Here's a deal that U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra is likely watching closely: the city of Los Angeles, reports InformationWeek, has just signed a contract to move 30,000 of its employees from a Novell email service to Google Apps-based email. The city estimates that the plan, $7 million at signing, will save the municipality $5 million over the next five years. Leaving aside the vagueness surrounding what "cloud computing" is, exactly, Kundra has been extolling the merits of moving government to the clouds. Google brings to the table rather enormous server farms all over the world, but storing government information in scattered bits and pieces raises security and reliability concerns -- especially after the recent SideKick debacle. Don't worry, says Google. This might be cloud computing, but it's a private cloud with a chain-link fence around it; the company is building a government-only Google Apps-hosting cloud, housed on only U.S.-based servers and staffed by employees that gave undergone the security checks called for by the government entities housing their goods on those servers.

Having one of the country's biggest cities make the Google switch -- while saving money, ensuring security, and giving its employees a bit more flexibility with how they use their email -- might help Kundra sell the idea of moving Uncle Sam to the clouds. In other U.S. CIO news, NextGov reports that the Open Government Directive that the OMB promised to deliver by the end of this month is now on a timetable of "within the next couple weeks."

(Photo credit: turtlemom4bacon [How much would you pay to know the backstory on that name?])

The "Open Government Directive" that Barack Obama ordered up on his first full day in the Oval Office is, reports NextGov's Aliya Sternstein, almost ready to drop. On January 21st, Obama called on OMB to come up with something concrete for the President to tell the dozens of federal agencies how they can satisfy his call to overhaul the United States government to make it less opaque, less inaccessible, and less insular. Sternstein quotes an OMB spokesperson saying that his office will have the President's open government marching orders drawn up and delivered "in the next few weeks at most...[i] in the next couple weeks, at best." Expect something in October, says OMB.

You might remember that we also heard in early September that the Open Government Directive was "imminent." In fairness, though, directive-izing takes time. That's partly because the wheels of bureaucracy move slowly. But there are signs that something more significant and fundamental is at play here with the OGD. And that's that, while words like transparent, participatory, and collaborative are all the rage and Gov 2.0 is a catchy shorthand for them, the theory of practice driving open government is, arguably, still pretty fuzzy.

Spend some time in the Gov 2.0 world...

Hacks.gov is only a matter of time, dontcha think? To be shortly followed by Microblogging.gov. And then Tunes.gov, a clearinghouse for DRM-cleared music that can serve as the soundtrack for government service...

Where were we? Oh yes. U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra announced in a speech this afternoon at NASA's Ames Research Center the launch of the new Apps.gov. In this case, the now ubiquitous short-hand "apps" refers simply to web-based or server-based software. What the new site adds to the mix is a one-stop shop for government innovators where they can pick up software that has been given an umbrella okay by the executive branch. Unlike the public-facing Data.gov, the audience for Apps.gov is almost entirely internal, but they share the same spirit -- centralize good and potentially powerful resources in one place in the hopes of stretching their utility...

At an informal press gaggle of sorts that took place after he left the ballroom stage at the Gov 2.0 Summit, U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra was eager to take the spotlight off of himself and make a point that you often hear in conversations around DC. Being the first official Chief Technology Officer of the United States comes with a relatively high-profile, in certain circles at least. That said, much of the innovation, experimentation, and ultimately success or failure of technology in Obama's Washington will depend not on him, but on the CTOs and CIOs with operational authority and hefty budgets stationed in the agencies and departments throughout the federal government.

Without a budget or much staff, Chopra's role is to advise the president from his perch at the Office of Technology and Science Policy while also creating space for federal CIOs, CTOs, and other senior technologist to flourish. "My priority is creating a culture of innovation at the agencies," said Chopra. While hardly household names, those technologists and managers have the day-to-day management responsibility over whether federal IT projects succeed. That point was echoed by U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, who deflected a question during a session this morning about the multi-million dollar price tag on the redesign of the Recovery.gov site. Despite OMB's role in overseeing the recovery process, said Kundra, officials with independent Recovery Accountability and Transparency are the ones ultimately responsible for Recovery.gov.

Chopra called out for particular praise a handful of his fellow technologists working at agencies and departments, including Todd Park and Peter Levin, the newly appointed CTOs at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Veterans Affairs respectively, as well as Alec Ross, senior technologist and advisor at the State Department.

We're not going to hold it against Charles Homans that he cites The Raven in Mt. Pleasant as his favorite DC bar (you locals know what I'm talking about) because his new Washington Monthly piece on data-driven government is otherwise seriously good stuff. It's an important article, and I urge you to read it. Maybe even twice. For one thing, there's critique of some of the more high-profile participatory government efforts. (Homans quotes the developer of Stumble Safely, one of the winners in DC's Apps for Democracy contest, as saying: "Most of these apps are bull____...Including mine—it’s a bar-crawl site!") Most chewy, though, is his look at what happens when Government 2.0 runs smack into Government 1.0. I'm not kidding around. Give it a read.

Here's what caused the White House to tweet out a celebratory "FTW," as mentioned below. CIO Vivek Kundra writes on the IT Dashboard's blog that, thanks "in part" to the data-driven oversight site, the Department of Veterans Affairs is calling a temporary halt on 45 tech projects worth about $200 million. The IT.USAspending.gov site visualizes and otherwise slices and dices the tracking data federal agencies provide to OMB on their IT spending. Kundra, in his second ever post to the blog (a post I can't link to directly because the blog -- bad blog! -- lacks links to individual posts): "During the next few weeks, the VA will audit these 45 projects to determine whether additional resources or new management teams can get them back on schedule. If they can’t be fixed, the projects will be canceled."

The VA is one of 12 federal agencies with 85% or higher compliance with government requirements to rate major IT investments. The Small Business Administration and Treasury Department hover near 10% compliance. Thirteen other agencies still score a zero on IT oversight compliance, giving Kundra and his team no data on high-dollar projects with which to work.

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.

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.

Tim O'Reilly picks up a nice catch from Wired's invitation-only Disruptive by Design conference in New York this week. Interviewed by Wired's Nick Thompson, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra said, tweets O'Reilly, that government agencies are "competing to be top data.gov contributor." (Those are O'Reilly's words, not Kundra's. We're guessing the full quote, complete with articles, is somewhere in the video above. But we haven't watched it yet.) This idea, that government innovation can come from intramural competition, is one that we've seen the Obama White House experimenting with. Take, for example, the "Open Government Innovations Gallery." Talking to folks in the White House, it's clear that the audience for that hall of fame is at least in part public servants working on technology projects elsewhere in government.

Being a cynical sort, you want to know if this clever approach to open government actually works. Whether it's soft power like sparking competition, or more direct tactics like strong arming, something needs to happen to make Data.gov into a deep and powerful resource. Kundra had talked about bringing 100,000 feeds to the site by the end of last week. You might recall that the site launched with about 40 feeds, before quickly doubling. As things stand today, Data.gov is playing host to 261 feeds.

The quality of the dialogue on the Office of Science and Technology Policy's Open Government blog continues to improve, day by day. Clearly, the folks running the show are learning as they go, and trying to tweak how they blog about policy so that a useful conversation can flourish. But the process still leaves a lot to be desired, which may be more the fault of the topic at hand and the tools available, then the specific choices being made by the OSTP's team. Should we drawing big conclusions from this experiment? Or should we treat is a big experiment, but just one of many that need to happen before we can draw firm conclusions about the prospects for involving the public in developing policy using online collaboration tools? (I think the latter.)

Here are some examples of what I mean. First the good news: The majority of the comments now appearing on the OSTP blog are serious efforts by citizens, and in some cases domain experts, to engage with the questions on tap...