Before he left New York to visit the small western Orissa village, the Obama administration had launched a redesign of WhiteHouse.gov with—of course—a blog.

“It was one of the few things in my career where my family understood what I did,” Mr. Dash told The Observer. “‘Oh, you helped make software that ran Barack Obama’s blog and that’s what you do.’ Between that and Britney Spears, they had the examples they needed.” (My.BarackObama.com and BritneySpears.com use software by Six Apart called Moveable Type.)

“That felt like a validation of all this work,” Mr. Dash continued. He was sitting at the 71 Irving Place coffee shop, just a few blocks from his home, his eyes bleary from overdosing on computer screen time.  “From then on out, I had this feeling that was going to be the trend.”

During the summer, Mr. Dash’s personal blog had its 10th anniversary. In August, he wrote a post titled “The Most Interesting New Tech Startup of 2009.” According to Mr. Dash, it was the executive branch of the federal government of the United States.

“[T]he current administration is comprised in great part of digital natives,” he wrote, “and it’s remarkable how quickly they’ve remade the .gov world into not just a number of compelling websites, but into a broad set of platforms that are going to inspire as much technological innovation as Twitter, Facebook or the iPhone did when they unveiled their technology platforms.”

Mr. Dash wondered: Could WhiteHouse.gov be the next iPhone? Could developers get just as giddy over coding software to serve their country as they are over creating an app for the Apple store?

He’s about to find out.

Soon after he wrote his post, Mr. Dash received emails and calls from those “digital natives” in the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, asking him if he’d like to help. They eventually approached him with an opportunity to lead a new Washington, D.C., incubator called Expert Labs. He got the job in early October.

With support from a $500,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and their Policy Innovation Network has launched Expert Labs as a nonpartisan, independent project that aims to improve the policy-making process by engaging experts and technologists.

“The government is already using technology to talk to citizens,” Mr. Dash told The Observer. “But we’re going to make technology that helps government listen to them.”

Expert Labs will borrow developers from the hallways of Google in Silicon Valley or start-ups like Foursquare and Kickstarter in New York to build government applications and social media tools in exchange for grants—and the chance to connect with some of the most powerful people in the country.

Mr. Dash plans to lure participants with a periodic, competitive model, similar to the Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge. He’ll ask government agencies about their policy initiatives (say, fighting childhood obesity) as well as operating issues (like expensive, licensed billing software) and then host competitions, asking developers to code social media platforms so specialists can provide innovative solutions. 

As director of Expert Labs, Mr. Dash, with his buddy list of powerful geeks, will serve as a government 2.0 switchboard—connecting the policy makers with technology innovators and experts to reinvent the way government works.

“Candidly, the name scared the hell out of me,” Mr. Dash said about the Policy Innovation Network. “This sounds like some scary think tank where you know a bunch of old dudes in suits are choosing how the world happens. I was like, this doesn’t sound like me.

“But, actually, this was really interesting; it’s just being marketed like it’s medicine, not candy. It needs more cherry flavor. I know how to present this as compelling as it is.”

Instead of the government dictating what kind of technology they need, Mr. Dash was providing the general public the opportunity to help them invent it.

Other good-for-government coding programs, like Code for America or N.Y.C.’s Big Apps competition, have similar models. But Mr. Dash said this is the first time there has been neutral ground for private developers to connect with their government in a big way.

“If people are skeptical about the ability of government to execute, then by all means, support our little entrepreneurial effort to do so,” Mr. Dash said.

Vivek Kundra, the administration’s chief information officer, and Katie Stanton, the director of citizen organization, wrote in a post on the White House’s Open Government blog that they are open to the public’s ideas on improving Web 2.0 technologies. “The National Weather Service does a great job of taking complex satellite data and making it widely accessible to people via new and traditional channels,” they wrote. “When you wake up, you can reach for your i-Phone, radio or newspaper and know whether it’s going to rain. How can we do this with other important government information, such as Medicaid and Medicare benefits, the state of the power grid or the Federal budget?”

Mr. Dash hopes to get answers for these types of questions—ready for review by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy—by spring 2010.

“To know that the White House read what I said, and was actually listening, that in itself is much more motivating than a million other things—like money or building something really cool,” Mr. Dash said. He hopes that developers and experts will feel the same way.

"This is the promise they all made in November," to contribute to change by getting more involved in the political process, he said. "I can't wait to pull that trigger on them."

greagan@observer.com

"Now, for the first time, the entire country can look at how we're spending money and give us feedback," Mr. Kundra said. "What this dashboard is going to allow us to do, for the first time, as we democratize data, as we make information available, we go to the golden source of that information. ... We're going to tap into some of the best ideas and the best thinking."

Mr. Kundra's IT dashboard, which he first announced on May 27, is a follow-up to Obama administration transparency initiatives like Data.gov, which makes more than 100,000 government data feeds and statistics—from census data to toxic waste release information to health studies and testing scores—available online in one place.

The IT dashboard displays data received from about 28 agencies (from the Department of Labor to the Department of Transportation), information on more than 7,000 federal IT investments and detailed numbers on more than 780 "major" projects (worth $38.6 billion total). The dashboard allows users to examine projects by line item and look at project spending and progress in different charts and graphs in green, yellow and red color codes to indicate whether or not those resources are spent effectively. There are also pictures and contact information for agency CIOs, and social media tools for sharing information.

"What the Obama administration is committed to is laying a new foundation for transparency, accountability and responsibility, especially in how we manage IT investments."

Mr. Kundra said the federal government is the largest single buyer of technology in the world at more than $70 billions dollars annually, and he wants citizens to use this new dashboard to keep tabs on how agency leaders and CIOs are progressing on these projects.

He mentioned a project to build handheld computers for 2010 census workers. Last year, the initiative was nixed and $600 million was lost. If the project was initiated while the dashboard was online, users could examine the 400 "change order" modifications sent to the government contractor. "By change order No. 10, you could tell there was something wrong," Mr. Kundra told the New York Times' Bits blog in June. "It is a leading indicator that they didn't have their requirements figured out very well upfront. Therefore, the statistical likelihood of a failure is very high."

With the new Web site, the problems would've been obvious. And users could've also sent the project managers a memo that there are things like iPhone already out there, and some cheap census software could be coded to help.

Mr. Kundra hopes to "tap into the ingenuity of the American people to show us a better way, to show us an innovative path," he said.

"I nearly fell out of my chair watching that," said Micah Sifry, co-founder of Personal Democracy Forum, who introduced Mr. Kundra and led a standing ovation for the presentation.

Mr. Kundra said he plans on launching a blog on the site to retrieve feedback and he hopes to build more dashboards with other government data. "We're exploring beyond where we are right now," he said. 

"Is the data perfect? No." Mr. Kundra said. When Andrew Raseij, Personal Democracy Forum co-founder, asked if "public documents" should be redefined as "searchable, accessible and readable online," Mr. Kundra said "yes." But he gave a reality check about access. The federal government is made up of over four million people with 10,000 different systems, he said, and data still exists in paper form, and in computer systems that the government has had to "bring people out of retirement" to extract.

"This is a beta," warned Macon Phillips, new media director of the White House, who was onstage with Mr. Kundra. "This hasn't been done before; I think we'll find some flaws in it," he said, referring to the IT dashboard.

But Obama's team is hoping Personal Democracy Forum members will help them improve these projects. "We are looking to this community, and one of the reasons we launched it here is that you are the important early adopters of this to really push us [and] develop this platform," Mr. Phillips said. "This community is a critical connector between our work—making government more of a platform and more accessible—and the public because you understand both sides. ... If we build these things and nobody uses them, it doesn't matter."