Vivek Kundra, the Obama administration’s Chief Information Officer, may want to turn his attention to the The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which begins its public hearings tomorrow. Here’s a screen shot of the Commission’s website as of 11:02am EST today:
I also grabbed a copy of the PDF-only Notice of Open Meeting, as the site, located at http://www.fcic.gov, is scheduled to launch in its full form later today. This is according to Ray Lehmann, Senior Editor with SNL Financial who spoke to a representative of the Commission this morning.
Launching a site for a Commission the day before it holds its first hearing is unacceptable. The “page and a PDF” placeholder above, which cannot be found using any of the major search engines, hardly makes up for this.
A good CIO should outline clear guidelines about how and when sites go live, especially in an administration that professes to have a strong commitment to making government more transparent. Either Kundra hasn’t established these protocols or the FCIC isn’t following them. Either way, Kundra needs to do his job and make sure this sort of slap-shod approach to making government information available on the web is no longer accepted.
Kundra was recently named 2009 CIO of the year by Information Week for his efforts to modernize the antiquated hulk that is the federal IT infrastructure. It would seem he still has much work to do.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.