The Final State of the Union
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Summary:
Applications are open for the Spring '17 Cohort of the Presidential Innovation Fellows. Join us.
Applications are now being accepted for the Spring 2017 cohort of Presidential Innovation Fellows! The Presidential Innovation Fellows program places top talent as agency entrepreneurs-in-residence, where they will bring their design, tech, innovation, and entrepreneurship talents to work on everything from policy to product development. Please apply here for the Spring 2017 Cohort.
Current fellows starting or continuing in the Fall 2017 Cohort are already innovating on a wide range of topics, including a new set of national security projects.
Launched in 2012 and administered by the General Services Administration, the Presidential Innovation Fellows program recruits talented and diverse technologists and innovators from the private sector for 12-month “tours of duty” in government to tackle some of the country’s most pressing challenges. Teamed up with Federal agency directors and program leads, PIFs work quickly and iteratively to turn promising ideas into game-changing solutions.
The Presidential Innovation Fellows program has recruited more than 110 Fellows into this highly-competitive program from across the country, including Austin, Louisville, Detroit, Honolulu, Chicago, and Santa Fe.
Fellows have partnered with leadership in 33 government agencies, together delivering results in months, not years. Fellows are collaborating on solutions on topics such as veterans affairs, economic opportunity, community policing, cancer clinical trials, cybersecurity, and closing the gender pay-gap.
Examples of collaborative PIF projects over the last four years include:
- In partnership with the Vice President’s Cancer Moonshot Initiative, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institutes of Health, a team of Fellows launched trials.cancer.gov, a streamlined, user-friendly site for searching for NCI-supported clinical trials along with a new application programming interface (API) integrated within the site. The combination will make it much easier for researchers to recruit new participants and for patients to find trials.
- A team of Fellows launched The Opportunity Project in partnership with the U.S. Census, an initiative to create new digital tools that use Federal and local data to empower communities with information about critical resources, such as affordable housing, quality schools, and jobs. Since its launch, the initiative has released more than 30 digital tools and convened dozens of Federal and local government organizations, private sector companies, and civil society organizations to help achieve the President's vision that "a child's course in life should be determined not by the Zip code she's born in, but by the strength of her work ethic and the scope of her dreams.”
- A team of Fellows in conjunction with the Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer, led the creation of Code.gov, the first catalogue of Federal government software. Code.gov is a platform for promoting the adoption of good custom-source-code development, sharing, and reuse practices to avoid duplicative custom software purchases and encourage reuse as open source code.
The first step is to apply online here. Candidates can apply for the Spring 2017 cohort until the deadline of 11:59pm EST on December 11, 2016.
We look forward to kicking off another exciting round of projects — help us spread the word and encourage talented innovators, technologists, and entrepreneurs you know to apply!
Nathan Olson is Acting Director of the Presidential Innovation Fellows.
Megan Smith is the U.S. Chief Technology Officer.
To learn more about the Presidential Innovation Fellows program and apply to be a Fellow, please visit: www.presidentialinnovationfellows.gov
