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The Census Bureau should provide an online response option for the decennial census. If the 2010 Census had used an online option it could have saved at least $35 million with a 20 percent response rate. Collecting survey results online is also more accurate. Other countries already do this.
For more information on this idea, see the following report:
http://www.itif.org/files/eCensusUnplugged.pdf
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The current FPDS-NG/USASpending sites are difficult to utilize and utilize different data entry field definitions resulting in conflicting information from one system to the other. As well, all of the information we are now being asked to provide is not available in either system. I would suggest the Department develop a flexible database system that will feed both FPDS-NG and USASpending that gathers all of the different information that is required to be reported for acquisitions. the system needs to be flexible enough to be expanded frequently and quickly to add to the ever-growing list of types of information acquisition personnel are required to gather and report
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Geographic Information Systems have been valuable assets in performing important research for decennial census. Specifically, land parcel databases and site address databases have been invaluable in evaluating the completeness of our master address file. Unfortunately, many counties do not have the funding to develop these systems or to focus their development of these systems on components that would be halpful to the decennial census. It would have been extremely useful if the Census Bureau acted proactively to provide financial support to county governments for the specific purpose of creating and maintaining site address databases. It seems that with all the Homeland Security monies available, DOC and Homeland Security could have partnered to provide this type of support for county governments.
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Too often we cannot get in contact with others because they are out at meeting(s). Individuals are walking, running, driving/being driven or flying to meetings. THIS is a waste of Valuable TIME, which costs FUNDS that should go to more important issues, i.e. jobs in America, healthcare REFORM, immigation control, the DEBT. Reduce your meeting(s) costs by using wide screen tvs instead of traveling and having to be there in person - be there in TPERSON.
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Disruptive Technologies: A Holistic, Pragmatic Approach
New technologies are emerging at a faster pace than Agencies can swallow. The rate of obsolescence outpaces the pace of change.
Despite the new technology flood, Agencies lack a strategy to on-board these disruptions. As a result, they often react, flounder, or simply ignore them.
We can solve these problems in four major areas of practice:
Leadership and Management: How must leaders change with new technologies? How will this transform Agencies from the inside out?
Customer Strategy: How is the public behaving differently online? How can I reach them where they are?
Enterprise Strategy: Internal systems are connecting with external - How will I keep up with the dizzying pace? Employees are adopting collaboration and social tools without my control - How should I manage?
Innovation and Design: Experimenting on the general public is a bad idea, so how can I learn in a safe place? What vendors and providers should I lean on?
Here is a great slideshare webinar to get you started:
http://www.slideshare.net/charleneli/developing-a-social-strategy-webinar
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The tsunami warning system within NOAA needs to embrace social media and Web 2.0 technologies to disseminate information and encourage discussion on tsunamis. This could include blogs, discussion boards, subscription services, and twitter/facebook accounts. It could even involve an aspect of crowd sourcing to gather information from the public on tsunami observations: wave heights, damage assessments, photographs, etc.
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All DOC's upper and middle managers should be required to work one to two weeks in a private sector environment to identify why it’s critical to select the highest qualified individual – not someone who’s affiliated with them and not qualified.
This will foster collaboration between private and public sectors and encourage managers to select the highest qualified individual despite their affiliation with them. It will also in increase the productivity by 50 – 70%.
There are a significant amount of hard working and dedicated individuals in DOC who are continually under utilized and overlooked. If managers realized the severity of their actions and how it under utilizing the Federal government, they may reconsider their actions.
Additionally, upper and middle management should be asses by those they supervise and their performance should be analyzed by the comments received. This will decrease mistrust and establish a transparent environment, which in turn, will foster open communication among all grade levels and increase productivity.
All awards and bonuses obtained by any employer within the DOC bureaus should be made public to all individuals in that bureau. This will encourage the majority of staff to work to the best of their ability, knowing that they will be recognized for their accomplishments and efforts.
Individuals coming into the Federal government from the private sector, generally have a worker’s mentality – being underutilized or unable to work in their area of expertise reduces moral and encourages mistrust across the Federal government.
Thank you for the opportunity to comment in this inquiry.
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Maintain PI website and keep it up-dated. Of course the public would have to be aware of its existance.
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Develop a web page and fact sheet or other handouts that clearly explain the government's numerous student intern and fellowship opportunities intended to help introduce students to government service and gain experience while earning some money. More effort should be made at DOC and bureau/agency levels to clearly communicate these student work opportunities. At the same time, more needs to be done to educate government offices of the options they may have for establishing positions to temporarily fill staffing needs and benefit students. Our office is looking to develop a Student Temporary Employment Program position or a Student Career Experience Program position. We can find some information about these programs, but we're left guessing who to work with and how to go about setting it up.
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The DOC via NOAA via the National Weather Service maintain many of the automated weather observation stations in the country. The calibration and maintenance records for these sites are not publicly available for some unknown reason. These stations are a part of the global warming debate, yet outsiders have no way to evaluate the integrity of the reported data.
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I like the ideas of some of the other posters to have a collaborative portal environment but I'd also like to see Commerce go to a shared service model. By elliminating redundant applications as an agency, Commerce could reduce its IT footprint and save significantly on licensing, maintenance and security costs acrost its bureaus. Of course, all bureaus will have applications unique to their mission but those would be the exception. As a starting point just having a central respository of all applications currently being used amongst the bureaus would provide a baseline of our inventory; from there, assess those applications common acrost multiple bureaus and put a plan in place to consolidate and move toward an enterprise service model. These services would be provided via a one-stop-shop Commerce portal. Although not perfect, DoD's concept of a Defense Knowledge Online portal can provide some good lessons learned on offering enterpise services through a single portal environment.
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The International Trade Administration's Survey of International Air Travelers (a.k.a. "In-Flight Survey") provides an incredibly rich dataset on foreigners' perceptions of the United States and Americans' travel habits abroad. Since it is administered while passengers are in transit, it achieves a response rate rarely attained by telephone and mail surveys today, and many of the questions asked are of extreme value to researchers in all social science fields. Data from the extensive SIAT questionnaire could be used by scholars studying such diverse topics as immigration, international education, technology use, environmental studies, social networks, tastes, income stratification, and even crime victimization. Access to such data would surely lead to many innovative research projects. However, ITA Tourism Industries has failed to even make a week's worth of SIAT data (which goes back through the 1980's and includes hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of records) available as a public use dataset. The summary tabulations of SIAT data provided to the public in exchange for its multi-million dollar investment in SIAT only begin to scratch the surface of the data collected, and the fees charged by ITA for access to even small and dated samples of this data are far beyond the resources of even the best endowed Ivy League sociology departments. Indeed, the current fee structure is such that the only organizations able to access the data are large corporations that could easily afford to do such market research at their own expense.
SIAT is probably the most restricted federal social science dataset of its size. In addition to its academic value, public access to SIAT data could significantly aid small businesses in the struggling tourism sector that are unable to invest in their own market research. Given the excellent public access DOC provides to taxpayer-funded data collections by such entities as the Census Bureau, current restrictions and fees are puzzling at best and at worst appear as corporate welfare.
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If broad collaboration across bureaus and with stakeholders is a goal, then Google is great solution (and at low cost). NOAA is currently running a pilot project to use Google Apps for email, calendaring, collaborative document creation, chatting, etc. The per-person cost, just for email, is one tenth the cost of the current Microsoft Exchange server model. Email is much more reliable and inboxes are much larger. Being able to calendar across organizations enables meetings that may not have otherwise been scheduled. Collaborative real-time writing and editing of documents saves time and builds shared understanding. Chatting with colleagues is quicker than email, and less burdensome on inboxes. The benefits go on and on....
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All management meetings in the DOC, such as the current NWS corporate board meeting should be webcast live and the cost of the meetings should be stated on a website. These meetings are held at the expense of the American taxpayer. The taxpayer has a right to see what goes on. The NWS SES force should not be holding meetings behind closed doors in smoke filled rooms. This current meeting is being held outside of government buildings at great expense...what are the NWS secrets these NWS managers are preventing from the public from participating in?
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The first part is to grab the attention of the citizen to inform them about the website. Second is to make the home page exciting - pizzazz. Third, that home page has got to assure that it the visitor can easily identify what they want to see and can easily get to that informaiton in a very few clicks.
I suggest a single icon(logo) be developed and used in all governemnt advertsing about the Open Government Plan - something that when seen is identified with the plan.
You have two sets of users to the website, thsoe who have a pretty good idea of how to navigate their way thru and those who really don't. The home page needs to be able to satisfy the needs from both sets on the same homepage. If the visitor finds what they want then you have a repeating customer.
Create a separate advertising plan to reach students, attract them and they become future customers.
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The one thing the public wants to know most is HOW the government makes the decisions to spend their money.
Therefore I suggest that the Whitehouse issue a directive through OMB that ALL meetings where budget or policy issues are being discussed (ESPECIALLY CIO Council and CFO Council meetings) be recorded on digital video, and that those videos be posted to a public website with a list of attendees and indexed by subject within 24 hours of the meeting taking place.
This would go a long way to curbing the corruption and under-the-table-deal-making that plagues most agency decisions, especially for procurement activities.
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Why is it that these departments are providing such great assistance to the nation through grants and other investment funding but, most of the citizens don't even know the names of the departments? I think we should start a blog, try and get more public media coverage and show the nation exactly how beneficial the Department of Commerce has been to this country's economic development.
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The best way to comply with Mr. Obama's request is to introduce the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). If you go the the United States Patent and Trademark Office and ask for a briefing on the Enterprise Application Integration Hub, you will quickly learn how the USPTO is saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and how they will soon be in compliance with President Obama's request for transparency. The ESB connects your legacy systems so they communicate with each other and share information. Using this approach is the quickest way to become transparent in government.
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There are many staff databases that are
One common staff directory with all informations should be kept by either OHRM or Secuirty office, so we can have one reliable list (e.g compared to peopel finder, email, phone directories, etc.),Office directories would be a subset view of these information based on their needs, so once an employee joins or departs, the information/status can only be updated once, saving many hours updaing datbases across offices.
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OPQA reviews office actions of examiners in the USPTO for compliance with legal standards and for technical accuracy. I would like to see OPQA post guidelines on a publicly accessible website for how they determine if a given reviewed office action is considered to be compliant or non-compliant.
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The Department of Commerce could collaborate with the SEC to gather information on how money flows between industries, between U.S. states, consumers as a group, and other countries via publicly traded companies.
The quarterly and annual reports of publicly traded companies would be more useful if a company's receipts and expenses were broken down by state, industry, consumers as a group, and country.
If the company has a database of receipts and expenses and the SEC has a database of companies (industry, state, country), aggregating the data is not difficult for the company to do.
Financial institutions that loan money could break down loans by consumer, industry, etc.
If a publicly traded U.S. company transferred assets to an offshore subsidiary, that should be reported as it affects how much money is circulating in the U.S. economy.
The quarterly and annual report data for publicly traded companies could be published as XML files archived together to reduce the number of requests to the server where they are stored and so the download can be done with a program instead of having to visit each page for a company.
Users of the data could create visualizations of the flow of money between states and industries and money entering and leaving the country.
You could answer questions like:
1. Is money in the finance/banking industry circulating within the industry or being transferred to other industries and consumers as loans?
2. Is there an industry a state should develop to reduce the amount of money leaving the state?
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Recent fishery closures and reversal of closure decisions are indicative of the broken methods currently used to establish fishery stock assessments. The NMFS makes decisions on data that is not transparent to those with in situ knowledge of the fisheries and refuses to use stock assessments provided by those with in situ knowledge of the fishery. Statistical modeling methods currently in use by the NMFS are woefully inaccurate.
The idea is to create online databases on a specie basis by region where the NMFS shares their stock assessments with the public and accepts feedback from fishermen, divers, fishing organizations, academia, etc. to build consensus.
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The 1,600 members of Open Source for America are dedicated to supporting and guiding federal efforts to make the US government more open through the use of open source software. We have established recommendations for all agencies to consider in their Open Government Plans, with these recommendations especially highlighting the need to remove barriers to the successful leveraging of open source software and open IT more generally. Open source software would seem to us to be the most concrete form of participation and collaboration available to the government's constituents and its employees. These recommendations -- and the ability to comment further on them -- are at http://opensourceforamerica.org/guidelines.
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Make data sets listing corporate relationships; partnerships and sponsorships; and related financial records. Search engine results in PDF format, Adobe and HTML format.
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The US Patent and Trademark Office should employ a common patent examination procedure including use of the same software with the European Patent Office. This includes one proviso that the discount for small entities be maintained. The USPTO rules that involve splitting one patent into multiple patents are sufficiently expensive and the goal of minimizing the number of patents granted so onerous that frankly it would be in the inventors' interest that the process be outsourced to the European Patent Office. The cost to small industry of the duplication of the legal proceedings is now beginning to be prohibitive. I suspect that this impediment to protecting US intellectual property is one of the causes of our present economic stagnation.
The Department of Commerce, in conjunction with the State Department should include in our trade policy applying pressure to reduce or eliminate the very significant expense of the nationalization of European patents by the individual countries.
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