The Independent View: Using Technology to Fix Washington

AS a political activist and 50 years in the information technology arena, I found this article in Fortune by Tory Newmyer interesting to my readers.

Two years ago, Todd Park, the country's top technology officer pitched President Obama a bold idea, how to inject some Silicon Valley zing into federal bureaucracy.

This led to a monthly breakfast attended by about 50 of the administration's tech-savviest operatives, an unofficial group that called itself the Innovation Cohort.

The resulting proposal included assembling a band of tech-industry standouts to tackle problems in the executive branch. Recruits would act with surgical precision, with one or two deployed per project and a mandate to achieve it within six months. With Obama's sign-off, the Presidential Innovation Fellows, or PIF's, were born.

That spring, Park along with a deputy, John Paul Farmer, and the country's information officer, Steven VanRoekel, traveled to the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York City to enlist talent. After hearing about projects like: giving patients online access to their health records, enabling aid workers in Afghanistan to deliver payments by mobile phone, and others, nearly 700 applied and they chose 18. Some selected included: a Yale Law School lecturer, the director of innovation at Aetna, and a entrepreneur who just sold a payment-processing company to Visa.

Before the PIF's got started, they went through a half-week training to learn the "lean startup", including experiment-driven product development, an IDEO developed model for testing new ideas, and the problem with laws that are not always agile.

While working on a new tech procurement reform, the failed HealthCare.gov showed everything wrong with the old way of doing things. Arcane contracting weeded out startups in favor of entrenched players, who then followed established practices bypassing the new testing the PIF's developed to prevent a meltdown. This solidified the need for a standing SWAT team approach.

Some of the other PIF's frustrations included:

. MyUSA - which aimed to make it easier for citizens to interact online with the federal government. After finishing the prototype, it was shelved due to the Paperwork Reduction Act, the law intended to keep the government from overburdening people and businesses with information requests, is now hamstringing technologist like the PIF's who would require their pilots to solicit public feedback of the prototypes before they could go live.

. Tech Procurement Reform - Bureaucratic hurdles thwarted the broad adoption of an online-bidding process that would have saved the government an estimated $24 billion a year.

So the government's inability to modernize is "the tech version of climate change".

To address these barriers, in April 2014 the administration launched a permanent coups of technologists called 18F. The idea is to expand the ranks of those toiling to wrench the federal government into the 21th century and recognize that many of the projects will take more than six months to execute.

In August 2014 the White House announced a new arm, dubbed the U.S. Digital Service, led by a Google engineer to clear the path through cobwebs of outdated policies so that the projects could advance.

The test begins this month when a third round of PIF's begin. Among the new projects are:

. Make the federal trove of data on weather and climate easier for entrepreneurs to use.

. Create a platform to crowdsource the digitization of 12 billion pages of government records stored in the national archives.

. Coordinate a challenge to identify asteroids that threaten earth.

Obama's first presidential campaign envisioned an "iPod government" that was simple, efficient, and user friendly as the breakthrough Apple devise.

The HealthCare.gov debacle seemingly dashed that dream.

The new PIF's and their sponsors are racing to restore it.