DC Technology Office Welcomes Student Robotics Competition

Today the District of Columbia Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) announced OCTO’s inaugural partnership in the regional FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition for high-school students.

FIRST, founded in 1989, designs accessible, innovative programs to build self-confidence, knowledge, and life skills while motivating young people to pursue opportunities in science, technology, and engineering. In the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), teams of students and their mentors build robots designed to solve a defined problem. Each team has six weeks to build its robot from a standard kit of parts. Then the teams test their robots in challenge matches that measure the effectiveness of each robot, the power of collaboration, and the determination of students.

This year, for the first time, the District of Columbia is hosting the regional FRC competition, scheduled for February 26-28 at the Washington Convention Center. OCTO employees will serve as volunteer mentors to the District teams. District Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Vivek Kundra will sit on the regional judges’ panel and has enlisted local business and community partners to support the regional competition. Winners of the regional competition will compete in the international FIRST Championship on April 16-18 in Atlanta, Georgia.

This year’s competition launched on Saturday, January 3 via an international satellite broadcast on the NASA channel. DC regional competitors and mentors viewed the kickoff from McKinley Technology High School in the District.

“Forty years ago, NASA fueled a generation’s imagination with the success of Apollo 11,” noted FIRST founder Dean Kamen in the kickoff broadcast. “Just as NASA scientists landed a man on the moon and returned him safely to earth in 1969, so too will these young people go on to explore new frontiers and develop breakthrough technologies that will change the world.”

The District will field 15 teams for the 2009 FRC, one from Friendship Public Charter Schools, one from the University of the District of Columbia’s Saturday Academy and 13 from the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS).

The DCPS teams include 200 students divided among five veteran teams that have entered at least one FRC before and eight rookie teams participating for the first time. The five veteran teams are Ballou Senior High School, Bell Multicultural High School, Roosevelt Senior High School, McKinley Technology High School and Francis L. Cardozo Senior High School. The eight rookie teams are School Without Walls High School, Calvin Coolidge Senior High School, Phelps Senior High School, Eastern Senior High School, Wilson Senior High School, Dunbar Pre-Engineering High School, Luke C. Moore Academy High School and Anacostia Senior High School.

District Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kundra welcomed the District teams to the January 3 kickoff broadcast at McKinley Tech. To cheers from the crowd, he congratulated McKinley Tech for helping lead a far-reaching “technology transformation” in the District’s public schools. Kundra recalled how a similar high school science competition sparked his lifelong fascination with science and math and set him on the path to an exciting technology career. “This competition will help you gain the skills you need to prosper in the global economy. It can really be a life-changing experience, leading to an exciting career in technology,” he said. “The science competition I entered in high school opened up the wonderful world of science, math and technology for me, as I know this competition will for you.”

To learn more about FIRST, visit http://www.usfirst.org/.

District of Columbia Opens New Window on Procurements

Today the District of Columbia Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) announced the launch of two new sites that open major government procurement transactions to public view for the first time in District history. Now anyone can watch procurements unfold, step by step from start to finish.

The new procurement transparency portals represent another step in OCTO’s Digital Public Square initiative. The Digital Public Square brings citizens together and helps them hold government accountable through data catalogs, data feeds, mapping applications, transparency websites, social media tools and more. Anyone can discover and participate in the Digital Public Square by visiting dps.dc.gov.

One of the new procurement transparency sites is contracts.dc.gov. There visitors can see and participate in major current procurements conducted by OCTO and other District agencies. For example:

• The Smart Access and Attendance Solution (SAAS) site provides information on OCTO’s procurement of a turnkey state-of-the-art system that will become the main access, security, and attendance solution for the public schools and eventually, other DC government agencies;
• The Evidence Warehouse site tells visitors about the District’s procurement for a state-of-the-art Evidence Control and Storage Facility for the police department;
• The Information Technology Staff Augmentation (ITSA) site is a comprehensive source of information about OCTO’s innovative master contract for information technology staff augmentation.

Each of the sites reveals every major step in the procurement from beginning to end, including the Request for Proposal (RFP) and other documents, questions and answers, and videos of pre-bidding conferences, public announcements, and other live events.

In addition, OCTO has created a new data site that offers complete information on OCTO’s procurements of contract staff. The new site, http://data.octo.dc.gov, reveals details of every IT staff engagement, including position, hourly rate, start date, and subcontracting vendor. A map on the site shows virtual “pins” for every award at the business address of each subcontracting vendor. Site visitors can see at a glance which vendors have been most successful in competing for OCTO contract staff business.

“We are driving transparency by practicing government in the public square,” said District Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kundra. “With our new procurement sites, we’re opening a window on District procurement and inviting the public to examine and comment on the ways we spend taxpayer dollars.”

Enable Participatory Democracy by Providing 250+ Data Feeds to the Public

Building the Digital Public Square

In ancient Athens—the model for the democracy envisioned by the framers of our Constitution--citizens met, face to face, in the agora—the public square--to conduct business, debate civic issues, and drive the decisions of government. Gone are the days of daily meetings at the agora. Today, citizens know government as red tape, long lines, and cold, distant bureaucracies. The reins of government have slipped from “we the people” to inaccessible government officials.

The District of Columbia, however, is at the forefront of a new era of governance, one in which technological advances now allow people from around the world unfettered access to their government. Through these advances, constituents can hold their government accountable from the privacy of their own homes. The District of Columbia is bringing people closer to government through collaborative technologies like wikis, data feeds, videos and dashboards. We’re throwing open DC’s warehouse of public data so that everyone—constituents, policymakers, and businesses—can meet in a new digital public square.

The District maintains vast stores of data on every aspect of government operations, from government contracts to crime statistics to economic development. We have organized this data into convenient catalogs and live data feeds and made them available to the general public at http://data.octo.dc.gov/. Visitors to the site can find information on crime incidents by date, time of day, ward, block, or method; details on construction projects by location, type of construction, budget, completion date or status; data on registered vacant properties by ward, address, owner or tax assessment; or information on businesses, such as the locations of District establishments that hold liquor licenses. Mapping technology also allows users to view data geographically with a single click. Using an ordinary Web browser, anyone in the world can access this information.

When we first opened the doors to government data, people were quick to respond. Individuals and organizations are not only viewing our government data, but are actually improving upon our work by analyzing and repurposing the information in useful ways. One innovative DC resident took it upon herself to gather publicly-available government data on service requests, crimes, and building and public space permits to create a Web-based informational clearinghouse site that informs southeastern DC residents about local real estate development and the quality of government services. The Knight Foundation, a non-governmental organization, transformed District data into an online community news forum at EveryBlock.com. Here, visitors can plug in their zip code and find and exchange information about everything of interest in their neighborhoods—local businesses and reviews, real estate listings, crimes, road construction, city service requests, community meetings, and more. A private entrepreneur has assembled law enforcement data from the District and across the country into an online database, called “CrimeReports.” Visitors can get crime data and maps by address, zip, code, and type of crime and sign up for personalized crime alerts.

These are truly grassroots ventures. The democratization of government data has revealed an enormous appetite for civic participation. We are ushering in a new age of participatory democracy, one in which citizens are in the driver’s seat when they interact with government. Accessibility has never been greater, and this is just the beginning. In the last year, we published over 200 data feeds. During the coming year, we expect to double that.

Today, building the digital public square is not just appealing, it is imperative for every government, whether municipal, state, or national. We live in the information age. Nearly 1.5 billion people have access to the Internet—and they are using it in every way. There is a worldwide digital market for goods and services. For example, Amazon.com, founded just over a decade ago, now handles about 56 million transactions a year, and Ebay, founded at about the same time, now has over 275 million registered users. There are a growing number of global social and artistic networks. Facebook alone, founded just four years ago, now has over 60 million active users, and YouTube, a year younger, hosted 3 billion video views in a single month this year. We responded to these new communications trends by expanding DC Government’s presence onto Facebook and posting job listings and bid solicitations on YouTube under the “DC Government” channel. Leveraging consumer technology in this way allows us to reach wider audiences at no cost to taxpayers.

Until now, government has largely been absent in the trend towards worldwide exchange of information and services. Starting here in the District, we hope to demonstrate that government, too, can and must step fully into the digital arena. That is why the digital public square is now at the heart of our efforts to make government services more effective, accessible, and transparent. By ensuring that every citizen has a front row seat in the digital public square, we’ll continue to return government into the hands of “we, the people.”

Please visit the DC digital public square at http://dps.dc.gov/.

Enable Participatory Democracy by Launching Apps for Democracy Contest

Mayor Fenty Announces Winners of Applications for Democracy Contest

Today District of Columbia Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Vivek Kundra announced the winners of the District’s “Applications for Democracy” technology contest. The contest launched on October 14, 2008, invited software developers to compete for the best new applications to make DC government data more accessible and useful for the public.

“My administration is committed to making government more accessible and more transparent, and through this contest we’ve gotten help from the most talented developers,” said Mayor Fenty. “I’m delighted with the responses. With these innovative applications, we can put government literally in the hands of the people.”

The competition, open to the general public, asked developers to create mashup applications (a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool) for the District's data using popular consumer technologies like the iPhone, Facebook, Google Maps and others. Contest entries were required to use open source programming. Entries were judged by an appointed jury based on criteria including usefulness to citizens, usefulness to government and originality.

The District collects and maintains vast stores of data on every aspect of government operations, from government contracts to crime statistics to economic development and much more. The District has already organized and published this data in a real-time data catalog with more than 200 data feeds at http://data.octo.dc.gov/. Applications for Democracy solicited the best and most cost-effective ways to package and present this data for easy viewing, analysis, and repurposing by the public.

“While the immediate goal of the Applications for Democracy contest is to develop innovative software to present District data, its long-term goals are broader,” said District CTO Vivek Kundra. “By making government data easy for everyone to access and use, the District hopes to foster citizen participation in government, drive private-sector technology innovation and growth, and build a new model for government-private sector collaboration that can help all governments address the technology challenges of today and tomorrow.”

The contest attracted more than 25 innovative applications, all licensed as open source and freely available to government and the public. Gold and Silver contest winners include:

Gold Prize Winners:

• Application: DC Historic Tours—a slick Google Maps mashup that combines custom walking tour creation with Flickr photo feeds and Wikipedia entries. Users can click through to create a custom map, save it and reference it later when they’re ready to tour the city.

o Agency—Boalt Interactive

• Application: iLive.at—presents users with information tailored to that exact location, cleanly organized into categories. The “Errands” category indicates how far the nearest shopping center, post office and convenience store are, among other things. “Crime” tabulates recently reported offenses in the area, and “The People” displays colorful pie charts giving demographic information. Users can also click on a category and the relevant items will be plotted on a map of their neighborhood.

o Independent Developers: Travis Hurant, Tim Koelkebeck and Brian Sobel.

Silver Prize Winners (6):

• Application: Park It—an application that allows you to check a specific area in The District for parking information. Allows users to check parking information before leaving the house and to see which streets are available for parking. Users can also check which meters cost money and which are free. Park It DC will even help users find out if they’re parking in a residential parking permit zone!

o Independent Developer: Shaun Farrell

• Application: Where’s My Money, DC?—a forum based Facebook application that encourages users to discuss procurements made by the DC government.

o Independent Developer: Keith Bradner

• Application: DC Crime Finder—Determines the user’s location and will return specific instances of various crimes based on a one-, two- or three-mile radius.

o Independent Developer: Mark Headd

• Application: Stumble Safely—an online application that helps users find the best bars and a safe path to stumble home on.

o Agency: Development Seed

• Application: Point About—a realtime, location-aware DC alerting tool for the iPhone, which includes crime reports, building permits and more.

o Agency: Point About

• Application: We the People—a peer-led community reference website that allows users to edit based on Washington, DC public data. We the People empowers everyone to make DC a more responsive community where all voices are heard and everyone can make a difference. Like Wikipedia, users can link any expression to its definition or another page.

o Agency: Chrys Tarvin

Bronze winners and honorable mentions are listed at appsfordemocracy.org. Votes are also being accepted for the People’s Choice Award.

A full list of submissions can be viewed at appsfordemocracy.org.

Maryland Tech Council Honors CTO Vivek Kundra for Outstanding Technology Leadership

Today District of Columbia Mayor Adrian M. Fenty announced that District Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Vivek Kundra has been honored as the IT Executive of the Year by the Tech Council of Maryland (TCM).

TCM represents the advanced technology and biotechnology communities of Maryland, the nation’s second-largest technology hub. Its Government Sector IT Executive of the Year award honors government leaders whose achievements and vision have raised the bar on quality and innovation throughout the IT industry. Mr. Kundra competed for this year’s award in a field of outstanding technology leaders, such as CIO’s from the US Department of the Army, the National Institutes of Health and the Government Services Agency.

Mr. Kundra won the TCM award for his pioneering work in digital democracy—advancing government accessibility and transparency through technology. Mr. Kundra has thrown open the government’s vast data storehouse to the public at http://data.octo.dc.gov/with over 200 data feeds in real time. Now citizens can track contract awards, crime incidents, vacant properties, construction projects—and much more. Last month, Mr. Kundra launched a contest for the best applications that repurpose the data to make it even more useful to government and the general public, which resulted in 47 applications created by citizens, NGO’s and the private sector.

In honoring Mr. Kundra, TCM observed: “Under Mr. Kundra’s leadership, thousands of District residents now have access to government information and services…Mr. Kundra has made the District the model for interactive citizen engagement through live data feeds and datasets.”

“My administration has worked hard to attract top talent to government, and we’re committed to making government services more accessible and more transparent,” said Mayor Fenty. “Through his dedicated effort and innovative approach, Vivek Kundra has advanced both of these goals a great deal in a short time. He’s a tremendous asset to my administration and the nation’s capital.”

“I’m humbled to receive this award and to be chosen from such an outstanding field of candidates,” said Mr. Kundra. “The award recognizes the technology revolution we launched in the nation’s capital that led to a transparent, accountable and participatory government.”

Create Secure Computing Environment by Shifting to an Offensive IT Security Posture

Shift Technology Investments to the Field by Providing Mobile Technology to Police Officers

District of Columbia Arms Public Safety Officers With New Technology

Today District of Columbia Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, District Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Vivek Kundra, Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) Chief Cathy L. Lanier, Fire Department Chief Dennis Rubin, and Office of Unified Communications (OUC) Director Janice Quintana announced the deployment of 1,006 mobile data computers to fire, emergency medical, and police officers in the field.

“Our public safety officers work hard to keep District residents safe,” said Mayor Fenty. “We’re always pursuing new methods to make their work more efficient and keep them in the field helping people, not in the office shuffling paper."

MPD
The deployment represents the latest step in MPD’s ongoing campaign to incorporate technology into its operation and to improve public safety. Law enforcement personnel are now equipped for the first time with mobile technology that will allow them to automatically generate electronic reports. This electronic reporting function will greatly improve the timeliness and accuracy of data.

Recently, MPD deployed 812 units mounted in police cruisers and assigned to specialized units. With the new laptops, police officers can perform real-time inquiries on wanted persons, drivers, stolen property, weapons and vehicles.

In the future, MPD and the District will issue hand-held personal digital assistants (PDAs) providing the same functions as the mobile laptops to officers on foot patrol, Segways, bicycles and motorcycles.

“This technology makes us more efficient. Our officers are able to spend more time patrolling our neighborhoods and communities,” said Chief Lanier.

OUC
OUC, which is responsible for 911 and 311 operations, is also responsible for the District’s radio division. The radio division provides system maintenance and support for the 9,000 radios across 18 agencies with primary users being MPD and the Fire Department. OUC will also provide system maintenance and support for the mobile data computers initiative. “Our goal is to ensure that the first responders for Fire, EMS and MPD have the latest and most reliable communication technology so they can respond quickly and safely to those in an emergency,” said OUC Director, Janice Quintana.

“Our new technology investments give us a common operating view of public safety in the District,” said CTO Kundra. “By arming our front line officers with technology, we’re ensuring that they have the information they need to protect residents anytime, anywhere.”

Fire Department
The District has deployed the remaining 194 mobile data computers to the Fire Department’s trucks and ambulances. With their new vehicle-mounted laptops, firefighters and ambulance will receive not only dispatch orders, but also maps from the District’s GIS system to direct them to the exact locations identified in 911 calls. In addition, the computers in command vehicles utilize GIS technology to map the location of fire hydrants, along with the most current data from the Water and Sewer Authority (WASA) about which hydrants are working PDAs, complete with maps, help firefighters and WASA crews manage the hydrant inspections.

In the future, the Fire Department computers will be equipped with additional software, including patient care data and floor maps of the locations of fire emergencies.

“When fire strikes or someone has a heart attack, there’s not a minute to spare,” said Fire Chief Rubin. “This technology brings even more resources to bear for our first responders, who help people every day in our city.”

District of Columbia Launches Open Innovation Challenge

Today the District of Columbia Chief Technology Office of the Officer (OCTO) announced “Apps for Democracy,” an initiative to develop new software applications to make the DC government’s data more accessible and useful for the general public and the government. Register for the contest at http://apps08.eventbrite.com/.

The District collects and maintains vast stores of data on every aspect of government operations, from government contracts to crime statistics to economic development and much more. The District has already organized and published this data in a real-time data catalog at http://data.octo.dc.gov/. The new initiative will solicit the best and most cost-effective ways to package and present this data for easy viewing, analysis, and repurposing by the public.

Technology developers are invited to compete in creating applications for popular consumer technologies like iPhones, Facebook, Map Mashups and others. Developers must use open source programming.

The contest is open to the general public and will run for a month from October 14 through November 14, 2008. The District will host a kick-off on October 16 and will conduct five open “Innovation Labs” each weekend to help contestants find collaborators. The contest will conclude on November 13 with an awards ceremony to unveil the winning applications. Additional contest details and guidelines for entries can be found at http://www.appsfordemocracy.org/.

The contest will serve as a catalyst to visualize the District’s data so it will be useful to the citizens of DC, improving their quality of life; foster innovation in the DC technology community resulting in startup formation and growth; solve the technology challenges of OCTO through more cost effective open collaboration; and work towards a new model for government/private sector cross collaboration that can be utilized repeatedly to solve our challenges and serve as an example for other governments.

“The Apps for Democracy contest is part of our drive toward digital democracy in the nation’s capital,” said District CTO Vivek Kundra. “Especially in these difficult economic times, it’s crucial to the government’s mission to find more efficient and impactful methods for delivering an even higher level of service for a fraction of the cost. We are ushering in a new age of participatory democracy, one in which technology is developed by the people for the people.”

District of Columbia Opens Virtual Permit Center in Ward 5

Today District of Columbia Mayor Adrian Fenty, Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (DCRA) Director Linda Argo, and District Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Vivek Kundra announced the opening of the District’s first neighborhood online service center in Ward 5.

The new Virtual Permit Center offers a popular District online service, DCRA’s “Postcard Permit” for home improvements. The Center is located at a site that is a Mecca for home improvement professionals and do-it-yourselfers—the District’s The Home Depot store at 901 Rhode Island Ave NE. The Home Depot is highly Metro-accessible, right next to the Rhode Island Ave Metro station on the Red Line.

For the first time, District residents and licensed contractors planning home improvement projects can get both the materials they need, and the required permits, all in one trip. Permit applicants can also take advantage of Home Depot’s extended, seven-day-a-week service hours: 6 am-10 pm Monday-Saturday and 8 am-7 pm Sunday.

“We are always looking for ways to make District services more accessible and convenient for our residents,” said Mayor Fenty. Now residents can combine their permit application with their visit to Home Depot and skip the trip to DCRA.”

The Virtual Permit Center is easy to find in the front of The Home Depot store. There are two self-service kiosks each equipped with computers linked to the District’s Postcard Permit system. The online process for Postcard Permits at The Home Depot Virtual Permitting Center is exactly the same as from any other computer: The permit applicant submits the information required for the particular type of permit requested (e.g., plumbing, electrical, structural), pays the associated fee with a credit card, and prints out a paper permit for his or her records. The applicant can call the DCRA Permits Customer Service Center at (202) 442-4589 at any time for assistance in completing the process.

The new Virtual Permit Center is the latest in a series of enhancements to streamline and modernize DCRA’s building permitting process. Last year, DCRA unveiled a completely overhauled and innovative new permit center at 941 North Capitol Street, NE, Room 2300, offering customers a more efficient and pleasant environment, as well as accessibility for permit applicants with disabilities.

“We know how busy people are—and how much they’re paying for gas these days,” said DCRA Director Argo. “With the Virtual Permit Center, we aim to minimize time, expense, and hassle for every District resident who’s doing a home improvement project.”

The District’s central technology agency, the Office of the Technology Officer (OCTO), collaborated with DCRA and Home Depot to establish the new Virtual Permit Center.

“We thank our partners at The Home Depot for collaborating with us to bring District government services to our customers where it’s most convenient for them,” said CTO Kundra. “The Virtual Permit Center is one of many steps we’re taking to enable our customers to deal with government on their own time and their own terms.”

Help Government Work Better, Faster by Switching to Cloud Services

Build Applications Faster, Cheaper by Leveraging Cloud Computing

Transforming Government with “Cloud Computing”

No one would be surprised to hear that the District of Columbia government gets our electricity from wall outlets and our drinking water from the tap. What might open some eyes is our use of “cloud computing,” an exciting new approach to provide email and manage our procurement much like we use these other utilities.

"Cloud computing" provides an innovative way for technology consumers—including governments—to obtain technology resources and services simply and cost-effectively. Cloud computing is to technology what the electrical grid is to the delivery of electricity or the public water-supply system is to the delivery of water. Once, every household, or every little town, had its own generator; every farm or village once had its own well. Households or villages had to maintain their generators and wells and protect them from weather, theft, and other harm. Today, consumers obtain electricity by simply plugging an appliance into a wall outlet and get clean water by simply turning on the tap—because large public utilities like the power company or the water and sewer company can meet these needs. In the same way, we can meet technology needs by reaching into the "cloud". In the cloud are companies like Google that maintain extensive technology resources, leveraging economies of scale to offer these resources to customers at a reasonable price.

With cloud computing, government technologists can obtain services from the cloud instead of maintaining their own hardware, software, and facilities and staff to house and operate them. Take email, for example. The District's email system serves 38,000 people. Previously, providing this basic technology service required us to purchase and maintain hundreds of servers, software to run on them, data centers to house the servers, security staff to protect the data centers, electricity to power them, and staff to operate and manage all this hardware, software, and real estate. In addition to incurring tremendous cost, we always had to worry about strains on the capacity of our email system, and we were effectively in many other businesses besides technology—like power, real estate, and security. With cloud computing, we can now obtain virtually unlimited email capacity at a much lower cost. Our technologists can get out of the real estate, power, and security businesses and instead focus on deploying technology solutions to meet our government service needs—like improving community policing, human services, education, and "back office" government operations.

This new strategy has already helped the District inaugurate a new era of transparency in one of the most time-consuming aspects of government operations—procurement. Using technology tools obtained via cloud computing, we have created government wiki sites to publish Requests for Proposals, solicit feedback, and share updates with vendors and the public for major procurements such as a new Evidence Warehouse for the police department and staff augmentation for our technology agency. We have harnessed YouTube to broadcast bidder conferences and other information to vendors and the public. Our cloud computing tools have also helped us launch procurements faster by enabling government employees to collaborate in creating procurement documents online.

The result is not just faster procurements, but more effective and more equitable ones. All interested parties get the same information at the same time, and a much broader range of potential vendors can participate than ever before. With more vendors participating, we extend procurement opportunities to more businesses, and government saves money through broader competition.

In the background, cloud computing is transforming everyday work life for District employees by arming them with more flexible, convenient tools for doing their jobs. Our cloud computing tools now allow employees to connect to District systems from anywhere they have an Internet connection, and to use the consumer technology they know and like—cell phones, iPods, PDAs, YouTube, Facebook, and more.

Ultimately, cloud computing will help us create the mobile, "anytime, anywhere" workforce. Government employees like police officers, human services caseworkers, building inspectors, and teachers can spend more time—as they should—keeping people safe, caring for citizens in need, teaching our children, and keeping buildings up to code--and still have all the benefits of government technology resources. As a result, customers from tenants to students will have much more immediate access to District employees and can make their needs known and voices heard more powerfully and effectively than in the past. Workers who need to telecommute or adopt flexible schedules will be able to do so even more easily without losing access to technology tools or compromising their effectiveness. Our ability to offer more innovative, flexible, customer-friendly technology will also help us meet the challenge of recruiting new employees.

Last but certainly not least, cloud computing allows us to make smarter use of taxpayer dollars. Overall, the fees we'll pay for cloud computing services will be less than our costs of buying, maintaining, housing, and operating hardware and software. In addition, our specific uses of cloud computing offer many opportunities for savings. To cite one simple example, with our new procurement wiki sites, we can upload videos of bidder conferences to YouTube quickly at no cost—whereas in the past, producing and posting a single video cost the government thousands of dollars. Multiply this savings by thousands of procurements each year, and the savings mount up fast.

Cloud computing offers enormous opportunities to shift our government resources from maintaining basic technology support to creating innovative technology solutions that improve government services. Cloud computing sits at the heart of our efforts to make government services more effective, accessible, and transparent. By deploying this powerful new tool, we'll continue to transform the District government for the benefit of customers and employees alike.

Create a Paperless Government by Digitizing 25 Million Documents

Mayor Fenty Announces Three National Awards for the Office of the Chief Technology Officer

NASCIO honors bring OCTO award count to 10 in 2008
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty announced today the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) has honored the Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) with three national information technology (IT) awards. The new honors bring the District’s total IT awards to 10 in 2008.

NASCIO named OCTO the winner of its Recognition Award in the IT Project and Portfolio Management Category, an award for state initiatives that develop governance processes, policies and systems for the efficient management of IT investments from concept, funding, implementation and operation to retirement.

The award-winning project was the “stock market model” developed by Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Vivek Kundra for managing the District’s IT investments. Kundra’s innovative idea was to manage IT projects as a portfolio of stocks, with each project as a company, its team as the management, its schedule and financial status captured in market reports and customer satisfaction as the market reaction. By applying these stock-market practices to government technology, Kundra was able to identify problem projects early and either switch managers or kill the projects, freeing resources for more promising initiatives. Earlier this year Kundra was honored for his ground-breaking stock market model by both the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, which recognized Kundra among outstanding IT innovators, and by InfoWorld Magazine, which named Kundra among the nation’s top 25 CTOs.

NASCIO also awarded OCTO its Recognition Award in the Government to Business Category. This award recognizes innovative applications that reduce business costs for regulatory compliance, help companies establish and grow a business, or improve day-to-day government-to-business interactions.

OCTO’s winning project was its Certified Business Enterprise (CBE) online Resource Center. District CBEs are businesses certified by the District’s Department of Small and Local Business Development (DSLBD) to participate in the District's contracting program. The program directs spending to District-based businesses to create local jobs, strengthen the local economy, and increase the District’s tax base. To maximize participation and benefits from the program, DSLBD needed a user-friendly, comprehensive online certification and contract compliance application. OCTO developed the application in consultation with DSLBD, the District’s Office of Contracts and Procurement (OCP) and the Office of the City Administrator (OCA). The result was a application that:

• Allows qualified business owners to submit online applications for CBE certification;


• Enables DSLBD to process the applications via the District’s Intranet;


• Provides a transparent and efficient process to verify agency compliance with CBE participation requirements;

• Tracks prime contractor payments to subcontractors to verify compliance with CBE participation plans; and


• Provides outreach tools to inform the CBE community about upcoming business opportunities, training classes and DSLBD/District business events.

The site has enhanced agency and prime contractor compliance with District CBE requirements, it has dramatically increased the accuracy of DSLBD data and it has improved the efficiency of certification processing and compliance tracking.

The third NASCIO award OCTO won was the Recognition Award in the Government to Citizens category for governmental applications that provide innovative and/or more efficient services to citizens. OCTO won the award with its CapStat “Building A City That Works” website. The site supports CapStat, a cross-agency accountability program launched by District Mayor Fenty. The Mayor and City Administrator hold regular meetings with agency directors to review agency performance data, assign action items, and hold the managers accountable.

The CapStat website is central to the program. CapStat meetings are recorded by video and broadcast on the site. The site offers performance data from CapStat sessions as well as agency performance reports. It is updated after each session to provide links to full-length session videos, resulting action items, and a revised schedule of upcoming topics. The site offers data catalogs and live feeds on a wide variety of District performance measures, such as violent crimes, service requests, permits, and many more. An interactive map illustrates the reports and shows, for example, where each crime occurred or which buildings received permits. By providing the detailed data District leaders need to assess agency performance and hold managers accountable, and by creating a vehicle for the District to share all of this data with the public, the CapStat website has played a vital role in delivering on Mayor Fenty’s commitment to transparency and accountability in District government.

“For my administration, improving services for citizens and ensuring accountability and transparency in government are paramount goals,” said Mayor Fenty. “These important awards from NASCIO, along with many other recognitions OCTO has received in the past two years, testify to the key role technology plays in meeting our objectives for the District.”

“I’m honored by these awards that reflect the evaluation of our peers around the country,” said District CTO Kundra. “We have assembled some of the smartest and hardest working people at OCTO so the District can lead the nation in innovation and service delivery.”

Bring Your Resume! 50 Tech Openings at Mayor Fenty’s Job Fair

The District’s Chief Technology Officer, Vivek Kundra, will recruit and hire qualified candidates for District technology jobs at Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s 2008 Citywide Job Fair on September 23.

The Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) leads technology for the District of Columbia Government. Whether it’s creating technology solutions for our public schools, fitting police cruisers with 21st century tools, or using GIS to help rebuild city neighborhoods, OCTO is helping government serve citizens smarter, faster, and better, through technology.

“At OCTO, we have career opportunities in cutting-edge technology,” said Kundra. “We’re leveraging the power of technology to improve service delivery, drive innovation, and bridge the digital divide to build a world-class city.”

Kundra and his leadership team will be on hand at the Washington Convention Center from 10 am to 4 pm to interview candidates and make provisional offers for software developers, network engineers, IT security specialists, messaging and storage engineers, and project managers to work on core and emerging technologies.

“We want to expand our team of talented, innovative thinkers,” added Kundra. ”We’ll be hiring on the spot—so candidates should bring their resumes and be prepared to interview with me and my staff.”

More than 150 exhibitors are expected to participate in the Mayor’s Citywide Job Fair, including both District government agencies and private companies. Applicants can visit the Citywide Job Fair Information Center to learn more about the exhibitors.

• Find Current Job Opportunities With OCTO

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