Over on the White House blog, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra and Michael Fitzpatrick from the OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Policy (a.k.a. OIRA) plant a bit of a flag in the ground with a post calling out the "existing practices" that conventional wisdom is beginning to eye as potential roadblocks to open and participatory government. The interesting two-sides-of-the-coin here are that the very policies Kundra and Fitzpatrick are calling into question were, at the time they were enacted, intended to make the United States government more open and participatory:

• The 1990 Paperwork Reduction Act. PRA was a good government bill meant to make engaging with government less onerous and open up the democratic process. But its documentation requirements might hamper the government use of wikis, blogs, and the like.
• The 2000 "Federal Cookie Policy." Issued as a OMB memorandum, the policy was meant to protect citizens' privacy, but it can get in the way of using some web 2.0 technologies -- YouTube, for example.
• "Records Management Law." It's not immediately clear (to me, at least) what Kundra and Fitzpatrick are referring to here, but they seem to be interested in making it easier to comply with guidance from the National Archives and Records Administration.
• The 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act. FACA was aimed at regulating the influence 'unofficial' advisors might have on the presidency. Today, it might limit the ability of, say, volunteer programmers to contribute their work to the federal government.

Kundra and Fitzpatrick are asking for your thoughts on whether or how to pursue changing these laws and policies.

Richard Stirling of the British Government's Cabinet Office is musing about what a "UK version of data.gov" might look like. (via The Guardian) What makes the prospect of government-run data hub across the pond somewhat differently intriguing than it is in the U.S. is that Britain has a less robust presumption of information freedom (and legal framework). Free and structured data, then, is potentially a bit more contentious; have a look at how the Guardian introduces its own section on freedom of information: "Britain can sometimes seem like a secret state..." Could be fascinating to watch how they wrestle with both the technological and political implications of open data.

Data.gov may soon be raising the bar on what open government means around the world. NextGov is reporting that CIO Vivek Kundra is planning to use the site to power a system to keep tabs on the progress of federal IT projects.

Yesterday, a Senate Governmental Affairs subcommittee held a hearing that was effectively a chance for out-going OMB e-government administrator Karen Evans to warn her successor, Vivek Kundra, about what lies ahead for him. She's been there, he's going to have to do that, so she may as well share what she's learned along the way. For all the excitement over Kundra's appointment in these parts, it's grounding to see the senators who turned up for the session. If the video is to be believed, it was a grand total of two: subcommittee chair Tom Carper of Delaware and Illinois's Roland Burris. Even with the meager audience, Evans admitted that it was "liberating to be here as a private citizen" so that she might open up about the tough job of dragging government IT into the 21st century. A sample:

[In some cases] the law will need to be changed to accommodate collaboration between the people and the people's government. For example, the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980, which was intended to reduce the burden of collecting information from the public, effectively prevents agencies from gathering feedback or user-generated content online. Adding a website survey requires an approval process which includes a public comment period. It's a Catch-22; we ask the public to comment on whether we can ask for their comments.

Evans goes with Joseph Heller; Kafka gets you there as well. Indeed, on a number of fronts, Kundra is going to find what he wants to do to make government more collaborative and transparent is going to take Congress going along with changes in law and regulation. And that will take the active support of a bunch more members than Tom Carper and Roland Burris.

The tech press and blogosphere have been rife with speculation that Vivek Kundra's new job as Federal CIO could be derailed by last week's news of the arrest of a top IT staffer in his old Office of the Chief Technology Officer of Washington DC. We here at techPresident hope that is not the case. For apart from Kundra's innovative approach to opening up government data, which we've covered here in some depth, he also brings a fresh, web-savvy perspective to the problem of making government more honest and effective. Unless there is evidence that Kundra was somehow involved in or responsible for the staffer's alleged crimes--and it appears there is none--he ought to be allowed to do the job he was appointed to do by President Obama. After all, we believe people are innocent until they're proven guilty, right?

Staffing headaches for the administration are adding a bit of a wrinkle to the Open Government Directive that Obama put in an order for on his first full day in office. Obama called for a government-wide operating plan on transparency, participation, and collaboration to be issued in 120 days. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that date creep hit a government project, but as it's written that's May 21. It's a fairly tight schedule, and even more so when there aren't all that many hands on desk. The "Chief Technology Officer" was given by Obama the lead in writing the directive. Of course, she or he has yet to be named, and talk has even died down considerably over possible candidates. Speculation is that the eventual CTO will be housed in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Obama's pick for OSTP director, John Holdren, has seen his nomination held up over some Senate bickering. There's some forward-moving news on that front, though. Holdren's nomination passed out of committee yesterday, and looks headed for confirmation on the Senate floor. Ultimate issuance of the directive is meant to come from OMB. As OMB e-government administrator, Vivek Kundra will likely have a hand in crafting the order -- but he's gone on leave in light of a procurement investigation in his old DC CTO office.

Headaches, no doubt. But the slack has been picked up, at seems, by Beth Noveck, who has been working from inside OSTP to reach out to advocates and stakeholders inside and outside government to get a working draft together.

The fallout from yesterday's FBI raid on the Office of the Chief Technology Officer had put the brakes on Barack Obama's appointment of Vivek Kundra as U.S. Chief Information Officer, according to several news reports. Kundra has gone on leave while the federal investigation into bribery in OCTO (called "ock-toe") continues. There's been no sign that Kundra has been implicated. But the investigation -- which involved some pretty elaborate alleged schemes having to do with overbilling and "ghost" employees -- is arguably more damaging for Kundra than it would be for another appointee. How's that? By the White House's own announcement, his White House nod at the tender age of 34 was due to his "pioneering work to drive transparency, engage citizens and lower the cost of government operations." White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs called it "a serious matter."

Politico's Ben Smith notes that the main target of the investigation inside OCTO, security official Yusuf Acar, is said in the FBI's affadavit to have been monitoring the emails that flowed in and out of the office in a bid to protect his doings. (Photo credit: ckramer)

Providing a strange backdrop to the Twittered excitement over U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra's speech at FOSE this morning was the breaking news that the FBI had raided Kundra's former offices at the DC CTO headquarters. What's the deal? The details are shaking out, but it seems that the Chief Security Officer under Kundra, Yusuf Acar, was the target of a federal bribery investigation. A second man, Sushil Bansal, was also arrested. Bansal, it seems, is a former DC employee who is now CEO of the DC-based Advanced Integrated Technologies Corporation, an "end-to-end Technology and Business Process Outsourcing Services company." AITC has received $350,000 in DC government contracts, and the AITC site lists the District's CTO office as the client for projects modernizing the city's "information systems in health, social services, education, courts, and related agencies" and its IT security systems. In fact, four of the five case studies on the AITC site have to do with worked preformed for the DC city government.

The arrests and raid are no doubt a headache for Kundra, the Obama White House, and administration vetters (who are no doubt buying Advil by the kilo at this point.) But it's worth noting that the newly-appointed CIO hasn't been implicated in the case.

Something else jumps out of the Washington Post's reporting on this affair. The DC office of CTO has 298 employees and a budget of $69 million? At first glance, that seems to be a healthily-sized office for a city of about half a million people.

UPDATE: Video of Kundra's FOSE talk is now up online.

Just a heads up that our new national CIO Vivek Kundra has the stage at FOSE right this very moment. He's saying interesting stuff, and if you happen not to be in the Washington Convention Center this morning, following along the #fose hashtag is a close second to being there.

ArsTechnica's Julian Sanchez asks the tough question on everyone's minds. Well, if it's not, it's clear in retrospect that it should have been. Yes, Vivek Kundra is visionary, revolutionary, and an open-government maestro. But is the newly-appointed U.S. "CIO" being handed a newly-created and ultra-powerful post? Or is he stepping into the existing Office of Management and Budget e-government administrator job? Sanchez does something that the old folks call reporting and picked up the phone to OMB. And yep, Kundra's actual appointment is to Karen Evans' old job of "Administrator of E-Government and Information Technology," a position that's been around since 2001. Sanchez jokes, "Everyone who had heard of Karen Evans before just now, raise your hand" -- thus forcing me to raise my hand and bury my head on my desk in shame. But he has a point. Evans acted as a coordinator and spokesperson -- leading the Federal CIO Council, frequently testifying before Congress on the state of federal IT -- but CIOs and CTOs embedded in individual agencies and department still retained a great deal of autonomy over their own IT processes.

In geek quarters, Vivek Kundra's appointment to the new post of Chief Information Officer/e-Government Administrator of the United States is sparking hosannas and cries of joyful anticipation such as you've never heard before. But that's because Kundra's uttering things about government not often spoken by someone with the power to make them happen. O'Reilly's Tim O'Brien has clips and notes from a conference call in which Kundra hops from Facebook-style self-organizing to the Human Genome Project to intra-governmental collaboration via wiki. CNET's Stephanie Condon does a rundown on the appointment (in which the CIO is framed as sort of the alpha CIO responsible for leading the many CIOs scattered across government). And the Sunlight Foundation's Clay Johnson has a quick guide to the tenets of Kundraism: (1) using alternative market models to reduce cost, (2) data driven decisions, and (3) operational data is public data.