Good, because frankly, those pie charts and bar graphs aren't all that intuitive. Team Vivek Kundra has launched a blog late yesterday to accompany the new IT Dashboard site. If done well, the blog could become a powerful oversight tool, turning numbers into narrative and making some meaning from the spending data that drives the site:

[W]e can’t simply make this an exercise in federal agency reporting. That is why we started this blog. We want to hear from you about what works and what doesn't with the site. Is there a more innovative approach that an investment should consider? Does the contract data look incorrect to you? Is there an application that we should add? This is a site to serve you, and to do that, we need to hear from you.

In a half-hour live chat conducted on the White House website and Facebook, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra and White House new media director Macon Phillips explained the inspiration for and mechanics of a new federal tech spending oversight site that debuted at PdF '09 earlier this week. IT.USAspending.gov offers a portal onto agency spending data on high-dollar federal technology investments. During the live chat, Phillips pulled in questions from the Internet. (One the chat got rolling, Facebook questions, said Phillips, were coming in "fast and furious.") Kundra answered them -- including an intriguing little riff on how every new historical transformation in the nature of technology compels government to adapt, either to merely survive or, hopefully, to thrive.

Coming in at just under 30 minutes, true geeks are going to want more detail on the Kundra approach to data-enabled management. Most normal human beings are going to want less. But this lunch-time sized session of engagement is a low-bar way to include the greatest possible swath of citizens in the changing nature of government.

On the campaign trail, Barack Obama liked to talk about the need to take a "scalpel" to the federal budget. Looks like that's not an approach shared by New York Democratic Governor David Paterson. Paterson has released an interactive "Budget Balancing Calculator" that challenges New Yorkers to bridge the state's $12.5 billion General Fund budget gap by adjusting state spending levels. But the calculator is much more a dull-edged hatchet than a scalpel.