The Center for Government Interoperability partners with colleges and universities to provide free prototyping services to federal, state and local government. The universities’ objective is to provide students with real world software project experience with an emphasis on teamwork, written and oral presentations, ethics and business and industrial projects. Students are typically only available for one semester, for short projects. They may not have specific commercial licenses such as Oracle or Microsoft. If your agency needs specific operating systems, databases or programming languages, you will have to provide them to the students. Student programmers operate under the oversight of their professor and are well suited for feasibility studies. The Center and the students to do not charge any fees.
Currently the New Jersey Institute of Technology will need two or three projects for the Fall 2011 semester starting at the end of August for their graduate students.
Prototyping can take the risk out of new projects and improve requirements gathering for complex projects. Prototyping can also greatly increase the accuracy of project estimates and reduce project cost by handling requirements cheaper, more efficiently and building them with higher quality.
The Center for Government Interoperability’s goal is to give government inexpensive prototypes, collectively sharing the same system if possible, so that government business analysts can experiment in a safe and innovative environment to save money and keep under project reporting thresholds.
The Center especially encourages like-minded government agencies to collectively prototype shared, open source systems.
Linked to from our site, is an interesting past project, the NASA ground controller project that New Jersey Institute of Technology students worked on to predict the impact location of a space capsule during its reentry process to ensure prompt recovery.
http://www.gov-ideas.com/collective-prototyping.htm.
If you know of any government agency that could use the students, please contact me.
Commercial prototyping companies are welcome to contact us regarding the Center’s vendor-assisted prototyping services.
Thanks,
Alex Glaros
Center for Government Interoperability
http://www.gov-ideas.com
Contact email and phone number: http://www.gov-ideas.com/contact.htm
Alex, this may be out of scope because we are a non-profit, but our goal is to create an Alpha electronic block club tool for among other things, crime prevention, disaster preparedness for promotion by government partners.
The key “community use” aspect is that we see a strong need to allow/encourage/support broader community life use to attract actual public participation.
See the one pager from http://beneighbors.org and the Alpha discussions in the online working group. Right now I am leaning toward an Alpha in Drupal or by adding to the current http://GroupServer.org platform we use.
Great project Steven, I’ll put in contact with the managing professor.
Alex