Clay Johnson

A dream team of innovators have descended on Washington, D.C., where they spend six months within the federal government to work on initiatives to support entrepreneurs, small businesses and the overall economy. Read More »

As the problem-plagued roll-out of President Obama’s signature healthcare policy undergoes congressional scrutiny for the first time, we speak with Clay Johnson, a former Obama campaign innovation expert who founded Blue State Digital, the company that built Obama’s 2008 website. During a House panel on Thursday, lawmakers questioned executives of two of the lead contractors behind the website, healthcare.gov — CGI Federal and Quality Software Systems Incorporated — about the myriad of glitches and defects. Johnson says the new website is built with outdated and proprietary software. "When the government is building software like this, it ought to be built out in the open — built with a licensing system called open source so that the public truly owns it," Johnson says. He notes that "In 1996, Congress lobotomized itself by getting rid of its technology think tank called the Technology Assessment Office. So they’re writing bills where they don’t understand the technology required in their laws."

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One week after , the federal site to help you sign up for health insurance exchanges went down again overnight for additional software fixes. The Obama administration says the technology powering the marketplaces buckled under unexpectedly high traffic. But the ongoing software hiccups for point to a much thornier problem: procurement processes. Read More »

President Obama on Monday called for an overhaul of the way the federal government purchases information technology in the wake of the troubled launch of the Healthcare.gov website. Read More »

The U.S. federal government, led by the executive branch, should make all taxpayer-funded software development open-sourced by default. In the short run, this would help to prevent the recurrence of problems like those that plague healthcare.gov. Longer term, it will lead to better, more secure software and could allow the government to deliver a range of services more effectively. And it would enrich democracy to boot. Read More »

It’s bad enough that the state of Oregon has paid software giant Oracle over $100 million to build a healthcare exchange site that doesn’t work. But it now appears that Oregon is stuck with Oracle, unable to simply hire another firm to finish the job. It’s the latest setback for the troubled Obamacare rollout, and it provides a classic example of an old-school IT provider lagging behind the new and more effective way of building massive web operations — the open source approach behind mega-scale websites like Google and Facebook. Read More »

For the first time in history, a president has had to stand in the Rose Garden to apologize for a broken Web site. But HealthCare.gov is only the latest episode in a string of information technology debacles by the federal government. Indeed, according to the research firm the Standish Group, 94 percent of large federal information technology projects over the past 10 years were unsuccessful...

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