Fed 100 nomination: Navy CIO Robert Carey

I mentioned earlier that I have been posting my nominations for Federal Computer Week’s Fed 100 awards.

I noted earlier that I was going to make — and post — a number of nominations for Federal Computer Week’s Fed 100 awards. Earlier, I posted about EPA’s Jeremy Ames. Now — Robert Carey, the Navy Department’s chief information officer.

Describe this person’s job
Carey is the chief information officer for the Department of the Navy

Describe the work for which this person is being nominated
Carey has won several Fed 100 awards, including being selected last year. But Carey has once again been a leader in the past 12 months, particularly in the areas of Web 2.0. In January 2008, Carey was the firstCIO to host a public blog, which he has used to reach out to the Navy Department community generally — but also the community generally on subjects ranging from information security to trust to privacy. But beyond that, Carey was also the firstCIO to issue a policy enabling the Navy to use Web 2.0.

What impact did this work have on the person’s organization or the larger federal IT community?
The Navy Web 2.0 policy has been widely seen as a potential model for other agencies particularly because it focuses on enabling Web 2.0 rather then limiting it. And Carey’s blog has inspired otherCIOs — and there are several CIO bloggers now.

In what way did the nominee go above and beyond their job description?
Both the blog and the Web 2.0 policy are firsts among the CIO community.

If needed, provide any additional background information to support this nomination
Navy CIO blog:
http://www.doncio.navy.mil/blog.aspx
The Navy Web 2.0 blog can be found here:
http://dorobekinsider.com/2008/11/04/hear-the-navy-cio-talk-about-the-navys-web-20-policy/
There is also a link here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/9616910/Navy-Web-20-policy-Utilizing-New-Web-Tools-

Obama CTO this week? Maybe… or maybe not… and a Kundra WP profile

The NYT is reporting that Team Obama will name the much-discussed Obama chief technology officer this week — Wednesday, to be exact. The Times reports that Obama will also name the much less discussed chief performance officer. (Italics are mine.)

Mr. Obama will use his public events this week to promise what one adviser called “radical reforms” to impose more control over the regular federal budget down the road. Among other areas, the president-elect will focus on changing Pentagon contracting and aid to corporate America, advisers said. He will also designate a chief performance officer and a chief technology officer Wednesday to help make government more efficient, they said.

NextGov’s TechInsider says… not so fast.

According to the Obama transition team, they have no plans to announce who may fill the CTO position on Wednesday. According to senior reporter Jill R. Aitoro:

“That report is wrong, there is no CTO announcement on Wednesday,” said Nick Shapiro, transition spokesman in an email correspondence with NextGov.com. He confirmed also that the person would not be named tomorrow either. Beyond that, no details were provided about when the announcement might be made, and other members of the transition team did not respond to inquiries.

What do you think? Matthew Burton has set up a prediction market about who the Obama CTO will be. At last check, there was a tie among a whole host of people. See the current predictions here. (It’s just for fun — virtual money, not ‘real’ money.)

Meanwhile, one of the DorobekInsider recommendations for a good CTO — DC CTO Vivek Kundra — got a nice profile in the Washington Post this morning. (For the record, the other DorobekInsider recommendation is Andrew McAfee, an associate professor at the Harvard Business School who is widely credited with coining the term “enterprise 2.0.”)

From the WP piece:

Kundra has introduced popular consumer tools to bureaucratic processes, runs his office like a tech start-up and works by the mantra that citizens are “co-creators rather than subjects.”

His ideas have caught the eye of President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team and landed him a role as a tech policy adviser to the new administration. His approach could serve as a model for how a federal chief technology officer, a new position Obama has pledged to appoint, might operate. Kundra has been mentioned as a possible candidate for the job.

The bidding process for city contracts is posted on YouTube, for example, and his employees use versions of Wikipedia and Twitter in the office. He wants to let drivers pay parking tickets and renew driver’s licenses on Facebook.

Read the full story here… and read Government Technology’s synopsys here.

Of course, there was a flurry of speculation that one of the reasons Steve Jobs was not going to be at MacWorld was because Jobs was going to be the Obama CTO. DorobekInsider survey says… BZZZZZZ

But the speculation may be coming to an end… we hope.

Fed 100 nomination: EPA’s Jeremy Ames

I noted earlier that I was going to make — and post — a number of nominations for Federal Computer Week’s Fed 100 awards. Of course, nothing motivates like a deadline — and the deadline is COB today. (You can post your nominations to FCW online at www.fcw.com/fed100. The 1105 Government Information Group sites migrated to a new content management system over the weekend — you can tell by the redesigned sites — but there are a number of loose ends — including the Fed 100 nomination form. So my guess is they will give people time to get their nominations in, I hope.)

As I noted, I will post my nomination here as well.

This one is for EPA’s Jeremy Ames, who spearheaded that wonderful project to create radon public service announcements by tapping in to the power of us.

Describe this person’s job
Jeremy Ames works for EPA’s Indoor Environments Division, which is responsible for air quality of indoor environments. This includes everything from asthma to radon.

Describe the work for which this person is being nominated
Ames was responsible for creating public service announcements. The challenge: Educate people about the dangers or radon. Rather then just hiring a company and paying them to create these PSAs for EPA, he used an innovative Web 2.0 approach: He let people create them for the EPA. And they did. They created their PSAs — and posted them on YouTube — and then EPA let people vote on the best one. Not only did they get more bang for EPA’s buck — you can see the videos for yourself.

What impact did this work have on the person’s organization or the larger federal IT community?

This was an innovative experiment — and should be an example to many other federal agencies — it was low risk and potentially high reward. Ames led the effort — and one of the most wonderful parts of it is that he did it largely under the radar. Most of EPA’s senior management team didn’t know about it. That is a real credit to their efforts to create a culture where people feel empowered to try something new. But it is a wonderful example of where an agency decided that it didn’t have to control the message — in the end, the people impacted by radon know more than anybody else. Ames allowed them to tell their stories.

In what way did the nominee go above and beyond their job description?

This experiment seems so easy, but as we know, few things are really easy. This was Ames idea — and he carried it out. The concept is simple, but he had to swim against the tide. The project spurred the creation of a its own social network of people impacted by radon, radonleaders.org.

View the winning video here… view the runners up here… and hear EPA’s Ames and Tom Kelly talk about it on Federal News Radio 1500 AM’s Daily Debrief with Chris Dorobek and Amy Morris here.