Vivek Kundra, federal CIO, and Macon Phillips, White House new media director, unveiled Office of Management and Budget's IT dashboard this morning at the Personal Democracy Forum Conference in New York City. And the PDF attendees gave him a well-deserved standing ovation.

The dashboard was built to monitor more than $70 billion in government information technology spending, showing all contracts within every agency, and is one of the features of the redesigned USASpending.gov, re-launched early this morning.

During the presentation, Kundra mentioned that launching a platform that will allow the government to tap into the best thinking and the best ideas. And Phillips added that it’s just the beginning. Kundra also admitted that announcing that the federal data will be available online to the public has spurred government bureaucrats to start cleaning it up, proving the rule that sunlight is the best disinfectant. The initial dashboard is for IT expenditures only. And I’d add, however, that if you want the data on the government investments in General Motors or AIG you’ll need to go to SubsidyScope.com.

In the question session, Andrew Rasiej, PDF co-founder and Sunlight senior technology advisor, asked Kundra if we should redefine “public” as “searchable, accessible and readable online. Kundra replied with an affirmative absolutely “yes.” As Jay Rosen, N.Y.U. journalism prof,  tweeted, “What we've been watching with CIO Vivek Kundra at #pdf09 is the undoing of the opacity agenda of the Bush years, right before our eyes!”

NextGov.com’s Gautham Nagesh noted today that the site’s new visualization tools are a definite improvement. “It's now possible with just a few clicks to see how much money an agency has invested in IT projects and what percentage of those projects are behind schedule or over budget,” Nagesh wrote.

We are told that OMB will be holding a press conference this afternoon at 3:30 (Eastern Time) to highlight the redesigned USASpending.gov and the IT dashboard.

Check it out!

Personal Democracy Forum kicks off Monday in New York. This will be PDF’s sixth event, with this year's theme being "We.gov,” as in all the ways that we, the people are using technology and new media to transform politics, campaigns, media, governance and civic action. This is one conference I never miss willingly (I think I've only missed one!) and I'm honestly not that much of a conference-goer. I think of it as my annual "brain food." I can't wait.

A “two-day tech + politics brainfest” is how Tim O’Reilly described PDF last week.  PDF will be tracking the state-of-the-art online politics, exploring government 2.0., looking at the new tools for organizing that are being used, as well as looking at the future of political journalism, blogging and networked media.

I’m excited to see old and new friends, many who are keynote speakers. A radically truncated list includes emerging technology expert (and Sunlight board member) Esther Dyson; senior fellow at Demos and PDF senior editor Allison Fine; now-former Washington Post “White House Watch” blogger Dan Froomkin (Dan posted his last earlier today…A must read!); New York State Senate CIO Andrew Hoppin (I blogged about him earlier today); journalism prof and Buzzmachine.com blogger Jeff Jarvis; Obama administration CIO Vivek Kundra; Craigslist founder (and Sunlight board member) Craig Newmark; law professor Beth Noveck; “Here Comes Everybody” author Clay Shirky; campaign re-inventor Joe Trippi and “The Cluetrain Manifesto” co-author and blogger David Weinberger. Really there are too many good people coming and speaking to mention

Congratulations, in advance to Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, PDF’s co-founders, and Sunlight’s senior technology advisors. It’s going to be a very exciting couple of days.

Maybe you can join at the last minute.

Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and grantees from this week:

Thursday’s launch by the Obama administration of Data.gov, the repository for all the information the federal government collects, generated a number of good press mentions. Vivek Kundra, President Obama’s new Chief Information Officer, built and manages the Web site, which developers can access data to create applications for the Web and handheld devices. The Washington Post's Kim Hart wrote about the launch and quotes Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s executive director, saying it "demonstrates the acceptance of the notion that providing raw data is inherent to establishing trust in agencies." Ellen said that the administration is redefining public information. "To be truly public, it needs to be available online. That's a dramatic shift." Hart also quotes Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org, saying most federal agencies have not traditionally emphasized openness. "It's not what Congress has told them to do in the past, and it's not their culture. There's going to have to be some real pressure on agencies to do this." Hart also mentions Sunlight Labs' Apps for America 2 contest, and writes that it is modeled after the Apps for Democracy contest started by Kundra when he was the District of Columbia's chief technology officer. Richard Waters at the Financial Times (subscription required) wrote about the launch and the contest, and quotes Ellen saying the launch represents "a sea-change in how government views its information."

Wired's Kim Zetter and Wired Science's Alexis Madrigal both have articles about Data.gov that mention Sunlight and the Apps for America 2 contest. Madrigal also quotes Ellen, “Data.gov says that our information is your information,” and that “it represents this enormous change in attitude about what public means. It means it’s online. It’s means it’s available. I think it’s a dramatic breakthrough in the role of government.”

Federal News Radio's Jason Miller produced a story on Data.gov, and includes an mp3 of his interview with Kundra who mentions the Apps for America 2 contest. Chris Dorobek, co-anchor of Federal News Radio's afternoon drive program, interviewed Ellen about the launch and posted the audio. Jon Gordon with American Public Media's "Future Tense" interviewed Clay Johnson, Sunlight Labs’ director, about Data.gov. Clay said the site represents "a good first step" by the administration.

Daphne Eviatar with The Washington Independent reported on the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) sending Congress a letter asking that it provide better supervision of the government’s $1.25 trillion mortgage-backed securities purchase program. POGO is concerned with potential conflicts of interest of having private fund managers advising the government on the program while also advising private clients on how to invest in similar assets. “(Potential) conflicts of interest could have a wide range of consequences, including financial losses for the American taxpayer, an unfair competitive advantage for the fund managers, and the continued erosion of public confidence in the government’s ability to stabilize the financial system,” POGO warns.

In a post on the blog of the Bill Moyers Journal, PBS journalists Bill Moyers and Michael Winship wrote about the influence being exerted by health industry in the debate over reforming national health policy. They cited Center for Responsive Politics data showing the health sector has spent more than $134 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2009. Speaking of health care reform, USA Today’s John Fritze wrote about former U.S. Sen. Tom Daschle (S.D.) remaining a key player in the health care debate four months after tax questions prevented him from serving as Health and Human Services secretary. Fritze quotes Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, saying Daschle’s private citizen status raises questions about what Daschle is advocating for and who he is representing when he meets with Congressional lawmakers behind closed doors. "It's like being a senator or being in the administration without having any of the restrictions," Melanie said.

Politico's Kenneth Vogel reported on how at least a dozen lawmakers and political committees held fundraising events in conjunction with Monday night's sold-out Bruce Springsteen concert at Downtown Washington’s Verizon Center. Vogel quotes Nancy Watzman, director of Sunlight’s Party Time project, as saying rock concerts are not an uncommon venue for political fundraisers. “Democrats do it and Republicans do it. They tend to have different musical choices, though,” Nancy said, conceding Monday’s cluster of Springsteen fundraisers are “quite a number for any particular concert, but that speaks to Bruce being The Boss.” Vogel wrote that Nancy is herself a Springsteen fan, and paid about $100 to see his recent concert in Denver. “I probably didn’t get as much bang for my buck, though, because I can’t call up a member of Congress now and say, ‘Hey, remember when he played "Born to Run?" Well, I have this bill I want to introduce.’”

Jim Abrams with the Associated Press wrote two articles about the earmarks House lawmakers are requesting to add to the transportation bill they will take up this summer. In the first article, Abrams quotes Bill Allison, Sunlight’s senior fellow, saying the collective disclosure is way ahead of where it was just three years ago. “But they could still be doing it better." Bill said that the Transportation Committee process falls short of a new requirement in both the House and Senate Appropriations committees that members post earmark requests online before they submit them. Also, there is no central location for posting requests, making them difficult to find on Web sites, Abrams wrote. In the second article, Abrams reported that the lawmakers are requesting $136.3 billion in earmarks. He recounts Bill's criticism about the absence of a central location for posting earmark requests, which makes them more difficult to locate. With the help of some other Sunlight staffers, Bill had dug through the earmark disclosures last week and built a easy-to-access database. His work motivated Mark Tapscott, editorial page editor at the Washington Examiner, to name Bill "One of the unsung heroes in the nation's capital." Eliza Krigman, writing at the National Journal's "Under the Influence" blog, also highlighted Bill's work. Krigman wrote that "Sunlight's 'Real Time Investigations' staff did the yeoman's work of scrolling through member's Web sites searching for transportation earmark requests through yesterday's deadline."

Thanks and see you next Friday.

Last Thursday, Richard MacManus, founder and editor of ReadWriteWeb, posted an interesting piece titled “Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web" where he explains how he sees the Web evolving with the three trends converging. And this morning, MacManus posted another more focused piece discussing Linked Data, where the Web allows users to connect related data that wasn't previously linked. MacManus sums up the concept nicely: “Linked Data allows you to discover, connect to, describe, and re-use all kinds of data. It is to data what the World Wide Web was to documents back in the 90's.” Data exists to be used, he wrote. “Linked Data enables data to be opened up and connected so that people can build interesting new things from it.”

MacManus embeds a TED presentation by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, and the leading evangelist for Linked Data. Here’s a YouTube video of Berners-Lee’s TED presentation:

Several weeks ago, Berners-Lee opened “A National Dialogue” discussion on what Open Linked Data is and why it’s important, including the governmental implications.

Linked Data has great implications for federal government data, but obviously, its promise reaches far beyond the confines of government. But here at Sunlight, making government data open, online and usable is our goal. And so is connecting the dots. Last month, Sunlight Labs envisioned an OpenData.gov, the new central repository for government data and research that new federal CIO Vivek Kundra is working on. We are all eagerly awaiting to see what Vivek unveils soon. But as Berners-Lee says is his Linked Open Data mantra…"Raw Data Now!

Think of LinkedData as our one click future.

Over the weekend, The Boston Globe published an important op-ed about President Obama’s transparency and the right-to-know agenda, written by Mary Graham, co-director of the Transparency Policy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School. Repairing current yet “broken” transparency policies should be President Obama’s first priority, Graham writes, and by doing so he would create a “powerful new instrument for change.”

Current transparency policies don’t really work very well. The assumptions that led to them  are correct, that is, citizens too often make crucial health care, investment and other matters,without the input of reliable information. Graham argues for more facts to be “presented in standardized, timely, and understandable ways so people can compare mortgage lenders, credit card deals, surgery outcomes, and more.” Transparency policies fail today because they don’t allow accurate comparisons, they’re vulnerable to politics and conflicts of interests and disclosure rules rarely keep pace with new risks. And I'd add, an awful lot of that information isn't available online and little is available in real time. It isn't disclosure if it's not online.

She advises the new Administration to communicate transparency policies in common and clear language so they can be understood by ordinary citizens. The Admnistration should mandate that the people within government designing the policies communicate and collaborate with each other. And the agencies should find ways to track unforeseen risks.

I would add a few other agenda items for the executive branch that are vital to fostering true transparency. In the Web 2.0 era data must be interoperable. In other words, all government databases must be made to work together. We believe that the administration needs to set up a strong central authority to control information policy, funding and standards. The  naming of  Aneesh Chopra and Vivek Kundra to the positions of federal CTO and CIO, respectively, are positive developments on this front. And finally, government should allow and encourage citizens to participate in government through collaborative projects, like the successful Peer to Patent Project.

Graham writes persuasively, “Neither the economy nor health care can be fixed unless transparency policies are fixed...Markets and ordinary citizens can cope with risks as long as they can understand them.”

That sounds like transparency to me.

The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs (HSGAC) is holding a committee hearing at 2:30 pm today to discuss a bill proposed by Sen. Tom Carper -- and cosponsored by HSGAC chair Joe Lieberman and ranking member Susan Collins -- that would create a system of accountability for federal information technology programs. (You can watch the hearing here starting at 2:30 pm) Congress Daily sums up the proposal and I've highlighted what might be the most important part:

A draft of the bill calls for the creation of a Web site to be updated quarterly with details about the price, schedule and performance of certain projects that annually cost $500,000 or more. Since the 2002 passage of the E-Government Act, nearly $450 billion has been spent on information technology, but many projects far exceeded cost estimates and did not perform as planned. The bill would also require each agency's chief information officer to create a program to improve technology acquisition, planning, project management and oversight and develop metrics for success that can be monitored in real-time. Under the bill, OMB would prescribe guidelines for departments to follow and agency heads would be required to submit annual reports to Congress detailing Internet technology accomplishments. The proposal would create a "tiger team" of private sector, nonprofit, and federal R&D officials to oversee tech projects.

Agency information officers and technology adopters have been pushing for OMB guidance for some time. There is a strong need for guidance on how agencies can use certain Internet technologies, including social media. Also, the idea of a "tiger team" seems like a perfect way to involve those outside of government who want to help.

Below is a list of those scheduled to testify:

• Vivek Kundra - Administrator, Office of Electronic Government and Information Technology
• David A. Powner - Director, Information Technology Issues , U.S. Government Accountability Office
• Karen Evans - Former Administrator, Office of Electronic Government and Information Technology, Office of Management and Budget
• Mr. Philip Bond - President, TechAmerica

Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and grantees from this week:

Various media outlets and bloggers, including the likes of CNET.com, the Associated Press, the National Journal, Lawrence Lessig and Craig Newmark, have covered and congratulated the Center for Responsive Politics' (CRP) for making its data records from OpenSecrets.org free for anyone to download. The Journal's "Tech Daily Dose" column reported that more than 120 people had downloaded bulk data within the first 24 hours of CRP opening up its archives.

The Washington Post's "The Reliable Source" column highlighted Capitol Words, which "slices and dices the entirety of the Congressional Record for your searching pleasure," they write. McClatchy's David Lightman reported that, in light of the financial crisis, words you would expect to be used by congressional lawmakers often, such as recession, bailout, stimulus and deficit do not crack the top 30 most frequently uttered terms so far this year. And Daphne Ritter with the New York Post looks at the top words used by several lawmakers from the Empire State's congressional delegation.

Alice Lipowicz with Federal Computer Week used OpenCongress data in writing about how only 10 congressional lawmakers (four senators and six reps) post their daily schedules on their official Web sites. New York Newsday editorialized about how Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) is blazing a trail in her congressional career by posting her schedule and personal financial disclosure reports online. "While (congressional lawmakers are) at it, they should make sure that information is easy to locate, archived and searchable, so that watchful voters can track, over time, the lobbyists and interest groups bending an official's ear," the editors wrote.

Last week, Ryan Singel at Wired's "Epicenter" blog wrote about Sunlight Labs' contest Apps for America, and asked his readers to vote for their favorites. This week, he reported back on the response he received, and issued what he terms the "Epicenter Reader's Choice award."

Speaking of Sunlight Labs, both Craig Newmark on his blog and Andrew Pratt at Science Progress praised the Labs' pre-design for the yet-to-be-launched Data.gov, the site that new White House CIO Vivek Kundra has promised will be an easy-to-use central repository of federal bulk data. "This is precisely the kind of work I've argued that the nonprofit and advocacy sphere needs to be engaged in right now," Pratt wrote.

The San Francisco Examiner editorialized about how Congress should exercise its oversight authority and find out where every last federal bailout dollar has been spent. The Examiner gives props to Anu Narayanswamy's Real Time Investigations expose' of the identity of senior U.S. Treasury officials who are also members of the Troubled Assets Relief Program's Investment Committee -- a small group that makes big decisions about which banks receive how much of our money.

The Washington Independent's Elana Schor reports on an analysis they conducted of House and Senate fundraising during the current election cycle compared to the previous cycles. Despite the economic downturn, their analysis showed significant upticks in campaign giving. Schor quotes Bill Allison, Sunlight's senior fellow, "For the average citizen, the election is over and they're not even going to think about it for the next four years." But the donors "who are paying close attention," have a vested interest in what Congress does -- or does not -- pass into law this year.

Thanks, and see you next week!

It’s an understatement to say that us open government advocates have placed great hope on Vivek Kundra. We take President Obama’s chief information officer at his word when he says he wants to radically change the way the federal government communicates with citizens, and vice versa. "We're going to be publishing government data and [operating on] a default assumption that information should be [available] to the people, not with the default assumption that information should not be in the public domain," he said during a speech he gave last month in Washington.

On Thursday, Government Computer News published a fascinating article by Joab Jackson, GCN’s senior technology editor, that looks at two main themes that have emerged regarding Kundra’s approach. Jackson also looks back illustratively at Kundra’s brilliant tenure as chief technology officer for Washington, D.C., as a guide as how he will approach his new role with the feds.

Jackson writes that cloud computing is first on Kundra’s list, the idea of taking advantage of services already available on the internet. He envisions putting government images on Flickr, videos on YouTube and having government offices using Google Apps. Jackson points out that this is the exact approach Vivek took for the D.C. government, cutting the cost of buying new software and allowing District employees to interact with each other. No doubt challenges exist that would have to overcome, such as setting up private clouds for sensitive data and changing bureaucratic aversion from opening up and fear of losing control.

Kundra says he will follow through on Obama’s promise of opening up government data, calling it a “key agenda item that we’re going to be pushing in this administration.” Again, Jackson looks back at his time with D.C. government. Not only did Kundra put on the Web 240 data feeds from District government internal systems (everything from bus and subway train schedules to crime statistics), he set up a contest to have developers design applications from government data. Apps for Democracy motivated volunteers to build 47 new apps for the Web and hand-held devices. Kundra also plans to build Data.gov, which he promises will be the go-to site for government data feeds.

Not only does Kundra promise to open up the data, he wants to make it much easier to use by increasing the power of government servers and making sure it’s accessible in formats that are nonproprietary and don’t require a computer science degree to use and understand.

This is getting really exciting.

Last week, U.S. Rep. Mike Honda (Calif.) guest blogged on O’Reilly Radar and asked, "how can Congress take advantage of Web 2.0 technologies to transform the relationship between citizens and government?" That’s quite a refreshing attitude for a lawmaker to take, for sure. On top of that he acknowledged how Congress needs to adopt a dramatic shift in perspective before that need can be met. “Instead of databases becoming available as a result of Freedom Of Information Act requests, government officials should be required to justify why any public data should not be freely available to the taxpayers who paid for its creation." That’s music to my ears. And then he asked what Web 2.0 features he should add to his Web site.

This week, Vanessa Fox responded to Honda by writing that new features are not nearly as important as making government Web sites search-engine friendly. This alone “would absolutely transform the relationship between citizens and government and make an amazing array of public data available.”

Vanessa gives a fascinating account of why government data, while technically online, is not optimized to be found by search engines and thus, might as well not exist at all. She has spoken with people who manage government Web sites, dedicated civil servants who spend considerable resources on making sure their sites have valuable, accurate information. But they spend little time ensuring their sites interact well with the major search engines. “That's like building a brick and mortar store with shiny new marble floors and high-quality, low-priced merchandise and keeping the front door locked,” she wrote. Google estimated that, as of 2007, about half of the content government agencies make available online doesn't appear in search results at all due to how the Web sites are constructed.

Crazy, huh? Now why is this? She says that commercial sites have a monetary interest in being search-engine friendly. Government sites are geared toward content, rarely for traffic and monetary goals. The priority has not been giving citizens the ablity to easily search government Web sites and find information.

Hopefully, this is changing. Vanessa notes that Katie Stanton recently left Google to head the Obama administration’s citizen participation efforts. Improving the “searchability” of online government data through the major search engines is a top expressed goal. And Vivek Kundra, Obama’s new CIO, has plans to create data.gov as the go-to site for government data.

Vanessa encourages us to check back with her. She promises to flush out more details of how government can set up short and long term improvements. But she adds, the first step is “understanding that making government sites search engine-friendly is key to improved transparency, increased public data accessibility, and a ‘Web 2.0’ relationship between citizens and government that brings positive change.”

Last week Doug Belzer at Federal Computer Week has an encouraging article about how Twitter, blogs and other Web 2.0 tools are revolutionizing government business. Belzer writes how government managers and elected officials are using social media to network and collaborate online, quickly connecting with audiences like never before.

“If they’re looking for information about an obscure contract vehicle, they can post a message on a messaging service such as Twitter and see if someone can help them learn about it,” he writes. “Or if they run across a particularly useful piece of information on a community-created Web page, they can give it a high rating so others can find it easily in the future.”

Belzer gives five examples of how bureaucrats have used social media “to take care of business,” contrasting this new and effective strategy with how they would have approached the project or problem before Web 2.0 tools were available and in use, with less impressive results.

One of Belzer’s examples, as a un-recovered peanut butter fan, is near and dear to my heart. When salmonella-tainted peanut butter was found in a number of food products, it was the responsibility of the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration to get the word out about the recalls. In the past, the agencies would attempt to raise the alarm by employing press releases, posts on Web sites, toll-free telephone lines, but the agencies never knew how effective these efforts were at alerting the public. But with this emergency the agencies are using Web 2.0 tools, such as a widgets, blogs, Twitter feeds and other social networks, as well as other social media outreach efforts. The CDC first offered their peanut-butter widget in early February. And since then, Belzer reports, about 16,000 sites, including newspapers, health agencies and personal Web sites, posted the widget, resulting in more than 6.8 million views. “That viral effect is really pretty amazing,” he quotes a CDC information officer as saying. “The reach of the widget grows exponentially.”

The promise of Government 2.0 is just beginning to dawn.