Big Data:
Vivek Kundra, 36, wants to consolidate the government data scattered over 94,000 separate Web sites into a single portal.
Image: Stephen Voss Redux Pictures
In Brief
- The federal government has begun a program to place all nonclassified information online in formats that make it simple for researchers and developers to work with.
- By opening up this information to the public, federal chief information officer Vivek Kundra hopes to reduce government waste and make it easier for citizens to interact with government.
- Kundra has also introduced the Information Technology Dashboard, a Web-based service that allows citizens to track the progress of various federal IT infrastructure projects.
- Privacy and security remain major challenges. Government databases often contain information about individual citizens, and that information must be stripped out before posting.
The federal government is many things, but transparent it is not. As the nation’s first chief information officer, Vivek Kundra is attempting to pull the federal infrastructure into the information age by making government data freely available online. Is it possible for technology to revolutionize the way we interact with government?
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: We all know that the White House has a Facebook page. Beyond that, what ways can the government use technology to better serve taxpayers?
This article was originally published with the title Digitizer in Chief.
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