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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.

Results 31-40 of 983

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May 20, 2013 Russia has officially withdrawn a letter of intent it filed in April 2012 saying it would join the Open Government Partnership, becoming the international transparency body’s first casualty.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 ...

How Data Can Aid Farmers' Markets and Education Innovations

May 16, 2013 Two things that came across my desk this week show the potential of President Obama’s new open data policy but also its potential pitfalls. That policy requires agencies to make all future data they collect open and machine readable by default. The hope is that entrepreneurs outside government will use ...

Cloud Computing Could Transform Foreign Aid

May 15, 2013 The next agency to invest heavily in the cloud may be the U.S. Agency for International Development. The agency is in the market for a flexible, cloud-based platform that will allow officials at USAID's mission offices overseas and Washington headquarters to rapidly build new technology, according to solicitation documents posted ...

Data Center Consolidation Savings ‘Minimal’ So Far

May 14, 2013 An initiative to consolidate federal data centers has yielded minimal savings so far and the government is unlikely to meet its goal of $3 billion in savings by 2015, the Government Accountability Office said in a report Tuesday. Agencies have also failed to adequately report on their data center cost ...

Dot-govs Dip Below 1,000

May 14, 2013 Remember that plan to drastically consolidate federal websites? Progress on the initiative has been slow since mid-2011 when President Obama first highlighted dot-gov proliferation as part of his campaign to cut government waste. As we approach the three-year anniversary of that initiative, though, the government has passed a milestone. For ...

The Story of an Open Document

May 14, 2013 When a cross-government team prepared to write the government’s new open data policy they wanted to do it in the most open way possible, Ben Balter, a Presidential Innovation Fellow who worked on the project, said. So for its primer on best open data practices, the team eschewed the common ...