Key to Open Government

Campus Report ^ | March 31, 2009 | Alanna Hultz

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Key to Open Government

by: Alanna Hultz, March 31, 2009

At a Center for American Progress (CAP) event, Dan Chenok, a member of President Obama’s “Technology, Innovation and Government Reform” transition team, Vivek Kundra, newly appointed federal Chief Information Officer, Katherine McFate, Program Officer for Government Performance and Accountability at the Ford Foundation’s Governance Unit and Bill Noveck, professor of law and director of the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School discussed what the Obama administration hopes to achieve, the policy issues facing the administration, the Obama administration’s vision for e-government and financial and economic transparency.

Kundra was the first panelist to speak and he said “there are two things we need to recognize, first that systems and information will be transparent rather than default and second understand the function of priorities and how to put data in the public’s hand.” Some examples he gave were the Recovery Act and how the public can access it in an easy, readable format on recovery.gov. He also mentioned the planned launch of data.gov as a way to transform the way the government pushes information. He also discussed a context-driven government rather than the old way of connecting the public to agencies and bureaucracies rather than services. Kundra said the federal government has over 24,000 websites, and sites such as Facebook have over 138 million users versus the number of hits an agency’s website would get. He said “the question is how do we get government services in social networks?” He also suggested that the Chief Information Officers across the executive branch rationalize the billions of dollars from the government to purchase technology and move toward a more context-driven government....