Welcome Vivek Kundra, New National CTO

The Washington Post reports that Vivek Kundra, CTO of the District of Columbia, will be Obama's new Federal Information Officer. The Post: "He also will be charged with using technology to lower the cost of government operations and making government data more accessible to citizens, two things he championed as the District's chief technology officer." They add that he encouraged use of YouTube and set up an internal wiki.

And, we may add, his office used Tableau. Here's one of their visualizations:

This appointment is not an isolated event:

• Author David Stephenson is working to outline the new Democratizing Data effort, of which Vivek Kundra and his office have been leaders.
• Recovery.gov has been bringing new transparency to federal spending, even if we had to offer a little advice on the Obama administration's data visualization techniques.
• We've seen increasing interest from all manners of e-government customers who want to get insight from and share data that's relevant to citizens.

So welcome, Vivek! We're big admirers of your & DC's work, and we're here to help bring public data to the public. Here's to transparency in government.