Eight named Nextgov Award winners

Nextgov named eight winners in its inaugural awards program on Thursday, recognizing federal managers who overcame bureaucratic inertia and political resistance to establish innovative processes that improved government operations and citizens' lives.

The winners of the Nextgov Awards represented a range of efforts, from supporting e-diplomacy and streamlining the applications process for Social Security benefits to giving troops on the battlefields better video-streaming tools over constrained networks.

A panel of seven judges, including former federal technology executives and open government advocates, reviewed the nominations federal managers submitted. They chose winners based on the level of risks the nominees faced in pursuing their ideas and how innovative the projects were. The awards ceremony was held at Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington.

Blair Levin, former director of a task force that developed the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan, an Obama administration initiative to bring high-speed Internet to rural areas, highlighted in his keynote speech the "daunting challenge" that federal employees faced in overcoming resistance to new technologies within the government.

"In many ways, we're still suffering from innovator's dilemma and spend all our time trying to optimize the methods of the past, ignoring ways we could change them for the better," said Levin, now a fellow at the Aspen Institute.

He spoke about the importance -- and difficulty -- of pushing forward a vision from inside the bureaucracy. "Those of us who toil in civil service . . . generally want our work to be judged by its long-term fundamental values," he said. "But short-term values often steer the value of long-term work and can undercut our ability to improve our government operations."

Daniel Stoian, special assistant to the undersecretary for management at the State Department, won an award for developing IdeaLab, an information-sharing application that solicits suggestions from State employees to improve business practices. He said while trying to develop IdeaLab, higher level administrators said it could not be built, because they were uncomfortable with exposing internal problems to so many employees.

"I had to go through all the layers of the bureaucracy and convince them that it would only be done internally," he said.

Since then, IdeaLab's success has prompted the department to launch Sounding Board, an online forum that has collected 900 suggestions from employees worldwide to improve operations and policies.

Jeffrey Wheeler, deputy chief at the Office of Boat Forces, won a Nextgov award for bringing together the community of law enforcement agents and emergency responders under the Boat Operations and Training Program, a single system to train federal, local and military organizations to protect the nation's ports.

"The hardest thing wasn't so much developing the technology," he said, while colleagues lined up in the background to take photos with him. "It was trying to get everyone on board."

Other winners were:

--Daniel Hogan, program manager at the Fish and Wildlife Service

--Anita Kelly Bible, lead project manager for Ready Retirement at the Social Security Administration

--Christopher Jackson, deputy chief of the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance integration division for the U.S. Joint Forces Command

--Lynn Mokray, chief of the legal division at the Air Force's Judge Advocate General's Corps

--Susan Burrill, director of the risk management division at the Federal Protective Service

--Tiffany Smith, a program analyst in the Office of eDiplomacy at the State Department