America's first chief information officer Vivek Kundra launched the new spending dashboard on his website Data.gov Tuesday, which should bring transparency to government-funded information technology projects. Kundra, who previously demo'd the platform at Wired's first-ever business conference on June 15th, announced it again Tuesday at the Personal Democracy Forum conference in Manhattan.
The purpose of the spending dashboard is accountability. Viewers will be able to track the progress of government-funded IT progress. More than that, they'll be able to point fingers. There's a little thumbnail picture of the CIO and contact information next to each project's page. People who are unsatisfied with the way things are moving can write in.
At this stage, Kundra and his team have thrown the data up, and hoped that America will work out the kinks. "This is version 1.0, we've launched it in beta and we're going to continue to innovate and ad more and more features." One feature that he emphasized was a feedback loop, so that the site won't just be about exposure, but also creating a dialogue.
It's going to need to create one quickly. The first "Uncle Sam Wants You to wiki" task is to do some serious editing.
"You could go through the site and find where it's broken and find data that isn't exactly right," White House Director of New Media Macon Phillips said.
"Far too often people wait two to three years and they try to perfect rather than starting and launching these platforms," Kundra added.
More than 1,000 journalists, technologists and political practitioners interested in politics and technology attended the two-day conference.
Pictured: Vivek Kundra, June 15, at the Wired Disruptive by Design Conference. Photo by Joseph Moran.
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