Challenge.gov is powered by New York-based start-up ChallengePost. You can follow @ChallengeGov on Twitter. See also GovLoop’s in-depth interview with GSA’s Director of Center for New Media and Citizen Engagement Bev Godwin about the new site.

Godwin announces launch of Challenge.gov at Gov 2.0 Summit:

Video overview of Challenge.gov and how to post a challenge:

Submit your ideas.

The General Services Administration recently announced it will create FedSpace, a ‘new social intranet for federal employees and contractors.’ The project will be managed by the agency’s Office of Citizen Services and the initial version is expected to launch late summer.

GSA describes it as follows:

FedSpace is a secure intranet and collaboration workspace for Federal employees and contractors. Designed to be “for Feds by Feds”, FedSpace will enable government employees to work collaboratively across agencies, through the use of Web 2.0 technologies like file sharing, wikis, a government–wide employee directory, shared workspaces, blogs, and more.

Gartner analyst Andrea DiMaio has interesting thoughts as to why it’s too late for FedSpace (with spirited and substantial comments). Whether you believe the federal government should create another social network or intranet is another discussion. I understand Andrea’s 30,000-foot assessment, but disagree, mostly because an officially-endorsed government network has huge potential to cut through the open Web clutter and protect the privacy of people who just want to get their jobs done.

FedSpace was inevitable and will survive the test of time, regardless of its success. Longer term (1-2 years), if effectively executed, it will have a huge impact on GovLoop, the largest unofficial social network for government employees. To his credit, GovLoop founder Steve Ressler shared his suggestions for FedSpace.

To learn more about FedSpace, there’s a great FAQ and overview page here.

This is a great opportunity for the federal government to do something creatively epic and have a major impact on the way government works. Below are some questions and recommendations.

Questions:

• What is the budget?
• What will it be developed in?
• Will it be hosted on a government cloud?
• How many people are on the development team?
• What contractor firms are working on the project?
• Who’s the project lead?
• How will success be measured?

Recommendations:

• Change the name. Government needs to stop mimicking dot-com social network branding and get creative. Use a naming contest as an opportunity build interest. While this may seem trivial, branding is a big deal.
• Read Steve Blank’s customer development classic The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Joshua Porter’s Designing for the Social Web is a great reference for non-technical team members and will help others get more excited about the potential.
• Leverage experts outside of the government tech bubble. Smart people are working internally on this project, but engage with in-the-trenches product and marketing development experts from popular commercial networks. Bring them in for brown-bag discussions or video-conference Q&As.
• Start an open blog to chronicle your progress and solicit input. You’ll get free advice and feedback from all sectors, increase project visibility and create a resource for state governments looking to do the same.
• Get serious about marketing it. Its usefulness will determine long-term success, but short-term, you’ll need to get very creative to get 2 million employees actively engaged.

GSA’s Office of Citizen Services is one of my favorite ideas for a government agency and inter-agency service. The work it does is fantastic, and its leadership is exceptional.

I’m also a big fan of GovLoop and have a great relationship with founder Steve Ressler. Steve has been gracious enough to feature me as a ‘GovLoop Member of the Week,’ and I regularly try to post updates on what’s happening over there.

Having said that, I’m wary of GSA’s implied endorsement of GovLoop, notably on it’s Resources page (Figure A) and in its recent ‘Government by Collaboration’ newsletter (Figure B) that includes an article by GovLoop with the headline ‘GovLoop’s “Extraordinary Collection of Talent.”‘

I’ve written about this before (NASCAR.gov: Should corporate logos be on government sites?), which generated some great comments around the role of private sector logo and link placement on government Websites.

In the spirit of open government, I hope GSA and GovLoop can figure out a better way to promote each of their services and non-government resources in a more appropriate manner.

Figure A

Figure B

I’m not sure I can recommend reading all of the plans cover to cover, but if you’re an advocate or have a vested interest in the future of a Federal agency, these plans are fascinating peek into each agency’s interior life. It’s not just the content of the plans, which run from exciting to comical to mundane. You can also learn a great deal about how agencies view themselves from the way these plans are presented and marketed. It will come as no surprise that the Department of Justice’s rather unlovely document spends a lot of time thinking about reducing its FOIA backlog. The Department of Energy clearly understands itself to be a first a research organization, based on its flagship data sets. The Department of Defense plan is crisp, to the point, and focuses on getting the behemoth to better collaborate and interact with other agencies, rather than the public.

The organizational psychology betrayed by these plans is for another post. My interest is in where agencies found open source. I’ve long advocated for open source as a concrete, tangible way to encourage collaboration between agencies and between the government and its citizens. I was pleasantly surprised, frankly, to see how many agencies agree. Here’s what I found, in no particular order.

US Agency for International Development

The USAID plan was a total surprise. I had no idea how many open source initiatives were being conducted by USAID. Page 30 contains this gem on their Global Development Commons work:

With over four billion subscribers in the world, the mobile phone is often the key to connecting and exchanging information with people in developing countries. The 2008 USAID Development 2.0 Challenge, implemented by the Global Development Commons, invited innovators and entrepreneurs from around the world to participate in a global competition to seek access to information and build new connections to the global community. Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation have become increasingly important engines of innovation globally, leveraged by the commercial, non-profit, academic and government sectors to identify opportunities and solve problems. USAID’s Development 2.0 Challenge yielded 115 submissions using high impact, low-cost, open source solutions.

The winner among the 115 submissions was the RapidSMS Child Malnutrition Surveillance system, which “enables health practitioners to share and track children’s nutritional information with the touch of a cell phone.”

The agency also operates the Intra-Health OPEN Initiative, which is “a suite of free open source solutions to supply health sector leaders and managers with a collection of new tools.”

Social Security Administration

The Social Security Administration is another open source underdog. Imagine all the pent-up innovation they can unlock once this project is underway:

We are in the process of creating internal capacity to host websites and applications based on open-source software solutions and we look forward to a lively exchange of ideas and program code within the growing Federal open–source software development community;

As part of SSA’s fifth goal, “making government more sustainable”, they see open source software as an essential tool:

We are a Federal leader in the use of Health Information Technology. Our work with the private sector may yield transferable ideas and tools. We will share our results and products as appropriate. For example:

• We look forward to sharing the products of our open–source platform efforts across the growing Federal open–source development community, as well as partnering with other agencies in future endeavors; and
• We are in the process of designing and developing an Electronic Technology Repository for communities of innovation. We expect this repository to employ open–source social networking and other tools to permit users to better manage agency knowledge, avoid unproductive duplication of effort, and share experiences. The repository will support the storage of shared materials and project artifacts, discussion boards, wikis, blogs, subscription feeds, and other pertinent information. We envision sharing these resources with other Federal organizations as well.

Others have criticized open source as being irrelevant to the open government movement, but I think interagency collaboration doesn’t happen anywhere near as often as it should, it can be made easier with open source, and it’s outstanding that the SSA seems to agree.

Department of Defense

The DOD has been using open source software for years. Though I was a bit surprised that it wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the DOD’s open government plan, and even more surprised that the much-hyped forge.mil project isn’t referenced at all, the plan includes a number of initiatives that happen to take advantage of open source tools:

The Wikified Army Field Guide, based on Mediawiki, will allow warfighters to collaboratively edit the Army’s field manuals, allowing the documents to be more accurate and responsive:

…as the battlefield changes rapidly, field manuals must keep pace.  Under the traditional process – in which a select few were charged with drafting and updating field manuals –manuals often failed to reflect the latest knowledge of Soldiers on the ground.

Using the same free software behind Wikipedia, the Army’s “wikified” field manuals invite military personnel – from private to general – to collaboratively update the Army Tactics, Techniques and Procedures Manuals in real time.  In so doing, the Army provides a secure means for battle-tested Soldiers to share their experience and advice from the field.  Wikified Army Field Manuals ensure the men and women who serve our Nation have access to the best possible information when they need it.

This is a very exciting opportunity to capture all the innovation happening “at the edge” and quickly incorporate it into useful, official documentation. It makes so much sense, I’m surprised it hasn’t already been done.

The plan also highlights XMPP, which is a tremendously popular instant-messaging protocol that runs, among others, Google Talk. It may surprise you to learn just how much XMPP’s most popular implementation, Jabber, is already being used inside the DOD. The Defense Connect Online program uses Jabber to provide secure IMs inside the DOD, and they announced in November that this would be opened up to the outside world. Because they standardized on an open standard with robust open source implementations, literally dozens of different chat clients are now available to these non-DOD DCO users.

It’s interesting how both Jabber and the Wiki Field Manual projects aim to improve collaboration, and do so on highly collaborative open source platforms. I don’t think that’s an accident.

Department of Homeland Security

VirtualUSA is DHS’ flagship initiative, which couldn’t be more appropriate. From page 23 of the DHS Open Government plan:

On December 8, 2009, Secretary Janet Napolitano publicly launched Virtual USA (vUSA), an innovative information-sharing initiative that draws on practitioner input to help Federal, State, local and Tribal first responders collaborate to make fast, well-informed decisions. vUSA integrates existing frameworks and investments to provide real-time access to operational information—such as weather conditions; traffic; the location and operational status of critical infrastructure; fuel supplies; availability of emergency shelters and medical facilities; and other critical information—that allows users to improve situational awareness and to respond quickly in emergencies.

vUSA currently operates as two pilots – one in eight southeastern states: Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Virginia and Tennessee; and the other in five states in the northwest: Alaska, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. In Virginia alone, vUSA reduced response times to incidents involving hazardous materials by 70 percent.

VirtualUSA is much more revolutionary than this lets on. It’s a very disruptive piece of software in its space. FCW has a succinct overview of the project’s history and what it means for first responders. DHS is funding this project, based on open source and open standards, in part because it wants to encourage collaborative toolbuilding and cooperation among the states, and also because this capability is too important to be in the hands of a single GIS provider, like Google or ESRI. Because it is an open source project, and uses open standards, VirtualUSA ensures that critical assets are not locked into a single vendor, and simultaneously lower the barrier to entry for new GIS vendors.

Department of Commerce

On page 18 of the Department of Commerce plan, under “Open Source Information Technology”, we find some familiar prose:

Also emerging from Commerce’s Open Government Ideascale community was a suggestion to “become more open through the increased use of open source software.” The Department has already begun using the open source tool, Drupal, for a number of its new websites and plans to increase this use in the future. Using open source technology will allow Commerce to develop new technologies and collaborate more readily with the public and other government agencies, and within the Department itself.

To make this happen, the Office of the Chief Information Officer and the Office of Acquisition Management will be consulted to ensure that open source offerings are fully considered during procurement processes. That consideration will include the value that the Department can receive through increased collaboration with the public and as a contributor to open source communities.

Nothing short of victory at Commerce for Open Source of America, whose suggestion this was. Congratulations!

Department of Labor

You’ll find open source in the strangest places. Until I read Labor’s plan, I didn’t appreciate how much data the Department of Labor is responsible for analyzing and disseminating. With that in mind, it makes perfect sense to find this initiative on page 29:

Create a “Developer’s Corner”

We plan to establish a “Developer Corner” on www.dol.gov/open that specifically targets and engages developers. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for developers to re-purpose our data, provide feedback, get technical help, bring developers with similar interests together and, ultimately inspire the best possible uses of our data for the benefit of the public. Ideas under consideration include a bug tracking system, RSS feeds for dataset changes, dataset versioning, public code competitions, data authentication, and an ideation platform to prioritize developer needs.

I think every department and agency that distributes data to the public (which is to say, all of them) should follow Labor’s lead and establish their own Developer sites. There’s no better way to stay engaged with this very powerful community.

Health and Human Services

The outstanding NHIN CONNECT project, which has a thriving open source community, got a mention on page 56 of HHS’s plan:

Nationwide Health Information Network – Direct

A key component of the Nation’s emerging health information technology infrastructure is the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) – a set of standards, policies, and services that enable the secure exchange of health information over the Internet. “NHIN Direct” is the latest development in the evolution of the NHIN. It’s an important effort to develop a “lightweight on-ramp” to the NHIN that will enable simple, direct exchanges of information between providers, labs, pharmacies, and consumers — and which will be easy to adopt and implement. In a process that launched on March 1, NHIN Direct is being designed in close collaboration with the community of potential users, with the entire process taking place in the open, in public, on a NHIN Direct wikispace. NHIN Direct will then be implemented in real-world tests and deployments by members of the community – with HHS’s Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) playing a coordinating and convening role. The gist of the NHIN Direct strategy is to utilize a community-driven approach to ramp up and power NHIN Direct-powered health information exchange.

I should mention that my employer, Red Hat, is involved in this project.

National Science Foundation

There was nothing explicitly about open source in the NSF’s open government plan, but their plan is worth mentioning anyway, as the NSF already does a tremendous amount of work in the open source community. Here’s a search for “open source” on their web site, which yielded over 5,000 hits when I last tried it:

http://search.nsf.gov/search?access=p&output=xml_no_dtd&sort=date:D:L:d1&ie=UTF-8&btnG=Google+Search&client=NSF&oe=UTF-8&proxystylesheet=NSF2&site=NSF&q=open+source

NSF regularly awards grants under the condition that software developed under those grants is given an open source license. Some very progressive thinking, and shrewd IP stewardship from the NSF folks, so we’ll forgive them for not mentioning open source directly in their plan.

Department of the Treasury

Yet another revelation. Treasury plans to cultivate open source projects to facilitate collaboration between agencies and between Treasury and the public. I’ve written about exactly this kind of collaboration before, back in December, so I’m enormously pleased to see that Treasury agrees. I’ve emphasized my favorite passages here:

In the areas of transparency, participation, collaboration, and flagship initiative, Treasury strives to share its efforts across Government to avoid duplication across agencies and to improve value/outcome of efforts. Treasury seeks to manifest cross-agency transferability in at least two of the following ways:

• Make training available to other agencies by opening up classes/webcasts to other agencies; providing slides, video and/or audio after the training; and posting on an e-learning platform.
• Name an advocate who gets the word out about what the agency has to share and invites other agencies to contact that person to learn from him or her.
• Design procurements for enterprise (where government is the enterprise) or in such a way that what is created can be shared across government at no cost.
• Develop and post code so it can be shared with other agencies (open source or the contract written such that the government owns the code.)
• Share platforms utilized by the agency with other agencies at no cost.
• Create participatory events across agencies with related missions.
• Collaborate on projects and challenges with the public and with the private sector in partnership with other federal agencies that have similar missions.
• Share all materials, results, tools, and training that could be transferable to other agencies with the Interagency Working Group as an efficient central dissemination mechanism.

Veteran’s Administration

The VA is an enormous consumer of information technology, and gained early recognition from the open source community for its public domain VISTA electronic health record platform. On page 22 of the VA plan, it becomes clear that the VA is expanding its use of open source to lower the barrier to entry for developers who want to help the agency:

AViVA

A Virtual Installation of VistA Architecture (AViVA) is a recent innovation that we are using to support collaboration. AViVA creates a universal user interface for the electronic health record and includes prototyping of data connectors in order to securely link the AViVA platform to patient data from any source. The AViVA project incorporates HealtheVet as an update of the VistA legacy database system.

VA’s current electronic hospital management system uses a graphical user interface known as the Clinical Patient Record System (CPRS). CPRS data is stored in the legacy data system known as VistA. CPRS requires installation on each machine that operates the program rendering the program difficult to scale and expensive to maintain and update. AViVA’s implementation improves this model in two ways. First, AViVA creates a modular, web-enabled electronic health record system that can be easily and remotely maintained. Second, Medical Data Web Services (MDWS), which can be accessed by the Department of Defense, will allow the creation of applications for any data source to be plugged into the system.

AViVA is a very exciting program for the collaboration portion of our Open Government Plan and because we are committed to creating systems that allow health care providers to collaborate to provide the best care for Veterans. AViVA’s web based presentation layer will allow our doctors and nurses around the country to search patient records as simply and succinctly as you can search for pizza on Google Maps and as securely as the best retail financial service businesses. Additionally, AViVA creates collaboration between VA and DoD, our partner in caring for our nation’s heroes. Finally AViVA creates an open source platform that allows software to be shared with entities outside of VA, creating opportunities for further innovation and development beyond the agency.

National Aeronautic and Space Administration

“NASA is working to make open source software development more collaborative at NASA to benefit both the Agency and the public,” it says right on the first page of the NASA open government plan. Here’s an agency which has always relied on a vibrant research community, software developers, and a culture of innovation. I’m not surprised by their focus on open source, but I am delighted. Among other things, NASA will be sponsoring an open source code competition, has an entire section of their plan devoted to open source development, and will be developing their Nebula cloud computing system on open source software.

It’s fair to say that NASA’s plan is the strongest I’ve seen for the open source community.

Your Turn

Who did I miss? What other opportunities for open source have you found in the open government plans? Leave a comment and let us all know!

For Drupal geeks:

Go.USA.gov is open source, and was developed in Drupal using the theme base Blueprint, Drupal Core, Shorten, Short URL, and TLD restriction modules.

User activity will be monitored to better understand citizen interests and needs. According to GSA, more than 700 public servants across all levels of government have registered to use the service, and more than 3,000 URLs that have been clicked over 450,000 times.

Having an outside contractor be heavily responsible for this role detaches the agency from its mission-critical work. I can understand services related to training and establishing processes that can then be left for agency employees to execute, but on-call assistance? Long-term or crisis-related social media and outreach should be the agency’s core focus.

What do you think?

From the solicitation:

FEMA’s OEA requires on-demand services of a professional media services company with experience and reliability in the deployment and delivery of professional broadcast transmission equipment and crews to various locations throughout the contiguous United States, Alaska, Hawaii, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and the Commonwealths of Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands. These services are used during pre- and post-declared federal disasters to support the OEA in its mission to prepare and disseminate information to the public.

The contractor(s) will be responsible for working with FEMA personnel to produce and deliver pre- and post-event information, including public communications, through national and local news media, agency social media efforts, and situational awareness support of: the Agency Administrator’s Office, senior leadership, the Disaster Operations Division (to include the National Response Coordination Center (NRCC) and all Regional Response Coordination Centers), Headquarters, Regional Offices, Joint Field Offices, Transitional Recovery Offices, Long Term Recovery Offices, and other DHS/FEMA facilities.

(HT Washington Technology)

As government searches for ways to better engage citizens, it will be interesting to watch whether an incentive-based approach works. The genius and resourcefulness of this is that GSA can turn a $2500 investment into a powerful marketing tool and create awareness about the site during the process (see also 7 ideas to get more government ideas).

GSA’s Dave McClure announces the contest: