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18F / federal-grant-reporting

Improving the experience of federal grant reporting.
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Follow up with DOL contacts #6

Closed nikzei closed 5 years ago

fureigh commented 6 years ago

Notes to self, from the delivery timeline: Reach out to DOL contacts to send an update and request intros to grantees who receive grants from other agencies too. Potentially mention the Excel spreadsheet. If appropriate, I may ask in subsequent email about how many grantees DOL or DOL ETA has and how much grant $ they receive.

fureigh commented 6 years ago

Upon closer inspection, I see that our DOL contact has said she doesn't have access to information about other agencies' grants (including whether DOL ETA's grantees receive grants from other agencies).

Looks like we'll need to find overlap grantees another way. Based on a brief exploration, beta.usaspending.gov looks like a promising way to do that. Once we've identified relevant grantees, we can figure out how to connect to them. (I'm wondering whether this will lead us in the direction of the SBIR or other DATA Act pilot partners...)

nikzei commented 6 years ago

I just did a little googling and here's a whole new "duplication" problem with federal grants - two agencies issuing similar grants to the same entity to do the same work:

https://www.nature.com/news/funding-agencies-urged-to-check-for-duplicate-grants-1.12317

"'The agencies are overwhelmed, and checking grants at other agencies is something that doesn’t exist,' says bioinformatician Harold Garner at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg. In a Comment article in this week’s Nature (see page 599), Garner and his colleagues estimate that nearly $70 million in overlapping funds may have been awarded over the past decade — money that could potentially have been spent on more original research."

nikzei commented 6 years ago

Is this in progress @fureigh or does it belong somewhere else on the board?

fureigh commented 6 years ago

I'll move it back to Next.

nikzei commented 6 years ago

I'm wondering if it makes sense to reach out to DOL folks now or whether it would be fine to send them an update email with our final materials attached once we're at the end. If the goal is to keep them in the loop, waiting until the end makes sense to me - we'll have a much more cohesive story to deliver to them re: the direction forward.

nikzei commented 6 years ago

Also, then we can send them what we end up having prepared anyway for all of the other stakeholder follow ups that we'll send out.

fureigh commented 5 years ago

Closing this to reflect that I circled back near the start of phase three (and subsequently).