Category Archives: Gov 2.0

Kundra: Closing the IT gap is the key to making government work better for the American people

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Today, the first chief information officer of the United States, Vivek Kundra, shared his reflections on public service.

Kundra, whose last day of work at the White House Office of Management and Budget was last Friday, is now at the Harvard Kennedy School and Berkman Center.

I arrived at a White House that was, as the Washington Post put it, “stuck” in the “Dark Ages of technology.” In their words, “If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past.”

As my team congratulated me on the new job, they handed me a stack of documents with $27 billion worth of technology projects that were years behind schedule and millions of dollars over budget. At the time, those documents were what passed for real-time updates on the performance of IT projects. My neighbor’s ten year old could look up the latest stats of his favorite baseball player on his phone on the school bus, but I couldn’t get an update on how we were spending billions of taxpayer dollars while at my desk in the White House. And at the same time, the President of the United States had to fight tooth and nail to simply get a blackberry.

These were symptoms of a much larger problem.

The information technology gap between the public and private sectors makes the Federal Government less productive and less effective at providing basic services to its citizens. Closing this gap is the key to making government work better for the American people – the ultimate goal.

His complete thoughts are embedded below. If you’re interested in frank insight into why changing government through information technology isn’t easy, read on.

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Notes from the third White House Open Government Partnership consultation

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In July 2011, the State Department hosted an historic gathering in Washington to announce an Open Government Partnership with Brazil and six other nations. For background on the initiative, read this digest on Open Government Partnership analysis for context.

This new new open government partnership could drive U.S. commitments, according to OMB Watch.

What those commitments will be is still unclear. Given that they’re due by September’s Open Government Summit at the United Nations in New York City, the timeline for drafting them is quite limited.

Last week, when the White House asked for ideas on the National Plan for open government, the community learned a bit more about what’s on the table: improving public services and increasing public integrity.

Clay Johnson has since offered the White House a deep set of recommendations for open government in response to the three questions it posed, including better ways to use open data, social media, improving regulations, public comment, and the developer community better. If you’re interested in open government, it’s a must-read.

Those are not the limit of potential commitments on the table, at least as evidenced by what we know about the series of three consultations with open government stakeholders in Washington that the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs held this July, on the 22nd, 25th and 29th. These consultations were not livestreamed or otherwise recorded, however, nor have OIRA’s notes been released to the public yet. That said, we have at least two accounts of what happened in July, from:

I attended the July 29th consultation and, while I did not record video or audio, can share the following written notes.

Attendees

As with the previous meetings, OIRA administrator Cass Sunstein led the discussion. White House OSTP deputy CTO for public sector innovation Chris Vein was also there, along with half a dozen OIRA staff and a representative of the National Security Archive.

Seated around the table were representatives from America Speaks, OMB Watch, the Center for Technology in Government at the University of Albany, Sunshine in Government. University of Pennsylvania professor Cary Coglionese and a board member from the International Association for Public Participation, Leanne Nurse, dialed into a conference speaker phone line.

Past meetings included representatives from the Revenue Watch Institute, Code for America, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Open Plans, Civic Commons, the Sunlight Foundation, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the Project for Government Oversight, in addition to Open the Government and NCDD.

Open Government Consultation

Sunstein started the meeting by offering high level context for the OGP and thanks to the organizations around the table.

When the OGP was devised, he said, it was done with background experience from the Open Government Directive that came President Barack Obama and the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Many of your organizations were “indispensable” during that process, Sunstein said, and even though what happened with the open government directive “wasn’t perfect,” there has been “tremendous progress.” He thought from the beginning, with regard to the OMB open government project, that it would be a work in progress, with plans scrutinized and improved over time.

Sunstein laid out the reason for the consultation: the White House has national action plan due in September, with an event at the UN as the president promised. The White House wants the national action plan to be as good as possible, “improving on what we’ve got so far as we can.” Reflecting his comments at the previous two consultations, Sunstein said that one way to think of the meeting is generating ideas through three stages, given the temporal and feasibility constraints posed by the short deadline for UN recommendations. He observed that where would be opportunities moving forward in the medium term, over a 3-5 month time period to do more.

Katherine McFate, the executive director of OMB Watch, asked a question about the parameters for the consultation, noting that if you go back and look at the open government partnership, there are five different challenges for countries. If you only have to pick one or two, she suggested, improving public services is one, and may be improving public integrity is another. Increasing accountability, likely to be three. (Given the recent White House blog post, OIRA may have taken that suggestion.)

In response, Sunstein replied that there are surely things that have budgetary repercussions, which you then have to answer for, although in open government, sometimes it’s possible to improve public services without stretching the budget.

Theresa Pardo, director of the CTG at Albany, after thanking OIRA for the opportunity to speak and to listen, focused on the some of the issues that have arisen during implementation of the open government directive, including the role of citizen engagement. One tension is how to think about citizen participation, versus accountability imperatives.

One of the things that we hear quite regularly when we talk to practitioners at federal, local, and state level, along with academics, is a lot of confusion about concepts underlying open government directive. There’s pressure towards clarity, and still a lot of ambiguity. One of the ways to push through in creating that clarity, she suggested, would be to focus a bit more on the conversation, on figuring out what the problems that citizens are seeking open government to solve. Pardo said that in their experience, in various jurisdictions in US and outside of the US, it’s a challenge to connect what’s happening in government agencies with what citizens are talking about in public. Over the long term, the opportunity for open government, she explained, is to move towards deeper engagement with citizens themselves about what problems are they experiencing.

Professor Coglianese, speaking over the phone, agreed with Pardo and McFate. He also suggested that the White House clearly take stock of where open government is currently. We’re seeing great things, in taking stock of regulations, he said. It would make sense to something similar with taking stock of public participation now, defining a better baseline of where to assess what kinds of reform are making changes.

The point, about defining a baseline for public participation, was taken up and emphasized by many of those invited to the July 29 consultation. One of our major tools is the public participation spectrum, said Douglas Sarno of IAP2 USA. No systematic approach to what we’re trying to do or what’s been achieved has been defined by the White House, he said, and no way of qualifying bonafide public participation versus hackneyed participation defined. There are good challenges in finding metrics.

Sunstein agreed that the regulatory process requires significant public participation. This week, the Regulations.gov team acknowledged the need to do more in that regard.

In response, Pardo cited a number of studies in which communications scholars and computer scientists are using machine language processing to analyze online rulemaking to see if it results in changing in deliberation or positive social interaction. Such studies can be expensive but useful. Part of the issue in integrated such work, however, is getting real movement in processes in partnership with academics, she said.

Pardo focused further upon the role of citizen engagement, both around rulemaking and the large context of open government. Nowhere, until just recently, she said, do we teach our public managers about how to look, engage, and use citizen participation tools. “There’s a capability gap at all levels of government. How do public managers in local governments and cities, think about their jobs in different ways?”

The National Association of State CIOs and others are looking at building capability to understand how to use data and engagement tools better, said Pardo, but across the board there’s lack of ability in these core competencies. Maybe building ability as with cybersecurity skills would make sense, she suggested, including professional standards for citizen participation.

Coglianese similary focused more on baseline assessments for public participation. There are some political scientists who have tried to assess the actual impact of public comment and proposed rulemaking, he said. In terms of what to look to as baseline, what is it you want to accomplish with this national action plan? Is the goal to increase public participation? What is the level right now? We don’t have a way of saying what the volume of interaction is across the federal government, he asserted.

We do know, however, that rulemaking tends to be more something that organizations participated in more than individual citizens, Coglionese said, citing a recent article on public participation that he’d authored law journal. “We need a baseline of who’s participating and at what level,” he said. “Is the goal of participation to increase the quality of public decision making? That’s hard to assess. To enhance public virtue? That’s much harder to assess. Until it’s clear exactly what it is you would want to do, you can’t answer these questions.”

David Stern, director on online engagement at America Speaks, validated Coglionese’s words, observing that his organization had recently looked at all open government plans by agencies and came to the same conclusion. There’s a lack of consistency in metrics used to evaluate projects, said Stern, and no standards about what defines good participation. Number of people, diversity, number of instances policy influenced? Standards and best practices, in this area, would be helpful coming from White House and OMB. Every open government project contains response to the most popular proposals, he said, which means that every public engagement initiative has a public engagement component.

Rick Blum of Sunshine in Government raised another issue: FOIA exemptions, including agencies proposing them independently. The Department of Defense is overclassifying, said Blum, and it’s very hard to track what’s happening. The Department of Justice has put up a FOIA dashboard but it’s “plagued with tech glitches and bad data,” he said. This has become a public debate about secrecy or disclosure, with some half a billion dollars being spent annually fulfilling FOIA requests, said Blum. There’s also concern about the impact of the recent Supreme Court decision in Milner vs the Navy.

On my part, I offered feedback that I’d collected from the broader open government community ahead of time and over the previous year.

First, the White House has not explicitly separated open government innovation, in terms of open data about the business of government, from “good government” initiatives that transparency advocates expect and demand, in terms of accountability to the people. Misset expectations around the goals the White House has set out have created widespread dissatisfaction and harsh criticisms of an administration that promised to be “most transparent ever.” The open government initiative in the province of British Columbia offers a potential model for the White House to consider, in terms of this separation.

Second, as the federal government moves forward with its ongoing review of .gov websites, there are opportunities to work with civil society and civic developers to co-create better e-services.

Third, opportunities exist for the White House to partner with entrepreneurs, media or nonprofits that are making government data open, useful and searchable. For instance, BrightScope has made financial advisor data from the SEC and FINRA available to the public. The work of Code for America and others on farmers market open data is another example.

Finally, there continue to be serious issues raised by developers about the quality of open government data on Data.gov. In general, public servants continue to release PDFs, as opposed to machine-readable structured data, and cite the language in the Open Government Directive for support. If government wishes developers and businesses to use its data for accountability, civic utility or economic value, then releasing data in the open formats that these communities find most useful makes logical sense.

Pardo took up the issues raised with good government versus open innovation, noting that the two aren’t necessarily against each other. The idea of high value data wasn’t well defined, she said. For instance, the calendars of public officials are nothing more than a dataset.

Sunstein asked after the data issues and the one of his deputies specifically asked about the language in the OGD. He brought up the work that the federal government has done on regulations.gov – which was a persistent focus from the OIRA administrator – and asked whether it was good enough, and over what time limit? And for whom?

The general answer there was clear enough: “we the people.”

Coglianese offered more feedback on regulations.gov: it’s not enough. There are data fields are not filled in, missing information, and things remain incomprehensible, he said. “Imagine how it is for many others coming for first time?” Coglianese endorsed the recommendations of ADA blue ribbon commission for a dedicated overseer of data quality, although such a role would require congressional authorization.

There are some really important opportunities to leverage data in regulations.gov, he emphasized. Leverage that data to extract it automatically, display the data on websites. For instance, many members of congress have a button on their websites forlegislation they’re sponsoring, which then takes visitors to data automatically etxtracted from Thomas.gov. Imagine a similar system for agencies and regulators, he suggested, or consider the EPA, which is trying to display every rule that the agency is working on., which is being developed in addition to regulations.gov.

Agencies right now are building websites around current uses, said Coglionese. That makes a lot of senses, and it’s what one would hope, but doesn’t go to the “separate question of who do they want their users to be.” He criticized the design of the new FCC.gov, although I pointed out that the process that preceded the FCC relaunch was focused on the most common purposes of the site’ visitors.

What was left unsaid in these open government partnership consultations? A great deal, due to the length of time allowed. The voices that were heard around this table were also those of advocates, policy, experts, academics, and technologists: not citizens, and by and large not those of the media, whose function in representative democracies been to hold government accountable on behalf of the public.

As the White House considers its commitments in advance of the September meeting at the United Nations, the people will have a window of opportunity to tell their elected officials what open government means to them and how they woud like their federal government to be more transparent, participatory or collaborative.

If you have feedback on any of those accounts, send it to opengov@omb.gov.

Health 2.0: Todd Park talks about open data and healthcare at NYC Hacks and Hackers [VIDEO]

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If you’re a regular reader of Govfresh or the O’Reilly Radar, you know how the chief technology officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Todd Park ,is focused on unleashing the power of open data to improve health. If you aren’t familiar with this story, go read Simon Owen’s excellent feature article that explores his work on revolutionizing the healthcare industry. Part of unlocking innovation through open health data has been a relentless promotion and evangelization of the data that HHS has to venture capitalists, the healthcare industry and developers. It was in that context that Park visited New York’s Hacks and Hackers meetup today. The video of the meeting is embedded below, including a lengthy question and answer period at the end.

health20nyc on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

NYC Hacks and Hackers co-organizer Chrys Wu was kind enough to ask my questions, posed over Twitter. Here were the answers I pulled out from the video above:

How much data has been released? Park: “A ton.” He pointed to HealthData.gov as a scorecard and said that HHS isn’t just releasing brand new data. They’re “also making existing data truly accessible or usable,” he said. They’re taking “stuff that’s in a book or website and turning it into machine readable data or an API.”

What formats? Park: Lots and lots of different formats. “Some people put spreadsheets online, other people actually create open APIs and open services,” he said. “We’re trying to migrate people as much towards open API as possible.”

Impact to date? “The best quantification that I can articulate is the Health data-palooza,” he said. “50 companies and nonprofits updated and deployed new versions of their platforms and services. The data already helping millions of Americans in all kinds of ways.”

Park emphasized that it’s still quite early for the project, at only 18 months into this. He also emphasized that the work isn’t just about data: it’s about how and where it’s used. “Data by itself isn’t useful. You don’t go and download data and slather data on yourself and get healed,” he said. “Data is useful when it’s integrated with other stuff that does useful jobs for doctors, patients and consumers.”

Al Gore, Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee on Internet freedom and democracy [VIDEO]

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Last month, Cory Doctorow talked with Al Gore, Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee in Mexico City about privacy, freedom, neutrality and democracy in the context of the Internet and the Web. Shaky handheld video is embedded below — the audio is worth tuning in, however, even if the video is a bit jumpy.

Hat tip to Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing, who writes:

We had a wide-ranging discussion, but kept circling back to the threats and promises for the net — copyright wars, privacy wars, government and grassroots. It was a lot of fun, and quite an honor, and I’m happy to see they’ve got the video online.

ExpertLabs: The future of open government is citizen-focused

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On Monday, the White House asked for ideas on the National Plan for open government in the Open Government Partnership. (For background on the initiative, read this digest on Open Government Partnership analysis for context.) Specifically, the White House asked for feedback on ideas related to two of the key challenges from the OGP: improving public services and increasing public integrity.

  • How can regulations.gov, one of the primary mechanisms for government transparency and public participation, be made more useful to the public rulemaking process?
  • OMB is beginning the process of reviewing and potentially updating its Federal Web Policy. What policy updates should be included in this revision to make Federal websites more user-friendly and pertinent to the needs of the public?
  • How can we build on the success of Data.Gov and encourage the use of democratized data to build new consumer-oriented products and services?

Today, Clay Johnson offered the White House a deep set of recommendations for open government in response to the three questions it posed, including better ways to use open data, social media, improving regulations, public comment, and the developer community better. If you’re interested in open government, it’s a must-read.

We believe the future of open government is citizen focused — to be open to engagement on the terms that citizens are used to in the venues they’re accustomed to.

The growth of social media since the delivery of the initial open government directive, and its adoption by agencies’ communications departments requires the next step: for social media to also be used in giving citizens a voice in regulatory decisions. We believe the future of open government is about discoverability. Moving data or regulations from print publications to the online world results in a net loss if there are less people viewing them. Government should work hard to make sure that all publicly available information is discoverable by search engines, and via social media.

We believe that the future of open government is through the engagement of open source communities, and that agencies should begin to open up to their participation. Government treats lawyers as experts in the field of law, why not treat developers as experts in the field of processing data? Take the next step and participate with them directly, rather than through independent vessels.

– Clay Johnson (@cjoh), Recommendations for Open Government

For more on the decision to use email in the consultation, read Tiago Peixoto’s post on Google Plus.

Pew: Search and email are nearly universal among adult Internet users

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The results of a new survey from the Pew Internet and Life Project will come as no surprise to most: Internet users: search and email top the list of the things people do online. These two activities have been the most popular since Pew first started tracking online behavior over the last decade. The advent of broadband, mobile devices and social media has not changed that dynamic, though it’s a safe bet that adults under 30 are sending quite a lot of Facemail, IMs and tweets these days too.

That said, Pew did identify a difference. “The most significant change over that time is that both activities have become more habitual,” writes Kristen Purcell. “Today, roughly six in ten online adults engage in each of these activities on a typical day; in 2002, 49% of online adults used email each day, while just 29% used a search engine daily.”

Search and email demographics

According to Pew’s numbers, search is most popular among adult internet users aged age 18-29, 96% of whom use search engines to find information online.

There’s also some evidence of a continuing digital divide based upon education and race. According to Pew, online adults, college-educated, and those in the highest income categories are more likely than others to use email.

“These demographic differences are considerably more pronounced when one looks at email use on a typical day,” writes Purcell. “Moreover, while overall email use is comparable across white, African-American and Hispanic online adults, internet use on any given day is not. White online adults are significantly more likely than both African-American and Hispanic online adults to be email users on a typical day (63% v. 48% v. 53%, respectively).”

This new survey and its findings should be read in the context of last year’s report that citizens are turning to Internet for government data, policy and services and considering in the context of the ongoing federal .gov website review.

If open government is to be citizen-centric, it will clearly need to be search-centric. That means ensuring that government websites are available in search and evaluating how search-centric redesigns at Utah.gov perform over time.

These results also suggest that as exciting as the integration of social media into government may be, officials tasked with public engagement and consultation shouldn’t neglect using email to communicate with citizens, along with Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and the other apps available to them. The difference in demographics usage of social media and email, however, does highlight that social media offers an important complementary channel to reach mobile citizens that access the Internet primarily through their mobile phones.

Jennifer Pahlka: Do more than leave or speak up. Make open government work better.

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In the face of existential challenges that test the national character of the United States of America, including long wars abroad and high unemployment at home, citizens may be tempted to tune out or voice their displeasure. With the growth of the open government movement, people now have another option: take the future of government into their own hands and try to make it work better. Today, Jennifer Pahlka, the founder of Code for America, highlighted why she believes the time for that choice has come. (If you’re following the open government movement, you’ve likely come across the work of Code for America, whose fellows have been trying to help cities work better across the country.)

…in the past twenty years, a solid chunk of American society has subscribed to the notion that the Internet was the new frontier, and a limitless one at that, and so the disgruntled could simply draw their own map, create their own circles, and be done with it. And it’s the Millennials who have brought us back down to earth and reminded us that the lesson of the Internet is that shared endeavor has value, that pooling resources is a good idea, and that government is the way we do things together that we can’t do individually. Which is why Millennials are the most pro-government generation in decades, however disgusted they would be by the debt ceiling brinksmanship, if they looked up from their laptops and smart phones long enough to notice. They are tapping into another innately American tradition, one of fundamental optimism, invention, and practicality. They’ve never met a system they couldn’t participate in, hack, mash-up, add value to or improve. And government is already meeting their expectations, providing data, enabling the creation of apps, and slowly adopting the tools of the Internet to make it easier for us to do the important work of governing ourselves together. – Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America, “Exit or Voice? How About Neither?“

For more on this front, watch Pahlka’s talk from the Future of Web Apps Conference, where she makes the case that civic startups are the next disruption.

Jennifer Pahlka – The Next Disruption: Government from Code for America on Vimeo.

Apps for the Environment: Can developers and government talk? [WEBINAR]

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Over the past two years, entrepreneurs, developers and government agencies have collaboratively explored the power of open data to improve health or transit data as open government fuel for economic growth. Now, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is looking to do the same with an Apps for the Environment challenge.

This Thursday at 4 PM EST, the EPA is hosting a webinar for developers to hear more from the community about what the government can do to make data more usable by developers. (Heads up, government folks: Socrata’s open data study found progress but a long road ahead, with clear need for improvement: only 30 percent of developers surveyed said that government data was available, and of that, 50 percent was unusable.)

I look forward to moderating the EPA webinar (register here) on Thursday. Listeners can expect to hear more about collaborative innovation in open government, crowdsourcing and challenges, and the sustainability of apps contests before we open up the discussion with Jeremy Carbaugh of Sunlight Labs and Michaela Hackner of ForumOne, the developers of DataMasher, the winner of Apps for America2.

If you’re interested in a different kind of public service through code, please tune in.

Steven VanRoekel named new federal CIO by White House

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The White House has named former Microsoft executive Steven VanRoekel and FCC managing director to be the new federal chief information officer of the United States of America, according a report out of the New York Times.

VanRoekel will inherit more than an $80 billion dollar portfolio of federal IT spending from Vivek Kundra, the first federal CIO in the nation’s history.

Over the past year, I’ve written about his progress taking FCC.gov from a long overdue overhaul to reboot as an open government platform, tapong into open source, the cloud, and collective intelligence in the process.

He brought a .com mentality to the FCC, including a perspective that “everything should be an API” that caught some tech observers’ eye. He worked with an innovative new media team that established a voice for social media for the @FCC on social media where that had been none and a FCC.gov/live livestream that automatically detected what device you’d used to access it.

VanRoekel is the man who told me in April that “the experiences that live outside of FCC.gov should interact back into it. In a perfect world, no one should have to visit the FCC website.” Instead, he said, you’d go to your favorite search engine or favorite app and open data from the FCC’s platform would be baked into it.

“If we think of citizens as shareholders, we can do a lot better,” he said. “Under the Administrative Procedure Act, agencies will get public comments that enlighten decisions. When citizens care, they should be able to give government feedback, and government should be able to take action. We want to enable better feedback loops to enable that to happen.”

If he’s able to execute against that vision on a national level, VanRoekel will have an impact. As a federal CIO, however, he’ll inherit a staggering challenge: evolve the nation’s aging IT systems towards a 21st century model of operations. In the age of big data, he’ll have to manage a lot of petabytes, doing much more with less.

He told that New York Times that “we’re trying to make sure that the pace of innovation in the private sector can be applied to the model that is government.”

Thank you for your service, Mr. Kundra. Good luck, Mr. VanRoekel. I’ll be following at @StevenVDC.

First reactions from around the Web.

Here’s some of the best coverage of the appointment from around the Web, starting with the Obama administration’s official announcement:

WHITEHOUSE: Transitions

OMB Director Jack Lew: Over the last two and a half years, the Administration has made unprecedented strides (PDF) in transforming how the government manages and uses information technology to deliver results for the American people. From moving to more efficient cloud solutions and shutting down hundreds of duplicative data centers to reducing planned IT spending by $3 billion and bringing unprecedented transparency to IT spending. That progress has been the direct result of having a President who recognizes the opportunity to harness advances in technology to make government work better and more efficiently for the American people. That’s why President Obama appointed the nation’s first Federal Chief Information Officer to implement the Administration’s technology reform agenda.

As the nation’s first Federal Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra has left a lasting mark on Federal IT – from opening up data in new and innovative ways, to rooting out waste and duplication in IT spending, to steering the Federal government toward more energy efficient and cost effective technologies. And in this time of budgetary and fiscal challenges, sustaining and expanding on those efforts is more important than ever.

That’s why I am pleased that the President has appointed Steven VanRoekel as our next federal CIO. Steve is the right person to continue our efforts to make the government more efficient and more responsive to the America people. He brings a lifelong passion for technology to the position, having spent his entire career in technology in both the public and private sectors.

Under his leadership, I am confident that we will continue to build on the remarkable gains that we have made in changing the way the Federal government manages IT.

TECHPRESIDENT: White House appoints Steven VanRoekel as new US CIO

From outgoing CIO Vivek Kundra, who is leaving for Harvard University, he will inherit a drive to cut costs while continuing to work on a modernization effort that will proceed with markedly less funding this year than when Obama first took office. The E-Government fund, which financed the development of signature Kundra projects such as the Federal IT Dashboard and Data.gov, was cut to $8 million this year, from $34 million. The federal CIO’s portfolio includes government IT policy and procurement writ large, not just modernization and a slice of the work of opening up the government — but this represents a significant curtailment of the White House’s ability to support innovation in those areas.

VanRoekel will also face the often grindingly slow pace of progress inside federal government, something that Kundra and others departing the administration have admitted was challenging to face every day. But he won’t be a stranger to that. In an interview with Nancy Scola upon leaving the FCC, VanRoekel described modernizing a commission that, when he arrived, had an Internet connection so bad that “lawyers would have to go home to use LexisNexis to do their jobs.” Under VanRoekel, the commission relaunched its web presence in a way that completely reframes basic functions like searching for and submitting comments on matters the commission is considering — a subtle shift, but an important one for people trying to monitor and influence communications policy. He described swapping out junk food in vending machines for healthier options. By the time he left, he could watch a YouTube video on the FCC Internet connection without slowing down the entire network.

WASHINGTON POST: New CIO’s role will be belt-tightening.

Not only was VanRoekel, the former Microsoft executive, unfazed by the prospect of trying to persuade a government that has to make $917 billion in cuts over the next decade to pay for snazzy new technology projects but he actually saw the belt-tightening as an opportunity.

VanRoekel’s role will focus on using technology to streamline government and cut costs. This was one of Kundra’s top priorities.

“The productivity gap between where the private sector has gone over the last two decades and where government has gone is ever-widening,” VanRoekel, 41, told reporters Thursday morning, referring specifically to the government’s slow uptake and lack of spending on new technology. “[This] can be done in a way that actually saves money, saves resources and everything else.”

POLITICO: VanRoekel hopes to cut costs.

Rarely do you get to take over in a place where so much good work has been done and so much momentum is already established with teams charging ahead at full steam,” VanRoekel said Thursday, just after the White House announced his appointment.

VanRoekel will continue Kundra’s agenda of eliminating waste in bloated information technology projects, move agencies to cloud computing technologies and make the government more transparent using Web-based and crowd-sourced tools. …

“When a college student is sitting in a classroom with a MacBook Air and a WiFi network, they’re Tweeting and Facebook connecting with friends, getting daily Groupon emails — that’s a lifestyle that the government doesn’t currently cater to,” VanRoekel said. “Part of the priorities also needs to be creating a 21st century workplace.”

CRAIG NEWMARK: Steven VanRoekel, new US Chief Information Officer

…the good news is that Steven’s taken the job held recently by Vivek Kundra, who’s done a really good job of making Federal IT more effective and saved a lot of taxpayers dollars.

Steven comes from the FCC, where I saw first hand that he’s really good at the same, bringing with him a lot of real-life private industry experience.

There’ll be a lot of news on this really soon, but the deal is that I wanted to let people know the good news; I bear witness that Steven’s the real deal.

GOVEXEC: New federal CIO named; no major strategy changes anticipated.

What I saw at FCC is that this notion of re-imagining government in the context of the pace and innovation of private industry can be done and it can be done in a way that saves money and resources,” VanRoekel said during a roundtable discussion with reporters. “We were in lock step with [outgoing CIO] Vivek [Kundra’s] team on data center consolidation, on the cloud-first policy and on using tools like TechStat, even though we were an independent agency.”

“This is not a situation where we’re asking someone to come in and make radical changes to priorities or to the strategic agenda,” federal Chief Performance Officer Jeffrey Zients said. “It’s about continued execution and getting proven results.”

FEDERAL COMPUTER WEEK: New federal CIO gets praise, advice from community.

The White House’s appointment of former Microsoft and federal agency executive Steven VanRoekel as the new Federal CIO replacing Vivek Kundra was met with enthusiastic congratulations on Aug. 4, but not all the reaction was positive.

COMPUTER WORLD: Former Microsoft exec, Obama donor named new U.S. CIO.

Ray Bjorklund, an analyst at FedSources, said VanRoekel “has obviously been well positioned in industry” and combined with his government experience, could be helpful. But Microsoft competitors for federal contracts may feel a little apprehensive, noted Bjorklund.

“You can’t take on major government positions like that and play favorites – that’s not the right thing to do,” said Bjorklund. “Industry may have suspicions, but they may not be well founded suspicions,” he said.

FIERCE GOVERNMENT IT: White House taps VanRoekel to replace Kundra as federal CIO

VanRoekel led the recent relaunch of FCC.gov. The new FCC website has received mixed reviews, but agency representatives have maintained that the website launched “explicitly and very proudly in beta.” In a June 2 interview with The Hill, VanRoekel acknowledged that the FCC redesign has been poorly received by lawyers and regulatory personnel.

While VanRoekel has a great deal of management experience and has established himself as a technologist, he has never acted as an agency CIO or served on the Federal CIO Council. Prior to his appointment to federal CIO, Kundra was the chief technology officer for the District of Columbia. Kundra’s predecessor, Karen Evans, was CIO of the Energy Department before her appointment at OMB.

NEXTGOV: New US CIO Has Cyber Track Record.

Incoming federal chief information officer Steven VanRoekel says experience safeguarding the cloud at his former employer, the Federal Communications Commission, has prepared him to improve the security of digital assets governmentwide.

In October, the then-FCC managing director announced that a new cloud-based environment hosting FCC.gov complied with a laundry list of security controls recommended under the 2002 Federal Information Security Management Act. “Our team has fully abided by the FISMA standards throughout this process; at relaunch, FCC.gov will have met or exceeded both low and moderate levels of clearance, enabling us to distribute information, power collaboration and innovate freely,” VanRoekel wrote on the FCC blog.

GARTNER: Welcome the the new US federal CIO and good luck.

Andrea DiMaio: At face value, he looks like a wise choice to fill Vivek’s shoes: he understands technology and the business of technology, has pursued the use of open source software at FCC (hence cleaning his record as a former Microsoft executive for those who still see the Redmond company as the enemy of open source), and has had a prominent business position in the current administration.

On the downside, he has not been running IT (or IT-intensive businesses) in a large agency or department, which is where most of the turf battles as well as potential savings will happen. While Vivek built a vision for transformation and innovation in government IT, the challenges are now in executing on that vision, in moving open government from a nice-to-have to a must-have, in shifting the use of cloud from the edges to the core of the government enterprise. This will take a lot of diplomacy and his past experience in industry may help, although he may still need some time (and solid advice from his staff) to grasp with the complexity of much larger agencies than the one he has been part of.

In my humble opinion, his greatest challenge will be to turn Vivek’s suggestions into an indispensible weaponry for agencies and departments to weather the challenging times ahead. To succeed, he will need to pick few battles to win, rather than try to fight them all. Ironically, the difficult economic and financial situation and the threats to the sustainability of government services and operations could be his best allies to deliver on the IT innovation agenda of the current administration.

INFORMATION WEEK: The New Federal CIO: A Closer Look

VanRoekel hinted at some of the areas that he sees as ripe for further change–open government, shared services, IT procurement and investment. “Vivek’s work was really the first step in a larger reworking of federal IT,” he said. But don’t expect too much, too soon. “This is all early thinking, of course,” he added.

VanRoekel’s background in both the public and private sectors was another factor in his favor. Obama, Zients, and Kundra have all argued that federal agencies lag behind corporate America in leveraging technology. “The gap is the single largest different between public and private sector performance,” said Zients.

There’s a lot of interest in tapping into private sector know-how. In that light, VanRoekel’s years at Microsoft are a feather in his cap, regardless of how others in the tech industry may view that experience, which included a role as a speech and strategy assistant to Bill Gates.

Missing from VanRoeckel’s resume is experience as a CIO, a gap that, for this particular job, is impossible to ignore. The White House had no shortage of accomplished agency CIOs to consider as Kundra’s replacement. Zients acknowledged “there was a lot of interest” in the position. VanRoekel’s ability to think strategically and “get things done” made him the best choice, Zients said.

Ultimately, the federal CIO must close the tech gap that hampers government agencies, a task too big to be accomplished in the two years that Kundra devoted to it. But the government’s $80 billion IT budget is more than enough to cover what’s needed. It’s a matter how effectively that investment is managed, and now it’s VanRoekel’s job to get it right.

Think Different About Hacking?

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The words “hacker” and activity of “hacking” have been receiving a great deal of attention over the past few years, in the wake of data breaches, Wikileaks, the Anonymous and LulzSec groups, and now the “Shady Rat” cyberespionage revelations. Given that it’s being reported as the biggest hacking attack ever, the attention is merited.

As journalism professor Adam Penenberg highlighted last month in Fast Company, however, the term hacking and hacker are frequently misused in the mainstream, and it’s nearly always used with a negative connotation.

Maybe it’s time to revisit that interpretation, or at least broaden it. I’ve been a fan of Lifehacker since its launch, after all.

Earlier today, Kara Swisher reported that Randi Zuckerberg is leaving Facebook to start a new social media firm. In her resignation letter to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and communications head Elliot Schrage, Zuckerberg wrote that “I am thankful for the strong mentorship, guidance, and support, which is empowering me to follow my dreams and show that you don’t have to be an engineer to be a hacker.”

New York Times social media reporter Jennifer Preston highlighted that line from Zuckerberg’s letter on Twitter and, when asked if she believes it to be true, tweeted “sure.”

An hour ago, I wasn’t convinced. Great hackers have historically been venerated for legendary technical skills and creative approaches to solving problems, as writer Steven Levy chronicled in his canonical book of the same name, “Hackers.” Do you have to be a doctor to be a surgeon? Or a lawyer to practice law? Being a hacker does imply something specific in terms of your ability, if not credentials, as you can read in the Jargon File. In the programming community, hacking can be a technical term of art.

There’s also more to “hacking” than lawbreaking, despite today’s headlines.

Around the globe, there’s now a genuine movement of civic hacking afoot, which adds to the etymology of hacking “efforts that put technology, and particularly Internet technology, to work solving the problems of civic life,” as Nick Judd writes at techPresident. “Civic hacktivists” (also known as favorably called “civic developers) now gather together around the globe. Code for America is inspiring a new generation of civic coders.

Even with reasons to support hackathons, the negative connotation of “hacking” lingers. As the New York Times reported, when New York City chief digital officer Rachel Sterne proposed hosting a hackathon to generate ideas for redesigning NYC.gov, “she had to explain to colleagues that it would not pose a security threat.”

Think different

That said, it may be time to think more broadly about the term “hacking” itself. Matt Lira, director of new media for House of Representatives Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VI), agreed with Preston, suggesting that Thomas Jefferson, JFK and the GratefulDead were all hackers. Can hacker be a metaphor applied to government, rhetoric or music?

“I believe that is how the phrase was intended, or at least what it means to me,” tweeted Lira. “People who do things their own way.” He shared one of the iconic Apple commercials from the company’s turnaround in the late 1990s, after Steve Jobs returned, by way of interpretation:

To echo the final words of the ad, hackers could be described as “the people who are crazy enough to change the world are the ones who do.” On that count, I’ve now met many people who are hacking on open government since I became the Gov 2.0 correspondent for O’Reilly Media, both from the inside and outside of the system.

With support, luck and a lot of effort, maybe more modern day hackers will be “just crazy enough” to make the government work better.