White House Releases IT Dashboard as Open Source Code

The White House has released the software code for its IT Dashboard and TechStat toolkit. The initiative was coordinated through Civic Commons, a code-sharing project incubated within Code for America that helps governments share technology for the public good, with support from OpenPlans.

Civic Commons staff worked with REI Systems, the contractor that originally built the IT Dashboard for the United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB), to prepare the code for release under an open source license. That work included a security audit, documentation, and a licensing review of the software's components.

"The creation of the IT Dashboard was a significant step forward in making government programs more transparent and accountable," said Tim O'Reilly. "Its open source release is a huge step forward — and a model for other government programs — in showing how to reduce the costs and increase the effectiveness of government by sharing tools developed by one agency with others who also need them."

A live demonstration of the opensourced code for IT Dashboard is now online. The IT Dashboard code is available at SourceForge.net and is released under a GNU Public License (GPL). A bug tracker and other resources are also online.