Clay Johnson

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Could Obama's Campaign Tech Gurus Fix Healthcare.gov? Let's Ask 'Em!

Tim Murphy | Mother Jones | October 24, 2013

The president's reelection team never had to tackle a project this big—or federal procurement rules... Read More »

'Rockstar' Innovators Descend on Washington

Camille Tuutti | Federal Computer Week | August 23, 2012

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 Todd Park Becomes Top Tech Recruiter, What's Next For CTO Role?

Rebecca Carroll | Nextgov.com | August 29, 2014

When Todd Park was asked in 2009 to become the Department of Health and Human Services' first chief technology officer, he wasn’t looking for a government job...The Obama administration announced Thursday that in his new role working for the White House from Silicon Valley, Park will continue his recruiting efforts and keep policy officials in touch with tech world developments and trends....

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Diagnosing the Online Health Exchange Debacle: "Proprietary" Software Needs a Dose of Open Source

Amy Goddman and Juan Gonzalez | Democracy Now | October 25, 2013

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 Johnson says the new website is built with outdated and proprietary software.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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Fighting The Next Obamacare Tech Fail

Dustin Volz and Sophie | Nextgov | January 16, 2014

In terminating CGI Federal's role in HealthCare.gov, President Obama finally "fired" one of the parties responsible for Obamacare's faulty website. That may appease the chorus of those calling on Obama to hold someone "accountable," but it does nothing to fix the underlying problem: the system for selecting contractors that picked CGI Federal in the first place. Read More »

Health Exchange Tech Problems Point To A Thornier Issue

Elise Hu | NPR | October 8, 2013

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 »

Memo To President Obama: HealthCare.gov Is More Than Just A Website

Katherine McIntire Peters | Nextgov | October 21, 2013

In explaining the administration’s implementation of the Affordable Care Act, President Obama sought to put the botched website in some perspective: “We did not wage this long contentious battle just around a website,” he noted. “That’s not what this was about.” Read More »

Obama Calls For IT Procurement Reform

Tom Shoop | Nextgov | November 5, 2013

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 »

Obamacare’s Open Source Project Lives On — Even After White House Kills It

Robert McMillan | Wired | October 22, 2013

Months before the ill fated launch of Healthcare.gov — the website built to give millions of Americans access to affordable health care — government officials were already describing it as something special. Read More »

Open-Source Everything: The Moral of the Healthcare.gov Debacle

Paul Ford | Business Week | October 16, 2013

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 »

Want Healthcare.gov To Work? Destroy And Rebuild Federal IT Procurement

Veronica Combs | MedCity News | October 27, 2013

The conversation started the first week after healthcare.gov launched. Maybe the problem was federal procurement, not Obamacare. Read More »

What Oracle’s Botched Obamacare Site Says About the Future of the Web

Klint Finley | Wired | March 7, 2014

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 »

White House Names 18 Presidential Innovation Fellows.

Bridget Mintz Testa | AOL Government | August 24, 2012

The White House introduced 18 incoming members of the Presidential Innovation Fellows at a ceremony in Washington on Thursday who will work as volunteers on five projects with innovators from within the federal government. Read More »

Why The Government Never Gets Tech Right

Clay Johnson | The New York Times | October 24, 2013

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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‘Badass Innovators’ Get Down To Work

Joseph Marks | Nextgov | August 23, 2012

Eighteen Presidential Innovation Fellows, sworn into government service by Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry on Thursday, have six months to get five major government initiatives up and running. Read More »