_posts/2016-03-08-san-diego-summit-opens-doors-to-technology-partnerships.md
---
title: "San Diego summit opens doors to technology partnerships"
date: 2016-03-08 13:22
authors:
- andrewmcmahon
tags:
- events
- general services administration
excerpt: "On March 18, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) will co-host the San Diego Summit on Emerging Digital Technology and Government as part of our work to bring new, emerging technology to the federal government."
description: "On March 18, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) will co-host the San Diego Summit on Emerging Digital Technology and Government as part of our work to bring new, emerging technology to the federal government."
image: /assets/blog/events/san-diego.jpg
---
*Originally published on [GSA’s
blog](http://gsablogs.gsa.gov/gsablog/2016/03/07/san-diego-summit-opens-doors-to-technology-partnerships/)*.
On March 18, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) will co-host
the [San Diego Summit on Emerging Digital Technology and
Government](http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/123302) as part of our
work to bring new, emerging technology to the federal government. It
will be a day of sharing what we’re doing to build effective digital
solutions, listening to perspectives on the challenges of doing business
with government, and offering training on how to sell to and buy from
the federal government. We invite you to attend if you are a newer
product company and would like to do business with the federal
government (or if you work with GSA or the federal government already).
We want to create an open dialogue between federal government policy
makers, the technology industry, and academia — because bringing new
technology to the federal government isn’t just a case of getting the
latest product. Identifying our technology needs requires collaboration
between designers and users, technologists and contracting officers, and
the government and the public. We must bring together the agency and the
entrepreneur, identify problems, and discover ways to use technology to
solve them.
We know that we, the federal government, have a problem being
understandable — we have sometimes Byzantine processes written in our
own language. Small businesses and start-ups don’t have the time to
decode the government’s processes and complex regulatory requirements.
To help address this issue, we’re bringing together agencies, Congress,
academia, and the technology sector. At events like this summit, we can
help small businesses and start-ups understand how to sell to government
and facilitate a dialogue between federal government policy makers,
customers, industry partners, and academia.
We’ve made strides in improving relationships by eliminating outdated
contracting requirements and reducing the difficulty of navigating the
contracting process but much more work remains. By developing
relationships with entrepreneurs, we can realize GSA’s vision of being
an economic catalyst and bring much needed agile and user-centric
improvements to the federal government.