White House wants open data to help local police forces

The White House continued its push for better policing Monday, with President Barack Obama announcing an initiative to use data to improve how community forces operate.

The Police Data Initiative, borne out of Obama’s task force on 21st century policing, will examine how open data and innovative technologies can help improve the relationship between law enforcement and the communities they protect.

“We’re doing these things because we’re listening to what law enforcement is telling us,” Obama said Monday in Camden, New Jersey. “The overwhelming majority of police officers are good and honest and fair. They care deeply about their communities. We should do everything in our power to make sure that they are safe, and help them do the job the best they can.”

Under the initiative, 21 cities will release 101 data sets that tabulate information related to uses of force, officer-involved shootings and police stops that have not been previously available to the public.

In addition, groups like the nonprofit Police Foundation, geographic information systems software company Esri, Code For America and open source software company Socrata are helping law enforcement agencies build platforms where they can share, access and study data related to transparency and community policing.

“By finding innovative work already underway in these diverse communities and bringing their leaders together with top technologists, researchers, data scientists and design experts, the Police Data Initiative is helping accelerate progress around data transparency and analysis, toward the goal of increased trust and impact,” U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith and Domestic Policy Council member Roy Austin Jr. wrote in a White House blog post Monday.

A group of volunteer technologists and data scientists joined Obama in Camden, working with the city’s police department to eliminate overlap in the unit’s 41 disparate data entry systems. The volunteers will also speak with officers, detectives and crime analysts on what data practices would allow Camden to meet its community policing goals.

In concert with the open data announcement, the Department of Justice released its body-worn camera clearinghouse, which serves as a road map and study tool for law enforcement agencies to examine the steps needed for creating a camera program. The clearinghouse is part of a program the Justice Department announced earlier this month that would allocate $20 million in grant money to police forces that want to equip their officers with the cameras.

The various initiatives come as a result of repeated high-profile incidents in which people were either hurt or died during confrontations with police. Obama referenced incidents, such as the recent conflict in Baltimore and last year’s clashes in Ferguson, Missouri, as examples where law enforcement and the outstanding community could come together for the greater good.

“We know these problems are solvable. We’re know that we’re not lacking for answers, we’re just lacking political will,” Obama said. “We have to see these problems for what they are — not something that’s happening in some other city to some other people, but something that’s happening in our community, the community of America.”

6 agencies fell short of records requirements – GAO report

Amid heightened public interest in federal records management practices, a watchdog agency released an analysis Thursday on how the government was adhering to certain records requirements.

The Government Accountability Office report found five agencies and the National Archives and Records Administration didn’t reach particular benchmarks.

“[C]ertain requirements were not fully met by 5 of the agencies because these agencies were either still working on addressing the requirement, or did not view the requirement as mandatory,” authors of the report wrote.

Records management has been a hot political topic in recent months: The GAO report comes after news earlier this year that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s used a private email account for official business.

Requested by leadership of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the GAO analysis evaluated how well federal agencies have followed a directive the National Archives and the Office of Personnel Management issued in 2012 to improve the management of the government’s records.

GAO researchers found that of the 24 agencies that the directive applied to, two (the Department of Veterans Affairs and OPM) did not designate a senior official to oversee records management who was at the assistant secretary level.

The report also noted that the National Archives didn’t require metadata in its plan for agencies to automate their records, as required by the directive. Metadata refers to additional information associated with data that makes it easier to parse information.

For the report, researchers went through a range of agency documents, including records management policies, procedures and guidances. They compared what they found to the requirements of the directive. They also conducted interviews with senior officials.

Authors of the report offered specific recommendations to the National Archives, OPM, VA, the Department of Transportation, General Services Administration, and National Science Foundation.

National Archives and four other agencies generally agreed with GAO’s recommendations, according to the report. The National Science Foundation said it “had no comments on the draft report but is committed to the continual improvement of information technology management, including its efforts related to records management.”

Small survey highlights need for doc management training

Earlier last week week, another study highlighted the need to train federal workers on how to handle their documents.

The study, which was released by information management services company Iron Mountain, found that 39 percent of respondents said they received formal training to manage records in their immediate control. At the same time, 17 percent have not received any training at all.

For its report, Iron Mountain commissioned market research company Market Connections Inc. to conduct a blind survey of 150 federal employees working with their agency’s records.

The study ran between February and March, immediately before and after news broke about the Clinton email controversy. Tyler Morris, director of product management for Iron Mountain Government Services, said the hullabaloo brought email protection issues to the forefront.

“If a secretary of a department isn’t sure what the rules are, how to follow them, it’s going to be very hard at the lower levels, too,” he told FedScoop.

Rep. Will Hurd blasts IT spending, encryption backdoors

Technology-minded lawmakers are rare on Capitol Hill.

Silicon Valley talent has flooded the executive branch in recent years, but only a handful of tech sector workers have made their way into Congress. Even fewer have a background in computer science. Yet, one of them is now leading the panel that oversees how the government spends its IT dollars.

Freshman Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, who worked at a small cybersecurity firm called FusionX before he was elected, was appointed chairman of the Information Technology Subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform this year. He has been quick to weigh in on a number of pressing issues, including the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act, cybersecurity and encryption.

FedScoop recently sat down with Hurd at his office to discuss the government’s use of IT resources, the FBI’s calls for a backdoor into encryption and the recent cybersecurity bills that have passed the House.

Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

FedScoop: In your eyes, is the federal government accomplishing its IT mission? The 2016 budget has $86 billion designated for IT — should that be higher or lower? What do you think the government should be doing better?

Will Hurd: I think the federal government is doing poorly when it comes to leveraging IT resources. Eighty-six billion dollars and 80 percent of that is on legacy systems? That’s outrageous. This is one area where we can be reducing the size and the scope of the federal government.

We have FITARA, which was passed last year — CIOs don’t even have control over the stuff that goes on the network. That’s a problem. FITARA was meant to fix that, and we are going to be doing our oversight to make sure that is happening. This is basic stuff that the private sector does because it’s going to save money. That’s hundreds of millions of dollars right there. The fact that the federal government has over 9,700 data centers, that number should be around 13. We’re not doing a good job because the way we procure IT services is really messed up.

FS: A bill you sponsored that went through markup last week, the DHS IT Duplication Reduction Act, has some language similar to FITARA. How would this work in concert with FITARA?

WH: I think it builds upon FITARA, and in a very specific niche. FITARA is not going to be the end-all, be-all. I think we are going to have to see legislation, especially after the Office of Management and Budget provides its guidance on how to implement it. I think we have a long way to go and we can never do enough to tighten up and eliminate duplication. I think this bill is a companion to FITARA, and you are going to see other small bills that take on a particular element within the various agencies.

FS: Have you talked to Tony Scott since he came on as U.S. CIO?

WH: We have talked. He is a guy who I believe we can work together. We are going to try to sit down and have some more interaction. We are going to figure out how the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the Government Accountability Office and OMB can work together to solve of these problems.

This is one of those areas where it’s not Republican or Democrat. This about good governance. Not only is that about saving money, it’s about being more efficient and effective in order to do more. We sometimes forget this is about making government better, not just cheaper.

FS: One of DHS’ other focuses is cybersecurity, so let’s address that: A recent Brookings Institution report called the government’s cybersecurity stance “abysmal.” Given breaches at the White House, State Department and OPM, that report’s conclusion has to worry you. What needs to be done to enhance the government’s cybersecurity presence?

WH: The federal government needs to adhere to the same standards that we talk about being important to protecting our infrastructure. We need to empower our CIOs to be the person that is responsible for the implementation of healthy practices on their networks. This is a critical area that’s only going to continue to get more complicated, but you have to have someone who is responsible for that. Right now, the way the existing infrastructure has evolved, we really don’t have that level of accountability.

FS: Is there anything that the government is doing with regard to cybersecurity that could be viewed as a positive?

WH: One of the questions I’ve been asking as I understand the enormity of this task is, ‘Where are people that are doing well?’ and ‘Where can we be mimicking some good things?’ There are some agencies out there that get it. I think within the intelligence services and the military, you have some incredibly capable people, because they are being attacked every single day by the most advanced adversaries that are out there. But we should be comparing ourselves to where we should be, not where we’ve been.

FS: Where do you see strengths in the recent information-sharing bills, like the National Cybersecurity Protection Advancement Act, that have passed through the House?

WH: I’m partial to the elements that I introduced [in that bill], specifically with regards to Einstein 3, moving intrusion detection a little further away from just the junction with the Internet. You’re going to eliminate a lot of known bad traffic from even coming close to our gateways. That’s a very simple technical fix. Also, making sure DHS is focusing on protecting our small and medium-sized businesses. They may not be a direct target of an attack, but to help them not be a drive-by target is important. These are all efforts moving in the right direction, but we can’t get there fast enough.

FS: How much responsibility does the private sector have with regard to cybersecurity and is there anything Washington can do to hold the private sector to a certain standard?

WH: What you are starting to see is the pressure to the bottom lines of these companies and the number of high-profile CEOs that have been fired because of data breaches. That’s going to make a lot of people make sure that they’re following the best practices to protecting digital infrastructure and the information of their customer. I think at the bottom line, profit motive is going to ensure these people are taking the right steps in order to protect their data.

FS: You were recently part of a hearing that looked at law enforcement’s calls for a backdoor into encrypted systems. What was your takeaway from that?

WH: Getting private companies to code in a backdoor is a non-starter. Period. I think the FBI walked away knowing that it’s not even worth bringing that conversation up. We’ve tried this road before, we’ve gone down this road in the ’90s with the Clipper Chip. I appreciate the problem, I get it. But the presumption is that every criminal is Lex Luthor and that’s not the case. Encryption has been around for a very long time. How many examples have there been where a bad guy wasn’t stopped because of encryption? The data is not there. I get this “going dark” phenomenon, but the men and women of law enforcement and the intelligence community are working their tails off to protect us every single day. We have to protect our civil liberties at the same time.

FS: Do you think there is ever going to be a middle ground where law enforcement is happy about encrypted systems?

WH: The better we get at encryption and protecting our digital information, the better it is for everyone. This doesn’t mean that law enforcement is never going to stop a bad guy. It’s going to be how do you adapt techniques and procedures that law enforcement has been using since the dawn of time to stop bad guys.

FS: There has been an influx of talent from Silicon Valley taking top roles in government over the past few months. Can the private sector help the federal government do its job better?

WH: I think so. I think these are people that understand the cutting edge of technology and how to implement it. That’s what we need. That kind of talent is absolutely going to be helpful, but the problem isn’t necessarily at the 30,000-foot view. The problem is how our RFPs [requests for proposals] for IT services are written. This is trench warfare and we’re going to have to get down into the nitty-gritty, into a level of detail, and fix the bowels of the system.

I joked to some IT entrepreneurs at South By Southwest, and I said, ‘I’m in the upper-bottom-third of people that understand technology, but in Washington I’m in the top 1 percent.’ That’s unfortunate, but we are going to do our part to solve some of these problems.

Meerkat and the government’s social media maturation

Prior to the Obama administration, creating a social media outlet for a federal agency was tedious. Clearances were needed, terms had to be set and nothing close to a “social media strategy” existed.

Skip ahead to two months ago, when Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker swore in Michelle Lee as director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office at the South By Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas. The ceremony, which marked the first time a cabinet member had been sworn into office outside of D.C., was live-streamed via Meerkat. The app, which broadcasts live video through people’s Twitter accounts, was a little more than two weeks old.

The quick adoption of these highly social live stream apps serve as a testament to how far governments have come with social media over the past few years. Once bogged down by red tape and a lack of know-how, agencies and lawmakers are flocking to new platforms as quickly as the rest of the population.

“You need to look at the change within the organization,” Meerkat CEO and founder Ben Rubin told FedScoop Friday. “Before Facebook and Twitter, there was no one in the org chart that dealt with social media. You would ask someone and they would say ‘What are you talking about? I don’t even know where to start.’ Now they are ready. There are digital departments from news to diplomacy to government.”

Since Meerkat went live, federal agencies along with state and local governments have experimented with live stream apps. The Interior Department posted a live glimpse of Everglades National Park’s alligators this past Earth Day on Periscope, a live stream app similar to Meerkat. Philadelphia city government jumped aboard the Meerkat platform without any sort of strategy meeting or public announcement.

Where the app is really looking to take off is with potential presidential candidates in the run-up to the 2016 election. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a Republican, has already used the app recently while speaking to voters in Atlanta, and many people think it will be revolutionary in the same way Twitter and Facebook were for Barack Obama when he ran for his first term in 2008. Rubin said in the past month, people from his team have been to D.C. twice to talk to people gearing up for the campaign trail.

“This new participatory medium, the new way to engage audience, has huge potential for candidates who want to show a more humanized side,” Rubin said.

He’s also quick to point out the experience Meerkat could bring to the public as a candidate assumes elected office, especially if the app is used in a unique way.

“The last thing that we want to see is using the same format in new devices,” he told FedScoop. “The phone just sitting there streaming, that’s not gonna fly. If Obama were to go to Iran and the person with him goes live [using the app], and the person says ‘Say hi,’ and Obama says ‘hi,’ I mean, when is the last time the president called you from the TV and said hi to you?’

While Rubin understands that campaigns or agencies are going to find ways to tailor live streams to fit their messages, the platform brings governments closer to its people and provides a new layer of transparency, he said.

“We have a long journey toward honesty and transparency in politics,” Rubin said. “This is not going to break the walls of honesty, but it’s going to be a positive step toward that. It’s going to give more materials as a voter to make actions.”

United offers reward miles to hackers who report security flaws

United Airlines is offering ethical hackers and cybersecurity researchers frequent flier miles for reporting discoveries of new vulnerabilities in the company’s website and mobile applications.

The company posted information Thursday about its so-called Bug Bounty Program on its website and claims it is the first such program to be offered by an airline.

The program “permits independent researchers to discover and report issues that affect the confidentiality, integrity and/or availability of customer or company information and rewards them for being the first to discover a bug,” according to the posting on United’s website.

United is offering 50,000 reward miles for low severity vulnerabilities, such as cross-site scripting. Medium severity risks, like brute force attacks, authentication bypasses or anything that could potentially lead to the loss of personally identifiable information, will earn researchers 250,000 miles. And the highest severity attack — remote code execution vulnerabilities — will earn a lucky hacker 1 million reward miles, which is more than enough for two roundtrip tickets from the U.S. to China.

The catch

Hackers that want to take part in the program must abide by strict rules established by United. For example, anybody caught running vulnerability scans against aircraft Wi-Fi systems, entertainment systems or avionics will face permanent disqualification from the program and could face criminal charges.

In addition, those interested in participating must be current members in good standing of United’s MileagePlus program and cannot reside in a country on a U.S. government sanctions list. Researchers also cannot be the author of the code in which the vulnerabilities are discovered or work for United Airlines. Hackers that meet those criteria simply need to be the first person to report the bug.

Kandy Zabka, vice president of cybersecurity and threat intelligence at Houston, Texas-based Dark Data Service LLC, called United’s decision to launch a bounty program “brilliant” and said it’s a great opportunity for a large pool of cyber talent.

“I know so many talented coders who cannot get jobs, but are honest people. This is one way to deflate the current trend of hacking just to hack or trying to get money illegally,” Zabka said. “I think all companies should offer bounties.”

An increasing number of companies are offering public bug bounty programs. According to the website vulnerability-lab.com, which maintains a list of such programs, there are 119 known bug bounty programs offered by the likes of Etsy, Microsoft, PayPal, Snapchat, Starbucks and others.

The United Bug Bounty Program comes just a few weeks after the airline banned security researcher Chris Roberts from flying on the company’s aircraft after Roberts tweeted about cyber vulnerabilities in onboard cyber systems while flying from Chicago to Syracuse, New York. Upon landing, he was met by FBI agents who confiscated his computer and questioned him for hours. He acknowledged to agents that he had scanned onboard systems during previous flights.

When he learned of United’s new bounty program, Roberts sent out the following tweet:

Tepid response to 18F’s quietly released openFOIA site

Developers at the 18F digital services shop showcased a new Freedom of Information Act site to a group of open government advocates Wednesday — and the reaction has been lukewarm.

OpenFOIA, now in its alpha stage, aims to make it easier to submit FOIA requests to various agencies. Developed in conjunction with the Justice Department, the current version is essentially an update to FOIA.gov, which lets users search for information on how to file requests in the federal government.

“Hopefully it will eventually go well beyond this,” Nate Jones, director of the FOIA Project for the National Security Archive, told FedScoop in an email.

Some transparency advocates have hoped the government would create one place where users could submit all their requests — more like the FOIAonline portal, which allows users to file requests for various participating government agencies. Indeed, a FOIA reform bill that’s working its way through Congress would require the government set up such a site.

However, openFOIA does not quite reach that mark. Jones said the site’s underlying problem is that 18F is only able to rely on the FOIA websites and methods that agencies currently use — even if those systems are subpar — and not create new processes.

“18F is not able to fundamentally change the ways FOIAs are requested, processed or posted,” he said in an email. “In that sense, 18F’s claim that it can make ‘hard things possible’ has, for now, been prevented by the federal bureaucracy.”

Sean Moulton at the Center for Effective Government echoed Jones’ concerns. While the demo site is “better than anything that’s out there right now,” he said, “what we were hoping for was kind of this one-stop shop where someone could submit a FOIA to any agency.”

He said 18F had explained several technical challenges to releasing a portal advocates had originally envisioned. But he said he remains hopeful that it could be done as the group releases subsequent versions of the site.

Abby Paulson of OpenTheGovernment.org, which was also represented at the meeting yesterday, told FedScoop her group has not taken a stance on the project.

“In general, we’re pretty supportive of the open government partnership process,” she said.

Meanwhile, in a blog post published on Medium, Nick Sinai, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, and a former deputy chief technology officer of the U.S., was optimistic the site would be a jumping off point for further innovation.

“In the long-run, imagine this service expanding to include a single place to learn about FOIA, initiate and track a request (like package tracking on FedEx), have open conversations with a federal agency about improving a request, and find previously released FOIA materials,” wrote Sinai.

Last year, 18F published a blog post about its efforts to make the FOIA process easier. Authors said they wanted to build tools that would “improve the FOIA request submission experience; create a scalable infrastructure for making requests to federal agencies; and make it easier for requesters to find records and other information that have already been made available online.”

Ori Hoffer, an 18F spokesman, confirmed his group “soft launched” openFOIA and received “a lot of feedback from stakeholders.”

“What this first step attempts to do is make the FOIA process less confusing for users unfamiliar with the process,” he said in an email. “DOJ, GSA, and their partners are eager to learn about what works best, or what can be improved, based on user’s experience.”

Hoffer said the site would continue to be developed and improved upon. 18F encourages users to send their comments to 18f-foia@gsa.gov.

Retail, financial services divided on federal data standard bill

Executives from the financial services, retail and e-commerce industries were split Thursday on whether a federal data protection standard could better shield consumers and companies from having their information stolen.

The disagreements surfaced Thursday during a House Financial Services Committee hearing on the Data Security Act. Introduced last week, the bill would hold financial services and retailers to the standards set by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which forces financial institutions to safeguard sensitive data and explain their information-sharing practices to their customers.

Brian Dodge, an executive vice president with the Retail Industry Leaders Association, told the committee that Gramm-Leach-Bliley is too broad of a rule for the range of businesses in the retail sector.

“If Congress were to pursue legislation that shoehorned the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act into the rest of the business community, it would go beyond the retail industry,” Dodge told the committee, adding that the Federal Trade Commission has sufficient ability to oversee the retail industry. “We don’t think you can regulate your way to security. We need to start with the baseline that is a strong standard and emboldens the FTC to enforce these standards.”

Tim Pawlenty, the CEO of the Financial Services Roundtable, was supportive of the bill, saying the standards in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act are flexible enough to cover all sizes of financial service institutions and can be scaled across other private sectors. He also added that the Data Security Act sets an important national standard in the face of data security laws that can vary from state to state.

“We’re only as strong as the weakest link in the chain,” Pawlenty said. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to have 50 different standards and 50 different responses.”

Laura Moy, senior policy counsel with New America’s Open Technology Institute, expressed some reservations about a federal standard, saying that it needs to be flexible and serve as a “floor, not a ceiling” for states that have their own robust data standards.

Any data legislation “would need to provide an agile mechanism to match developing technology and new threats,” Moy said. “We can’t always forecast the next big threat years in advance, but we know that there will be one.”

A forthcoming threat that was discussed during the hearing was how the move to EMV cards, better known as chip-and-PIN cards, will affect what companies would be liable for in breaches or cases of identity fraud.

Pawlenty and Dodge agreed that more could be done but diverged on how their industries could enhance security practices. Dodge argued that card issuers should be forced to use both chip and PIN measures when card companies switch to EMV standards in October. Currently, card holders will not be required to use a PIN with their EMV cards.

“Retailers believe that American consumers deserve the best available card security and that deploying the two-factor authentication enabled through chip and PIN will prevent criminals from duplicating cards with ease, devaluing the data that retailers collect at the point of sale and ultimately reducing cyber-attacks on retailers,” Dodge wrote in his testimony.

Pawlenty, along with Stephen Orfei, general manager of the PCI Security Standards Council, said that other measures like biometrics, tokenization and end-to-end encryption are moving the industry away from any card-based protections. Orfei added that any security implementations are weak unless their standards are followed.

“Applying our standards is the best line of defense,” he said. “When bundled and implemented properly, the data is useless and there is no reason to break in.”

Rep. John Carney, D-Del., who co-sponsored the bill with fellow committee member Rep. Randy Neugebauer, R-Texas, said a solution needs to be discovered quickly, because the patchwork of state laws is failing to protect companies and consumers.

“We think consumers and the companies that handle their personal financial data should know the rules of the road when it comes to protecting this data,” Carney said. “The fact is that the White House, Congress and consumers agree that the status quo isn’t working.”

STEM in the sun: Kids flocking to tech summer camps

Most kids look forward to a break from school during the hot summer months, but many are deciding to swap alfresco activities for computer coding.

More schools, government agencies, nonprofits, startups and traditional camps are offering programs that appeal to kids’ inner technophiles, with programs lasting from a day to several weeks that focus solely on coding and STEM, trendy new fields that are attracting interest among kids at an increasingly earlier age.

According to a 2013 survey from the American Camp Association, which tracks the $15 billion industry, 54 percent of camp directors said they added a new activity or program in the last two years. STEM summer programs surged by 12 percent, along with fitness and wellness programs.

As the federal government continues to devote more resources to expanding programs, like President Barack Obama’s recent $240 million commitment to increase STEM awareness among minorities, girls and low-income children, more kids are getting into the game – literally. At a tech incubator in Crystal City, Virginia, an after-school coding program recently wrapped up a spring session, attracting about 15 kids who traveled from near and far to attend.

FedScoop has compiled a list of cutting-edge summer programs that are making waves in different cities, including some that are still accepting applications.

Washington, D.C.

Microsoft’s Innovation & Policy Center is putting on an event May 21 called DigiGirlz Day, a daylong technology camp for middle school girls who are interested in IT or entrepreneurial careers. They will be able to use products like the Surface tablet, build apps and play with Xbox games. Prominent women at the company will talk about possible career choices in STEM fields. The event, which is also being held in several other cities on different dates, will be held from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. More information can be found here.

iD Tech gets girls involved in science, technology, math and engineering through its TechGirls program, run by the Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. This summer, five American girls ages 7 to 17 will not only get a science-minded education, but will also participate in a cultural exchange program with their peers from countries like Algeria, Egypt, Jordan and Morocco. The three-week program “seeks to inspire international friendships and initiate a vital exchange of perspectives,” according to program officials. The deadline to apply was May 2, but iD Tech runs several other camps throughout the country.

NASA offers a host of summer programs for middle and high school students interested in everything from astronomy to weather trends, but many of the application deadlines come early in March. For those who still want to get a taste of space, the Virginia Space Flight Academy in Wallops Island – about a three-hour drive from downtown Washington – is still accepting applications for four different weeks through August. The co-ed residential camps are targeted to kids ages 11 to 17, where they can build rockets, learn robotics and take a tour of the nearby NASA Wallops Flight Facility. More information can be found at https://www.vaspaceflightacademy.org.

New York

Vidcode, a startup run by two friends who met at a Startup Weekend EDU in New York a couple of years ago, is offering coding classes for girls ages 11 to 14 at the 92nd Street Y. The summer intensive workshop, which costs $595 and runs July 20-24, teaches budding computer scientists the “language of the Web,” also known as JavaScript, according to the program website. Students will also learn how to make interactive music videos, stop-motion animations and documentary projects. For more information, visit http://www.92y.org/Class/Vidcode-11-14-yrs.aspx.

A new city pilot program called NYC Summer STEM 2015 will engage 1,200 kids in 2nd, 7th and 10th grades at sites across the city for four weeks, New York City Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina announced last week. The curriculum will be provided by the Polytechnic School of Engineering at New York University, and will focus on robotics, engineering, technology and the science behind urban development and sustainability for the older students. Elementary school students will receive hands-on learning with topics like infrastructure, energy and transportation. The $2 million project is being funded by Microsoft and the Fund for Public Schools. Students can register for the program by borough when the application is available. For more information, visit the NYC schools page.

California

“Cool Technology,” “Eco Explorations,” “Geology Camp” and “Lego Engineering” are courses still available for kids entering 4th and 5th grades through the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Groups of 16 campers each can learn how to build technological contraptions (kids will find out how to attach bananas to computers to make music), explore local aquatic and terrestrial environments, study rock crystals and learn the mechanics behind Legos. The workshops start at various times during the summer and last two to three weeks. Several sessions across all grade levels are still open and can be found here.

Kids who are clamoring for an authentic college experience can still apply for some open slots at Digital Media Academy’s technology summer camps at Stanford University, which run from June 22 to Aug. 21. Students ages 12 and up can take sessions on campus, eat in the dining halls and stay in a dorm overnight. Open programs include Adventures in 3D Game Design with Minecraft, Photography & Graphic Design, and Robotics & Programming. For more information, visit https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/northern-california-tech-camps/stanford-university/.

Health Datapalooza: Data innovation five years later

It was nearly five years ago that an enlightened group of leaders first gathered at an obscure forum in Washington, D.C., hosted by the Institute of Medicine and the Department of Health and Human Services, to explore how big data could improve health care in America.

Propelled by an energetic new chief technology officer at HHS named Todd Park, the forum brought together innovators from all walks of the health care and IT communities. Their vision was to create a platform for harnessing health care data — analogous to how an entire industry arose around a steady government supply of National Weather Service data.

That initial forum, held June 2, 2010, rapidly snowballed into what today is better known as the Health Datapalooza, which is expected to bring more than 2,000 technology experts, entrepreneurs, policymakers and health care system leaders together in Washington at the end of the month.

It also gave rise to the Health Data Consortium, a public-private partnership which now manages the Health Datapalooza and works to promote the availability and innovative use of open, machine-readable health data.

And it later became a model for the White House — which recruited Park to serve as U.S. chief technology officer in 2012 — to showcase how freely available government data might fuel innovation and jobs in other fields including energy, public safety and education.

The challenge then, and now, for those working to unlock the value of all that data — especially government data — has been in trying to liberate oceans of data from the systems, applications and processes in which they were created, and allow it to become the raw material for other uses. But there also remains a slew of legal and policy hurdles that must be addressed if the economic and social benefits of data innovation are to be fully realized in the U.S.

A new report released this week by the Center for Data Innovation puts those hurdles into clearer perspective. In it, authors Daniel Castro and Joshua New lay out a dozen bipartisan recommendations for ways Congress might accelerate data innovation in the U.S.

These recommendations offer a constructive snapshot of the issues facing those who have a stake in the data economy – which is pretty much everyone these days, but in particular those who produce the data on which much of the U.S. economy depends.

A good example, and one that is especially relevant to those gathering at this year’s Health Datapalooza, is the need to adopt universal patient identifiers for health care.

While hospitals and health care providers have generally embraced electronic health records, they have yet to fully benefit from them because there is still not an accurate and efficient way to match patients to their records.

As Castro and New make clear, “Without a reliable patient matching system, providers must spend time manually matching patients; patients can be erroneously matched to the wrong records, and some records belong to a patient can be overlooked. Even a single organization with multiple computer systems may experience this problem where misidentification rates range from two to twenty percent.”

The Department of Health and Human Services “recognized the ‘urgent and critical’ need to create a system of unique patient identifiers almost two decades ago, and this need has only grown more severe since then,” they noted.

While the original language of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, identified the need to create a national universal patient identifier system, subsequent legislation blocked funding for enacting such a program. Congress can and should change that.

Similarly, educators, school administrators, researchers, families and prospective college students could gain enormous value from education data.

Unfortunately, many of these data sets are fragmented, vary by state, are often not publicly accessible, or aren’t interoperable. For instance, while 43 states link K-12 education data with early childhood data and 44 states link K-12 data with postsecondary data, only 19 states link K-12 data with workforce data and only 18 states link all four categories of data, according to Castro and New.

Once again, the creation of a reliable system to ensure that a “de-identified student record could be tracked over time” could provide much greater insight in “analyzing things like the impact of early-childhood education on the workforce,” they wrote.

Castro and New offer up a number of other recommendations — improving the management of geospatial data, clarifying financial regulatory data requirements, taking advantage of new data technologies to modernize supply chains, and letting consumers access their energy data from smart meters. Their recommendations are worth reading and advancing.

Innovators, of course, aren’t going to wait for Congress or federal policymakers, nor should they.

That was the genius behind the first Health Datapalooza. It served as an innovative way to circumvent the bureaucracy and inertia that has kept data captive, working as a catalyst that brought data users and producers together in the same room with business-minded developers to reimagine how data can be put to smarter use.

Keeping faith with America’s veterans

Putting the 1 percent of Americans who serve the nation in uniform back to work after a decade of war and sacrifice isn’t just a moral imperative, but it also happens to be good for the country’s tech industry.

With more than 18 million science, technology, engineering and mathematics jobs open and few qualified candidates to fill them, America’s tech industry faces a talent crisis like no other time in its history. Likewise, more than 1 million veterans will make the difficult transition from military to civilian life during the next five years. For many, it will be a move from a life of dedication and purpose to one of uncertainty in a frail private economy known more for eating its young than for developing it.

Retired Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Chris Cortez sees an opportunity in the convergence of these two socioeconomic forces.

“Every day industry is pulling their hair out trying to find qualified people to fill those roles,” said Cortez, vice president of the newly created military affairs division at Microsoft. “And now you have this pool of talented service members who are leaving the military and who are going to want to find a job and nobody’s really going after them. But why not? Look at the experience they gain, look at the leadership skills and the tough situations they have to work their way through. This is a pool of talent that can really help America.”

Cortez’s commitment to his fellow veterans isn’t lost on Microsoft. The company has been an active participant in multiple programs designed to put veterans to work. And when Congress passed the VOW to Hire Veterans Act in 2011 — allowing service members to begin the private employment process while still on active duty — Microsoft stepped up and created the Microsoft Software and Systems Academy. The 16-week intensive course provides those who are accepted training in a multitude of IT disciplines and guarantees graduates an interview with the company.

When we get to our full potential, we’ll probably be graduating over a thousand per year.

“They don’t have to have a technology background, but they do have to have some aptitude. And we personally interview them,” Cortez said in an interview at FedScoop headquarters in Washington, D.C. “We select those we truly believe can make it through this. This is not easy. It’s not a give-away program.”

Through Cortez’s leadership, the MSSA program has become the crown jewel of Microsoft’s military affairs division, stood up by Cortez last July. What started 18 months ago as a pilot project at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state has expanded to Fort Hood, Texas, and Camp Pendleton in California.

To date, about 220 veterans have graduated from the course. “The overwhelming majority of those 220 have been hired into an IT company,” Cortez said. “We don’t and we don’t pretend to be able to hire them all. We guarantee you an interview, but if we don’t hire you, we want you to get a job.”

So far, Microsoft has hired about a third of the graduates — a hire rate that tracks with industry standards in terms of the interview-hire ratio. Microsoft has enlisted its enterprise partner companies in the effort, many of which have agreed to review and interview candidates for open positions.

But even Apple — Microsoft’s historic competitor — has hired a graduate of the MSSA program. “And we’re happy about it. It’s about the veterans,” Cortez said.

Army special forces Sgt. Bernard Bergan remembers his last year in the military as a stressful time for him and his wife. A tour in Afghanistan and the lengthy, unpredictable deployments that come with life in special operations put a great strain on his family — although they would never say it. As he was preparing to finish his six years as an IT specialist with the Army’s 1st Special Forces Group, an unexpected deployment to Korea injected even more uncertainty about how his post-military life would play out.

That’s when he discovered the MSSA program in 2013. At that time, the program was still new and Bergan understood there was some risk involved in dedicating his last 16 weeks to a training program. But because it was Microsoft behind it, he felt the risk was worth taking. And that’s when it started for him.

The program required 12 to 18 hours per day. “It was almost like I was deployed but coming home every night,” Bergan recalled during an interview with FedScoop. “They have 16 weeks to train you and prepare you for a big interview at Microsoft. It’s very intense. It’s not for the faint of heart.”

And while the interview for a job at Microsoft is guaranteed, nothing else is. “That guaranteed interview is like a light at the end of the tunnel, but it starts another tunnel,” Bergan said. “There’s no real preparation for that outside of just digging deep and knowing that as a military [veteran] you’ve been through so many tough things in service to your country that this is just another tough thing you have to go through if this is the goal you want to pursue.”

Veterans like Bergan bring skills that can only be learned through military service. “The military — start to finish — is a leadership program,” he said. “You learn to trust those around you but you also learn that they are completely dependent on what you bring to the table as well. When companies hire veterans they tap into people who are always willing to step up and always willing to lead.”

Cortez called Bergan “a perfect example” of what can be accomplished through the MSSA program, noting that Bergan has already been singled out at Microsoft as a software tester and has been approached by other divisions. “You give these young people a foundational skill set and you allow them to show what they’re capable of in the company and bingo!”

MSSA graduates go on to become system administrators, cloud administrators, database administrators, software developers and software testers, according to Cortez. And plans are to expand the program.

“We’re going to grow it. When we get to our full potential, we’ll probably be graduating over a thousand per year,” Cortez said. “Our goal is that every time we have a graduation that 100 percent get hired by us and other IT companies. Let’s not just get them a job. Let’s get them a good job.”

Cortez is quick to point out that it will take more than just Microsoft to make a significant dent in the converging crises of STEM worker shortages and veteran employment. “There’s no way we can do everything ourselves, but this is the right thing to do and it’s the right time to do it,” he said. “Somebody asked me, ‘What’s your greatest fear?’ There is none. It’s goodness.”