "concerned that a tool designed to improve the distribution and effectiveness of federal grants has so many issues in this technological age, in some cases putting applicants at a disadvantage compared to those who utilize other channels." He said the GAO report underscored the need for the House to pass the Federal Financial Assistance Management Improvement Act to help put Grants.gov back on the right course.
The legislation, sponsored by Lieberman and Voinovich, passed the Senate in March but does not yet have a House companion. Their bill would require OMB to maintain a public Web site that allows federal grant applicants to search and apply for grants; manage, track and report on the use of grants; and provide required certifications and assurances for grants. The measure also requires OMB to report to Congress within nine months of enactment, and biennially thereafter for 15 years on progress made in implementation. Additionally, the bill lays out a framework for OMB and agency-level strategic plans.
The co-creator of the government accountability Web site StimulusWatch.org has launched a new project intended to make federal rulemakings easier for the public to access and offer comment. Jerry Brito, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, recently unveiled OpenRegs.com, which takes the Federal Register's daily XML feed to new heights. Currently, the U.S. government's Regulations.gov allows citizens to find, review, and submit comments on federal documents but Brito and others believe the portal is not as dynamic and user friendly as it could be.
OpenRegs.com offers automated lists of comment periods closing soon across all agencies; recently opened comment periods; and recently published final regulations. Users are also be able to find regulations by agency and by topic as well as subscribe to alerts for particular issues of interest. Furthermore, the OpenRegs.com community is able to discuss certain regulations online and submit comments. Brito told Tech Daily Dose in an e-mail that the U.S. government has made some strides to modernize. Regulations.gov has launched a user-feedback section and officials have promised a design refresh later this summer.
President Obama's Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra unveiled a new blog on Monday that will facilitate a discussion about an Internet-based dashboard he unveiled last month that makes available in a single location details about every major IT project of the federal government. The interactive Web site lets the public see each initiative's goals, schedule, cost outlays, key personnel, contractors used, and where the effort stands in real time. Since its June 30 launch, the IT dashboard has received more than 20 million hits and the White House has gotten an "encouraging response" from members of Congress and the public," Kundra wrote.
"We want to hear from you about what works and what doesn't with the site. Is there a more innovative approach that an investment should consider? Does the contract data look incorrect to you? Is there an application that we should add? This is a site to serve you, and to do that, we need to hear from you," he said. Answering that call, the Sunlight Foundation has already offered a detailed critique of the IT dashboard here.
NextGov.com's Aliya Sternstein reports...
The General Services Administration will release by early next week a redacted version of the potential $18 million contract to upgrade Recovery.gov, GSA officials said on Monday. Government transparency advocates had been calling on GSA and the board overseeing stimulus spending to publish the agreement that will cost taxpayers $9.5 million through January 2010 and up to $18 million if all options are exercised. Officials on Wednesday announced that GSA, on behalf of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, had negotiated the contract with Hollywood, Md.-based Web services developer Smartronix, but provided few other details about the deal.
The board late Friday posted an update that included a link to a June 15 request for proposals, which states the vendor must "move with speed" to provide a system that is expandable, secure and able to extract information from a separate data collection portal, feed that information to various third-parties and assess data quality. The new version of Recovery.gov is slated to launch Aug. 27. The solicitation also requires a back-up system and maintenance services. SRA International and Accenture, both technology services providers, also bid on the contract, GSA spokesman Robert Lesino said on Monday.
Meanwhile, the government's chief overseer of economic stimulus spending is defending last week's award to Smartronix. Earl Devaney said Friday in an interview with National Journal Group that critics of the contract's cost have oversimplified the task of rebuilding "the government's largest Web site" in a matter of months, as well as the challenge of putting in place security controls and interconnectivity with a reporting system designed to handle an ocean of data. Read more about Devaney's comments in Monday's CongressDaily PM Edition here (subscription required).
The chief watchdog overseeing stimulus funds on Friday dismissed criticism of the federal government's award of an $18 million contract to a Maryland-based company to overhaul tracking Web site Recovery.gov. Earl Devaney, the top cop at the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, said critics of the project's price tag have oversimplified the task of rebuilding "the government's largest Web site" in a matter of months, as well as the challenge of putting in place security controls and interconnectivity with a reporting system designed to handle an ocean of spending data.
The contract calls for the spending of $9.5 million by January 2010, with options that would boost the price tag to $18 million by 2014. Republicans circulated messages ridiculing that figure on Thursday, and good government groups bristled at a lack of details about the contents of the procurement deal. Smartronix, Inc. was picked by a GSA-led panel of experts, Devaney said, adding he did not personally participate in the selection process and had "never heard" of the firm before.
A two-year-old effort by Internet and government transparency activist Carl Malamud and the National Technical Information Service to post oodles of videos online for use in the public domain has become the one of the most popular YouTube channels of the U.S. government. The FedFlix program ran for a year and it was so successful that the project agreement was amended so NTIS now sends Malamud and his team at Public.Resource.Org a minimum of 100 tapes a month. In addition to those, Malamud has systematically written every other agency he could find and paid for DVDs or asked for videotapes. For example, he has about 60 hours of valuable training material from the Federal Aviation Administration, reels from the Mine Health and Safety Administration, and a slew of Occupational Safety and Health Administration safety videos.
All told, Malamud says he has posted 1,000 videos online, including original Walt Disney, John Ford and James Cagney films as well as content from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, Fish & Wildlife Service, U.S. Army and Air Force, the Smithsonian Institution and many others. The videos can be found on YouTube for casual viewing; on the Internet Archive Web site, where users can burn their own DVDs; and at Bulk.Resource.Org as raw data so individuals can create their own stock footage library of public domain material. Most of the content is from the federal government but Malamud has added videos from Washington, Illinois and a few other places. A California state agency wrote him this week offering 17 DVDs filled with material.
Watch several of Tech Daily Dose's favorite flicks after the jump...
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., on Monday successfully pushed through an amendment to the $3.1 billion FY 2010 legislative branch appropriations bill that he argued would make it easier for the public to examine Senate expenses, such as salaries for staff, travel and office operations. Those records are already computerized but his plan would make the files available online for public review. Senate Appropriations Legislative Branch Subcommittee Chairman Bill Nelson, D-Neb., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid supported the proposal and agreed to a limited debate on the issue. He said his amendment would help the Senate "lead by example" and rein in spending within individual offices while providing much needed public accountability for taxpayer dollars. "I'm just as frugal with their money in my office as I am on the floor," said Coburn, who routinely objects to congressional spending sprees and has earned the nickname "Dr. No."
Meanwhile, a similar effort in the House has been delayed due to "security and support issues" that the House Administration Committee says must resolved before so-called "statement of disbursements" are made available in an electronic format. Although the chamber's servers were upgraded to handle massive, sudden influxes of e-mail and Web hits, the new technology needs to be tested in preparation for what is expected to be an enormous online interest in records, the committee said in a Thursday statement. Additionally, the committee and the Chief Administrative Officer want to ensure staffers are fully trained to explain the SODs to constituents who may call or e-mail. Online support materials like a frequently asked questions page and a glossary of terms are in the works. The first SOD to be posted on the Internet will cover the quarter beginning July 1, 2009 and will be posted as soon as possible following the end of that quarter.
President Obama often refers to the clear-cut benefits of striking a healthy balance between transparency and national security, such as upholding the Constitution. More ambiguous are the financial savings derived from increased transparency, NextGov's Aliya Sternstein writes in TechCentral's latest Issue Of The Week. In fact, even some open government proponents say Obama's transparency agenda may initially cost taxpayers more money. Specifically, the administration's ongoing review of classified information policy to address the problem of over-classification likely will result in some short-term overhead expenses. The cost-range is hard to assess, partly because the federal budget is not structured to provide that sort of empirical data, said Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, a nonpartisan think tank. But in the short term, "any change in policy is likely to result in increased costs, including changes that favor more open government, if only due to the costs of producing revised guidance and of employee training," he said.
On the other hand, the alternative -- over-classification -- is almost always expensive, say some classification specialists and transparency advocates. Information technology systems to guard classified information are particularly costly. Information security continues to be the most costly category reported by agencies, representing 56 percent of total security classification costs for FY08. Of the four subcategories of information security, "information systems security continues to be the most costly, at $4.3 billion, or 90 percent of estimated costs for information security," according to a May 19 report to the president from the Information Security Oversight Office at the National Archives and Records Administration. That office oversees classification and declassification policies and audits classification programs.
Read the full Issue Of The Week here (subscription required).
The Obama administration on Wednesday publicly disclosed on the Internet its annual report to Congress on staff titles and salaries. Since 1995, the White House has been required to deliver such a document to Capitol Hill. Consistent with President Obama's commitment to transparency, his Web team posted the rundown as a PDF document and as a searchable table (powered by Socrata) as it was sent to lawmakers. In addition to core White House staffers' details, the report also contains the title and salary of administration officials who work at the Office of Policy Development, including the Domestic Policy Council and the National Economic Council.
For the nosiest amongst us, here's a quick listing of some key officials' earnings:
Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff: $172,000
David Axelrod, Senior Adviser: $172,000
Valerie Jarrett, Senior Adviser: $172,000
Carol Browner, Assistant to the President: $172,000
Anita Dunn, Director of Communications: $172,000
Robert Gibbs, Press Secretary: $172,000
Greg Craig, Counsel to the President: $172,000
Lawrence Summers, Director, National Economic Council: $172,000
James Jones, National Security Adviser: $172,000
Susan Crawford, Special Assistant, Technology: $130,500
Matthew Loveless, Director, Technology: $55,000
Timothy Ryan, Assistant Director, Technology: $50,000
David Cole, Deputy Director, Technology: $60,000
Jason Brown, Director, Cybersecurity Policy (Detailee): $91,259
Macon Phillips, New Media Director: $115,000
Jesse Lee, Director, Online Programs: $70,000
Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman praised the Office of Management and Budget's announcement Tuesday of a new Web site that allows the public to track and comment on federal information technology spending. "When I won enactment of the E-Government Act almost a decade ago, the federal government was a newcomer to the online world and had only just begun to think seriously about how to provide American taxpayers with valuable electronic services and information. All that has changed," Lieberman said in a statement.
The IT dashboard on USASpending.gov "marks another leap forward for open government, public accountability, and management efficiency and serves as a model to open up more information on federal spending." With a click of the mouse, anyone can see and have their say about the decisions, successes, and setbacks of how tax dollars are spent on IT projects, he said. Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Federal Financial Management Subcommittee Chairman Thomas Carper, D-Del., concurred, saying he wants to work with the Obama administration to expand the effort to bring greater transparency for other large investments, including weapons acquisitions.
Read CongressDaily's Tuesday coverage of the issue here (subscription required).
Karen Evans, administrator of e-government and information technology at the Office of Management and Budget in the Bush administration lauded her successor's Tuesday launch of an Internet-based dashboard that makes available in a single location details about every major IT project of the federal government but warned of potential challenges on the horizon. The interactive Web site unveiled by Vivek Kundra at the Personal Democracy Forum's conference lets the public see each initiative's goals, schedule, cost outlays, key personnel, contractors used, and where the effort stands in real time. Read more coverage in CongressDaily's PM Edition here (subscription required).
Data quality will continue to be an issue, Evans told Tech Daily Dose. "The management of the agency's IT portfolio is a complex process and there are many reasons why a project may not be on schedule which then, affects performance and costs. With the public availability of the data, OMB and the agencies' CIOs will need to be prepared to respond to the corrective actions they have in place for investments which are not necessarily performing optimally." Additionally, the dashboard should serve as a tool to highlight areas that need attention rather than as a punitive mechanism for lack of performance, she said.
The future challenge is to avoid compliance reporting and to get true management oversight of IT investments, Evans said. She pointed out that the dashboard's level of transparency far exceeds what was available under the annual management watch list and the high risk list -- the OMB's standard methods of assessing troubled projects. "The departments and agencies have worked diligently to put management practices into place to ensure results for their investments," Evans said. "The IT dashboard is taking this detailed information and making it available to public and the Congress. Transparency is always a good thing."
When President Obama addressed calls for legalization of marijuana during his March online town hall, he proved that "when the people lead, the leaders will follow," Internet activist Jim Gilliam argued Tuesday at the Personal Democracy Forum's annual conference. Leading up to the big White House event, citizens were asked to vote on economic questions they wanted the commander in chief to answer. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws spearheaded a grassroots effort to push questions tying Mary Jane to economic improvement and job creation to the top of the heap. [Read related Tech Daily Dose coverage here].
"I don't know what this says about the online audience," Obama laughed during the webcast. "The answer is no, I don't think that is a good strategy to grow our economy." Over 92,000 people submitted over 100,000 questions and cast over 3.5 million votes. More than 67,000 people watched the event online. After the town hall, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was pressed for details on the administration's pot policy, the California Budget Office released an estimate on revenue that could be generated by a marijuana tax, and Obama's drug czar Gil Kerlikowske said he would stop referring to the "war on drugs" because it was unhelpful.
"Obama knew what he was doing... He wanted outrage," said Gilliam, the creator of a Web site that imagines how the White House might work if it was run completely democratically by thousands of people over the Internet. On WhiteHouse2.org, decriminalizing marijuana ranks 22nd and legalizing medical marijuana ranks 44th. The site's top five user generated priorities for Obama include: replacing the federal income tax with a "FairTax;" restoring, upholding and defending the Constitution; ending corporate welfare; securing all U.S. borders; and letting banks that make bad loans go out of business.
White House Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra on Tuesday unveiled a new Internet-based dashboard that makes available in a single location details about major information technology projects pursued by the federal government. Read more in CongressDaily's PM Edition.
On Tuesday, White House Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra and White House New Media Director Macon Phillips will unveil an Internet-based interactive dashboard that will make available in a single location details about every major information technology project pursued by the federal government. The big reveal will take place at the Personal Democracy Forum's annual conference in New York City. The Web site will let the public see each initiative's goals, schedule, cost outlays, key personnel, contractors employed, and where the effort stands in real time, Kundra has said. He launched a similar program as chief technology officer for the District of Columbia, where he worked before joining the administration. The plan is aligned with legislation introduced earlier this year by Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Federal Financial Management Subcommittee Chairman Thomas Carper, D-Del., which called for a Web site to be updated quarterly with the price, schedule and performance details of major federal projects. Read more about the initiative in a recent CongressDaily story here and check in Tuesday for more details.
The longstanding belief that the U.S. government cannot fail continues to propagate a low tolerance of risk among agency Web managers despite the Obama administration's ambitious high-tech agenda, the team leader for a unit of USA.gov that provides online training and tools told a crowd at the Personal Democracy Forum's annual conference Monday. "We're told don't screw up because it will get on front page of Washington Post. That underlies everything you do," Sheila Campbell said. That culture of hesitancy paired with a personnel system that lets poorly performing employees stay in jobs without adequate tech training for many years, is impeding innovation, she added.
At the same time, watchdog groups that criticize the U.S. government for being slow to improve its Web presence need to realize that federal Web managers are drowning in data. Campbell acknowledged that no one truly knows how many government Web sites actually exist but said a good estimate is around 24,000 -- and some have more than one million pages apiece. Adding to the complexity is the fact that outdated content on those pages is not taken down in a timely fashion and laws like the Paperwork Reduction Act have not kept pace with the Internet era. Campbell said a variety efforts are underway to overhaul aging rules and recruit innovative people. President Obama has led by example, hiring Aneesh Chopra, Vivek Kundra, Beth Noveck and others.
NextGov's Aliya Sternstein reports that a comprehensive online warehouse of downloadable federal statistics is expected soon to add clickable tags that allow users to search and catalog related content. "We want to be able to get multiple tagging. We've seen in social networking, that's been extremely useful," White House Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra said of the features coming in a few months to the next version of Data.gov. Toward the end of June, Kundra's office also will unveil a publicly accessible Web application that will quantify the progress of federal IT programs, allowing taxpayers to see whether the projects are on schedule and within budget. "We're going to power a lot of that through Data.gov," he said Thursday. "The idea is it's better to create platforms that are horizontal in nature, [but] what I don't want to do is give the impression that this is all going to happen overnight."
The goal of the government data depot, which launched May 21, is to encourage nongovernment users to mash agency information with other data sets to generate new services and sites and to enhance search engines. For instance, a real estate developer could map the migration patterns of wildlife, obtained through a live data feed from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite, on top of blueprints to pinpoint areas where construction could harm the ecosystem. But the government's outdated information technology systems prohibit much of that innovation now, Kundra stressed. "The federal government has over 10,000 systems and a lot of these systems are old," he said, noting that eventually the government will need to transition to hardware and software that can provide real-time feeds. "What we want to make sure is that we bake all of that [transparency] into new procurements."
Read the full story here.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has asked the chamber's Chief Administration Officer Dan Beard to enforce a new level of disclosure for official expenditures from the offices of House members and to post the documents online as soon as possible. She announced the expansion of House rules, which is part of her larger effort to increase transparency and accountability on Capitol Hill, on her blog Wednesday. Member's expenses are currently collected and published as bound paper volumes called the "Statements of Expenditures" but Congress has not made this public information available in an online format, the Sunlight Foundation's John Wonderlich said on his group's blog. The watchdog group called for online disclosure of the expense records in December 2008 and again last Wednesday, he pointed out.
Transparency watchdogs have argued that failing to make disbursement reports available online gives them an air of secrecy that is largely unwarranted given the uncontroversial content of the reports. As Sunlight advocates in its model Transparency in Government Act, a transparent 111th Congress will open up its books for review by the public, "and will find that this painless endeavor helps to begin to restore the public's trust in the accountability of the institution," Wonderlich said. By instructing the CAO to place the expenditures on the Internet, Pelosi is opening lawmakers' expenditures to unprecedented public scrutiny, he added. The move follows a recent scandal in the United Kingdom where Members of Parliament faced scrutiny for expensing personal items on the public dime. Read more here.
The Seattle-based start-up that helped fuel President Obama's Web-based transition team donor disclosure effort has changed its name, hired a Washington, D.C. public relations firm and on Tuesday launched a social network that aggregates public data from around the world in a single destination. Socrata, formerly known as Blist, is piggybacking on the administration's zeal for open government by offering a Web site intended to increase agencies' transparency; promote civic participation and community collaboration; and improve policymaking. Building on more than a year of beta test feedback from more than 40,000 public and private sector customers, Socrata.com initially is providing free access to more than 200 public datasets. The Obama administration recently unveiled Data.gov, a Web destination for citizens to gain access to agencies' raw data feeds. Socrata offers a wide range of feeds on everything from government agencies to those bilked by financier Bernard Madoff to seafood and chicken recipes.
"Much has been discussed in recent months about government transparency and citizen participation. Socrata truly allows government transparency to come to life," Socrata CEO Kevin Merritt said in a press release circulated by tech PR firm 463 Communications. "We are providing publicly available data in an interactive, social format that enables citizens, for the first time, to discover, read, manipulate and share publicly available data with a tool we all have -- a Web browser." Until now, sites focused on public datasets have been hard to navigate and often required tedious downloading of raw file-types to proprietary applications for offline use by IT experts, Socrata said. Plus, most of those sites were not engineered for Web 2.0. The firm is backed by Frazier Technology Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures and raised more than $6 million in its first round of funding.
In related news, the Sunlight Foundation recently launched a contest for to Web engineers to use Data.gov information in creative and helpful ways. First prize is $10,000 and the winner will be announced later this summer. Read more about that effort here.
Time is almost up for the first part of the White House's consultation to build a framework for President Obama's open government initiative. A public online brainstorming session, which began last week and is hosted by the National Academy of Public Administration, ends Thursday. Team Obama wants citizens to submit ideas, discuss and refine others' ideas, and vote the best ones to the top. The themes deemed most important will provide the basis for two more stages of interaction: a discussion phase, when officials will deepen the conversation about compelling topics raised during the brainstorming, and a drafting phase, when the public will again be asked to collaborate on draft recommendations through the use of a wiki. Here's a rundown of several of the most popular ideas proposed during the brainstorming session:
• Support a mandatory 72-hour public review period on all major spending bills.
• Require all government meetings subject to federal open meeting laws to be webcast.
• Provide an online, visually interactive, one-stop-shop, federal budget Web site.
• Use visual recording and mini animations to convey complex ideas.
• Ask federal agencies to adopt "core principles for public engagement."
• Centralize petitions to Congress and the president.
• Create an online citizen participation portal.
• Public FOIA archive on every agency Web site.
President Obama's Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra views the administration's open government initiative, which formally kicked off Thursday, as one leg of a three-legged transparency and accountability stool. In his first interview after being confirmed by the Senate, he told Tech Daily Dose that the interactive public consultation on principles to frame the initiative will culminate later this summer in OMB guidance to agencies. "We're certainly not standing still waiting for the recommendations," he said, pointing out that on his first day in office, Obama called on cabinet agencies to get involved immediately. The White House has already provided what Chopra called a menu of open government criteria that departments have begun to put into practice. Early results of their work can be found in an "innovation gallery" at WhiteHouse.gov/Open. "As you can see, our employees aren't waiting on memos on what policy directive there should be. They're embracing principles that the president has outlined and working within their leadership structures to make them effective," he said. "Our challenge as leaders is to help support and nurture their enthusiasm."
Another component, which Chopra believes is potentially the most important, is the mandate that he work with Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, the General Services Administration and others to distill the components of a successful open government initiative and provision them in a manner that can be reused by anybody in government through the GSA or other means. One example is Obama's online town hallin March, which attracted more than 100,000 participants who submitted and voted on topics he would address in a live Internet event. "We need to figure out what components allowed him to be successful in that experiment and carry them across government," he said. Then Chopra introduced his new favorite buzzword: "productize." "We have to productize the components that have been deemed successful in our 120 days and take it from there."
President Obama wants everyone's input on his plan to increase transparency, accountability and responsibility in government -- even ideas from his political opponents. Hours after the White House launched its Open Government Initiative forum to solicit opinions form the public on Thursday, House Minority Leader John Boehner weighed in. In an idea, which his office said is leading in votes by a wide margin, Boehner asked the White House to support a mandatory 72-hour review period for all major spending bills and follow through on their yet-unfulfilled promise to allow five days of public comment on all bills before signing. Groups that support that proposal include the Sunlight Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council. "As the remainder of the process unfolds, it's our hope that the White House and Congressional Democrats will take notice and work with us in holding the federal government more accountable in how they spend taxpayer money," Boehner's New Media Director Nick Schaper said in an e-mail.
President Obama's e-government agenda took a major leap forward Thursday with the launch of several initiatives aimed at increasing openness and accountability but transparency watchdogs, while largely content, wonder if officials are moving too fast and may not get meaningful public feedback. The administration simultaneously unveiled its online hub to build Obama's open government directive, which he outlined on his first day in office; Data.gov, a Web site intended to "democratize data" by giving the public raw feeds of government information; and announced proposed overhauls to Regulations.gov to make searching and commenting on federal rules easier.
In a Web video, Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett called the initiative "an unprecedented process for public engagement in policymaking" and urged citizens to brainstorm ideas and discuss the most promising ones. On the front lines of the effort are Vivek Kundra, OMB administrator for e-government, and a team at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy led by federal CTO Aneesh Chopra, who was approved by the Senate late Thursday to serve as OSTP's associate director. The confirmation of another tech player, Larry Strickling, who would head the National Telecommunications and Information Administration stalled when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid failed to get unanimous consent, a Reid aide said.
Sunlight Foundation Executive Director Ellen Miller called the open government site "fascinating" and Data.gov "path-breaking." She said the initiatives represent "a dramatic demonstration of the administration's intent to use technology to create a more transparent and collaborative government." But others like OMB Watch Executive Director Gary Bass tempered their excitement with skepticism. He worries the open government brainstorming phase that ends next week and the mid-June timeline for drafting recommendations for Obama is too fast. He is also concerned that questions the White House posed to spur the online dialogue are too basic and letting Internet users vote on the best ideas will let "cool" but ultimately flawed concepts prevail.
A Web video featuring President Obama's senior advisor Valerie Jarrett welcomed visitors Thursday to the online hub for the administration's open government initiative. Watch the video above and learn more about the project to increase transparency, accountability and responsibility at WhiteHouse.gov/Open. In related news, Regulations.gov proposed a new design intended to make it easier to navigate, search and comment on federal regulations. A two-minute video found here walks citizens through the proposed changes officials plan to implement this summer.
President Obama's federal chief information officer Vivek Kundra has launched Data.gov. In March, he announced he was working on the Web site intended to "democratize data" by giving the public raw feeds of information from a range of agencies. Kundra, who previously served as the District of Columbia's chief technology officer, said the site will build on successes like the National Institutes of Health's publication of Human Genome Project data and the Defense Department's release of satellite data. The former revolutionized personalized medicine, while the latter led to the commercialization of GPS devices, he said at a government IT summit. "We need to make sure that all that data that's not private, that's not restricted for national security, can be made public," Kundra said.
Since his appointment in March as federal chief information officer, Vivek Kundra has had a full plate. Also the e-government administrator at the Office of Management and Budget, Kundra has taken on the formidable task of increasing the transparency of government data and oversight of information technology investments. In addition, he's faced personal scrutiny when the FBI launched an investigation into bribery charges at his former office with the District of Columbia government, where he was chief technology officer. Nextgov's Gautham Nagesh spoke with Kundra this week about the challenges of his new position and what he hopes to accomplish in this administration's era of open government.
In the interview, he talks with Nagesh about his vision for Data.gov, which a senior official recently revealed could go live by the end of the week: "We recognize the power of tapping into the ingenuity of the American people and recognize that government doesn't have a monopoly on the best ideas or always have the best idea on finding an innovative path to solving the toughest problems the country faces. By democratizing data and making it available to the public and private sector ... we can tap into that ingenuity. Data on Data.gov will be available in multiple machine-readable formats, including XML, that will allow people to slice, dice and cube data sets. [Users can] visualize information, create applications and find value at the intersection of multiple data sets."
Read edited excerpts of the Q&A here.
Honolulu became the first American city to run an all-digital election last week, allowing voters to cast their ballots online or over the phone for neighborhood board members. The 115,000 eligible voters can also use laptop computers at polling sites, but mail-in ballots are no longer an option in this year's election, which is running from May 6 to May 22. The city previously experimented with online voting in 2007, and budgetary concerns appear to have pushed them towards using it exclusively this time around: The city claims it is saving more than $100,000 in mailing costs by going digital. "If you look at the world as it is today, people are looking for different ways to do business in a bad economy," said Lori Steele, CEO of Everyone Counts, the firm running the election for Honolulu. While officials aren't releasing turnout figures yet to avoid influencing the election, Steele said voters are opting for the online ballot over the telephone option by a 2-to-1 margin. The number of votes cast online already exceeds the total from 2007 with more than a week of voting remaining. -- David Herbert
Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Joseph Lieberman on Wednesday night introduced what has become a perennial non-binding resolution to put non-confidential Congressional Research Service reports online. Homeland Security and Government Affairs ranking member Susan Collins, Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and others signed on. Rather than creating a new tool for public access, the resolution would let members and committees share reports using the same online services that are available on Congress' internal CRS Web site. The resolution also requires an index of CRS issue briefs and reports be made public.
CRS, which is housed in the Library of Congress, uses taxpayer dollars to produce reports on public policy issues and represent some of the best research conducted by the federal government, the Center for Democracy and Technology said in a blog post. Under the current regime, citizens can ask for copies of reports through their member of Congress but only if they already know the report exists. Projects like Open CRS, which is run by CDT, receives updates on reports as they are published from an anonymous lawmaker, but a public index of reports would simplify this process, the group stated.
In March, Lieberman wrote to Senate Rules Committee Chairman Charles Schumer calling for a sanctioned, automatically updated clearinghouse for the documents so "those with power and those without have equal access to this important resource." Under the chairmanship of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., last Congress, the Rules Committee authorized CRS to create software to let senators place individual reports on their Web sites. That did not go far enough, Lieberman wrote. Read more in CongressDaily here (subscription required).
Organizers of a week-long online dialogue focusing on the federal government's economic stimulus-tracking Web site Recovery.gov are embracing new Web technologies to spread word about their forum. During the course of the Internet conversation, which begins Monday and is hosted by the National Academy of Public Administration, participants are encouraged to "submit ideas on website design, data collection, data warehousing, data analysis and visualization, waste, fraud, and abuse detection, and other topics that are key to achieving greater transparency and accountability." The online discussion will be the first step in soliciting ideas for the structure of the Web site, which is intended to let taxpayers see how stimulus funds are being spent. Read CongressDaily's recent story here.
Earl Devaney, chair of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, and Ed DeSeve, special advisor President Obama for stimulus implementation, are circulating a letter they hope will generate widespread interest in the project from the public as well as state and local partners, potential stimulus recipients and solution providers. Participation from the blogging community is critical to the success of this initiative, they wrote. Their team created a one-page summary of the IT dialogue that bloggers can copy and post. They also encouraged potential participants to follow the conversation via microblogging tool Twitter {@natldialogue / http://twitter.com/natldialogue}or on the "Recovery Dialogue: IT Solutions" Facebook group. As of Thursday afternoon, the Twitter page has 273 followers and the Facebook group has 100 members.
One of Washington's leading open government groups has laid out its vision of what Data.gov, the forthcoming repository for government data and research, should look like. The Sunlight Foundation's renderings come as President Obama's CIO Vivek Kundra works on the project, which he expects to unveil later this year. "Providing access to government data is one of the clearest ways to be more transparent -- and it is our hope that Kundra and team nail this with Data.gov," said Sunlight Labs director Clay Johnson. In order to do so, his group wants to see: bulk access to data; accountability for data quality; clear, understandable language; service and developer friendly file formats; and comprehensiveness. Read Sunlight's detailed recommendations here.
From CongressDaily's AM Edition...
The Obama administration is soliciting suggestions from information technology professionals, vendors and members of the public who think that its economic stimulus-tracking Web site needs a makeover. Beginning Monday, the team that administers the stimulus Web site Recovery.gov will host a weeklong forum -- conducted entirely on the Web -- to encourage participants to "submit ideas on website design, data collection, data warehousing, data analysis and visualization, waste, fraud, and abuse detection, and other topics that are key to achieving greater transparency and accountability," according to organizers. The "online dialogue" will be conducted on a message board manned around the clock by moderators from the National Academy for Public Administration, a nonpartisan advisory board charged with vetting proposed and existing government programs. Read the full story here (subscription required).
The co-creator of the government accountability Web site StimulusWatch.org has embarked on a new project aimed at making federal rulemakings easier for the public to access and offer comment. Jerry Brito, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, is putting the finishing touches on OpenRegs.com, which will take the Federal Register's daily XML feed to new heights. Currently, the U.S. government's Regulations.gov allows citizens to find, review, and submit comments on federal documents but Brito and others believe the portal is not as dynamic and user friendly as it could be. OpenRegs.com will offer automated lists of comment periods closing soon across all agencies; recently opened comment periods; and recently published final regulations, Brito said. Users will also be able to find regulations by agency and by topic as well as subscribe to alerts for particular issues of interest. Furthermore, the OpenRegs.com community will be able to discuss certain regulations online and submit comments. The site should go public in the next week or so, he said.
As promised, the White House on Tuesday launched Recovery.gov -- a Web site that features information on how the $787 billion economic stimulus package is being spent along with tools to help citizens hold the government accountable. Issues surrounding the site's implementation and measures for success will likely arise as part of a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing planned for March 5. OMB Director Peter Orszag is expected to testify along with GAO Acting Comptroller General Eugene Dodaro and Phyllis Fong, chair of the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency.
"It is critical to ensure that systems are in place -- ahead of time -- to oversee this massive level of spending and that the public is provided with as much information as possible about where their money is going," Chairman Joseph Lieberman said in a Saturday press release. Ranking member Susan Collins echoed his sentiment, noting that she opposed releasing the remaining government funding for financial institutions last month because the initial roll-out lacked what she believed was proper transparency and accountability. "We cannot afford to make the same mistake with the economic stimulus package," she said.
The issue is expected to gain traction in the House as well, according to a spokesman for House Oversight and Government Reform Committee ranking member Darrell Issa. "The promise of transparency must be met with more than rhetoric -- it must be exercised in application," Kurt Bardella said in an e-mail. "The reality is the federal bureaucracy is now being asked to absorb hundreds of billions of dollars and the potential for waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement is something we will need to be diligent in preventing.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Tuesday announced his plan to "restore confidence in the strength of U.S. financial institutions and restart the critical flow of credit to households and businesses." Core elements of the program include a new capital assistance initiative; a public-private investment fund; an initiative to reduce credit spreads and restart the securitized credit markets; an extension of the FDIC's temporary liquidity guarantee program; more oversight to help make banks accountable and.... a new Web site: FinancialStability.gov.
"We will begin immediately a process of consultation designed to solicit further input from key public and private stakeholders. Details on all programs will be posted on FinancialStability.gov over the course of the next several weeks," a press release stated. For now, the site doesn't offer much (see screenshot above). The site will eventually provide information disclosed or reported to Treasury by funding recipients as well as public companies' 8Ks, 10Qs and 10Ks. Read more here (subscription required).
A government transparency group is urging Congress this week to post its massive economic stimulus legislation online for at least 72 hours before consideration. The House passed its version last month and the Senate is expected to approve its legislation -- worth about $820 billion -- on Tuesday. While there is currently no formal requirement to do so, the House and Senate should each ensure that lawmakers and citizens alike have time to review the measure before they vote, the Sunlight Foundation said.
"Because the scope and public import of this legislation demand a measured and transparent process we strongly urge President Obama to post the enrolled version of the bill on WhiteHouse.gov for five days before signing it, in accordance with his campaign promise," the group stated. "While access and feedback from the public after final passage is not as effective as providing online availability of legislation before final passage, it would still give the public an opportunity to make their views known to the president."
My colleague over at NextGov.com and Government Executive Gautham Nagesh has been monitoring the Office of Management and Budget's expected announcement about a new e-government administrator. Here's the latest...
Federal information technology specialists think District of Columbia chief technology officer Vivek Kundra would be a strong successor to Karen Evans in the top IT job at the Office of Management and Budget, but they caution that change comes much harder at the federal level. "I think it's great; Vivek is both creative and practical," said Bruce McConnell, an independent consultant and former chief of information technology and policy at OMB. "His track record as D.C. CTO is amazing in terms of opening up government and making systems work. I think he's taking on a bigger challenge this time, but he's got the tools and experience to be very successful."
Ray Bjorklund, senior vice president and chief knowledge officer for the consulting firm FedSources, agrees. "There are big challenges for anybody taking on that position, but [Kundra] is somebody who seems to have a fresh, dynamic way of approaching IT management . . . and is also very willing to be decisive," he said. Despite having "fairly rigorous" processes in place for managing IT investments, the office of e-government has "probably never had enough decisiveness built into it," Bjorklund said. "There are painful decisions that have to be made," he added, referring to programs that should be either eliminated or consolidated across agency lines.
Read the full story here.
My colleague Kevin Friedl writes at NationalJournal.com's Under the Influence blog that President Barack Obama has not kept a pledge to post bills online before signing...
When President Obama signed into law an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program on Wednesday, he was keeping one promise while breaking another. The measure, designed to expand health insurance to some 4 million additional children, was a significant step towards his pledge to "require that all children have health care coverage. And in his remarks at the signing ceremony, the president called it a "down payment" on his broader pledge to bring universal coverage to the U.S.
But by signing the bill the same afternoon it was passed in the House, Obama fell to an 0-2 record on one of his most specific good-government promises, announced over a year and a half ago during a campaign speech in Manchester, N.H.: "When there is a bill that ends up on my desk as president, you will have five days to look online and find out what's in it before I sign it." The wording of that pledge has since been amended to refer only to "non-emergency legislation," but neither the SCHIP legislation nor the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act he signed into law last week meet that test.
Read the full post here.
Congress and the new administration should adopt policies that will promote "a dynamic force of third-party Internet sites and tools to enhance the usefulness of government data," the Association for Computing Machinery's public policy committee recommended Thursday. The group's statement came on the heels of President Barack Obama's "day one" memos urging government transparency and citizen participation and an announcement that the public will be able to track economic stimulus package funding at Recovery.gov after the bill wins congressional approval.
"Internet users are combining and analyzing information in innovative ways that go beyond what the data's original publishers imagined," ACM Vice Chair Edward Felten said in a press release. "Government has a treasure trove of data and it can unleash creative new analysis by giving users access to this data in a format that allows them the advantage of easy, fast integration, machine-readability, download capability, and authenticity measures." Felten is a professor at Princeton University and an oft quoted cyber expert.
ACM's recommendations for data that is already considered public include...
President Barack Obama plans to announce he has appointed Vivek Kundra, the District of Columbia's chief technology officer to take the top information technology post in the federal government, according to a source. Kundra, who has deployed advanced applications to improve the performance of public services during his nearly two years as CTO for the District, will replace Karen Evans as administrator for e-government and information technology in the Office of Management and Budget.
The position effectively serves as the federal government's chief information officer. The administration could announce Kundra's appointment as soon as Thursday. Kundra could not be reached, and a spokesman for Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty declined to comment. Kundra's name has been linked to a top IT job in the Obama administration for months, though most of the discussion has focused on the still-open chief technology officer position. During the campaign, Obama said the CTO would report directly to him, indicating the position would have authority. Read the full Government Executive story here and an earlier interview with Kundra here.
Office of Management and Budget E-Gov Administrator Karen Evans said this week that Rep. Tom Davis' annual evaluation of agency efforts to protect sensitive information on government computer systems is relatively consistent with the agencies' performance on her office's own scorecard -- even though the methodology is different.
Nine federal departments received a failing grade last year as part of the House Oversight and Government Reform ranking member's report card. The document, unveiled Tuesday, also called attention to eight agencies that received an "A." [Read CongressDaily's coverage here]
"What agencies need to improve upon is their oversight and management of systems, which are operated by contractors and their application of common security configurations" established by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Evans said. "OMB and the Hill share the goal of moving our scorecards beyond a compliance exercise to measuring results."
Most notably on the Virginia Republican's tally, the Transportation Department went from a "B" to an "F" and the Labor Department went from "B-" to "F." An OMB official said Labor dropped due to a negative inspector general report. Transportation dropped apparently due to factors such as the results of the FY07 financial statement reporting.
The Department of Homeland Security improved its 2006 "D" to a "B" in 2007. That's because of the agency's performance as well as an inspector general report that validated oversight of contractor systems and the factors which reduced the other agencies. It also appears that Davis gave DHS credit for continual improvement in financial management.
The Ad Council is running public-service annoucements aimed at educating people about Wireless AMBER Alerts, text messages that are sent to mobile subscribers as soon as local law enforcers release AMBER Alerts about missing or abducted children. People can get the alerts by registering at www.wirelessamberalerts.org.
Here are two of the ads about the service:
When it comes to value of congressional Web sites, the Congressional Management Foundation will only go so far in its criticism.
As noted in yesterday morning's edition of Technology Daily, the group gave most lawmakers D's for their online presence. It named the lawmakers with the best sites but stopped short of calling out those who have the worst. "It is not our mission to shame people into change," project manager and co-author Tim Hysom said in an interview.
But that's OK because Ben Pershing, who writes the Capitol Briefing blog for The Washington Post, is happy to take the task upon himself -- and his readers. In writing about the foundation's "Gold Mouse" awards yesterday, Pershing invited readers to publicly name the "Gold Rats" who haven't a clue about how to use the Web.
There are no nominations yet, but Republican new media consultant David All, who used to work for Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., had this to say:
They're equally bad on both sides of the aisle. To be fair, most of the members aren't personally to blame for such bad Web sites, but it's in fact the byproduct of the outdated congressional rules which limit a member's use of the Web. In other words, it's against the "rules" to post YouTube videos.
Here are some telling excerpts from an academic treatise in Democracy: A Journal Of Ideas that is written in predictably dry prose but that is still intriguing because of the subject matter -- incorporating the "wiki" concept of peer collaboration into government decision-making:
Our institutions of governance are characterized by a longstanding culture of professionalism in which bureaucrats -- not citizens -- are the experts. Until recently, we have viewed this arrangement as legitimate because we have not practically been able to argue otherwise. Now we have a chance to do government differently. We have the know-how to create 'civic software' that will help us form groups and communities who, working together, can be more effective at informing decision-making than individuals working alone.... To bring about the new revolution in governance, the next president ought to issue an executive order requiring that every government agency begin to pilot new strategies for improved decision-making. For example, he or she could require that each agency ... set forth at least one "Peer-to-Policy" experiment to see how it could make its decision-making practices more collaborative.
(Hat tip to Micah Sifry at Personal Democracy Forum)
One of the federal government's oldest continuing programs, Job Corps, has for the first time turned to video-sharing site YouTube to provide parents and students with information about what the initiative has to offer.
Job Corps, which was part of President Lyndon Johnson's " War on Poverty," began in 1964. It is currently managed by the Labor Department as a no-cost education and vocational training effort that helps 16-24 year olds secure job opportunities across the country.
Remarks made by Job Corps Director Esther Johnson as well as testimonials by program participants Tiffany Williams and Kelvin McJunkin and alumnus David Bol were uploaded to YouTube last week, officials said. The footage is from a Job Corps summit held in October.
In addition, a public service announcement was sent to radio stations around the country, Johnson said in an e-mail. The outreach effort fulfills a promise she made to "do whatever we could to spread the word and market the wonderful opportunities that Job Corps offers its students."
Antitrust officials at the Justice Department launched a new Web site on Wednesday aimed at educating consumers and policymakers about the potential benefits that competition can bring in the arena of real estate brokerage services.
The site includes maps identifying states with real estate laws that can inhibit competitiveness, a calculator to help users tally their potential savings when brokers pursuing new business models compete for their business, and links to additional government resources.
The estimated median commission paid by home sellers in 2006 was $11,672, but new brokerage models have the potential to reduce that by thousands of dollars, officials said. But in a number of states, laws make it illegal for brokers to offer rebates or requiring them to offer services that consumers may not want, the agency said.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says if some members of Congress want to put their daily schedules online "that's excellent" -- but don't expect her to do it.
"I'm certainly not publishing my schedule on the Internet. I have enough security problems as it is," Pelosi said. In response to a follow up question about just listing who she is meeting with without saying where, Pelosi she said she tends to meet with fellow legislators. She added she doesn't think publishing lawmakers' personal schedules is something that will make a difference in open government.
Pelosi spoke during a press conference to celebrate President Bush signing lobbying and ethics reform legislation Friday afternoon.
Mark your calendars! A new $5 bill design will be unveiled online next month, the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing announced Tuesday. The tech-savvy project is aimed at "staying ahead of counterfeiters by using the latest advances in technology to enhance the bill's security," officials said.
The Sept. 20 virtual launch will also provide an opportunity "to engage people in the public education process," said Dawn Haley, chief of external relations at the bureau. Moneyfactory.gov's "new money" page has already gotten 200 million hits since its launch in May 2003 and receives about 280,000 unique visitors each month.
The Fed is banking on its "'Wi-5" theme to "get consumers excited about the new bill" and encourage folks to learn more about its security features. An online Q&A for reporters and podcasts will round out the bill's digital debut.
Streaming video of man-on-the-street interviews will be posted on the site, which will showcase consumers identifying the new $5 bill's updated security features, the bureau said. What's next? The $100 bill will get a facelift after the $5 bill is issued in early 2008.
Care to send some free samples my way?
Excerpted from Government Executive's Tech Insider Blog:
Who is editing most of the entries on Wikipedia, the open online encyclopedia that anyone can edit? For government agencies, NASA wins by a large margin, according to the Web site WikiScanner.
The government agencies that have been cited by WikiScanner for more than 1,000 edits to Wikipedia entries are listed below. The number represents the number of times a computer at that government organization was used to edit an entry on Wikipedia.
1. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (nasa.gov) 6,846
2. Department Of Veterans Affairs (va.gov) 4,210
3. Forestry And Fire Protection (ca.gov) 4,148
4. Dept Homeland Security (dhs.gov) 4,081
5. Information Systems U.S. House Of Representatives (house.gov) 3,736
6. National Institutes Of Health (nih.gov) 3,019
7. U.S. Courts (uscourts.gov) 2,869
8. U.S. Dept. Of Agriculture (usda.gov) 2,435
9. City Of New York (nyc.gov) 2,404
10. Salem Public Schools (ct.gov) 2,398
Read the full blog post and lengthier list here.
HDNet's Dan Rather is making waves with his new report that Election Systems &Software, one of the nation's largest e-voting manufacturers, assembles voting machines in the Philippines -- in sweatshop-style factories.
Rather's hour-long report is available online. Rather digs deep and interviews a former ES&S worker from the Philippines who claims the company regularly provided voting jurisdictions in the U.S. with faulty equipment.
Kim Zetter at Wired News' Threat Level blog already has done some interesting follow-up work on the HDNet report. She wrote yesterday that ES&S failed to disclose its Manila facility to the Election Assistance Commission. Vendors are required to report to the EAC the locations of all their manufacturing and assembly facilities.
ES&S responded to Zetter's post this morning, and said it was an "unintentional oversight" that it did not report the Manila facility.
-- Michael Martinez
Cross-posted at Beltway Blogroll
Rep. George Miller is getting some bipartisan blog love for a new interactive campaign against the Iraq war that is engaging voters via blogs, online social networks, podcasts and Web video.
Both Republican new media strategist David All and self-avowed "lefty" Colin Delany of e.politics mentioned the effort, as did the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet.
Technology Daily is on top of the story, too, thanks to our e-government/Web 2.0 expert, Aliya Sternstein. You can read her story from yesterday PM Edition in the extended entry.
Governments can survive in the online community of so-called Web 2.0 if they adapt written policies and technical infrastructures first -- before experimenting with the online alternate universe, Gartner Research analysts said on Wednesday.
Thriving in the new virtual landscape requires governments to change their mindset about serving the public, said Andrea Di Maio, a vice president at Gartner Research.
At present, the government wants to establish its Web site as the portal of choice for all citizen services and inquiries -- and is struggling to do so. A one-stop shop for services is not the right approach, Di Maio said.
When people move into a new home, they eventually need the government to change their postal address, but, in the midst of the big life change, that is the last item on their checklist.
"The first thought is: I need electricity and gas and water," Di Maio said. Agencies should link their Web services to other popular Web sites, like those belonging to utility companies, to better accommodate citizens. In this manner, private sector Web sites act as an intermediary in delivering government services.
Di Maio described Web 2.0 as both a blessing and a curse at the G-Con Gartner Government Conference on Wednesday.
For Chairman Christopher Cox, moving the Securities and Exchange Commission into the information technology world is a top priority. Taking advantage of modern technology to further the commission's goals was a major theme in the chairman's prepared testimony Tuesday before the House Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Subcommittee.
Cox said the SEC's current online system, known as EDGAR, is "just a vast electronic filing cabinet" that "doesn't allow you to manage all of that information in ways that investors commonly need."
As a result, financial firms that can afford it get most of their information from middlemen who put the data into more useful forms, he said. The process is expensive, inefficient, creates errors, and "feeds the notion that the rich and the highly sophisticated have a leg up in today's markets," Cox said.
"The SEC expects to rename the EDGAR system in 2007," Cox noted. "In all, the commission is investing $54 million over several years to build the infrastructure to support widespread adoption of interactive data."
The $905.3 million budget request for fiscal 2008 "will allow the SEC to continue its commitment to information technology, which has the potential both to reduce regulatory costs and to give investors vastly more useful information than what they receive today," he added.
Cox said various technology improvements "will make the SEC more productive, and give both investors and taxpayers better value for their money."
He also reiterated his push for interactive data: "In the very near future, investors will be able to easily search through and make sense of the mountains of financial data contained in current company disclosures."
See Technology Daily's PM story for more details on Cox's testimony.
-- Winter Casey
As reported in yesterday afternoon's Technology Daily:
Action on legislation to open access to government-funded research is likely in the 110th Congress, a key observer said Monday.
Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, said in an interview that free, online access to research normally only available in expensive journals would allow cash-strapped institutes and scientists to get the most cutting-edge research.
"It's a competitive advantage. It builds innovation," she said, adding that bipartisan competitiveness initiatives could fuel passage of the legislation.
Another factor in favor of action now is that one of the sponsors of the bill, independent Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, now chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. His previous proposal would have directed agencies that spend more than $100 million annually in funding outside research to publicly post electronic manuscripts of peer-reviewed articles within six months of original publication.
New Media
Online Politics
Tech Policy
