White House Seeks Tech Innovation Fellows by Elena Malykhina.
The White House death march farce I covered in A Competent CTO Can Say No continues.
Next group of six to twelve month projects are:
- — Disaster Response and Recovery: The project will “pre-position” tech tools for disaster readiness in order to diminish economic damage and save lives.
- — Cyber-Physical Systems: A new generation of cyber-physical “smart systems” will be developed to help the economy and job creation. These systems will combine distributed sensing, control and data analytics.
- — 21st Century Financial Systems: The 21st Century Financial Systems initiative will transition agency-specific federal financial accounting systems to a more modular, scalable and cost-effective model.
- — Innovation Toolkit: A suite of tools will be created for federal workers, allowing them to become more responsive and efficient in their jobs.
- — Development Innovation Ventures: The Development Innovation Ventures project will address tough global problems by allowing the U.S. government to identify, test and scale new technologies.
Sound like six to twelve month projects? Yes?
I know, I know, I should be lining up to participate in this fraud on the public and be paid for doing it. Looks nice on the resume.
Successful solutions will not be developed on fixed timelines before problems are defined or understood.
Some will say, “So what? So long as you are paid for time, travel, etc., why would you care if the solution is successful?”
That must be why there are no links in the Round 2 announcement to “successes” of the first round of innovation.
Take the first one on the list from round one:
Open Data Initiatives have unleashed data from the vaults of the government as fuel for entrepreneurs and innovators to create new apps, products, and services that benefit the American people in myriad ways and contribute to job growth.
Can you name one? Just one.
Sequestration data (except for my releases) continues to be dead PDF files. And the data in those files is too incomplete for useful analysis.
Is that “…unleash[ing] data from the vaults of the government…?”
Or did the sequestration debate escaped their attention?
The number of people willing to defraud the public even in these hard economic times was encouragingly low.
Only 700 people applied for round one. Out of hundreds of thousands of highly qualified IT people who could have applied.
Is defrauding the public becoming unfashionable?
Perhaps there is hope.
Lest there be some misunderstanding, government at all levels is filled with public servants.
But you have to get away from elected/appointed positions to find them.
They mostly don’t appear on Sunday talk shows but tirelessly do the public’s business out of the limelight.
Public servants I would gladly help, public parasites, not so much.