Submitting Federal Proposals Requires Windows

Petronius Arbiter writes "The US federal government is requiring that proposals for grants etc be submitted using a common system at http://grants.gov/. That's a good idea, except that effectively, you must use Windows and Explorer. See To operate PureEdge Viewer, your computer must meet the following system requirements: Windows 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000, XP... PureEdge on Grants.gov will not run within the Firefox browser. They do have a Citrix substitute for non-Windows users. However the site goes on to say "Note that a limited amount of users can access the Citrix Server at any one time... Finally, you will find the best time to work and submit an application via Citrix is during off-peak hours, usually between 10 p.m. and 10 a.m., EST. Finally, if your organization has more than 10 non-Windows users, they want you to add a dedicated Windows box to handle the traffic. For National Science Foundation clients, this is a big step backwards. NSF has had an excellent online system, http://fastlane.nsf.gov/ for years. Fastlane has no bias towards MS. However, by federal edict, NSF people must also use grants.gov."

Comments

Actually this is illegal.

[jdawgnoonan]

Publicly available government sites are required by law to function in more than one browser. I work with government web-sites and if anyone wanted to make a big deal out of this they could.

How does this happen?

[Qubit]

As someone wrote in another comment, "Who got bribed to use this system?".

In this day and age there should be no excuse for government organizations (fed, state, and local) to implement platform-specific interfaces like this, but it seems that articles like this pop up on /. every other week. It is neither expensive nor technologically difficult to create websites to accept grants (or to accept anything else from the public) while using existing, widely-supported web standards.

I know that there are watchgroups like Amnesty International who police the actions of governments WRT human rights issues -- is there a need for a watchgroup to monitor the technology/websites of the US government to ensure that they are not off in a corner with a single vendor, wanking off?

Why is this so difficult?

A friend of mine in Washington (state) spent a couple of weeks trying to create an interface between his program and some behemouth-of-an-LMS that cost the feds hundreds of thousands of dollars. If the LMS had just supported a *standard* for interfacing with other programs, he probably could've hacked it together in a couple of days, but as it was, I don't think that he could ever get the interface working properly.

Widely-used, royalty-free/patent-free standards. Is it really that difficult?

NSF systems is nice for me from old Linux

[sunhou]

I run RedHat 8.0 (with a window manager from RedHat 5.0) on a 4-year-old machine in my office; I use LaTeX to prepare all my grant proposals, and produce PDF output. I can get through most of my proposal submissions to the National Science Foundation via their FastLane system, although my university requires me to fill out an Excel spreadsheet. I suppose I could do it under OpenOffice, although the spreadsheet doesn't really work right in the old version of OO I'm running.

So I have a copy of VMWare with Windows XP in it, which I use mostly just for doing my grant budget spreadsheets.

FastLane lets me upload my PDF files which make up the bulk of a proposal, and fill out some forms in the web browser (mozilla, since I couldn't get FireFox running on this old version of Linux, it needed some newer C libraries or something). FastLane is really quite platform-independent, it works great for me. Our university built an in-house system for doing the internal side of grant proposals (getting approvals from one's chair, dean, etc. and having the university Sponsored Programs office approve the budget); they basically copied FastLane's style, so it can also be done from a web browser under pretty much any OS people are using around here.

I did submit a proposal to the National Institutes of Health last year, and had to use the stupid PureEdge software. It was a pain, but it did work under VMWare. I still wrote the actual project description in LaTeX under Linux, and just imported the PDF output into PureEdge.

I'll be unhappy if, as some people here have hinted, FastLane goes away and we're all required to go through grants.gov.

As other people have mentioned, yeah it shouldn't be "too easy" to ask for a pile of money from the government. But like other things I deal with (such as fighting for tenure), you expect a certain amount of difficulty, but sometimes people go above and beyond to make sure things are really more difficult than they need to be. I know I do that on many occasions too. :-)

(As for why I run such an old version of Linux, I've customized this old window manager in some ways that I haven't been able to find out how to do under a modern version of Gnome/KDE; when I finally find a way to, I'll likely upgrade. But that's another story.)