STATUS REPORT
conditions, evacuation routes, and school and government building floor plans. It does so without requiring local government to change their own systems.
For another example, The National Institutes of Health, together with the Food and Drug Administration and the National Library of Medicine, developed a tool called "Pillbox" that allows consumers to identify tablet and capsule medications, together with linked drug and labeling information. This site contains high-resolution images of pills along with appearance information concerning pill color, size, shape, and imprint. The Pillbox site can aid consumers—as well as medical emergency and poison center personnel—in the identification of unknown pharmaceuticals.
Nor is cooperation limited to government agencies. To the contrary, public-private collaboration as called for by the President's Transparency and Open Government Memorandum has led to many innovative uses of government information. For example, the Veterans Administration, with help from both other federal agencies and outside foundations, launched a "Blue Button" capability that allows veterans to download their personal health information from their "My HealtheVet" account. Since its launch in August 2010, the VA has had over 300,000 unique Blue Button downloads.
Such public-private collaboration has been encouraged over the past year through the establishment of the GSA's Challenge.gov. Challenge.gov provides a platform for government agencies to tap the creative and entrepreneurial spirit of experts and ordinary citizens alike to address problems identified by agencies. In its first year, Challenge.gov featured more than 100 challenges from more than 25 agencies across the executive branch. For example, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the State Department, and NASA have issued challenges to seek solutions to pressing technological problems relating to their missions.
To illustrate, in partnership with the Wright Brothers Institute, the United States Air Force Research Lab launched a new "Open Innovation Pavilion" featuring more than $100,000 in prizes for novel solutions to tough challenges facing the U.S. Air Force, including how to detect small arms fire within a fraction of a second and accurately pinpoint its source, how to drop humanitarian supplies into populated areas without danger of falling debris to the people below, how to stop an uncooperative fleeing vehicle without permanent damage to the vehicle or harm to any of its passengers, and how to determine the approximate age and gender of small groups of people at a distance. The America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 provided all agencies with broad authority to conduct prize competitions. Agency efforts to promote public-private collaboration and harness the ingenuity of those outside of government are ongoing.
Finally, as a complement to agencies' ongoing efforts, a recent report by the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology noted the necessity of an open government research and development agenda, with emphasis on understanding how open government policies spur economic growth. Based on that report, the Federal Chief Technology Officer convened the first "Open Government R&D Summit" in March 2011, bringing together scholars, researchers, and policymakers to address the most important issues that could impede open government's lasting success. Following the conference's success, several academic centers
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