Now that about a year's worth of White House visitor logs are online, we got to wondering who's been in to see Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra and where the visitors are from. Finding the answer turned out to be not so simple, as the White House visitor logs suffer some transparency shortcomings.

Before we get into what we found after we downloaded the logs, you might want to first check out the visualization we made with the results. But, read on for an explanation of what exactly we did, as it could affect your conclusions based on the visualization tool.

Of the 1,762 data rows that we determined made up a cleaned-up sample of raw logs of people coming to see Kundra, we found that 1,024, or about 60 percent, belonged to someone who had seen Kundra three or more separate occasions. That's the data subset we ran through the tool. Our main reason for doing so is that the White House public visitor logs don't record a visitor's company or agency affiliation, meaning that anyone wanting to know which federal agency or company representatives might visit Kundra on a regular basis must manually match affiliation to the logged name. Since that's time-consuming and tedious work with a decent probability of introducing error (we were conservative in our assessments, contact us if you spot an error), the White House could significantly bolster the value and transparency of its visitor log data set by including affiliation data in the future.

We couldn't determine the affiliation of some individuals in our data subset. Also, we did our best to find the affiliation that a person had on the day of the meeting.

The Kundra log data appears to encompass (some fields are missing) a period of meetings that started on Sept. 18, 2009 and runs through Aug. 31, 2010. The data also show what could be lapses in logging visitors since the "total people" column doesn't always correspond to the same number of logged visitors. For example, while a party of four was recorded as passing (or expected to have passed) through White House gates on Aug. 16, 2010 at 8:27 a.m. to see Kundra, only two people's name are in the logs. A similar thing occurs at 9:37 a.m. that day, when the names of only three people from an apparent  party of five have been logged.

As for what the subset of data (people logged as visiting Kundra three times or more) shows us, visitors appear to hail most often from the General Services Administration or from the Office of Management and Budget itself. The reason for the latter, we believe, is that OMB staffers are located both in the New Executive Office Building, which is outside the White House perimeter, and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where Kundra has his office, which is inside.

If you add visits from four OMB contractors--Touchstone SRA, REI Systems, PCI Communications and Threespot--the number of visitors who probably met with Kundra on internally-related matters account for 617 of the total, which amounts to 35 percent our total logged visits raw data and 60 percent of FierceGovernmentIT's subset of that data.

The person who logged the most visits to Kundra is Dave McClure, associate administrator GSA's office of citizen services and innovative technologies, who apparently went to see Kundra in his EEOB office 70 times. Anna Bartosiewicz, a Touchstone SRA contractor, is a close second, with 69 logged visits.

You can download our cleaned version of the Kundra visitor logs in full as an .xls document. We downloaded the entire posted White House visitor log data set to Excel and filtered for visits to "Kundra, Vivek," and "Vivek, Kundra." That produced 1,763 total records. We then filtered again by appointment date and found only one record dated earlier than Sept. 18, 2009. We eliminated that record, leaving 1,762 records as data. In the .xls document, we've highlighted anyone who's been to see Kundra three or more times in yellow. A red row means a three plus visitor whose appointment was canceled; we did not count the canceled record as a visit.

For more:
- see our visualization of Kundra visitors
- download our clean-up raw dataset of Kundra visitors (.xls)

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