The Top 5 Government Tech Stories of 2013

...Large-scale, multi-year technology projects have a well-documented history of inefficiency and poor performance that’s cost the government billions of dollars and troubled White House officials and congressional overseers for years.

...The Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act has already passed a House Committee and similar legislation was introduced in the Senate in December. Both bills would increase the power of agency chief information officers, with the goal of making them more accountable for IT failures.

...The White House published an open data policy in May requiring federal agencies to collect and publish new information in open, machine-readable and, whenever possible, non-proprietary formats.

...numerous agencies are moving to open source software systems, which means the software’s basic building blocks are in the public domain and not dependent on proprietary systems owned by specific vendors.

...A new slate of agencies announced plans to monitor social media, both to gather intelligence and to track the effectiveness of their own programs.