Dashboards Galore

Yesterday, the Obama administration's Chief Performance Officer Jeff Zients announced that the Office of Management and Budget would be launching a "performance dashboard" this summer. These so-called "dashboards" are becoming one of the hallmarks of the administration's transparency efforts. The performance dashboard is part of President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget proposal, as is a dashboard that will track federal workforce statistics. And the Federal IT dashboard launched last June. I have no problems with these dashboards in principal, but I do have a couple of thoughts on how they should be structured and networked. First, all of the dashboards should be available from a central website that explains clearly what kind of data is in each one so federal employees and the public will know where to go for the information they want. Second, I think the dashboards could use something like the apps stores that Apple and Android are running for their phone products, places where developers can build and offer tools to sort through data that folks can pick through and use to filter out the information that they want, and then rate the apps they think are the best. Such an open source approach would save the government money, and provide an incentive for outside sources to look through the data. The dashboard and opengov announcements already have a lot of mainstream reporters I know looking more seriously at these data dumps: it'd be a good thing to entice the rest of the public to follow suit.