Another EC Meeting

The Executive Committee had a packed agenda for our monthly meeting yesterday. In addition to status updates pertaining to the various activities around the organization, the EC discussed the ACT strategic initiatives guidance; the administration’s proposed policy on collaboration, a proposed press policy, and new award in the Fellows program.

ACT has started its process of developing the 2009 strategic agenda. This list is intended to provide a government-wide view of critical IT activities and hot issues on which the government would like IAC input, advice and guidance. This will be the third iteration of this document. This year, at the request of Vivek Kundra, ACT used the five pillars to structure their discussion and output. They have mapped items from last year’s list, as deemed appropriate, into the five pillars and added additional items based on current hot issues. This draft is being circulated among the ACT board members for refinement prior to distribution to ACT/ IAC members to solicit member comments. We hope to distribute the agenda next week.

Additionally, we hope to post the strategic agenda on a wiki to enable web-based dialogue and community wide interactivity to refine the agenda. Ken Allen met recently with Dr. Childs, head of the IRM College at the National Defense University to discuss a collaboration to bring innovative technologies such as Twitter and other social media tools to ELC and, time permitting, MOC. They also discussed whether the IRM College could set up a wiki to make the ACT strategic agenda available for public comment. This certainly is supporting the administration’s transparency objective. We are proud that IAC can enable this type of support to ACT and the administration.

The EC also discussed the Administration’s proposed policy on collaboration. As you may recall from my March 16 post, this relates back to President Obama’s pending Open Government Directive. A task force has formed, has met twice and has reached out to membership broadly for input regarding recommendations for content in the Directive. If you have thoughts on how transparency and collaboration should be implemented by the agencies, please give Bob Dix or Ken Allen a call or send them an email.

The EC considered proposed changes to the press policy. We concluded that more work was needed to reflect a policy of openness yet respect for the desires of our government guest speakers. The EC will consider updates to the policy next month.

We also reviewed a proposal for a new award to recognize an individual among the Fellows who most exemplifies the vision and mission of the IAC Fellows. With a growing number of alumni from the Partners and Voyagers programs, this is an excellent way to recognize those individuals who remain connected and supportive of Fellows activities and the ACT-IAC mission.

That’s it for this update. Keep checking back for more updates.

Leslie