Blog
November 8, 2006
OMB says “Turn off duplicative systems…or else”
Jason Miller posted an enlightening article, reporting on Karen Evans’ intention to have agencies turn off duplicative systems. In past years, funding for IT that duplicated functionality in government-wide systems (e.g. Grants.gov’s find and apply) was cut. Now, though, OMB…
OMB: Initiatives will outlast Bush
GovExec published an interesting article last week about the permanence of initiatives such as the Lines of Business (grants management being one of them). Many agencies are asking themselves whether to pay a lot of attention to these initiatives, in light…
Altum acquires Easygrants from defunct Arlington Group
I see that our friends at Altum have acquired Arlington Group’s Easygrants software! This is a great development for Easygrant users because support was non-existent as a consequence of Arlington Group shutting up shop. Altum’s a great company and their founder, Ken Fang, is…
October 31, 2006
Solpath: an open source grants management package
Well I’m glad that someone has finally found the courage and means to start an open source grants management system project! These folks have just launched and are focused on foundations and non-profits. (Their chosen technology stack — PHP, MySQL,…
October 27, 2006
Resolving CVS Commit Conflicts with Word Documents
CVS is extremely popular for configuration management (with Subversion quickly gaining speed). It uses “optimistic locking” in which multiple users can work on the same file at the same time, and any conflicts are resolved when the file is “checked-in”. …
October 26, 2006
Grants.gov Stakeholder’s Meeting 10/25/06. And I don’t mean to be annoying. Honest!
The Grants.gov PMO held their bi-monthly Stakeholder’s Meeting yesterday and while I couldn’t attend (we’re responding to a large proposal and I’m — how can I put it? — going nuts) I got the notes from a colleague. The presentations should be on the Grants.gov…
Google seeks access to Grants.gov data (and others) — what about RSS?
They’re already indexing every book on the planet, so why not government data? GovExec reports that Google is trying to open government data to Internet search engines (though I can’t imagine which one they have in mind!) to better enable users…
October 25, 2006
TinyMCE, Spellchecker, and Firefox Crashes
TinyMCE is a powerful JavaScript-based WYSIWYG HTML editor that you can embed into TEXTAREA fields of your Web forms. In addition, a PHP based spell checking system called Spellchecker allows TinyMCE to highlight unknown words (using aspell or Google’s spelling Web service).…
October 23, 2006
GCN article about FM and GM integration
Jason Miller just filed new story for GCN discussing how the Financial Management Line of Business (FMLOB) and Grants Management Line of Business (GMLOB) are working together to figure out how they intersect. Yours truly is quoted in there (I’m…
October 19, 2006
+HelloWorld()
And so begins another blog, and good thing too, because there weren’t enough already!
Despite all the navel-gazing that tends to occur, there have been some extraordinary uses for them out there. The ones that I read on a daily basis tend…