New US CIO - apps for democracy too!

[Tracey P. Lauriault]

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/white-house-names-first-chief-information-officer/?emc=eta1

The Caucus | A New York Times Blog
March 5, 2009, 10:08 am
White House Names First Chief Information Officer
By Brian Knowlton

Update | 12:46 p.m. In a 25-minute conference call, Mr. Kundra
discussed some of his plans and interests, including his intention to
extend the use of “cloud computing” in the federal government and to
create a data.gov web site that
will put vast amounts of government information into the public domain.

He sketched out an ambition that is hardly modest: to shatter the
assumption that government technology automatically must lag behind
the private sector. Saul Hansell at Bits has more on the conference
call.

First Federal Chief Information Officer | 10:06 a.m. Perhaps not
surprisingly, President Obama has formed a close friendship with the
District of Columbia’s young, Blackberry-addicted, problem-solving
mayor, Adrian Fenty. Now, the president has raided Mr. Fenty’s staff
to name a youthful, Indian-born techno-whiz as his first federal chief
information officer.

The White House said Thursday that it had selected Vivek Kundra, 34,
the chief technology officer for the District, to the federal
position, where he will be expected to oversee a push to expand uses
of cutting-edge technology. He will have wide powers over federal
technology spending, over information sharing between agencies, over
greater public access to government information and over questions of
security and privacy.

But he will also – as Mr. Obama mentioned twice in the space of a
six-line comment distributed by the White House – look for ways to
“lower the cost of government operations” through technology.

Mr. Kundra’s background seems to suit him well for both aspects of the
job. Born in India, he lived in Tanzania until the age of 11, when he
moved to the Maryland suburb of Gaithersburg. One of his first
memories there, according to a profile last month in The Washington
Post, was of seeing a dog-food commercial on television. “I was
shocked,” he said. “I was used to seeing people starve in Africa. It
was mind-boggling to me that people could afford to feed their dogs!”

He appears to bring a similar tight-fisted mentality to his oversight
of technology in 86 District agencies.

In just 19 months with the District, Mr. Kundra has moved to post city
contracts on YouTube and to make Twitter use common in his office and
others. He hopes to allow drivers to pay parking tickets or renew
their driver’s licenses on Facebook.

His office’s Web site offers a “Digital Public Square” with links to
information on everything from crime to parking to tourism. It
provides a map of free wi-fi hot spots, a public library finder,
leaf-collection schedules; even a widget to view live snow-plow
progress.

A contest he launched in October – “Apps for Democracy”
(http://www.appsfordemocracy.org/) – brought 47 entries from residents
offering applications to give District residents Web and cellphone
access to crime reports, pothole-repair schedules and other city data,
The Post reported.

Mr. Kundra, who likes to refer to citizens as “co-creators,” estimates
he spent $50,000 for contest costs and prize money; he hopes to save
$2.6 million over what it would have cost to hire contract developers.

Mr. Kundra, who holds a Master’s of Science in information technology
from the University of Maryland, previously served as assistant
secretary of commerce and technology in Virginia. InfoWorld magazine
has called him one of the 25 top chief technology officers in the
country.

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Tracey P. Lauriault
613-234-2805
https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault