June 30, 2009 10:54 AM ET

By Kimberly Chou

President Barack Obama’s Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra announced this morning the launch of an “IT dashboard” that allows people to see how the federal government is spending taxpayer dollars on information technology projects.

Announced at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, the IT dashboard, allows users to view data for various federal agencies, including major investments and dollars spent, as well to view the “health” of projects through graphs comparing planned and actual expenditures.

Kundra said the IT dashboard represents a “democratizing of information.” The data used is available on the government’s data.gov site, Kundra said, but the dashboard makes accessing and understanding the raw numbers much easier. Contact information for the Chief Information Officers of each agency are also available via the dashboard.

“We can’t make policy behind closed doors anymore,” said Beth Noveck, the U.S. deputy chief technology officer for open government. She said that her department, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, uses feedback from its blogs to develop recommendations for policies. Personal Democracy Forum founder Andrew Rasiej described it as open-source policy making.

The technology behind the IT dashboard isn’t perfect yet, Kundra acknowledged, nor is all information on government spending integrated into the IT dashboard. Whether data on the AIG or General Motors bailouts would be made available, for example, is still “being explored for later.”

Kundra said that making all public government information readable and searchable online is “absolutely” viable — just not yet because of the economic and practical challenges in combining information saved in multiple formats.

Highlighting the challenge was the fact that within an hour, the IT dashboard had crashed, returning the error message: “Unable to contact target server after 5 tries.”