If there's one thing that is coming to be a hallmark of the Obama approach to managing government, it may well be this: dashboards. A favorite of the modern business world, computer-based dashboards aim to give executives a glimpse at whether his or her organization's constituent parts are working together to form a smooth-running machine. As quickly as your speedometer or gas gauge tells you what you need to know about your car, a management dashboard is meant to inform the boss about organizational performance.

But when it comes to the U.S. Open Government Dashboard currently in the works at the White House, the "boss" is meant to be you -- an interested public and outside watchdog groups.

Fourteen different federal agencies and departments, from the will have their performances tracked when the open government dashboard goes live, scheduled under the terms of the terms of the President's recently-released Open Government Directive to happen no later than February 6th of 2010. And the White House is looking for helping figuring out just what the dashboard should track. "We need to enlist your help holding 'our feet to the fire,'" blogged Beth Noveck, Deputy U.S. CTO for Open Government. "We are looking for your input about what metrics the Dashboard should measure." The White House is taking comments through the Office of Science and Technology Policy's WordPress blog...

Sure, U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra, and White House new media director Macon Phillips come in for a round of Jon Stewart's special blending of mocking. (How many times do you think Chopra's been called "an Indian George Clooney" since this aired?) It's got to ouch a bit. But there's a way to look at it as a very good thing, indeed. Technologists in politics have reached a level of public interest where they're good Daily Show fodder.

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...

Think more about technology. And by all means, figure out how we can buy more of it. That's the gentle nudge that Peter Orszag and John Holdren gave federal agencies in a joint memo issued this week.

The directors of the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Office, respectively, asked federal offices to include in their 2011 budget request ideas for how scientific and technological research can confront "four practical challenges" facing the U.S, namely job growth, energy creation, health care, and national security.

What's more, think about playing well with each other, said Orszag and Holdren. In a nod to "today's open innovation model" that's all the rage outside the halls of government, agencies are given notice that "the whole chain from research to application does not have to take place within a single lab, agency or firm." Agencies are prodded to "become highly open to ideas from many players, at all stages."

We like to ask just how, exactly, Vivek Kundra, Aneesh Chopra, and other government technologists-in-residence are going to drag America to a tech-savvy future we talk much about. It's a good question. But this is also one good answer. Take some chunk of the enormous sums of money the U.S. government spends every year and start buying our way there. NextGov's Gautham Nagesh has more.

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.

At Personal Democracy Forum 2009 this morning, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra was rewarded with an enthusiastic standing ovation in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Rose Theater for pulling back the curtain on the federal IT spending dashboard he has been talking up in recent weeks, as an interface onto the biggest of the technology projects that are commissioned and executed under the vast umbrella of the federal government. With the admission that IT.USAspending.gov is in beta and might contain bugs, dead ends, and major gaps (the tag on the project site sets the we-know-we're-not-perfect-yet tone, calling the dashboard "a journey towards greater transparency and accountability") the site has ambitions of opening up a portal onto the tremendous sums of money spent on federal information technology projects that have an unfortunate history of going horribly, miserably, disastrously wrong.

To be sure, the data behind the dashboard has long been tracked by what's called "Exhibit 300s" submitted by agency CIOs to the White House's Office of Management and Budget. But the IT dashboard makes that information far more malleable and trackable (with the added bonus of some snazzy charts and graphs):

The IT Dashboard provides the public with an online window into the details of Federal information technology investments and provides users with the ability to track the progress of investments over time. The IT Dashboard displays data received from agency reports to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), including general information on over 7,000 Federal IT investments and detailed data for nearly 800 of those investments that agencies classify as "major". The performance data used to track the 800 major IT investments is based on milestone information displayed in agency reports to OMB called "Exhibit 300s" Agency CIOs are responsible for evaluating and updating select data on a monthly basis, which is accomplished through interfaces provided on the website.

Check out the site, dive into the data, and play around with the tools here -- including the ability to create an RSS feed to track your favorite (or least favorite) federal IT spending projects.

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.

Over on NextGov (which, if you have an interest in tech policy, you really should be reading rather regularly), Gautham Nagesh reports that with Recovery.gov struggling to get its footing, some are recommending that the two-year-old USASpending.gov site step into the breach.

USASpending, created as a result of legislation jointly authored by Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn and a then junior Democratic Senator from Illinois by the name of Barack Obama, is not without its own troubles. The site has struggled to get timely data reported from agencies. But the Obama Administration isn't junking its old and more-or-less reliable car in favor of the sporty new Recovery.gov. U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra has just issued a directive instructing agencies to submit spending the reports required by USASpending.gov on the 5th and 20th of each month, instead of the 12 times a year previously mandated.

A quick peek at the new Data.gov reveals that the federal government's data catalog has grown by a few dozen new data feeds, bringing the number of information sets available on the site up to 80. The site had been critiqued for launching about a week and a half ago with just over 45 feeds, so this new growth will be welcomed by many. The bulk of the new data sets appears to consist of previously-published IRS studies on tax-exempt charitable organizations and private foundations from 1992 to 2005.