100 people who made a difference in government IT – Plus 7 gov stories

On GovLoop Insights’ DorobekINSIDER:

• If you ask 20 people to define open government, you will get 20 different responses. The lack of uniformed definitions makes implementing open government services very difficult. It would be like asking a pastry chef to bake a cherry pie and then providing 20 different recipes. The chef would have no idea which pie you really wanted to eat. So, what can government do to clear up the ambiguity? We define terms with UNC’s Logan Harper.

You can find all of our programs online: DorobekINSIDER.com and GovLoop Insights at http://insights.govloop.com.

But up front: 100 people who made a difference in government IT

Federal Computer Week has just published its annual Federal 100 award — and there are some great names on the list including GSA Administrator Dan Tangerlini, GSA’s Lena Trudeau (who, concidently, will be on our February DorobekINSIDER LIVE talking about innovation), Homeland Security’s Margie Graves, among others.

Having been involved with this program for years when I was at FCW, I know that the list is generally well vetted — not perfect, but well vetted. And the criteria is for people who have made a difference. Sometimes people who made a difference.

From FCW editor Troy K. Schneider:

Full disclosure: I was a little scared about this year’s Federal 100 awards.

It wasn’t that I didn’t think good work was being done in federal IT — FCW finds evidence of that every day. But most of 2013 was downright dysfunctional, and Federal 100 awards demand more than just doing one’s job in tough times.

When the year begins with a government shutdown barely averted, agencies send employees on unpaid vacations, and HealthCare.gov becomes a poster child for technology projects done wrong…well, I feared that identifying truly exceptional work would prove depressingly difficult.

As the nominations rolled in, however, it became obvious that I had underestimated the IT community.

Read the full list here.

The SEVEN stories that impact your life

1. Roll Call: Boehner: ‘No Sense Picking a Fight’ on Debt Limit. “Just days away from the administration’s deadline to extend the nation’s borrowing authority, Speaker John A. Boehner told House Republicans he sees no reason to pick a fight they cannot win on the issue.”

2. Federal Times: Obama seeks to strengthen safeguards for federal job applicants. “Federal agencies should not discriminate against job applicants who are out of work or who run into money troubles through no fault of their own, President Obama said in a newly issued memorandum.”

3. Federal News Radio: IRS to pay employee bonuses at lower percentage rate. “The Internal Revenue Service reached an agreement Monday with the National Treasury Employees Union to pay frontline union employees who earned performance awards last year. The awards would be paid from a pool of 1 percent of bargaining unit salaries.”

4. NextGov: Senators Launch Probe Into Massive Data Breaches “Several senators repeated calls for legislation to ward off massive data thefts during a hearing Monday to review the vulnerability of the nation’s digital-payment systems, the first in a trio of sessions this week examining the enormous breaches sustained recently at retailers around the country.”

5. Washington Post: Who is Obama’s surgeon general nominee? “President Obama’s pick for surgeon general, Affordable Care Act advocate and physician Vivek Murthy, is scheduled to testify Tuesday before a Senate panel that will decide whether to send his nomination to the full Senate for a vote.”

6. Defense News: Air Force developing air and missile defense planning system. “Lockheed Martin has won an $8 million Air Force contract to develop a software planner to integrate air and missile defenses.”

7. Federal Times: Report: Postal Service should offer financial services. “The Postal Service should offer financial services, such as prepaid cards and check-cashing services to broaden its reach to millions of under-served Americans, according to a new report.”

Before we finish up… a few items from the DorobekINSIDER water-cooler fodder… yes, we’re trying to help you make your water-cooler time better too…

Facebook turns 10

• BusinessWeek: Facebook Turns 10: The Mark Zuckerberg Interview: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg shares his 10-year plan: ”He doesn’t see Facebook building infrastructure computing services, as Amazon.com has with its cloud initiative, or operating systems and wearable computers, as Google or Apple have. His mission is to expand access to the Internet for the billions of people who have yet to visit the Web.” The upside for Facebook is a bigger audience in developing countries.

• Slate: Facebook Was Born 10 Years Ago Today. Here’s What It Looked Like

• Time magazine: Facebook Turns 10: What If It Had Never Been Invented?: There’s no way to know for sure what would have happened, of course. But trying to imagine life without Facebook is still a useful way to reflect upon all the ways it’s changed the world in its first decade, from the most obvious ones to those which are easier to overlook. So I’m going to do it.

• Australia’s ABC News: Facebook turns 10: the social network in numbers

• Slate: That Time I Told My Roommate It’d Be Dumb to Go Work for “The Facebook”