With some fanfare U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra has unveiled the U.S. Federal IT Dashboard, which he said provides transparency to the government’s $74 billion budget.
It’s a work in progress. (Picture from our friends at CBS News.)
Right now the system delivers .csv files, commonly read by spreadsheets, or you can get an RSS feed and track your search.
Unfortunately the file I downloaded to my own copy of Open Office did not include tags, just numbers. This makes it impossible to identify what the money is being used for, although you can calculate changes in the figures.
It’s hard to underestimate the enormity of the task Kundra has set out for himself. Federal IT is a welter of different standards with different data formats and different meanings for data sets. The integration needed to get even this far is impressive.
But there is a lot more to do before real meaning is delivered to ordinary citizens concerning where their money is going.
I assume Kundra understands this, and that the folks at the Personal Democracy Forum, where he made his presentation, understand it as well.
Now if they’d just admit what they don’t know, and what they intend to do about finding out, we would really be getting somewhere.
