A few weeks after the first public mentions of Vivek Kundra's IT Dashboard, it's out.

Kundra demo'd the dashboard for a few of us yesterday, and it's astonishing how quickly his office--a government one, no less--put together something so polished. I hope the dashboard becomes a model as well as a supervisor for government software development.

Tomorrow at 1 pm--a few hours after Michael Bloomberg's keynote at the PdF Conference--the New York City Council will hold a hearing on a proposed bill to open all city data. Quoting Sam Wong,

The bill will require the City to create a centralized online repository of all publicly available information that is either produced or retained by the City. Furthermore, data published under this legislation will be done so in a format that will be readable by any computer device, whether that is a laptop or a phone. Not only will this collection of information be invaluable to elected officials, other government agencies and public advocates, but it can also be used by private citizens who could use the information in ingenious and unforeseen ways.

A Craigslist ad that was apparently posted by the San Francisco government is calling for contributors to what it calls the city's own version of data.gov:

My favorite thing to complain about is government systems: how bad they are, how unnecessarily expensive major contractors are, and how everyday Web developers could do much better work for a much lower price. But it's so hard for those everyday people to get a foot in the door. Maybe if a group of them got together and bid on a project collectively...

Clay Johnson, the director of the Sunlight Foundation's Sunlight Labs, had this idea today: let's all put in a bid for the Recovery.gov job.

Around this time yesterday, I, along with countless others, tried to bring down the Web sites of Iran's information and justice ministries, and state-sponsored media outlets. The idea was to silence the pro-Ahmadenijad, anti-dissent messages coming from these outlets, and in so doing, strengthen the opposition protests in Tehran.

You didn't have to be computer smart to take part: a developer in San Francisco had set up a push-button tool that would, upon your click, immediately start bombarding 10 Web sites with requests. I clicked Start, and in the 10 little boxes below, I could see the pages load and reload. About half of them were already down.

This was exhilarating. The goal was to promote democracy, and I could actually watch as it happened. Empowering.

But there's more to it than that. I'm conflicted about the virtue of this idea. I'm still trying to sort out my thoughts about what happened, but I know that we will be talking about yesterday morning for years to come. We turned our collective power and outrage into a serious weapon that we could use at our will, without ever having to feel the consequences. We practiced distributed, citizen-based warfare. That is frightening. Here is how my thinking evolved throughout the day:

That headline is intentionally vague: it's hard to know, from short tweets and jerky YouTube videos, how widespread the protests are. the scale of what we're watching. All we know is that it's interesting; that you can follow along; and that it's happening right now. A few accounts on Twitter are worth your attention:

This time tomorrow, Iran may have a new president-elect. The polls opened just over an hour ago, and if you're awake, you can get tech-related updates on Twitter via @Iran09:

Mousavi's #election site had been under DDOS attack last night from #iran gov.

SMS system is still down in #iran, two hours before the #election

If you happen to be in Iran, a few of us Americans are requesting stories about your experience: Andrew Sullivan has asked his readers to send him "first-hand accounts of campaigning and voting so Dish readers can get a more concrete sense of what the mood is," while the New York Times' Lede blog has a form that lets users submit pictures and videos from the polls. Both sites will post the submissions later for all to see.

A few days ago, the Department of Transportation launched a project with the University of Utah to design a better bus stop: instead of the typical "open meetings and workshops," Next Stop Design is seeking design submissions online from anyone and everyone.

If you're in New York this week, take note that it is Internet Week. It kicks off Monday night with the fourth gathering of IgniteNYC, where I (along with 13 others) will be giving a 5-minute presentation, with 20 slides auto-advancing every 15 seconds. (Here's more on the Ignite format.) My presentation will be on A-Space, which I've written about here before.

Following yesterday's announcement about the Obama Administration's cyber security plans, Douglas Rushkoff has responded by expounding on his own idea (which I've mentioned here before) for a public-based distributed defense network. He writes in the Daily Beast,

the appointment of a czar to manage yet another highly centralized, top-down extension of the administration only betrays our chronic, almost constitutional inability to engage in distributed warfare by distributed means...Because of the 'Net's decentralized nature, cyberwarfare is less like an artillery battle than it is like hand-to-hand combat. We are all on the frontlines; each of our computers the potential weak spot in the network.