White House

The federal government has been given its “permission slip to innovate,” U.S. Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel said Thursday when discussing the 1-year anniversary of the Digital Government Strategy.

The General Services Administration announced the awarding of a new governmentwide blanket purchase agreement that will allow the federal government to consolidate its wireless service plans and centralize management.

The federal Chief Information Officers Council, in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security, will soon publish a concept of operations to implement continuous monitoring in the federal government, Deputy U.S. CIO Lisa Schlosser told Management of Change conference attendees.

FedScoop’s afternoon roundup of news and notes from the federal IT community.

In an effort to make the nation’s cybersecurity posture more resilient, the General Services Administration has reached out to a multitude of stakeholders for their input.

Roundup of the top 5 must-reads from the past week.

Office of Management and Budget Controller Danny Werfel has been tapped as acting commissioner at the Internal Revenue Service.

Developers are already heading to Project Open Data, the White House’s public repository hosted on GitHub intended to foster collaboration and promote the continued improvement of the recently released open data policy.

In an interview with FedScoop, Gray Brooks, senior API strategist for the General Services Administration’s Digital Innovation Center, pointed to two primary reasons the growth of APIs is expected to continue.

Close to a week after the White House unveiled its open data policy, a congressman has released a new discussion draft of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2013, which would unlock and standardize federal spending data.

The White House is beginning a new series of Google+ Hangouts starting tomorrow titled “We the Geeks,” which will highlight the future of science, technology and innovation in this country.

A request for proposals pilot project, developed under the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows program, is starting to gain ground in the small business IT community.

It is hard to tell whether federal data center consolidation efforts are actually saving taxpayers money. Why? To start, no one is tracking agency progress in closing data centers against the cost-savings goal, according to congressional lawmakers.

Many senior government officials have called for a whole-of-community approach to addressing sequestration and other looming issues, but do government executives really have the ability to work together across agency barriers?

Former White House Presidential Innovation Fellows Kara DeFrias and Adam Becker discuss their experiences and the role open source played in the innovation and collaboration process.

Roundup of the top 5 must-reads from the past week.

GitHub’s Ben Balter, a former presidential innovation fellow, gives his insights into the new White House open data policy and what it means for federal agencies in this interview with FedScoop Radio.

The Obama administration yesterday revealed its plan to launch competitions to create three new manufacturing innovation institutes this year, and the contest begins immediately.

The release of the White House open data policy was met with widespread acclaim by open government advocates. Here is what they had to say about it.

To help understand the executive order and the accompanying memo from the Office of Management and Budget, FedScoop has created a short guide to the White House’s new open data policy.