2012 Cloud/GOV date announced: February 17, Washington D.C.
2011 Conference Highlights
- Presentations: you'll find coverage of our keynote sessions and other panels, as well as government Cloud Computing testimonials.
- Twitter Archive: follow our twitter conversation to catch many of the conference highlights.
- Media Coverage: check out the media buzz!
- Attendee List: you'll find an impressive roster of 265 federal, state and local government IT purchasers -- as well as ISVs and other industry influencers.
SAVE THE DATE
We will soon announce the date for our 2012 Cloud/Gov conference. In the meantime, if you want information on participating, please complete this form:
Cloud/Gov News 
Data Driven Innovation Case Study: Pearson-Enabling the Digital Ocean to Improve Student Outcomes
Mon, 20 May 2013 15:36
Data-Driven Innovation (DDI) benefits all sectors of our economy, increases efficiency, saves money and resources, and improves quality of life. From safety and security, to the environment and infrastructure, to health and education, the opportunities for DDI to improve our lives are boundless. In SIIA’s whitepaper, Data-Driven Innovation A Guide for Policymakers: Understanding and Enabling the Economic and Social Value of Data, we explored the ways our member companies are leveraging data to provide cutting edge solutions. Here’s one case study, from Pearson:
Today, we’re in the digital ocean. We can gather information about students’ daily learning activities and interactions with content as they happen in computer-based instruction. The increase of technology-based learning in schools enables us to have all students doing meaningful activity on digital devices. Computers now allow us to capture all kinds of data about what students do as they interact with learning material, seamlessly recorded as they go about their daily learning activity. These interactions can produce an “ocean” of data that, if used correctly, can give us a completely different view of how students progress in acquiring knowledge, skills, and attributes.
This ability to capture data from everyday student learning activity should fundamentally change how we think about assessment.
Invisible assessments allow us to gather information much more frequently without interrupting the flow of instruction, hence the term “invisible.” This lets us provide teachers, students, and parents with feedback about progress immediately and in time to make adjustments to teaching and learning. It also eliminates the common complaint about the heavy time requirements of traditional assessment.
By capturing many, many observations of a student’s learning activity over time, we are able to build models of student learning and proficiency without the pressure of performance on a single test.
David LeDuc is Senior Director, Public Policy at SIIA. He focuses on e-commerce, privacy, cyber security, cloud computing, open standards, e-government and information policy. Follow the SIIA public policy team on Twitter at @SIIAPubPolicy.
SIIA Says Fed IT Acquisition Reform is Moving in the Right Direction, But Concerns Remain
Wed, 20 Mar 2013 19:54
SIIA today applauded Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and the House Government Oversight & Reform Committee for including many of the organization’s recommendations in legislation to reform federal IT acquisition, but said further changes are still needed. Following the bill’s mark-up today, SIIA outlined several key areas that it believes must be addressed for the bill to have the intended positive impact on the federal IT marketplace.
Chairman Issa and his staff have clearly recognized that, more than 16 years after Clinger Cohen became law, federal IT acquisition reform is long overdue. We’ve been working closely with the Chairman and the Committee, and believe that the marked-up version of the legislation is much improved and headed in the right direction.
SIIA remains supportive of the legislation’s objectives, but we continue to have concerns with several specific provisions and the impact they will have on federal IT marketplace. Following today’s mark-up, we will continue to work with Chairman Issa and the committee in order to make improvements in four key areas. We remain very hopeful that, with careful consideration and deliberation, Congress will develop an effective solution to this important concern.
SIIA is seeking changes to the legislation in a number of areas, including:
* Removal of the provision that would create a standardized approach to security assessments for cloud products and services. This provision would essentially establish the FedRAMP process in statute and could conflict with FISMA requirements, creating confusion for cloud companies seeking to do business with the federal government.
* Revising the software licensing provisions, which currently fail to recognize the value of resellers, the varying types of user licenses, and the overall scope of software licensing in the federal government. The current provisions could potentially create additional barriers to entry for small and minority businesses.
* Revising the provision asking agencies to justify not using the Federal Strategic Sourcing Initiative (FSSI) for any purchase of services and supplies offered under FSSI. The current provision appears to give an unfair preference for FSSI, and the vast majority of IT products and services purchased by the federal government are too complex to be effectively purchased using FSSI.
* Updating the section on website transparency to make open data the default for government and to embrace the use of open application program interfaces (APIs).
Read SIIA’s full comments.
Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG. Sign up for the Public Sector Innovation Roundup email newsletter for weekly updates.
