Weekly Round-up - September 30, 2011

John Kamensky:

• Defense Department’s Business Transformation Agency Hits “Vanish” Button. After a valiant effort to cut internal Defense bureaucracy, the agency leading the transformation is being shuttered. . . to reduce bureaucracy. Federal News Radio reports that BTA’s strategic initiatives are being absorbed by different parts of the Department and that there will continueto be top-level leadership from the Department’s Chief Management Officer – a position that did not exist at the time BTA was originally set up.

• GAO’s E-Gov Status Report.  GAO issued a report:   Electronic Government:Performance Measures for Projects Aimed at Promoting Innovation and Transparency Can Be Improved.   The report examines the use of the $34 million E-Gov projects fund and, according to Federal Computer Week, “GAO Gives Lukewarm Review to Obama Transparency Initiatives.”

• Crowdsourcing Earthquakes.  Here’s a cool story from NextGov’s Joseph Marks about how the US Geological Survey is using Twitter to crowdsource the intensity and the scope of earthquakes.  His story, of course, features the August 23rd earthquake on the East Coast!  While the USGS’s “Did You Feel It?” effort has been in place for a decade via the web, only when Twitter came on the scene did it become more widespread . . . and useful.

• DATA Isn’t Cheap.  The Congressional Budget Office released its cost estimate for the proposed Digital Accountability and Transparency Act -- $575 million over the first five years after the bill is enacted.  The bill would require the tracking of all federal dollars down to the sub-recipient level, modeled after the successful Recovery Act’s recovery.gov effort.