Code for America, federal government release federal IT dashboard for public use

Code for America, in collaboration with OpenPlans and the Federal Government have made the Federal IT Dashboard available for any government entity to use and customize through the organization’s Civic Commons project. The Federal IT Dashboard was launched in 2009 as a means of increasing Federal transparency, and allows users to track $80 billion of annual IT spending.

The IT Dashboard tracks details of federal spending, status, and ROI of information technology projects, allowing users to monitor how effectively taxpayer dollars are being spent. According to the OMB, the IT Dashboard was a major component of the process the Federal Government employed to save over $3 billion in just its first two years of deployment.

The code for the Federal IT dashboard is now available on Civic Commons under an open source license for use by the public and government entities. Several cities, states and countries including Chicago, New York, West Virginia, and the Netherlands have already expressed interested in using the code.

A live demo of the Dashboard is available here. The code is available and open at http://sourceforge.net/projects/it-dashboard, and listed at http://www.cio.gov/tools, where the Federal CIO Council has also made available the TechStat Toolkit, a set of tools and processes for reviewing projects flagged by the Dashboard.

“Transparency is not just about data that’s out there in the public domain,” said US CIO Vivek Kundra in a statement, “it’s actually about government that performs and delivers for the American people.”

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