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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."
Three OSs for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Man doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord in his dark throne
In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie.
One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them all,
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie.
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
The PureEdge Viewer is a small, free program which will allow you to access, complete and submit applications electronically and securely on Grants.gov.
I guess those great minds in the federal government have never heard of HTML forms and SSL.
I wonder who got bribed for this crap.
There is a nice mini-howto explaining how to access grants.gov through Linux:
Grants.gov Howto
It's not pretty, but I have a feeling a more streamlined solution will eventually emerge.
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.
You've obviously never bought computers for a large organisation. Try multiplying by at least a factor of 5.
Secondly, anything that makes people get up from their desk and workstation and move to another computer on another desk, log in and start working there - away from their files, email and dead-tree data - costs time and money for no good reason. Taxpayers' money.
Then factor in the support costs associated with a whole different OS. And the time lost near deadline days when several people want to submit proposals at the same time. And ensuing arguments which have potential to reduce productivity over weeks and months to come and generally make the workplace that little bit suckier.
All for no reason.
If you like, factor in that 3 of the allegedly required OSes are unpatchable (Windows 98, ME, NT 4.0) and therefore a security risk and add in arguments between the irate scientist digging out their old crufty Windows box because the damn goverment's damn stupid web site is broken and the network support people who won't let it on to their network.
And then the arguments that start because some bright spark (possibly with grant money and clout) demands a dual boot (i.e. impossible to remotely support in any large organisation) workstation because they now need both Linux and Windows to do their work: Linux to do the actual work and Windows to get the funding.
All because there is no desire either to stick to standards or implement cross-platform solutions, or even to think about the users running scientific workstations on real OSen not having bloody Internet Explorer. (Grr.)
Unfortunately, having worked in a biomedical research lab, government funding is crucial in keeping that research going. Sure, you can refuse it but that would be like shooting yourself in the foot. I've seen many brilliant researchers with very promising research topics run out of the facility because of lack of funding, and it's surely one of the most, if not the most, crucial aspects to running a lab.
Refusing to apply on principle is not anything any sane scientist would do. Government-based funding is already difficult to obtain, especially without the proper connections, but not applying in the first place is completely impractical. Even if a lab ran solely on non-Windows based computers, dropping $200 on an old Windows-based PC just for this function would be a no-brainer.
And yes, I think this is a lousy idea on the part of a government that has already concluded that Microsoft has a monopoly.
*golfclap*
For those of us who have to support researchers this is old news. In fact the sumssion fails to mention two important facts: PureEdge (now under a new name since IBM bought the Canadian company) has a beta version of the viewer out for Macs (still nothing for linux), and grants.gov have already announced that they will be replaceing the PureEdge solution within the year.
The government has recognized this problem and is switching their e-forms client from PureEdge (now owned by IBM and called Workplace Forms) to Adobe Reader. They awarded a new contract to General Dynamics IT late last year (switching from the original integrator, Northrop Grumman) and will be rebuilding the whole thing while maintaining the existing form sets and whatnot. The new Adobe forms are scheduled to be available in early April; see this FAQ for more information.
I wrote about this whole thing on my own site and on my company's blog. It's been a major problem for some research universities in particular, who have a loyal Mac community. But I think Grants.gov's on the road to fixing it.
(Full disclosure: Our company was part of a bid to win the contract that was awarded to General Dynamics. Our team proposed a different approach that would have yielded the same outcomes but we're not part of the GDIT team.)
I am a researcher that falls under this, my labs are mac/linux wherever possible. I scrounged a surplus PC to run this software. It sure is annoying that my tax dollars went to pay for such a thing though. This is not the real travesty though... the real travesty is that the National Science Foundation already has a much better system than grants.gov for submitting grants called fastlane, its all webforms and no extra program necessary. If even automagically creates pdfs for you if you wish. Their web-site works with Safari and Firefox too. The rumor is that NSF will have to ditch its easy to use and well designed grant submission software for the POS that grants.gov is.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
This is a blessing in disguise, really. Anything that makes it harder for the U.S. government to give away my money is good by me.
This contains the implicit statement that this does make it harder to give your money away. I don't think this is true. Grants usually get plenty of submissions. This does two things, it changes who gets the money excluding mac and Linux using researchers and it motivates organizations to buy Windows so as not to be left out. Neither benefits me.
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.)