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Office of Science and Technology Policy Blog

  • Public Input Solicited for Conference on Prizes and Challenges

    Posted by Phil Larson on April 29, 2010 at 9:50 AM EDT

    OSTP, the Domestic Policy Council, and the Case Foundation are soliciting comments and questions from the public in advance of a conference tomorrow that will bring together thought leaders from the public and private sectors to help inspire and shape Federal agency efforts to launch prizes, challenges, and open grantmaking initiatives.

    Experts participating in this day-long session have blazed new trails in testing these innovation strategies—from grand, global competitions to smaller, community-based efforts—and will share their insights with an inspired and fast-growing community of public-sector innovators from a wide array of Federal agencies and Departments.

    The public is invited to participate in the event in two ways:

    • Share questions and suggestions with the organizers in advance of the event by commenting online at www.casefoundation.org/promoting-innovation
    • Participate in a series of interactive Q&A sessions on the web live, during the event.
      • Each session will last a half hour and participants and schedules are as follows (times and participants are subject to change):
        • 11:00 a.m. ET: Bonin Bough, PepsiCo and Tara Roth McConaghy, GOOD, Inc.
        • 12:00 p.m. ET: Peter Diamandis, X Prize Foundation and Tom Kalil, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and National Economic Council
        • 1:00 p.m. ET: Sonal Shah, White House Office of Social Innovation & Civic Participation, and Jonathan Bays, Consultant with McKinsey & Company and Co-Author of the recent report, And the winner is…: Capturing the Promise of Philanthropic Prizes
        • 2:00 p.m. ET: Aneesh Chopra, U.S. Chief Technology Officer
        • 3:00 p.m. ET: Jim Bennett, Netflix, and Rob McEwen, US Gold and Lexam Explorations and Goldcorp
        • 4:00 p.m. ET: Beth Noveck, Assistant Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, and James Shelton, Department of Education
      • The Q&A sessions will take place at www.casefoundation.org/case-soup
      • Anyone can submit a question via Twitter using the hashtag #opengov, via e-mail at casesoup@casefoundation.org, or in the chat room during the live sessions.

    Additional details, including the event agenda and live Q&A are available at www.casefoundation.org/promoting-innovation.

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  • Help Bring Hands-on Learning to America’s Students

    Posted by Thomas Kalil on April 28, 2010 at 4:22 PM EDT

    Last November, President Obama launched the “Educate to Innovate” campaign, a public-private partnership designed to move American students from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math achievement over the next decade.

    One of the initiatives that President Obama announced was National Lab Day, a nationwide movement to support science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in our schools by bringing hands-on, discovery-based lab experiences to students. Teachers can register on the National Lab Day website and can request funding or describe a project they would like to do in collaboration with STEM professionals. Scientists, engineers, and other volunteers can help by upgrading lab equipment, assisting with hands-on projects, mentoring students, or hosting field trips.

    Dr. Arden Bement, Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), recently sent a letter to NSF employees and the many scientists and engineers that NSF supports, urging them to get involved in National Lab Day. Although National Lab Day is a year-round activity, teachers and schools around the country will be organizing events on May 12th—so sign up now!

  • Following Public Evaluation, OSTP Upgrades Open Government Plan

    Posted by Beth Noveck and Eugene Huang on April 26, 2010 at 1:07 PM EDT

    April 7th marked the latest milestone in the Obama Administration’s goal to make our government the most open, effective, and accountable in history. This was the date that 29 cabinet departments and major agencies posted their Open Government Plans—roadmaps with concrete milestones for transforming each agency and making each more transparent, participatory and collaborative. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released its own Open Government Plan for using openness and innovation to improve the use of scientific evidence in policymaking and the development of policies supportive of science and engineering. As OSTP Director John P. Holdren has written, the OSTP Open Government Plan "is not a final product but the first draft of a living document we are committed to revising and updating with your input." That's why, in the ensuing two weeks, we've read your feedback and evaluated our own plan against the requirements of the Open Government Directive. Today we are publishing that self-evaluation, together with Version 1.2 of our Open Government Plan (pdf) (you can view the edits we made from Version 1 here)—an improved version that fulfills both the spirit and the letter of the Open Government Directive.

    Now our goal is to implement the commitments in our Plan and, for that, we need your ongoing help to devise specific strategies. Here are some are the highlights:

    Transparency

    • OSTP IN THE OPEN: We are opening up OSTP by starting to post profiles of many of our employees in their own words online in text and video so that you can know who we are and what we do.
    • R&D DASHBOARD: Building on the work of USASpending.gov and IT.USASpending.gov, we are developing an R&D dashboard that will make it possible for anyone to track the government’s investment in basic research across the Executive Branch.

    Participation

    • OSTP BULLET-POINT BOOT CAMP: We are publishing a template to help you make policy proposals to us in the same format that staff uses to brief senior officials.
    • PARTICIPATORY PCAST: This highlights the work we are doing to use new media to enable public participation in the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
    • GEEKS FOR WONKS: A public-private partnership with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to connect science, technology and innovation students with government officials to promote civic engagement by designing and building prototypes of civic software.

    Collaboration

    • OSTP BULLPEN: We showcase the new physical space we created to foster greater collaboration within the agency by tearing down the walls that divide us.
    • NSTC COLLABORATION PLATFORM: This highlights the tools we are building to connect people across the agency.
    • S&T EXPERT NETWORK: A public-private collaboration we are exploring to develop better ways of bringing scientific and technical advice to government from more sources, faster.

    Tell us how we can do this better and faster. E-mail us at intheopen@ostp.gov or tweet us at @whitehouseostp using #OPENOSTP.

    Beth Noveck is Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government

    Eugene Huang is Senior Advisor to the CTO

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  • Public-Private Session to Focus on Prizes, Challenges, and Open Grantmaking

    Posted by Robynn Sturm and Rick Weiss on April 26, 2010 at 11:46 AM EDT

    Policymakers in more than 25 Federal agencies and Departments are poised to get a mix of education and inspiration at an all-day session to be held later this week that will focus on the use of prizes and other incentives to generate solutions to pressing problems.

    The event, co-sponsored by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Domestic Policy Council, and the Case Foundation, is an outgrowth of President Obama’s Strategy for American Innovation, released in September. That plan called upon agencies to increase their ability to promote and harness innovation, in part by using policy tools such as prizes and challenges. The concept is simple: Offer a reward—including some measure of fame and boasting rights—to the first person or team to achieve a difficult goal. Then step back as players who might otherwise not have shown interest rise to the challenge and race to the finish line, in many cases getting there faster and at less expense than would otherwise have occurred.

    This week’s event also has roots in the Open Government Directive issued by the White House in December, which called upon agencies to use new approaches such as open grantmaking to tap the expertise and ingenuity of the American people and bring the best ideas to bear on our Nation’s most pressing problems. Like prizes and challenges, open grantmaking techniques aim to identify novel ideas from unexpected places to get more and better results for the budgetary buck.

    These strategies have already been used to great effect by the private and philanthropic sectors and a handful of forward-leaning government offices but are still largely unexplored by Federal agencies and Departments. Now that is about to change.

    On Friday, some of the world’s top experts in prizes, challenges, and open grantmaking will descend on Washington to inspire and guide more than 100 creative policymakers from across the Executive Branch. These visiting experts, from a number of high-profile companies and organizations, will candidly discuss their successes as well as their difficulties and lessons learned. Federal participants will also have the opportunity to share with these mentors some of the ways they are considering using these techniques in their home agencies, and get feedback on their plans.

    The benefits of these approaches are potentially large. As outlined in an Office of Management and Budget guidance (pdf) released last month, the Administration believes that prizes and challenges can help the government:

    • Establish an important goal without having to choose the approach or the team that is most likely to succeed;
    • Pay only for results;
    • Increase the number and diversity of the individuals, organizations, and teams addressing a particular problem or challenge;
    • Improve the skills of the participants in the competition;
    • Stimulate private sector investment that is many times greater than the cash value of the prize;
    • Further a Federal agency’s mission by attracting more interest and attention to a defined program, activity, or issue of concern; and
    • Capture the public imagination and change the public’s perception of what is possible.

    Preliminary details about Friday’s event are posted here, with additional details to come out later this week.

    Robynn Sturm is United States Assistant Deputy Chief Technology Officer

    Rick Weiss is Director of Strategic Communcations and a Senior Policy Analyst in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

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  • Comment Period for Commercialization of University Research is Extended

    Posted by Phil Larson on April 23, 2010 at 3:38 PM EDT

    The comment period for the Request for Information relating to Commercialization of University Research, issued by the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Economic Council and published in the Federal Register on March 25, 2010 (#75 FR, pg. 14476), will be extended for an additional 30 days. The comment period will now close on May 26, 2010 at 11:59 P.M. Eastern Time.

    Contact nec_general@who.eop.gov with any questions.

  • White House Streamlines Progress-Report System for Federal Grantees, Freeing Additional Time for Research

    Posted by Diane DiEuliis on April 23, 2010 at 11:36 AM EDT

    Imagine you are a scientist whose research is funded by various Federal agencies, and imagine that not only does each of these agencies require an annual progress report—a reasonable requirement—but that each has its own complicated forms for doing so and its own system you must navigate in order to submit those forms.

    As Federal grantees know, this is the unfortunate situation today, and it is one of the big reasons why a survey sponsored by the National Academies found that administrative burdens now consume fully 42 percent of people’s time at the Nation’s research institutions, draining precious resources that might otherwise be devoted to research.

    Today the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is announcing a change that will help resolve this longstanding inefficiency: the release of a new, universal, standardized progress-reporting format (pdf) for academic scientists and other Federal grantees.

    A new form may hardly seem a thing for the Federal bureaucracy to crow about. But this is a form of the future. Not only will it simplify the lives of scientists and their administrators, it will also help Federal agencies and overseers do a better job of grant management. And because the submitted information will be both uniformly organized and primarily digital, the new forms will allow program managers to compare interim scientific results more readily across complementary programs within and between agencies.

    "I wish I had this kind of streamlined report form when I was running research projects supported by Federal agencies," said OSTP Director John Holdren, whose White House office spearheaded the effort. "Ensuring that there are common standards across agencies will ensure that researchers spend less time managing paperwork and forms, and more time producing research results across all science and technology fields sponsored by the Federal Government."

    The new form, formal approval of which was completed this week with the signing of a memo by Dr. Holdren and Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag, includes standardized fields to be used by all Federal research agencies as well as customizable fields to accommodate special assessments that may be needed by some Federal agencies or programs. The memo calls upon agencies to craft implementation plans to ensure timely adoption of the format.

    According to a “faculty burden” survey conducted by the Federal Demonstration Project, supported by the National Academies, research faculty consider “grant progress report submissions” to be their top administrative burden. (The other winners in order were: personnel hiring, project revenue management, equipment and supply purchases, Institutional Review Board protocol approvals and training, training personnel and students, and student evaluations.) The survey concluded that an estimated $97,000,000 in salary support is spent nationwide on research-related administrative duties.

    Diane DiEuliis is Assistant Director for Life Sciences at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

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