Cheat Codes for Successful Procurement

Speakers

• Traci Walker

  Executive Director of the Digital Services Coalition and former procurement lead for the U.S. Digital Service

  United States

• Mike Gifford

  Senior Strategist at CivicActions and former member of the Government of Canada's Open Source Advisory Board

  Canada

• Daniel Abadie

  Head of Partnerships of the Center for Digital Public Infrastructure and former Undersecretary of Digital Government, Argentina

  Argentina

• Traci Walker, Executive Director of the Digital Services Coalition, is a leader in digital government services. With over two decades of federal government experience, she has served as a contracting officer at the Executive Office of the President (White House) and the General Services Administration (GSA). As a founding member of the US Digital Service, Traci pioneered efforts to transform government procurement, co-authoring the TechFAR Handbook and spearheading the creation of the Digital IT Acquisition Professional (DITAP) program, which now has trained over thousands of contracting professionals. Alongside her work at the DSC, Traci recently launched Awkward Walker Consulting LLC to push forward change in government acquisition and digital services—because sometimes, being a little awkward is exactly what’s needed.

• Mike Gifford, is CivicActions’ Open Standards & Practices Lead and a thought leader on open government, as well as digital accessibility and sustainability. He has worked with governments in North America and Europe, and spoken internationally. He is also a W3C Invited Expert and recognized authoring tool accessibility expert. Mike has served for two years on the board of the Digital Services Coalition. In his last year he served as president of the board where he helped better define what it was to be a digital agency. In this role, he met with leaders in government and the private sector who are working for modern digital government. Previously, he was the Founder and President of OpenConcept Consulting Inc., a web development agency specializing in building open source solutions for the open web. OpenConcept was an impact driven company and Certified B Corporation. Like CivicActions, OpenConcept worked extensively with the Drupal Content Management System. Mike has spearheaded accessibility improvements in Drupal since 2008, and has served as a Drupal Core Accessibility Maintainer in 2012. As a long-term environmentalist, Mike has found ways to integrate his passions for the web and the planet. He is an active participant in both the W3C’s Web Sustainability Interest Group and in the ACT-IAC Climate Change Community of Interest.