The White House gathered the heads of 60 business, labor, municipal, and academic organizations on Friday to announce plans to invest $4 billion in building energy efficiency over the next 24 months, and none of that will be taxpayer money.
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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s “Shredder Challenge” could be called the world’s ultimate jigsaw puzzle contest. But it was serious business for the nearly 9,000 teams of problem solvers from all over the world who entered the competition after DARPA officials launched it in late October.
In the Shredder Challenge competitors attempted to reconstruct machine-shredded documents in increasingly difficult stages to claim DARPA’s $50,000 prize. The challenge comprised five separate puzzles in which the number of documents, the content of the documents and the technique employed to shred the documents varied to make the challenge progressively more difficult. Keep reading →
This week at the SemTech Biz DC Conference, Jim Hendler, advisor to Data.gov, explained the history of the “friendly competition” between the US data.gov and data.gov.uk and said that the latter had about 6000 data sets that were in better shape than the former. So I decided to take another look and was very impressed.
Hendler also said that the UK Government has designed and made great use of standard Web address practices in their linked data and moved even further ahead of the US in open data with creation of the Open Data Institute. Keep reading →
One of the more effective members of the Obama administration, Dan Gordon guided several important cost-cutting and procurement reform initiatives. Now he is about to step down. I think it is safe to say Gordon has been one of the most consequential OFPP administrators in recent years.
He didn’t join immediately after Obama’s inauguration, but rather in September of 2009. This was when tensions between government and industry were running high. Many IT contractors felt their staffs were being raided by agencies. The administration, joined by federal employee unions, seemed to be hell-bent on pulling back work from contractors and taking it wholesale in-house. The White House was looking for across-the-board cuts in spending on contractors.
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Ever since the discovery of the Stuxnet cyber attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program and the assignation of Iran’s chief Stuxnet Investigator, Iran has been hell-bent on developing offensive and defensive cyber capabilities.
Over this past year or so numerous comments about the cyber domain that have come out of Tehran and recently the leader of Iran’s Cyber Defense Organization, Brigadier General Gholam-Reza Jalali stated that Iranian computer experts are adequately prepared to defend the country against any possible cyber attack. Based on open sources they seem to have put cyber intelligence secondary to attack and defensive capabilities. Keep reading →
Recently, Shelley Metzenbaum, associate director of performance and personnel management at the Office of Management and Budget, blogged about Saving Taxpayer Dollars With Moneyball.
She said: “Using all the relevant data we can find to do more with less must be the rule, not an exception, in government.” Keep reading →
You might be hearing it a lot. Federal CIO Steve VanRoekel is calling for departments and major agencies to create vendor management organizations, or single-office gateways for managing contractors.
He comes at this in the context of the 25-point IT reform plan. He’s vetting the idea through the President’s Management Advisory Board (PMAB.) Industry uses VMOs widely. Basically VMO is modern parlance for purchasing department. Keep reading →
February’s “snowmaggeddon” storm that trapped commuters in their cars for hours during evening rush hour, has prompted a new set of dismissal and closure notifications for federal employees aimed at preventing a repeat of such problems.
Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry announced the new procedures Thursday. Keep reading →
February’s “snowmaggeddon” storm that trapped commuters in their cars for hours during evening rush hour, has prompted a new set of dismissal and closure notifications for federal employees aimed at preventing a repeat of such problems. Keep reading →