On July 23, an advance notice of a federal rule change to encourage federal vendor feedback was published in the Federal Register.

The General Services Administration, the Department of Defense and The National Aeronautics and Space Administration are considering an amendment to the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) to establish a standard survey for obtaining voluntary feedback from actual and potential offerors concerning federal government contracts and solicitations.

The Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) for “FAR case 2017-014, Use of Acquisition 360 To Encourage Vendor Feedback” seeks public input on the potential benefits and burdens of voluntary feedback surveys and especially encourages feedback from actual and potential federal contractors.

The ANPR offers some suggestions for public commenters to consider, including whether different information should be collected on the survey based on the type of company or the type of acquisition, what is a reasonable estimate of an organization’s costs to complete the survey, and ideas of what might be the best way the government can obtain honest and open feedback on the contract administration process.

Public comments must be submitted in writing to the Regulatory Secretariat Division on or before September 21, 2018, to be considered during the formulation of the proposed rule.

“President Obama adds Pinterest to his social networks” by Dara Kerr in C|Net.

“The Fastest Downloads in America — Big Cities Ranked” from Government Technology.

“NASA Wins Third Shorty Award” by Ross Gianfortune on NextGov.

“NASA’s Twitter Wins Shorty Award for Social Media” on LiveScience.com.

“Report: Republicans Outpace Democrats in Twitterverse” by Emma Dumain in Roll Call.

“White House to petitioners: We ARE listening” by Joseph Marks in Nextgov.

Below is a video released by NASA that shows the pattern of snowfall across the globe every month for a 10 year period beginning in February of 2000 and ending last month.

The observations were collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite.

To learn more, read this article by Samantha Murphy from Mashable.

A proposed federal regulation would require mandatory privacy training for certain contractors.

Under a new rule put forward by the Department of Defense, the General Services Administration, and NASA, contractors would be required to identify employees designing, operating or having access to government systems of records, or handling personally identifiable information.

This training would be required upon the award of a contract and at least annually thereafter. Vendors would be required to maintain records of employee training for request by the government.

This rule does not apply to commercial items. The Regulatory Secretariat is accepting comments until December 13.