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Joseph Marks

Staff Correspondent

Joseph Marks covers government technology issues, social media, Gov 2.0 and global Internet freedom for Nextgov. He previously reported on federal litigation and legal policy for Law360 and on local, state and regional issues for two Midwestern newspapers. He also interned for Congressional Quarterly’s Homeland Security section and the Associated Press’s Jerusalem Bureau. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin and a master’s in international affairs from Georgetown.

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GSA Softened Some Requirements for Bulk Wireless Buying Program

7:40 AM ET The General Services Administration modified the terms of a bulk purchasing program for wireless phone service inked Wednesday after a government auditor found the agency was seeking benefits that weren’t common in commercial wireless plans. Verizon, which was competing to be one of the wireless suppliers under GSA’s Wireless Federal ...

White House Releases New Tools for Digital Strategy Anniversary

May 23, 2013 The White House marked the one-year anniversary of its digital government strategy Thursday with a slate of new releases, including a catalog of government APIs, a toolkit for developing government mobile apps and a new framework for ensuring the security of government mobile devices. Those releases correspond with three main ...

GSA Inks Bulk Wireless Buying Program With Top Telecoms

May 22, 2013 The General Services Administration inked a blanket purchase agreement with four major wireless providers Wednesday that it said would save the government $300 million over five years. The contract with AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon will dramatically reduce the number of individual wireless phone plans throughout government and allow agencies ...

NASA Contest Winners Offer Microclimate Data on Earth and Spinach on Mars

May 22, 2013 The “galactic impact” winner of NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge crowd sources micro-climate data, using volunteers and low-cost sensors, to give a much richer portrait of weather patterns across a city. The NASA Greener Cities Project, produced by a team of developers from Gothenburg, Sweden, has the greatest “potential to ...

Massive Catalog of Streaming Government Data Coming Thursday

May 22, 2013 Government data officials have nearly completed an exhaustive list of nearly 300 application programming interfaces that will allow outsiders to stream up-to-date information from government agencies straight to their computers, websites and mobile apps. The final version of the federal API catalog will be released Thursday on the government dataset ...

VanRoekel to Temporarily Lead OMB Management Team

May 21, 2013 Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel will temporarily lead the White House Office of Management and Budget’s management team, an OMB spokeswoman said Tuesday. OMB Director Sylvia Burwell asked VanRoekel to lead the management team on an interim basis until a new deputy director for management is confirmed, spokeswoman Ari ...

How Feds Fail

May 20, 2013 During a panel discussion on innovation’s role in government on Monday, an audience member asked participants how they react when innovations fail. The panel took place at the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council’s annual Management of Change conference in Cambridge, Md. Here’s what the panelists said. It’s ...

Shared Services Can Be a Money Maker for Some Agencies

May 20, 2013 Sharing services isn’t just a good way for federal departments to lower information technology costs, it’s also a way for underfunded agencies to scratch back some of their dwindling budgets by providing services to their peers, a Customs and Border Protection official said Monday. CBP’s technology division has lost more ...

From Russia with Opacity

May 20, 2013 Russia has officially withdrawn a letter of intent it filed in April 2012 saying it would join the Open Government Partnership, becoming the international transparency body’s first casualty. Open government and technology blogger Alex Howard broke the news of Russia’s withdrawal from the OGP on Friday. Nathaniel Heller, whose organization ...

White House Defends Obamacare on We the People

May 17, 2013 The White House turned to its petition site We the People late Thursday to combat Republican criticisms of President Obama’s two-year-old healthcare overhaul. Around the same time that the House of Representatives voted for the 37th time to repeal the 2010 Affordable Care Act, the White House posted responses to ...