Daily Digest | A Closed Bid to Open Government

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Daily Digest

Daily Digest | A Closed Bid to Open Government

the editors | July 9, 2009 - 2:31pm | Email This!

In Closed Bidding, Defense Contractor Gets $18M to Open Up Recovery.gov ABC News' Rick Klein broke the story that a Maryland-based IT firm has been awarded a five-year contract worth a full $18 million to revamp the struggling Recovery.gov website. By general consensus, Recovery.gov isn't doing a very good job fulfilling its raison d'etre, which serving as a window onto giant government contracts awarded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. And so, it needs to be improved. But here's the irony -- the contract was awarded as part of the closed Alliant Government Acquisition Contract, a $50 billion behemoth that is open to only about 60 or so pre-approved government contractors. GSA's pre solicitation for the Recovery.gov redesign read, "There will be no public bid opening"...
Peer-to-Patent Closes Shop The Peer-to-Patent project, spearheaded by Beth Noveck in her law professor days before she became Deputy U.S. CTO for open government, often gets talked about as one of the more successful examples of how citizens can be invited in to do the actual work of governing. Alas, from now on, it will have to be talked about in the past tense. The U.S. Patent Office has chosen not to renew the project. Peer-to-Patent has fallen victim, says its leaders, to the country's troubled economic situation. Their just-released second anniversary report explains what happened and is chock full of details of how the experiment worked over the course of its two-year run...
PdF Chat Time with Sam Graham-Felsen When it comes to promoting cause campaigns, says Sam Graham-Felsen, "The fundamentals are the same" as they were for the Obama campaign: it's about storytelling and authentic content. Graham-Felsen is content director and director of outreach for Blue State Digital. For his thoughts on reaching an audience used to being marketed to, reading glib one liners, and hearing sound bites, read on...