UCF helps develop federal phone app

There may be more than 140,000 iPad apps, but only a couple dozen are government-developed.

One of these rare apps, Federal Register, came to fruition in UCF's Mixed Emerging Technology Integration Lab at the Institute for Simulation and Training on account of its team led by Allogy Interactive Founder and CEO David Rogers.

The Federal Register is most likely not on America's list of top reads, but for government workers and general contractors, it is a must-read. It is the official journal of the federal government, which contains a daily record of government operations.

Before there could be an easily accessible app, there had to be an easily accessible database.

The Federal Register has been online since 1994, but it was not until 2009 that the publication became searchable through www.data.gov. Prior to 2009, the Federal Register took up more than 80,000 pages over the course of a year and cost the United States more than $4 million annually to print.

Trudy Givens, a Bureau of Prisons employee from Portage, Wis., won President Barack Obama's 2010 SAVE award, when she suggested sending the Federal Register to federal employees online rather than in print. Her idea expects to draw an estimated savings of $16 million through 2015.

Colin Forward, Allogy communications director and senior computer science major, said the proof-of-concept app was developed before Givens received her award.

"Givens had the idea, but we were actually in the process of creating the app so we used her idea as evidence that there was demand for it," Forward said. "There is a two-week delay when you send an app into Apple, and if you go into iTunes, you'll see our app was uploaded two weeks after the published article [in the Washington Post]."

Rogers said that Givens may have thought of the idea for the Internet version, and the app was part of a broad effort.

"Tom Suder [senior IST adviser] orchestrated all of the plans, and he brought [Allogy and IST] into the project with the [Government Printing Office] and the White House," Rogers said. "And Reynold Schweickhardt, the director of technology policy for the GPO, is one the guys who came with the idea for this particular app."

Suder, also Mobilegov's president and founder, serves as a strategic advisor for the IST in Washington, D.C., paved the way for the app's implementation.

"[We] went with our research for the app to the federal chief information officer, Vivek Kundra," Suder said. "Kundra came up with data.gov, where every federal agency puts their information and makes all the agencies submit its information onto a feed – a common API like Apple does."

Before data.gov, this information was unavailable to the public.

"We met with the GPO, where the Federal Register is produced, to talk about creating an app that is public, elegant and something that people would use," Suder said. "There are 400,000 public feeds on data.gov, and we needed to make a live-feed app, which changes every day, hour or however often it's updated."

Suder said that the app was a collaborative effort.

"David [Rogers] is the technical guy, and I look at the ways to save money. We said we have to come up with a great app, and so we developed it," he said. "No one really objected to the elimination of paper so we decided to use this technology to save money."

The eight-month-old app, which was developed in six weeks from scratch, takes the No. 5 spot on Information Week's 10 Cool iPad Apps From Uncle Sam.

Today, there are few government developed apps, but that is expected to change as more information becomes searchable online.

"These public-private partnerships and these [databases] becoming open information makes it possible to create really cool, new apps," Rogers said.

The Federal Register is one of many developments, as its team continues applying technology in low-tech areas to save money and advance mobility.

If you would like to learn more about the Federal Register, check out http://www.gpoaccess.gov/fr/. If you would like to download the Federal Register app for your iPad, visit http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/federal-register/id427703795?mt=8.