But there is no clear consensus regarding what a digital watermark is, or what common standards and policies around it should be, leading many AI experts and policymakers to fear that the technology could fall short of its potential and even empower bad actors.

Industry groups and a handful of tech giants — most notably TikTok and Adobe — have been singled out by experts as leading the charge on AI watermarking and embracing a transparent approach to the technology. They’ll need all the help they can get during what promises to be an especially chaotic year in digital spaces. 

With over 2 billion people expected to vote in elections around the world in 2024, AI creators, scholars and politicians said in interviews with FedScoop that standards on the watermarking of AI-generated content must be tackled in the coming months — or else the proliferation of sophisticated, viral deepfakes and fake audio or video of politicians will continue unabated.

“This idea of authenticity, of having authentic trustworthy content, is at the heart of AI watermarking,” said Ramayya Krishnan, dean of Carnegie Mellon University’s information systems and public policy school and a member of President Joe Biden’s National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee. 

“Having a technological way of labeling how content was made and having an AI detection tool to go with that would help, and there’s a lot of interest in that, but it’s not a silver bullet,” he added. “There’s all sorts of enforcement issues.” 

Digital watermarking “a triage tool for harm reduction”

There are three main types of watermarks created by major tech companies and AI creators to reduce misinformation and build trust with users: visible watermarks added to images, videos or text by companies like Google, OpenAI or Getty to verify the authenticity of content; invisible watermarks that can only be detected through special algorithms or software; and cryptographic metadata, which details when a piece of content was created and how it has been edited or modified before someone consumes it.

Using watermarking to try and reduce AI-generated misinformation and disinformation can be helpful when the average consumer is viewing a piece of content, but it can also backfire. Bad actors can manipulate a watermark and create even more misinformation, AI experts focused on watermarking told FedScoop.

“Watermarking technology has to be taken with a grain of salt because it is not so hard for someone with a knowledge of watermarks and AI to being able to break it and remove the watermark or manufacture one,” said Siwei Lyu, a University at Buffalo computer science professor who studies deepfakes and digital forgeries. 

Lyu added that digital watermarking is “not foolproof” and invisible watermarks are often more effective, though not without their flaws. 

“I think watermarks mostly play on people’s unawareness of their existence. So if they know they can, they will find a way to break it.”

A senior Senate independent staffer deeply involved in drafting legislation related to AI  watermarking said the concern of bad actors using well-intentioned watermarks for manipulative purposes is “1,000% valid. It’s like Olympic athletes — now that I know that you’re looking for this drug, I’ll just take another drug. It’s like we need to try our best we can to keep pace with the bad actors.”

When it comes to AI watermarking, the Senate is currently in an “education and defining the problem” phase, the senior staffer said. Once the main problems with the technology are better defined, the staffer said they’ll begin to explore whether there is a legislative fix or an appropriations fix.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in September that ahead of the 2024 election, tackling issues around AI-generated content that is fake or deceptive and can lead to widespread misinformation and disinformation was an exceedingly time-sensitive problem.

“There’s the issue of actually having deepfakes, where people really believe … that a candidate is saying something when they’re totally a creation of AI,” the New York Democrat said after his first closed-door AI insight forum. 

“We talked about watermarking … that one has a quicker timetable maybe than some of the others, and it’s very important to do,” he added.

Another AI expert said that watermarking can be manipulated by bad actors in a small but highly consequential number of scenarios. Sam Gregory, executive director at the nonprofit WITNESS, which helps people use technology to promote human rights, said it’s best to think of AI watermarking as “almost a triage tool for harm reduction.” 

”You’re making available a greater range of signals on where content has come from that works for 95% of people’s communication,” he said. “But then you’ve got like 5% or 10% of situations where someone doesn’t use the watermark to conceal their identity or strip out information or perhaps they’re a bad actor. 

“It’s not a 100% solution,” Gregory added.

TikTok, Adobe leading the way on watermarking

Among major social media platforms, Chinese-owned TikTok has taken an early lead on watermarking, requiring users to be highly transparent when AI tools and effects are used within their content, three AI scholars told FedScoop. Furthermore, the company has created a culture of encouraging users to be comfortable with sharing the role that AI plays in altering their videos or photos in fun ways.

“TikTok shows you the audio track that was used, it shows you the stitch that was made, it shows you the AI effects used,” Gregory said. And as “the most commonly used platform by young people,” TikTok makes it “easy and comfortable to be transparent about how a piece of content was made with presence of AI in the mix.” 

TikTok recently announced new labels for disclosing AI-generated content. In a statement, the social media platform said that its policy “requires people to label AI-generated content that contains realistic images, audio or video, in order to help viewers contextualize the video and prevent the potential spread of misleading content. Creators can now do this through the new label (or other types of disclosures, like a sticker or caption).”

Major AI developers, including Adobe and Microsoft, also support some forms of labeling AI in their products. Both tech giants are members of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), which addresses the prevalence of misinformation online through the development of technical standards for certifying the source and history of online content.

Jeffrey Young, a senior solutions consultant manager at Adobe, said the company has “had a big drive for the content authenticity initiative” due in large part to its awareness that bad actors use Photoshop to manipulate images “for nefarious reasons.” 

“We realized that we can’t keep getting out in front to determine if something is false, so we decided to flip it and say, ‘Let’s have everybody expect to say this is true,’” Young said. “So we’re working with camera manufacturers, working with websites on their end product, that they’re able to rollover that image and say, this was generated by [the Department of Homeland Security], they’ve signed it, and this is confirmed, and it hasn’t been manipulated since this publication.”

Most major tech companies are in favor of labeling AI content through watermarking and are working to create transparent watermarks, but the tech industry recognizes that it’s a simplistic solution, and other actions must be taken as well to comprehensively reduce AI-generated misinformation online. 

Paul Lekas, senior vice president for global public policy & government affairs at the Software & Information Industry Association, said the trade group — which represents Amazon, Apple and Google, among others — is “very supportive” of watermarking labeling and provenance authentication but acknowledges that those measures do “not solve all the issues that are out there.” 

“Ideally we’d have a system where everything would be clear and transparent, but we don’t have that yet,” Lekas said. “I think another thing that we are very supportive of is nontechnical, which is literacy — media literacy, digital literacy for people — because we can’t just rely on technology alone to solve all of our problems.”

In Washington, some momentum on AI watermarking

The White House, certain federal agencies and multiple prominent members of Congress have made watermarking and the reduction of AI-generated misinformation a high priority, pushing through a patchwork of suggested solutions to regulate AI and create policy safeguards around the technology when it comes to deepfakes and other manipulative content.

Through Biden’s October AI executive order, the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology has been charged with creating authentication and watermarking standards for generative AI systems — following up on discussions in the Senate about similar kinds of verification technologies. 

Alondra Nelson, the former White House Office of Science and Technology Policy chief, said in an interview with FedScoop that there is enough familiarity with watermarking that it is no longer “a completely foreign kind of technological intervention or risk mitigation tactic.”

“I think that we have enough early days experience with watermarking that people have to use,” she said. “You’ve got to use it in different kinds of sectors for different kinds of concerns, like child sexual abuse and these sorts of things.” 

Congress has also introduced several pieces of legislation related to AI misinformation and watermarking, such as a bill from Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., to regulate deepfakes by requiring content creators to digitally watermark certain content and make it a crime to fail to identify malicious deepfakes that are related to criminal conduct, incite violence or interfere with elections.

In September, Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., Josh Hawley, R-Mo., Chris Coons, D-Del., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, proposed new bipartisan legislation focused on banning the use of deceptive AI-generated content in elections. In October, Sens. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, and John Kennedy, R-La., introduced the bipartisan AI Labeling Act of 2023, which would require clear labeling and disclosure on AI-generated content and chatbots so consumers are aware when they’re interacting with any product powered by AI.

Meanwhile, the Federal Election Commission has been asked to establish a new rule requiring political campaigns and groups to disclose when their ads include AI-generated content.

In the absence of any AI legislation within Congress becoming law or garnering significant bipartisan consensus, the White House has pushed to get tech giants to sign voluntary commitments governing AI, which require steps such as watermarking AI-generated content. Adobe, IBM, Nvidia and others are on board. The private commitments backed by the Biden administration are seen as a stopgap. 

From Nelson’s point of view, NIST’s work on the creation of AI watermarking standards will “be taking it to another level.” 

“One hopes that CIOs and CTOs will take it up,” she said. “That remains to be seen.”

The post AI watermarking could be exploited by bad actors to spread misinformation. But experts say the tech still must be adopted quickly appeared first on FedScoop.

The companies — Adobe, Cohere, IBM, Nvidia, Palantir, Salesforce, Scale AI, and Stability — join an initial seven that convened at the White House in July to sign on to the set of voluntary commitments overseeing how the emerging technology is developed and used. Representatives from the cohort met with Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, and other senior administration officials at the White House on Tuesday.

The first companies to accept the commitments were Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

The Biden administration says these commitments are an “immediate step and an important bridge to government action,” according to a fact sheet, as the White House develops an upcoming executive order and lawmakers consider legislation focused on AI. The fact sheet acknowledges the in-the-works executive order, saying the Office of Management and Budget will “soon release draft policy guidance for federal agencies to ensure the development, procurement, and use of AI systems is centered around safeguarding the American people’s rights and safety.”

“These commitments, which the companies have chosen to undertake immediately, underscore three principles that must be fundamental to the future of AI—safety, security, and trust—and mark a critical step toward developing responsible AI,” the White House said in the fact sheet. “As the pace of innovation continues to accelerate, the Biden-Harris Administration will continue to take decisive action to keep Americans safe and protect their rights.”

In total, the companies agreed to eight commitments, which range from opening their algorithms to security testing and sharing information across industry on them prior to launch to a variety of measures that put security, transparency and responsibility at the forefront of their products.

“We applaud the Administration for making this a priority — open discussions between industry and policymakers like today are foundational to enacting safeguards without stopping AI development,” Akash Jain, president of Palantir U.S. government and an attendee at the meeting, said in a statement. “Today, Palantir, along with other leading AI companies, made a set of voluntary commitments to advance effective and meaningful AI governance, which is essential for open competition and maintaining US leadership in innovation and technology.”

These commitments complement the actions of the U.S.’s allies, such as Japan’s G-7 Hiroshima Process, the United Kingdom’s Summit on AI Safety, and India’s leadership as Chair of the Global Partnership on AI. 

Short of forthcoming policy or legislation, the Biden administration in the past year issued its foundational Blueprint for an AI ‘Bill of Rights,’ which is meant to work in tandem with the AI Risk Management Framework published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. However, some policy and tech experts say those leading frameworks are inherently contradictory and provide confusing guidance for tech companies working to develop innovative products and the necessary safeguards around them.

The post Eight more tech companies join White House commitment to manage AI risks appeared first on FedScoop.

The launch of the bot comes amid a push across federal government to use robotic process automation to streamline agency processes. It will automate the currently manual process of paying invoices every month and updating budget lines items needed to pay invoices to customers or vendors. 

“It’s the first time we’re actually automating something through robotic process automation. So that’s what makes it so innovative for us is because the bureau doesn’t have bots right now, we were just sort of like putting our toes in that world,” Peter Sursi, head of finance modernization, accounts payable and relocation services said at the Adobe Government Forum in Washington on Tuesday. “So for us to get one on the finance side for us is pretty exciting. It’ll save us a lot of labor hours.” 

The tool would affect all 56 FBI field offices and approximately 250 task force officers that process the financial payments within those offices as well as FBI customers who get paid through the invoices which were previously manual processed and time intensive.

Sursi said the new finance bot was created in the past two months and is in final stages of testing, which has energized his team to create a longer list of FBI finance projects that could be automated and made much faster thanks to bot automation.

In March, State Department CIO Kelly Fletcher revealed that her agency had used robotic process automation to cut the processing time for its monthly financial statement from two months to two days.

Speaking at FedScoop’s ITModTalks, Fletcher said financial reporting was one of several areas where the agency is using AI to improve the efficiency of back-office operations, which has the ability to substantially improve reporting processes because of State’s federated structure and global operations.

The post FBI finance team working on first software bot appeared first on FedScoop.

A recent report, “Achieve mission success one stage at a time,” produced by Adobe, proposes a three-stage approach to digitizing documents and workflows that can help agency leaders build upon their existing digital modernization strategies.

The guide explores how to: 

• Create better experiences for citizens and employees by digitizing document processes
• Secure document management with digital, signable and integrated document approval workflows
• Streamline processes to improve agency efficiency and drive down costs
• Simplify implementation and achieve quick wins and steady progress with a staged approach to digital document modernization

Read the full report and uncover a fresh, creative solution to solving your agency’s digital modernization challenges.

This article was produced by Scoop News Group for FedScoop for, and sponsored by, Adobe.

The post A three-stage approach to digitizing documents and workflows appeared first on FedScoop.

The report, “Building from a Strong Foundation: It’s Time for Digital Government,” sheds light on the finding of a survey that asked 160 U.S. government decision-makers across federal, state and local agencies about the lasting impact of the pandemic on modernization initiatives to improve agency operations and online citizen engagement.

Of those respondents, 66% said their agency will maintain accelerated digital transformation progress as the pandemic subsides and two-thirds said that they have either applied for, or plan to apply for, government funding to further support digital transformation initiatives.

The report found that government agencies have made tremendous progress in their digital transformation programs over the last 17 months. Agencies ill-prepared for the overnight transition to remote work and digital services rose to the challenge. Accelerating their digital modernization has allowed agencies to better serve and support citizens and employees now and into the future, according to the findings.

The study, produced by Forrester Consulting study and commissioned by Adobe, also discovered:

• How digital processes have improved citizen and employee satisfaction
• What lasting impacts the pandemic has had on agency operations
• Why now is the time for a digital-first government

Read the full report to uncover more digital transformation trends of U.S. government agencies.

This article was produced by Scoop News Group for FedScoop, and sponsored by, Adobe.

The post Survey points to strong support for digital transformation projects appeared first on FedScoop.

One of these key milestones is the first anniversary of the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act (21^st Century IDEA), which was authored by Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and signed into law Dec. 20, 2018. Similar to the President’s Management Agenda Cross-Agency Priority (CAP) Goal, the 21^st Century IDEA is also focused on improving customer experience with federal services.

The law strives for a more consistent, mobile-friendly user experience across federal digital services and websites. Essentially, it requires agencies to take stock of their public-facing digital assets and streamline and modernize them for the 21st century.

Departments and agencies may want to consider using this milestone as an opening to assess their critical technology investments that can support their unique missions and meet the ongoing benchmarks outlined in the 21st Century IDEA. This is a terrific inflection point and opportunity.

Because there are many competing demands on agencies, it is hard to meet these significant benchmarks on citizen experience. Nearly everyone sees it as something that is sorely needed, and leaders should be applauded when they prioritize these citizen-facing touchpoints over the operating and maintaining legacy systems budget black holes. That is bold leadership with real impact. In fact, the federal government continues to spend 80 percent of its IT budget on legacy technologies, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office — that’s nearly $72 billion in total. This model is not only unsustainable, but it also precludes federal agencies from meeting requirements outlined in the 21^st Century IDEA, spanning from website modernization to the digitization of government forms and accelerating the use of electronic signatures.

As the 21^st Century IDEA celebrates its first anniversary, we’re already seeing strong agency leadership that prioritizes IT spending on long-lasting technologies to help citizens and employees. Here are five federal agencies and departments that are paving the way to meet the tenets of the 21^st Century IDEA:

Department of Commerce/U.S. Census Bureau

For the U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 will serve as an inflection point because for the first time in nearly 230 years, the census tabulation is going digital. Citizens will now have the option to complete the census online, by phone or through the mail, which will provide a more seamless experience for citizens to submit their responses wherever they are and through whatever device they choose. The U.S Census Bureau is a leader in meeting the 21^st Century IDEA requirements through its design of a mobile-friendly website that is configured to drive efficiency and cost savings. The digital migration is expected to save billions of dollars in the coming years and will likely lead to greater participation in the census. For instance, the Census Bureau projects nearly 55 percent of the U.S. population will respond to the census online – that alone amounts to nearly three-quarters of the total respondents during the 2010 census.

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

Upon joining the General Services Administration’s Centers of Excellence, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) set a goal to migrate more than 950 paper-based forms to mobile-friendly, cloud-hosted forms. Through this modernization effort, HUD integrated best-in-class technology with existing government services, ensuring that all Americans – especially senior citizens – have the necessary tools available to obtain affordable housing. As a result of digitizing its broad swath of paper-based forms, HUD also meets a benchmark outlined in the 21^st Century IDEA, which requires all forms to be digital by December 2020.

General Services Administration

The General Services Administration (GSA) often carries the torch when it comes to digital government transformation. Whether it’s the Technology Transformation Services (TTS), which helps agencies build, procure or share technology or the Office of Customer Experience (OCE) which is responsible for ensuring customer needs are top of mind when making critical decisions, the GSA oversees several organizations that assess the current state of its digital services and identify ways to improve these services. The GSA has already put together a multi-disciplinary team to guide GSA as they inventory and assess their digital services to meet the 21^st Century IDEA’s vision of improving digital experiences across government.  GSA’s Digital.gov team is also working on creating more visibility around the Federal Web Council and the work that they’ve been doing around 21^st Century IDEA.

U.S. Department of Energy

The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) within the U.S. Department of Energy sits at the forefront of innovation, as it is responsible for transitioning the nation to embrace a global clean energy economy. The Department took a forward-looking approach to updating its website and forms. Through the redesign of its website, the EERE incorporated visually compelling infographics about taxpayer investments to seamless access to digital forms for grant funding applications, ensuring a greater user experience for citizens.

U.S. Department of Agriculture

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) launched a series of programs that align with the key objectives of the 21^st Century IDEA. One standout program is the Voice of Customer initiative, which enables employees to leverage data analytics and feedback to identify the customer needs and execute strategies to accommodate them. In addition, the USDA continues its efforts to consolidate data centers and update Farmers.gov, a site dedicated to helping U.S. farmers obtain services, such as a farm loan, faster than ever before.

Although these five agencies are paving the way when it comes to digitizing their services, other agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), are also making great headway. To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the 21^st Century IDEA enactment, citizens and government employees alike take comfort in knowing their government is focused on activities that directly impact their lives, such as modernizing forms and websites, as outlined in 21st Century IDEA.

In short, as we celebrate the first year of the 21st Century IDEA enactment, it is heartening to see such a  tremendous early impact for citizens, and there is still so much more to come.

Jace Johnson is VP of Global Government Relations & Public Policy for Adobe.

The post The five leaders of the 21st Century IDEA appeared first on FedScoop.

But in order to make a real difference, digital-services leaders said at Adobe’s Government Symposium on Thursday, agencies need to expand their thinking. One way to make significant improvements in customer experience (CX) is to take a holistic view of all the public-facing elements of an agency’s mission, said Marcy Jacobs, the executive director of the U.S. Digital Service at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and Simchah Suveyke-Bogin lead of the Customer Experience Center of Excellence at the General Services Administration.

“The way government is funded and organized doesn’t lead to good cross-agency CX improvements,” Jacobs said during a panel on personalized digital experiences. “It could be that a business line is building a thing and they’re not thinking about the context of how … anyone interacts across multiple touch-points.”

For example, a large agency like the VA might provide several unrelated services to the same person, Jacobs said, but there shouldn’t be wide variations in the CX for those tasks.

“It gets tricky when one channel at a time is trying to [improve customer experience]” Suveyke-Bogin said. “Coordinating” plans across different areas and teams is important she said.

Michael Leen, who works at the digital production company MediaMonks, said that in the private sector, this kind of coordinated approach can yield “incredible cost savings.”

But taking a wide view isn’t without challenges, Jacobs admitted. Sometimes looking at the whole of an agency “can be paralyzing,” she said.

“It’s big and it’s complicated and it’s multi-channel and it’s multi-year budgets and it’s not something that can be tackled, probably, in an administration,” she said. But try not to get too caught up in all that. Instead — “start with something.”

At the VA, the relaunch of VA.gov in November 2018 as a homepage for the agency-provided benefits that veterans use most was preceded by years spent developing and testing new digital tools at Vets.gov. And while the new VA.gov is important, it’s also just the very tip of a very large iceberg. The initial relaunch included just 200 redesigned pages of the more than 400,000 across VA.gov. Poke around on the site and it doesn’t take long to find “old” pages. These, Jacobs told FedScoop in February, will get rewrites and updates in the coming months.

“Just follow a thread and get some momentum and learn and then continue to iterate and grow that,” Jacobs advised Thursday. “Because trying to solve it all at once is not possible.”

The post Customer experience is a whole-of-agency endeavor, leaders say appeared first on FedScoop.

Adobe announced Tuesday that Olson has joined the firm as head of industry strategy and marketing for public sector, a position that will focus on introducing the company’s slate of customer experience solutions to the federal market.

“Adobe is an incredibly innovative company that has been recognized globally as a leader in technology for building capabilities that have tremendous impact at scale for their customers,” Olson said in a statement. “I’m excited by the opportunity to partner with the public sector to share this experience.”

Olson led the General Services Administration’s technology services and acquisition arm following the departure of former Director Joanne Collins Smee in August 2018. She oversaw the ongoing IT Modernization Center of Excellence efforts at the Department of Agriculture during her tenure, as well as GSA’s September selection of the Department of Housing and Urban Development as the next agency to take part in the CoE initiative.

Prior to her tenure, Olson served as TTS chief of staff, as well as the director of the service’s Innovation Portfolio, overseeing various projects, such as Challenge.gov, Digital.gov and the Emerging Citizen Technology Office, among others.

The move to Adobe comes at a fortuitous time, when the Trump administration has placed a strong emphasis on focusing IT modernization efforts on improving citizen-facing services and customer experience.

The San Jose, Calif.-based technology company offers a slate of cloud-based, customer experience products, and Olson said the new job adheres closely to her experience in helping drive digital transformation in the public sector.

“Throughout my career, I have experienced the power of what can be accomplished when government and industry come together to share experiences and build solutions together,” she said. “I’ve had the unique opportunity to do this from multiple vantage points, most recently at GSA, working collaboratively across government to transform how agencies build, buy and share technology to improve user experiences.”

GSA selected former SunTrust Banks CIO and Technology Business Management Council board chairman Anil Cheriyan to be Olson’s successor last month.

Olson was a 2018 FedScoop 50 award winner.

The post Former TTS chief Kelly Olson lands at Adobe appeared first on FedScoop.

On Monday, the executive branch convened around 150 tech leaders, including representatives of Amazon, Apple, Adobe and more, in order to “explore ways for more people to take a civic tour of duty,” as Chris Liddell, White House deputy chief of staff for policy coordination, put it in a statement.

The summit is the biggest push to date for this relatively nascent concept, a process by which private sector tech employees may take a leave of absence from the hallowed halls of places like Google or Microsoft for a short-term appointment in government. But the interest doesn’t come out of nowhere — behind the scenes, an informal group that includes a White House office, a range of tech companies and even some industry associations has been working hard to make civic leave accessible.

Here’s what that looks like, and some of the challenges both companies and the government are facing along the way.

Like pro bono, but for technologists

The blueprint for civic leave for technologists, proponents say, is simple. Many professions, like law and medicine, have an inbuilt culture of civic work — think working pro bono hours or joining Doctors Without Borders. If you work in law or medicine, you probably have a colleague or mentor who has participated in a program like this, and the familiarity breeds comfort.

Tech, a comparatively young industry, doesn’t have that well-laid path. But with the rise in digital-native groups in government like the U.S. Digital Service and the General Services Administration’s 18F, short-term appointments have become possible. Now, proponents want to push pro bono for tech into the mainstream.

“The country benefits when patriotic citizens with technical expertise choose to serve at the federal, state or local level,” Liddell explained.

Industry group BSA | The Software Alliance, which boasts members like Adobe, IBM, Slack and others, has been working closely with the White House Office of American Innovation to align government needs and company expectations when it comes to making civic leave a reality.

Fundamentally, BSA Vice President of Legislative Strategy Craig Albright told FedScoop, the exchange of talent can be a win-win-win — for employees, their companies and the government.

For the employee, a turn in government can be a career accelerant. Even as a junior employee, he said, “the government is a place where you can be handed responsibility.”

For the companies? “If the government were able to make use of technology more effectively, then that certainly creates opportunities for [software vendors],” he said. But there’s a deeper interest, too, he argued. “The technology industry does have a deep sense of wanting to do good, wanting to make things better, wanting to solve problems. It’s just part of the culture.”

And the government, finally, gets talent — talent that, conventionally, might prove to be otherwise inaccessible.

The U.S. Digital Service’s Eddie Hartwig, recently named the office’s deputy administrator, told FedScoop that the value of civic service is that it extends the possible field of prospects. Recruiting to USDS is hard, he said, because it must “catch people right at that moment,” when they want a new opportunity but are OK with the time limits that come with the organization’s short-term employment strategy. The promise of a private sector job that one can return to after a few months in government may encourage a greater diversity of people to take the leap into public service, Hartwig said.

‘The things that our engineers can do, no one else in the world can do’

There are a number of major American tech companies that already have established civic leave policies, including Google, Adobe and Microsoft. For Adobe, it all began three or four years ago.

“We were looking at groups like the U.S. Digital Service and 18F that were really getting some momentum in the government and wondering if there’s a way to get employees involved,” Jace Johnson, Adobe’s head of government relations, told FedScoop.

The company realizes that it has a resource — talent — that the government often finds it hard to come by. “The things that our engineers can do, no one else in the world can do,” Johnson said. And these engineers, he added, get really excited about the types of problems the government must solve.

By poking around internally, Johnson discovered that Adobe’s standard leave policy is actually pretty flexible. Employees could theoretically utilize an Adobe leave of absence for any number of reasons, from working for an NGO to taking a turn of civic service and more.

Despite this, many employees don’t know that civic leave is an option. So Johnson began a sort of internal marketing campaign. Exposing tech talent to the opportunities available, he said, “seems to be the best role that we can play.”

A model policy

Microsoft, according to multiple interviewees, is thought to have the most advanced civic leave policy.

A look at the company’s policy document and attendant “civic leave application,” a copy of which was obtained by FedScoop, provides insight into how it’s handled there. The document precisely lays out who is eligible for civic leave, how to request it, what happens to benefits and bonuses while they’re away, and the conditions of return.

“Microsoft allows leaves for significant work that is an opportunity for employees to apply the skills normally used in the course of their work for Microsoft to advance civic goals, and to gain skills that can provide development opportunities and increase market knowledge,” the policy reads.

Employees with two years of work under their belts at the company and a good performance history are eligible for the leave; the application for interested employees requires basic information about the position and why it’s a good fit or opportunity. Microsoft offers to keep positions open for employees to return to “to the extent feasible” for up to 12 weeks. Civic leave for more than 18 months is not typically granted, the policy states.

Microsoft declined to comment for this article.

‘There’s definitely interest,’ but will it take off?

So who participates in civic leave? Finding numbers and specific stories can be challenging. Most tech companies that allow civic leave don’t have readily available data on their use of it. Johnson said there have “undoubtedly” been Adobe employees who have used their leave to do civic work, but that the company doesn’t track specifics.

USDS also does not have a sense for how many people join while on civic leave; USDSers are treated the same whether they plan to return to a previous employer after serving or not, Hartwig said.

A White House official, meanwhile, estimated “a couple thousand” tech employees total, from various companies, have joined government for term appointments — a number the White House wants to scale up. “The more people do it the easier it becomes,” the official added.

But those thousands might not be “doing it” in a strict sense. One anecdotal issue that Johnson and others mentioned is that some employees who take civic leave don’t ever return to the original company — instead staying in government longer than expected or using the experience as a “springboard” for their next role.

“We [at Adobe] don’t view that as a bad thing,” Johnson said. But it’s easy to see why some companies might have a different opinion, and discourage civic leave out of the fear that it’ll cost them their workforce.

Another challenge inherent in talking about civic leave may be its resemblance to a kind of revolving door for the metaphorical “swamp” of Washington. But government officials are quick to assuage concerns that civic leave could create too cozy a relationship between government and industry.

According to Office of Management and Budget rules, Hartwig said, USDSers who plan to go back to a private sector company are barred from working on projects relating to that company while in service at USDS.

The White House official said maintaining neutral distance needs to be “a huge priority of any kind of public service,” and cited “existing mechanisms” that can help. “This is one of the areas where federal policy is helpful,” the official said. “The regulations around procurement, etcetera are pretty clear-cut.”

At this point, it remains to be seen if civic leave will become as de rigueur in tech as similar acts of service are in other career areas. However, significant stakeholders seem aligned on trying to promote it moving forward, whether through further White House summits or something else.

“It’s a priority for us,” the White House official said.

The post The White House wants to make civic leave for technologists normal and accessible. Will it take off? appeared first on FedScoop.

Maybe another website consolidation effort could help, said experts of Adobe, Amazon Web Services and Akamai Technologies at an event Wednesday in Washington.

When the question becomes, “Do we need one standard for websites across government,” then government should think about what is good for the citizen, said Brett McMillen, general manager of civilian government at Amazon Web Services. It’s not ideal when two sites under the same department have different designs, he said.

“Sometimes we’re confusing to citizens in having lots of different looks and feels,” McMillen said.

John Landwehr, a vice president at Adobe and chief technology officer for the software company’s public sector business, said it had a good experience in helping Canada’s government in a consolidation effort.

Many organizations are worried that they are going to lose control if their sites are consolidated, and that afterward, changes to the website will be slow to be implemented, he said.

“That is completely false,” he said.

He said agencies can get management responsibility for different sections of website content, while the overseeing department maintains one look and feel for the whole website.

Another thing to consider, Landwehr said: “If there are these scorecards and there continue to be a number of agencies that score low on accessibility and mobility and other key metrics, perhaps they should be the first ones to be consolidated into a portal that provides those capabilities by default for all the tenants of that main website.”

He added: “That could be a good way to make sure that there’s incentive for organizations to stay current, and if for some reason they can’t because of budget or expertise, they do have another platform where this can be consolidated.”

White House leverage

The post Another federal website consolidation effort? Vendors say it could benefit the public appeared first on FedScoop.