PIXEL MAVERICK

The US Government’s CIO, Vivek Kundra, is recommending a significant change in how the government approaches its information technology efforts.  He is proposing that the US Government should tap into the vast amounts of knowledge in the technology communities of citizens throughout the country.  Basically Mr. Kundra is very wisely capitalizing on the fact crowdsourcing a huge number of very smart people beats a bunch of MIT super-brains locked in a basement in DC anyday of the week.

As a big supporter of any model that takes a community approach I applaud Mr. Kundra on this recommendation.  It will be interesting to follow this and see how he plans to implement this approach and account for the following:

• Structure
• Security
• Politics

Structure: I would think that they will model the operational structure of something like this in a similar fashion to how the infamous Linux Red Hat open-source project was handled.  With key members of the US Government holding the most senior positions in the community, and some order of task/ group leaders filtering down to the regular developer who is contributing ideas and code from his laptop at home.

Security: At this point in our country’s technological evolution, the security of our information architecture is one of the most (…if not the most) crucial elements to our national security.  I will be very interested to find out how the US Government plans to handle this from a National Security standpoint.  With all of the people who will have access to this, it will be a monumental task to ensure a level of security high enough to not put our national security at risk.

Politics: How do you ensure that people who participate in this community are not using it to further their partisan politics.  It seems as though the higher level leaders in the structure would be able to manage this, but with the sheer volume of IT problems that the community will be working on it would be possible for sub-groups within the community to form and work to further their party’s agenda with the types of solutions they offer, argue about, and ultimately implement.  Great!  Just what we need, another battleground for the donkeys and elephants to fight on and piss off the public in the process.

I will try and follow this and will post on what I find regarding how this innovative idea of Mr. Kundra evolves.