President Barack Obamas Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra announced this morning the launch of an IT dashboard that allows people to see how the federal government is spending taxpayer dollars on information technology projects.

Announced at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, the IT dashboard, allows users to view data for various federal agencies, including major investments and dollars spent, as well to view the health of projects through graphs comparing planned and actual expenditures.

Kundra said the IT dashboard represents a democratizing of information. The data used is available on the government's data.gov site, Kundra said, but the dashboard makes accessing and understanding the raw numbers much easier. Contact information for the Chief Information Officers of each agency are also available via the dashboard.

We cant make policy behind closed doors anymore, said Beth Noveck, the U.S. deputy chief technology officer for open government. She said that her department, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, uses feedback from its blogs to develop recommendations for policies. Personal Democracy Forum founder Andrew Rasiej described it as open-source policy making.

The technology behind the IT dashboard isnt perfect yet, Kundra acknowledged, nor is all information on government spending integrated into the IT dashboard. Whether data on the AIG or General Motors bailouts would be made available, for example, is still being explored for later.