As the U.S. military struggles to recruit tech talent, Special Operations Command has found that a good, old-fashioned internship could be one solution to its STEM hiring woes. During the summer of 2020, SOCOM partnered with Coding it Forward, a program with a mission to get young, civic-minded STEM students into government, for a specialized internship program. The students worked directly on projects related to predictive maintenance, automation and video indexing. Jackson Barnett tells the story.

A Message From AWS Educate

With over 1,500 institutions and hundreds of thousands of students who use AWS Educate, we wanted to take you on a trip around the world and highlight how students are learning and innovating with the cloud. Learn more.

Meet State's new CIO

The State Department has appointed Keith Jones as CIO. Jones has a deep background in federal IT, including a job as deputy chief information officer for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from 2012 until 2018. He replaces Stuart McGuigan, who left the CIO role at the end of the Trump administration. Sara Wilson has this one.

A data-driven COVID-19 strategy

President Biden released a national COVID-19 response strategy last week that, among other things, promises data personnel, technology and other resources will be devoted to making IT systems for tracking COVID-19 and future outbreaks interoperable at all levels of government. To better evaluate progress, the strategy proposes establishing the White House COVID-19 Response Office to coordinate federal agencies, as well as the creation of publicly accessible performance dashboards for tracking metrics like cases, testing, vaccinations and hospital admissions. Dave Nyczepir takes you inside the strategy.

SPONSORED BY GDIT

The keys to ensuring cloud rollouts meet your agency’s mission

Kristie Grinnell, GDIT’s global chief information officer and vice president for supply chain, sits down to discuss with FedScoop the critical security and infrastructure considerations agency leaders need to keep in mind as they move more of their IT operations into a hybrid-cloud environment. Read the full interview with Grinnell.