White House, The

Last week’s G20 Summit in Hangzhou, China showed that US leadership has driven a growing global consensus on a number of issues central to the growth of the digital economy and the high paying jobs of the future. Due in no small part to U.S. leadership, this year the G-20 endorsed policies long advocated by the United States that will help drive innovation and entrepreneurship and make the digital economy an engine for global opportunity.

1. Free Flow of Data.
2. Multistakeholder Internet Governance.
3. Net Neutrality.
4. Broadband Opportunity.
5. Intellectual Property.
6. Strengthening Cybersecurity.
7. Transparency and Good Governance.

[Penny Prtizkers is the US Secretary of Commerce. Jeffrey Zients is the Director of the National Economic Council and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy]

In his final State of the Union Address and subsequent weekly address, President Barack Obama set a bold goal—every American student should have the opportunity to learn computer science (CS). Since the President’s call to action, strong momentum for CS education has been growing at all levels of government and in the private sector. Twelve states have taken concrete policy steps to expand CS education—and there are now 31 states that allow CS to count towards high school graduation. More than 100 organizations have already pledged more than $250 million to support CS education. To mark this progress, and celebrate new commitments in support of the President’s initiative, the White House is hosting a summit on Computer Science for All. Key announcements being made include:

More than $25 million in new grants awarded from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to expand CS education
A new CSforAll Consortium of more than 180 organizations, which will connect stakeholders with curriculum and resources, as well as track progress towards the goal of Computer Science for All
New commitments from more than 200 organizations, ranging from expanded CS offerings within the Girl Scouts of the USA that could reach 1.4 million girls per year, to Code.org supporting professional development for 40,000 additional teachers, to new collaborations to bring CS to students in a variety of settings from African-American churches to family coding nights to tribal Head Start programs to students as Chief Science Officers.

President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate David J. Arroyo to be a member of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Board of Directors.

Arroyo is Senior Vice President and Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer at Scripps Networks Interactive, where he has worked since 2004. Arroyo was an Associate at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher from 2000 to 2004. He served as a Law Clerk for Judge James G. Carr in the United States District Court from 1999 to 2000 and as an Associate at Kirkland & Ellis from 1996 to 1999. Arroyo was Chairman of the Board of Latino Justice from 2008 to 2012 and received the Luminary Award from the National Association of Multi-Ethnicity in Communications in 2010. He was first appointed to the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2014. Arroyo received a B.A. from Duke University and a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School.

While the vast majority of cyber incidents can be handled through existing policies, certain cyber incidents that have significant impacts on an entity, our national security, or the broader economy require a unique approach to response efforts. These significant cyber incidents demand unity of effort within the Federal Government and especially close coordination between the public and private sectors.

This Presidential Policy Directive (PPD) sets forth principles governing the Federal Government’s response to any cyber incident, whether involving government or private sector entities. For significant cyber incidents, this PPD also establishes lead Federal agencies and an architecture for coordinating the broader Federal Government response. This PPD also requires the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to maintain updated contact information for public use to assist entities affected by cyber incidents in reporting those incidents to the proper authorities.

The Obama Administration continues to build on this history of innovation by announcing new wireless research efforts that will improve testing and research of advanced wireless technologies. This effort will help spur innovation in many ways, from pushing the frontiers of tele-medicine through robot-assisted remote surgeries, to testing of autonomous vehicles that talk to each other to keep us safe, to the roll-out of smart manufacturing equipment in factories, to providing more connectivity for more people. Each one of these innovations has the potential to support increased productivity growth that can put more money in the pocket of American families.

Thanks in large part to these forward-thinking spectrum policy initiatives, the United States has become a world leader in wireless, achieving the goal the President set in the 2011 State of the Union that more than 98 percent of Americans should have access to fast 4G/LTE mobile broadband, which operates at speeds up to ten times faster than eight years ago. These policies also help to ensure that the United States is ahead of the curve in working to avoid a spectrum crunch, where the fixed amount of spectrum available would limit new development.

The Advanced Wireless Research Initiative will build on President Obama’s seven-and-a-half-year track record of accomplishment in wireless and wireline broadband policy.

The National Science Foundation is committing $50 million over the next 5 years, as part of a total $85 million investment by NSF and private-sector entities, to design and build four city-scale advanced wireless testing platforms, beginning in FY 2017. As a part of this investment, NSF also announces a $5 million solicitation for a project office to manage the design, development, deployment, and operations of the testing platforms, in collaboration with NSF and industry entities. Each platform will deploy a network of software-defined radio antennas city-wide, essentially mimicking the existing cellular network, allowing academic researchers, entrepreneurs, and wireless companies to test, prove, and refine their technologies and software algorithms in a real-world setting. These platforms will allow researchers to conduct at-scale experiments of laboratory-or-campus-based proofs-of-concept, and will also allow four American cities, chosen based on open competition, to establish themselves as global destinations for wireless research and development.

NSF is also announcing plans to invest $350 million over the next 7 years in fundamental research on advanced wireless technology projects that can utilize NSF’s share of time on these platforms. This will allow a broad base of NSF-funded experiments on potential breakthrough technologies to be taken from proof-of-concept to real-world testing at scale, here in the United States.

In addition to these testing platforms and research investments, the Administration is also announcing additional coordinated efforts and investments across Federal agencies to help accelerate the growth and development of advanced wireless technology.

President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate Janette L. Dates to be a member of the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Dr. Dates is the Dean Emerita of the Howard University School of Communications, a position she has held since 2012.Dr. Dates served as Dean of the Howard University School of Communications from 1996 to 2012, Acting Dean from 1993 to 1996, and Associate Dean from 1987 to 1992, having first joined the University as an Assistant Professor in 1981.She was a Freedom Forum Media Studies Center Fellow at Columbia University from 1992 to 1993, an Associate Professor at Coppin State College from 1985 to 1987, and an Assistant Professor at Morgan State University from 1977 to 1980. Dr. Dates was Anchor and Co-Producer for the series The Negro in U.S. History from 1973 to 1974, and Producer, Writer, and Anchor on the weekly television program North Star from 1972 to 1973.She served as a member of the Baltimore Mayor’s Cable Communication Commission from 1990 to 1994. Dr. Dates was first appointed to the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2013.Dr. Dates received a B.S. from Coppin State College, an M.Ed. from Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park.

President Barack Obama has asked US Chief Technology Officer and Assistant to the President Todd Park to take on a new role for the Administration as a technology advisor based in Silicon Valley.

Park will begin the new role in September after he and his family have returned home to California.

Park’s focus will be recruiting more top tech talent like Mikey Dickerson into government and identifying innovative ways to improve the quality of government digital services, two central goals of the President’s Smarter IT Delivery agenda. He will also help ensure that the Administration has an on-the-ground sense of how technology is evolving and can craft policy and initiatives accordingly.

Moving forward, Mikey Dickerson, Administrator of the newly created US Digital Service, will draw on 13 key "plays" drawn from private and public-sector best practices that, used together, will help government agencies provide services that won't only work better for users -- they'll take less time and money to operate.

Follow along as Dickerson makes his way through Day One.

The Obama Administration is formally launching the US Digital Service.

Mikey Dickerson, a top private-sector engineer who was part of the team that helped fix HealthCare.gov will serve as the new Administrator of the US Digital Service and Deputy Federal Chief Information Officer. The digital team has one core mission: to improve and simplify the digital experience that people and businesses have with their government by:

• Establishing standards to bring the government’s digital services in line with the best private sector services;
• Identifying common technology patterns that will help us scale services effectively;
• Collaborating with agencies to identify and address gaps in their capacity to design, develop, deploy and operate excellent citizen-facing services; and
• Providing accountability to ensure agencies see results.

With this announcement, the Administration is also releasing for public comment two crucial components in our growing IT toolkit that will help enable agencies to do their best work -- the Digital Services Playbook and the TechFAR Handbook.