Comments on: Sysop-in-chief leaving Whitehouse

By: jennystun

jennystun — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 11:48:44 +0000

I remember reading sometime back that Kundra’s mandate was to streamline all IT in the federal govt and make information available to people in a easy accessible way. Not sure how much progress he made towards this end, since his tenure was kind of short and these things take time to implement. I think he must have set the vision and the execution is the key. But I have seen that in large scale projects when the new head honcho comes in generally there is a significant change in direction and people and there is a big setback in time. Interesting to see how it goes. I am also curious why he is leaving.

By: al_beruni

al_beruni — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 21:45:01 +0000

razib, you missed this one bad. Your comments reminds me of the time when I was dealing with these high-falutin physicists, ostensibly to find topics to collaborate on. On learning that my group consisted of phd computer scientists, the senior physicist got all excited and wanted to know if we would code their fortran programs for them

Kundra is a technology strategist who has defined an architecture and 5-10 year goals for govt web sites. His idea has been to get govt information systems to the point where you can (securely) search and interact with all of your personal and related public information. This means social security, irs, medicare, medicaid, disability, state dept and so on. He has really pushed hard to moving towards using the cloud as well. A side benefit of all this work is that states are also following along closely – as the feds define technologies and profile standards – the states are able to pick it up quickly as well.

I am personally very sorry to see him leave. He is also a great speaker. I assume he is going to some place like the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

By: John Jacobi

John Jacobi — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 21:37:39 +0000

Kundra is neither information architect nor systems administrator – both of those are technical positions that mean getting your hands dirty.. An architect designs in some detail the technical aspects of a systems design – typically a glorified computer programmer. Kundras is a management position so he was Chief Information Officer. I was worried about cloud computing used by the government. But if used properly, it should work fine. No system is impregnable and the private companies probably have far more robust security than some government outfits.(Wikileaks leaks for ex). Anyway, according to the article, all top secret info will be handled by the government itself.

By: twoPeopleResign

twoPeopleResign — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 19:55:04 +0000

so two people resign today:

one of them aimed, cocked, and blew us away with a shot...

the other aimed then blew a shot of his cock