Update from the Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP) and Commons Working Group (CWG) meetings.

Part I: Adobe update

Last week I spent three days at the FDP and CWG meetings in Washington. These sessions are almost always interesting and this latest round continued that record. 

Not surprisingly, one of the most anticipated topics was news on the Adobe Acrobat-based version of the SF424 forms. What we heard was that most of the 424R&R family of forms are “finished” and ready to be used. However, six of the forms in this family are either not yet built or have not yet passed through the G.g testing regimen and that seriously limits the utility of those that are “finished”. G.g did promise that all of these forms would be ready for use by the end of this month.

Before getting too excited about this, we’d be wise to consider the comments of some of the agency people. Their feedback was basically along the lines of “yes, we’ve been hearing this for a while.”  I was also told that once the forms are approved and released by G.g they still need to go into testing and review by NIH. 

All of which led the NIH people at the CWG meeting to say it was almost certain that the Adobe forms would not be used for the February and March ’08 submission dates. It sounds very likely that many people will be forced to continue working with the PureEdge system until (at least) June of 2008, S2Sers excluded.

For those who want to see more of what went on at the meeting, all or most of the slide presentations may (or will) be found here.