The United State’s New CIO, Vivek Kundra

Vivek Kundra at the Announcement for the “Applications for Democracy” Technology Contest Winners

Although the mainstream media pretty much glossed over it (because covering our country’s IT infrastructure is too complex for them), I was eager to hear all about President Obama’s choice of federal Chief Information Officer, but even this Whitehouse Press Release was thin on details:

Vivek Kundra will bring a depth of experience in the technology arena and a commitment to lowering the cost of government operations to this position. I have directed him to work to ensure that we are using the spirit of American innovation and the power of technology to improve performance and lower the cost of government operations. As Chief Information Officer, he will play a key role in making sure our government is running in the most secure, open, and efficient way possible.

It appears there was some surprise at the Kundra pick, as many assumed he would be Obama’s choice for the new position of Chief Technology Officer. After spending some time learning about Kundra’s accomplishments, Kundra seems like the perfect pick for CIO. As Washington DC’s CTO, Kundra made a wealth of useful data freely available online in a variety of formats complete with RSS feeds.

Kundra also came up with Apps for Democracy, a competition that invited developers to program applications that weave the District’s data into useful information services. The two winning programs Carpool Mashup Matchmaker and DC Bikes, Your Guide to Biking in DC, would have cost millions in taxpayer dollars for Washington DC to build in-house, but through Kundra’s initiative, they were built for a tiny fraction of that. As Kundra explains the success of harnessing emergent phenomena, “You have Darwinian innovation in the consumer space, and that fundamentally lowered our operating costs.”

Vivek Kundra’s IT for Government philosophy is part of his efforts to build a Digital Public Square. This concept is synchronous with the concept of democratizing government data. That is, the government should simply give us all the raw data and leave it to citizens to extrapolate information from it. Don’t just give us a graph of world warming trends or tablespoons of temperature data, give us the whole shebang*.

How will this play out in the federal government? Soon America will be getting a another domain name to add to the list of new URLs President Obama’s been adding to our online resources, data.gov. This site will offer a very different solution than President Bush’s National Information Exchange Model, which focuses on federal agencies making data available to each other, Kundra’s website should simply dump as much data as possible produced by all federal agencies in its rawest form, with tags, search capabilities, and RSS feeds.

Wired magazine has set up a wiki for brainstorming the best practices data.gov should implement, outlining the data already out there and examples of sites that serve as working models of what to strive for.

This is a very exciting initiative. Data itself is not information, but I am certain that once this ocean of data is freely available to American citizens, the IT geeks of the world will discover the information within it.

* Not really the whole shebang. See here, here, here, and here for the whole shebang.

Note: Watch this space for positions to open in the federal government hiring to work on this project.