New USG Grant System Excludes Mac Users

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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- -------- Original Message --------
Subject: New USG Grant System Excludes Mac Users
Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2006 09:30:21 -0500
From: Richard Forno <rforno () infowarrior org>
To: Infowarrior List <infowarrior () attrition org>
CC: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>

New Grant System Excludes Mac Users
Electronic Forms Compatible Only With Microsoft
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/12/AR2006021200
942.html

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 13, 2006; Page A19

What if the federal government were about to give away more than $400
billion in grants, but only people whose computers ran on Microsoft software
could apply?

That is the predicament that many scientists, scholars and others say they
are in as the government enters the final phase of its five-year effort to
streamline its grant-application process.

The new "Grants.gov" system, under development at a cost of tens of billions
of dollars, aims to replace paper applications with electronic forms. It is
being phased in at the National Institutes of Health, Department of Housing
and Urban Development and other federal agencies. All 26 grant-giving
agencies are supposed to have their application processes fully online by
2007.

The problem: Although many U.S. scientists and others depend on
graphics-friendly Macintosh computers, the software selected by the
government is not Mac-compatible. And it is expected to remain so for at
least a year.

Last week, faced with evidence that the system will not be fully accessible
to Mac users by this fall as promised, NIH quietly dropped its plan to
switch to electronic applications for October's $600 million round of major
"R01" grants.

But NIH and other agencies already have been asking for electronic
applications for smaller grants, triggering hair loss among frustrated Mac
users.

"It's been hell on wheels," said Mark Tumeo, vice provost for research and
dean of the college of graduate studies at Cleveland State University, one
of many smaller institutions that have been hit especially hard by the new
requirement.

Although most observers believe that the move to electronic granting will
eventually pay off, concerns about fairness during the transition have
prompted angry humor on Mac-related listservs.

"Uh, this would be the same government that spent a lot of time and money
pursuing Microsoft for its anti-competitive behavior?" one blogger wrote.
"And they now offer a government site that mandates monopoly?"

Charles Havekost, chief information officer at the Health and Human Services
Department, which helps manage Grants.gov, acknowledged that the system is
"not perfect" but encouraged applicants to look at the positive side: They
can go to one site and see every grant being offered by every federal
agency, and use a standardized electronic form to start the process for most
grants.

The overall Grants.gov system, under construction by Northrop Grumman under
a $22 billion federal contract, attracts more than 1 million hits every day,
Havekost said. The system accepted more than 16,000 applications for about
20 agencies last year. And it took in even more than that last month alone,
with 45,000 expected by the end of this year.

"In early 2002, people laughed and said, 'This is going to be impossible to
get agencies to work together,' and yet we were able to do it," Havekost
said.

But the promise of making Grants.gov accessible to everyone remains
unfulfilled because of a decision by Grumman and HHS to give a small
Canadian company called PureEdge Solutions the job of creating the
electronic forms.

The PureEdge solution, it turns out, works only with the Windows operating
system. And that is especially galling, several scientists said, as at least
one major grant-making agency, the National Science Foundation, has for many
years been using a "platform-independent" system that works seamlessly with
all kinds of computers.

Mike Atassi, program manager for Grumman's Grants.gov system integration
team and an avowed fan of Macintosh computers, said the choice of PureEdge
was logical given that the contract demanded full implementation within
seven months and because more than 90 percent of computer users nationwide
use PCs.

Critics note that in contrast to the domination of PCs in the business
community, Macs constitute about one-third to one-half of the computers
scientists and academicians use.

A long-standing PureEdge promise to make its forms Mac-compatible came into
question last summer when IBM bought the company. Last week, an IBM
spokesman said the company is "still planning to fully support the Mac,"
probably by fall.

Atassi said if he receives a test version from IBM by this fall, it could be
ready by the following spring.

Meanwhile, the government is steering people to certain "workarounds" --
ways to make Macs behave as though they were PCs -- which can be purchased
or downloaded from the Internet. But those systems are receiving mixed
reviews.

At the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass. --
one of the nation's premier research institutions, where every senior
scientist has a personal grants administrator -- Mac users have used an
in-house version of a Web server called Citrix to get around Grants.gov's
limitations, said Mary Anne Donovan, administrative lab manager for a
Whitehead researcher.

The process has advantages over paper applications, Donovan said. "I can't
tell you how many times I've had to take a cab to the airport at the last
minute to FedEx my nine paper copies," she said. "If you can just press a
button and send it, that's got to be better."

But others who have turned to the workarounds recommended by Grants.gov have
not fared as well.

Nancy Wray, who directs the office at Dartmouth College that handles federal
grant applications, said a recent attempt to use the Citrix server
workaround was a bust. After struggling though lingo-laden government
instructions "an awfully long time," she said, the grant applicant "just
gave up."

Christine Sell, who works with Tumeo at Cleveland State, called the
Grants.gov workarounds "a walk in the wilderness." Mac users loathe one
approach recommended by the government -- a "PC emulation" program --
because it is susceptible to PC-specific viruses they normally do not have
to worry about.

Other glitches plague the system, said Wendy Baldwin, executive vice
president for research at the University of Kentucky, who told of a
researcher who filed on time but did not find out until two days later that
the electronic form had not gone through.

"When it takes 48 hours to get a 'fatal error' notice back, you're screwed,"
she said. "This is supposed to be a partnership. . . . If you crank off your
investigators and they don't make their deadlines, that's a terrible thing."

In an interview, HHS's Havekost acknowledged that "there's been plenty of
hue and cry," adding that applicants can apply for waivers to use paper if
need be. Asked to confirm that the workarounds were at least "workable" -- a
word he had used twice earlier in the conversation -- he pulled back.

"That's not my word," Havekost said. "There will be a firestorm if you say I
said it is workable."



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