Obama's data.gov CIO quits White House

The man behind the launch of the US government's Data.gov website, which is undergoing a funding crisis, is standing down from his job as federal CIO. The White House confirmed today that Vivek Kundra, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in March 2009, had handed in his notice with plans to take on a fellowship post at …

[Anonymous Coward]

They won't fill that role

with anyone effective. Sounds like the big software corps have gotten to the administration. I'm surprised it took that long

[Oninoshiko]

someone care to tell me why

this takes even 8MUSD?

I'll be happy to do it for 1M!

I mean, I agree with Sir Lee that governments should be more transparent, but I fail to see why it takes 35M to put up a web-site linking the documents, and letting google index it.

[davenewman]

It's the data, not the documents, stupid

data.gov.uk and data.gov provide lots of data in forms that computer programs can manipulate and mash up to do new things (see, e.g., parkopedia). The best data sources also include RDF markup (or even ontologies) so the computer programs can work out what the data means.

None of those things can be done by indexing the frequency of words in documents.

The Semantic Web turns the web into a distributed database - not just lots of documents.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, Wednesday... perfect

Hmm... What's this? A new Buckaroo office in our midst saves $3,000m taxpayer dollars, improves intergovernmental data access and management, and in the name of the Public Good pulls back the drapes and opens the windows to replace the opaque stale air? All that with a $35m office budget??

Well then, as keepers of the public trust, it's incumbent upon us to applaud initiative and success. Why don't we, say ---- oh, I don't know... what day are we? ah yes, Wednesday. Perrrrfect, it's 'hump' day ---- let's foist him an 85% budget cut.

hmm... it's good to be the king.