The Department of Better Technology
Description
Vocal Characteristics
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EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
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a few weeks ago, President Obama announced a new research initiative to map the human brain. It's a significant investment of $100 million dollars to prevent treat and cure brain injuries. This is a website called SAM dot gov. It launched late last year and it's the central hub responsible for all the databases behind government contracting. The G. A. O. estimates that this website will cost the taxpayer $181 million. I'd like to say that this is a one off anomaly. But government regularly pays millions of dollars for websites. So how did we get to the point where the cost of mapping the human brain costs less than a website? The first reason is because of something called procurement, it's how government or any really large institution buys things right now. Procurement law is regulated by the federal acquisition regulation. It's about 6000 pages of regulation that ensures that contracts go to people who understand the law the best not people who can do the best job related to that. The field of technology and the field of government don't speak the same language. This makes it so that when you, as a small business want to say bid on a website, you can't search the bidding systems for the word website or you won't get any relevant results or if you do, it's not obvious what to do with them. Finally, inside of government, the tools suck because government can't get affordable technology. It means that the people whose job it is to negotiate contracts and get the most value for the taxpayer are often bogged down with the worst tools or by doing, menial data entry work. All of this leads to closed anti competitive marketplaces that make it hard for small businesses to compete and hard for the taxpayer to get the best price. So we're creating a new social venture. It's called the Department of Better Technology. It's open for business. See a lot of the efforts around open government have been around government's relationship with the citizen and they're great. They're even vital. But if you take a look at something like recovery dot gov, It was built by government to provide oversight over the recovery funding of 2009, open government is really hard for government to sustain because it's so expensive. So we're going upstream to equip government with better technology that will drive down the cost of opening up and spur economic development by making it easier for governments to engage with innovative companies in their own backyards. Our first step with that as a product that we call Procured on io It's based on technology that we made for the Presidential Innovation Fellowship Program at the White House earlier this year. It makes it easier for people like you to find potential projects to bid on, to take a look at them, monitor them for updates, ask questions about them and finally, to bid on them. At the same time, it provides people inside of government with the tools they need to manage these procurement swell. It gives them the ability to customize project descriptions, create custom response field for easy management later and a simple familiar interface for reviewing the bids that are coming in when we deployed this for the federal government. We found some exciting results and this pilot experiment that we did, we reduced costs. The bids coming through the system were much lower than the bids coming in through traditional means. But we also found we increased engagement. Many of the bids that came in were from businesses that had not ordinarily contracted with the federal government before and finally we increased speed, bids came in faster meaning the procurement can be done more quickly with the right tools. The next phase of open government revolves around procurement. Anybody that's interested in government being more transparent, more participatory, more accountable or just more efficient has to care about procurement and we do. That's why we've made procured dot io open source ready for any city, state or enterprise to take and use as they see fit and if they need some help, the Department of Better technology is here to help support it. Just email us at Hello at D o b t dot c o. We're from the Department of Better Technology and we're here to help