Transparency | Socialfeds

Government IT Dashboard Debuts

http://it.usaspending.gov/

Tuesday at the Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York, Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra and White House Director of New Media Macon Phillips announced the launch of the new government IT Dashboard (beta of course) to provide an online window into the details of Federal information technology investments and provides citizens with the ability to track the progress of investments over time.

Filled with news, statistics, and charts, the dashboard reveals IT spending across all the major federal agencies. Select any agency, and you can see its budget and spending pattern. For example, according to the site, the Department of Defense chews up the most tax dollars, with a 2009 IT budget of $33 billion.

An interactive data feed page lets you filter specific types of data by IT project, category, and department to see a spending snapshot and then export the data as a CSV file or RSS feed. While there is a thick smog of government-ease within this feature, the ability to export the data and create even more usable mashups is very promising.

I am very excited about the new Dashboard, however, I think the Whitehouse should take a step back from creating fancy new websites to evaluate and improve (or decommission) similar sites already out there. Late last year, the Visualization to Understand Expenditures in Information Technology (VUE-IT) site was debuted by the Whitehouse which basically gives the same info that the IT Dashboard has suddenly made “more transparent”.

The goal of VUE-IT is to improve the understanding of the annual Federal Government Information Technology investments made through the President’s Budget (sound familiar?). VUE-IT organizes IT investments by agency and bureau, as well as by the Federal Enterprise Architecture’s (FEA) service groupings; Service to Citizens, Support Delivery of Services to Citizens, Management of Government Resources, and Service Types and Components. While VUE-IT doesn’t have all the pretty pie charts and visualizations as the new Dashboard, it kinda makes more sense.

Hopefully both VUE-IT and the new IT Dashboard will contribute to the accountability that we’ve all been looking for in agencies to create a substantial change to how IT programs are developed and managed before they start spending the money.

New dashboard shows where federal IT tax dollars go

Whitehouse Preparing Data.gov 2.0

Launching in Beta - A Look at PdF ‘09, Day 2

Posted
July 1st, 2009

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Transparency
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White House Open Gov Initiative Launches Final Phase

The Open Government Team, in the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House has announce the opening of Phase 3 to accept draft recommendations. The final phase of the initiative was launched yesterday and runs through this Sunday, June 28. Phase 1, Brainstorming, encouraged the sharing of idea recommendations on how to make government more open. Citizens could vote on proposed ideas or their own. The next phase, Discussion, encouraged participants to dig deeper on the ideas and challenges identified during the Brainstorm phase. The goal of Phase 3, Draft, is to encourage collaboration on crafting constructive proposals to address challenges from the Discussion phase. This is your chance to participate in drafting policies that will promote greater transparency, participation, and collaboration across government. Federal employees as well as the general public are highly encouraged to participate in this final phase. An informational teleconference will be held today, June 23rd, at noon eastern to explain more about the drafting phase.

Call-in #: (800) 553-0272
Call Name: “Open Government Call”

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Dear All,

Today the Drafting Phase (Phase III) of the Open Government public consultation process begins at www.whitehouse.gov/open (click on Participate). This Drafting Phase invites you to collaborate on creating recommendations for open government policy using a web-based wiki tool. You are invited to a teleconference on Tuesday, June 23rd at noon eastern to learn more about the Drafting Phase and how it will work.

The first phase invited you to brainstorm topics for the Open Government recommendations and the second phase explored those topics in greater depth through on-line discussion. This third phase is intended to translate good ideas into specific, concrete, actionable policy. We are asking you to craft recommendations on each of the topics you identified as being of greatest importance.

The Drafting Phase begins today and runs through Sunday June 28th (at midnight). We suggest that you review the submissions from the earlier phases of this process, such as the Discussion blog, the public brainstorm, the government employee brainstorm, and From the Inbox. Incorporating earlier input, you can write your own draft recommendations, or combine and edit those of others to create a new recommendations. You can then vote on the best draft under each topic through June 30th.

We encourage you to contribute early, so other participants can build on your proposed text. Complete directions and a video tour are available on the wiki website.

Also - don’t forget to add any final comments to the weblog, where new postings on collaboration have recently gone up.