Behind the Curtain at TCG

BFELoB PMO receives honorable mention for MAX suite

The BFELoB PMO has received an honorable mention from the 2011 Government Computer News Awards.

The honorable mention was recieved for the MAX application suite. MAX has numerous tools including data collection and collaboration. Read the article here. (Dislosure: TCG supports some of the MAX applications.)

NITRC Now Acccepting Externally-Issued Identity Credentials in Advance of Government Directive

NITRC--the Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse--recently promoted code to allow for externally-issued identity credentials one week before Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel instructed federal agency CIOs to begin accepting non-government, externally-issued identity credentials. The ability to link a Google ID account to a NITRC log-in was included in TCG's September 2011 release. TCG built and operates NITRC for NIH. Under this contract, TCG established a web-based clearinghouse for neuroimaging analysis tools, vocabularies, datasets, and databases to facilitate the dissemination of these resources and the discussion of needs and limitations. The site provides opportunities for community comment on neuroimaging informatics knowledge resources to guide development and enhance their use by the research community. The NITRC initiative also offers a framework for other scientific areas: tools and resources created under Federal grants for scientific research in any specialty can be shared with scientific communities using the NITRC approach. For more details on NITRC, see our case study on TCG's web site.

TCG Is #36 on 2011 WBJ 50 Fastest Growing Companies List

TCG has been ranked in position 36 on the Washington Business Journal list of the 50 Fastest Growing Companies in the Washington, DC  region for 2011. This is TCG’s first time on the list, which is based on consecutive growth over the last three years. Click here to read the full press release.

TCG's Brian Ibbison Featured in Federal Computer Week Rising Star Profile

Brian Ibbison, who is a technical and project lead with TCG, has been featured in a Rising Star Award profile in Federal Computer Week. Brian's receipt of this award represents the third year in a row that a TCG team member has been recognized as a Federal Computer Week Rising Star. Click here to read the profile.

Telework Exchange Announces Fall 2011 Town Hall Meeting

The Telework Exchange--a public-private partnership focused on eliminating telework gridlock--has announced that its Fall 2011 Town Hall Meeting, Take IT Home, will be held Tuesday, October 18, from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center (1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW).

The program will consist of two tracks addressing both technology requirements and management needs for putting Federal telework programs into action.

Registration is complimentary to government employees (industry rates apply) and Town Hall Meeting attendees are eligible to receive continuing professional education credits.

For more information and to register, click here.

FDP Fall General Meeting Registration Now Open

The Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP), which is an association of federal agencies, academic research institutions, and research policy organizations that works to streamline the administration of federally sponsored research has announced that registration for the FDP Fall General Meeting, September 14-16, 2011 is now open and will close Thursday, September 1, 2011 at 5:00pm. It will reopen on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 3:00pm for on-site registration with the higher onsite registration fees.  Please click here to register for the meeting. For any questions regarding online registration, please contact Claudette Baylor-Fleming at cbaylor@nas.edu or at (202) 334-3994. Please click on the follow links for frequently asked questions:  General FDP FAQ or Mentoring Program FAQ.

ACT-IAC releases results of grants management survey

ACT-IAC's Collaboration & Transformation SIG recently released a white paper titled "Industry Survey of Challenges to Improve Federal Grants Management". The group surveyed industry participants to identify opportunities for improvement of the Federal grants management process and associated systems. The conclusions are pretty much what one would expect:

1. Develop additional standardization and a common taxonomy of grants data.

2. Creating a taxonomy is a challenge given the diverse nature of the grants landscape, array of participants, required traceability, difficulty in linking actual expenditures to goals, and the multiple layers of funds distribution.

3. Standardize interface standards and grants business processes such as application workflow, grant evaluation scoring and decision methodologies.

4. Proprietary and open source methodologies and tools can perform data management, virtualization, mining, and analysis. Public data exchanges and data sources may also prove useful.

5. Current websites provide significant amounts of data but struggle with transparency due to a lack of accurate data. 

At the end, of course, the basic recommendation is that the government must establish underlying policies that address these gaps before the gaps themselves can be filled in.

This is the same refrain we've heard many times before: grants management is a complicated beast, which has grown organically as Congress has made laws to serve the nation's needs. A complete, holistic approach to grants management is ambitious -- probably too ambitious, frankly -- but incremental gains can be made by establishing standards in specific areas. We've seen this work with the SF424, for example.

Still, kudos to ACT-IAC for trying to pull this project together into a coherent product.

FDP Posts Draft Agenda for September Meeting

The Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP), which is an association of federal agencies, academic research institutions, and research policy organizations that works to streamline the administration of federally sponsored research, has posted a draft agenda for the FDP's September 2011 meeting on the FDP website. The agenda can be found on the homepage under Announcements, and under the MEETINGS navigation link on the left of the homepage. The meeting will be held on September 14-16, 2011, at the Hyatt Regency Capitol Hill. All FDP meetings are open to the public. For registration information, please refer to the meeting information on the FDP website.
 
For more information or questions, please contact David Wright @ dwright@nas.edu.

NIH BCIG Announces Fall 2011 Program

The NIH Biomedical Computing Interest Group (BCIG) has announced its Fall 2011 Program. All sessions are free and open to the public. For more information visit the BCIG home page.

Fall 2011 Program

• Sep  1:    BCIG Brainstorming Power Breakfast (unstructured dialogue on biomedical computing topics of interest to participants)
• Sep  8:    BCIG Lecture entitled “The Logic of Chance: The Nature & Origin of Biological  Evolution,” given by Eugene V. Koonin, PhD, NCBI
• Sep 22:   BCIG Book Club Meeting on “The Checklist Manifesto – How to Get Things Right,” by Atul Gawande
• Oct 6:     BCIG Brainstorming Power Breakfast (unstructured dialogue on biomedical computing topics of interest to participants)
• Oct 13:   BCIG Brainstorming Session on “How Can Computer Science & Informatics Support Clinical Applications of Mass Spectrometry?” 
• Oct 27:   BCIG Book Club Meeting on Oct 27* The Other Brain: From Dementia to Schizophrenia, How New Discoveries about the Brain Are Revolutionizing Medicine & Science,” by R. Douglas Fields (author will be present at this meeting)
• Nov 3:    BCIG Brainstorming Power Breakfast (unstructured dialogue on biomedical computing topics of interest to participants)
• Nov 10:  BCIG Speaker Event (speaker needed; please make a suggestion)
• Nov 17:  BCIG Brainstorming Session on “Prospective Design of Clinical Research Protocols with Comparative Effectiveness & Patient Centered Outcomes in Mind”
• Dec  1:   BCIG Brainstorming Power Breakfast (unstructured dialogue on biomedical computing topics of interest to participants)

Announcements for individual events including time and location will be sent out just before each event. For additional information please contact Jim DeLeo (jdeleo@nih.gov; 301-496-3848).

AGA Call for Volunteers: Candidate Assessment Tool for Grants Managers

The Association of Government Accountants  (AGA) is launching a new project to help identify accomplished grants managers. AGA just issued a call for volunteers to develop a “Candidate Assessment Tool” for use by managers at all levels of government in screening candidates for grants management jobs. To view the call for volunteers, click here. For more information or if you are interested in participating please contact AGA's Director of Intergovernmental Relations Helena Sims at hsims@agacgfm.org by July 18, 2011.