Federal CIO Vivek Kundra spoke at Wired magazine’s Disruptive By Design business conference today, demonstrating data.gov, a new online hub for data from government agencies. Although Kundra (left) conceded that data.gov has to be careful of the information it publishes — in order to avoid violating citizens’ privacy or throwing off the financial markets with faulty info — he said he hoped to facilitate transparency of government agencies.
“The default setting of the U.S. government should be open,” Kundra said, adding that he hopes to publish data from government agencies across the board in order to allow the American people to manipulate and use it. In fact, Kundra said his office is now accelerating the pace that they are publishing information. There will be 100,000 feeds available by the end of the week, he said.
But what sort of information is available on data.gov? Kundra said the information will be everything from flight delay data, as well as reasons for flight delays, to Internal Revenue Service data or even updates about the spread of the H1N1 flu.
Of course, this might sound good to us, but not everyone is happy by the great strides taken by Kundra and his team. Government agencies that are used to requesting millions of dollars in funding for technology updates or “people who want to maintain the status quo” will be thrown by this new transparent approach to information distribution. But Kundra doesn’t mind the naysayers.
“The federal government does not have a monopoly on the best ideas,” Kundra said. And creating transparency and openness through Web sites like data.gov will allow us “to return to real democracy as ‘We the people,’” he added.
• Related: Wired‘s Chris Anderson: “The Free Vs. Paid Debate Is Misunderstood”
This morning I was reading an exciting article about Vivek Kundra being among the remaining two choices for becoming the next Chief Technology Officer of the United States. This is a huge deal for D.C. in particular as Kundra is currently part of the mayor’s cabinet and will most likely continue to help the local area. He has continuously emphasized his focus on helping local startups to win big contracts in favor of large bureaucratic contractors.