One of the philosophical cornerstones of the open-government websites championed by federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra was to promote transparency in government.
For example, the Office of Management and Budget launched the IT Dashboard to track federal investments in IT projects to increase agency accountability and also to âshine a lightâ on where federal dollars are flowing the money is going.
But in a recent White House blog post, Kundra is taking transparency to a whole new level.
The nationâs first chief information officer announced OMB is releasing the source code for the IT Dashboard and the TechStat toolkit.
Kundra said the reasoning behind releasing the source code is two-fold.
âFirst, to take the platform to the next level, we want to tap into the collective talents and ingenuity of the American people, to enhance functionality, improve the code and address existing challenges,â he said.
The other reason is to allow programmers and others to use the source codeâs baseline programming to create new projects.
In many cases, these programmers are state and local CIOs and others from around the world, who âare all interested in implementing these platforms in their respective organizations,â he added.