The General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Service office launched a four-phase program to solicit, fund and test ideas from federal employees seeking to improve government services through the use of technology, Nextgov reported Monday.
The 10x program “is designed to find, fund, grow and sustain new technology products and services,†Nico Papafil, acting lead director of the initiative, told Nextgov. “In other words, we incubate and accelerate great proposals to help move government IT forward.â€
Will Cahoe, 10x project coordinator, said the agency asks its employees to provide two or three sentences on a problem they want to address through the use of a Google Form as part of the “10x Mad Libs†process. The agency’s 10x program has four phases – investigation, discovery, development and scale – and allocates funds ranging from $20,000 to $1.28 million as the project progresses into each phase. GSA supports the 10x program, focusing on cross-agency initiatives with broader impact, through the Digital Services Fund.
“One of our goals in the next few months is that we really want to publish and make public a lot of the research that comes out of these projects,†Cahoe said.