Obama’s Big Startup

TechDirt and Anil Dash each have interesting articles (link, link) about Aneesh Chopra and Vivek Kundra. Those are the guys that the new administration put in charge of overhauling the federal government’s IT infrastructure and actually implementing a lot of the administrations transparency in government promises. The article argues that what they’re doing is the most interesting tech startup of the year. That’s not the sort of thing you expect to hear someone say about the federal government.

They have done a pretty impressive job of actually getting useful product out the door, which is an important part of the startup mindset, and not typically part of entrenched bureaucracies.

For examples, go check out the Federal IT spending dashboard, data.gov, the stimulus package maps, and the apps at Sunlight Labs.

One area where this hasn’t gone well is the cash for clunkers program. It would be nice if we could get a nice chart like this one from Good magazine that was getting updated as the data rolled in. The reality is that the administration seems to have been very slow to release any numbers and reluctant to publish them in an easily accessible way.