GSA plans a series of workshops aimed at increasing contract opportunities for mid-sized businesses.

Obama administration officials said the Business Breakthrough initiative is aimed at companies that are too big for small business set-asides but not big enough to compete with multinational giants.

“We have heard from businesses, especially medium-size businesses, who felt that they were falling through the cracks here,” said Ginger Lew, senior adviser to the White House National Economic Council, in a March 10 media conference call.

The workshops, to begin in May, are designed to help companies navigate the federal marketplace. Some of the training will be aimed at companies that are new to the federal market; other sessions will provide in-depth information on GSA contracting programs for more experienced contractors.

GSA said it will also provide opportunities for small firms through its mentor-protégé program.

NASA will host an open-source software summit later this month. Executives of Mozilla, Linux and Red Hat are among the scheduled speakers, according to a NASA release.

The space agency said goals for the summit include establishing a method to support collaboration with the public throughout the development life cycle; exploring NASA’s ability to release and develop software under varied open-source licenses; determining whether and to what extent NASA can participate in open-source software governance bodies; and collecting best practices from private industry and other federal agencies.

The summit is scheduled for March 29-30 at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA.

Many defense contractors would be required to display a DOD fraud hotline poster in their workplaces under a proposed rule.

The Defense Department’s inspector general requested the change. Currently a company that maintains its own internal fraud hotline may post that phone number instead of the DOD number.

The rule would apply to companies with DOD contracts totaling more than $5 million.

The proposed rule is DFARS Case 2010-D026. Comments are due May 10.