Any time I’ve heard government officials talk about the future of Recovery.gov, I’ve heard them mention maps. Maps that will let you drill down to your neighborhood and see the stimulus spending right around you. Well, the maps were rolled out last Thursday, and there was even a congratulatory press release from Vice President Biden. Tell me if you notice anything interesting in this map of federal grant recipients from Recovery.gov.
Geography wizzes will recognize that almost all the bubbles on the map, which represent federal grants, neatly coincide with state capitals. Check it out for yourself right here. What this highlights is a deeper problem of stimulus spending data: reporting is only required to go to two levels down. Sure, we can see that the Department of Education gave the state of California (displayed on the map as a bubble in Sacramento) so many millions of grant dollars. And we may even know that California gave a subgrant to the Los Angeles School Board. But what happens after that is missing, and will likely remain missing under the Act’s transparency requirements and OMB guidance.
These maps are great, but I’d rather have deep, meaningful data in a structured format so I can make my own maps.
The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board has finally made the first big move toward building Recovery.gov. According to Federal Times:
GSA announced last night that it has awarded a contract for the Recovery.gov redesign; the $18 million contract went to Smartronix, a Maryland-based IT firm. It beat out 58 other bidders.
The first part of the contract is worth about $9.5 million through January; other options, which extend through January 2014, are worth another $8.5 million or so.
Does anyone have a link to the actual contract? I’d like to know what we’re getting for $9.5 million. The core functionality of USASpending.gov, which is supposed to track all federal spending, was acquired for less than $1 million. In a recent Mercatus briefing paper I took a look at the spending transparency sites of 10 states and the most expensive one cost $300,000. So what is this $9.5 million website going to have on it? Is Smartronix also building out the central reporting database at FederalReporting.gov?
Quick drum bang: Make the raw spending data available and you will see corporations, non-profits, newspapers, and opengov nerds put up dozens of Recovery.govs with more features than the RAT Board can conceive or afford.
UPDATE: Crack reporter Aliya Sternstein at Nextgov has been doing a fantastic job covering the Recovery.gov story and she reports today that the RAT Board promises to make all the raw data available. Also in her piece, FederalReporting.gov has its own contractor, CGI Federal. So, that can’t account for the $9.5 million price tag. Still looking for the contract.
UPDATE 2: Folks have been saying that Smartronix beat out 58 other bidders for the contract. That is not correct. If you read the GSA release carefully, they say “59 companies were eligible to compete for the award.” There were reports last week that there were only two bidders. Today Jason Miller said on the radio that he could only confirm 3 bidders, including Smartronix.
Phase three of the White House’s Open Government Initiative ends this Sunday, and with it a tripartite experiment on receiving public comment about how to make government more open.
This is of course an important and monumental milestone. Never before have we seen the intersection of technology and public input to guide a governmental process on the front-end. Sure, we’ve been able to sound-off via email to our legislators when we support or oppose a bill, or file comments on a rulemaking–but there’s never been a coordinated, proactive solicitation for general public input. That’s why the Open Government Initiative is important.
It’s certainly One of Good Intent. That the process was itself an open process is a mild achievement, given that the theme was how to make government more open. But transparency is hard to achieve even with the best intentions. It may be that by opening the floodgates to public comment, we’ve increased the quantity of input, but not the quality.
A New York Times article from earlier this week raises the notion that soliciting comments isn’t easy, or maybe even productive. From the article:
[The White House] got an earful — on legalizing marijuana, revealing U.F.O. secrets and verifying Mr. Obama’s birth certificate to prove he was really born in the United States and thus eligible to be president.
Now, it’s easy to pick out a few extreme examples, but see it for yourself–the vast majority of the comments are off-topic, and some are even offensive or just flat out bizarre. Continue reading →
I previously lauded the Sunlight Foundation for its intention to bid on the contract for updating Recovery.gov. There’s been extensive excessive discussion of it on the Open House Project Google group.
The general theme among the one or two critics has been “leave the incompetence to the experts.” They’ve been a bit curmedgeonly, frankly.
But an informative and balanced comment highlights the practice of “wiring” government contracts. The contracting authority gets together with the preferred contractor and they collaborate to make it very difficult for anyone else to win the bid.
Well, that’s why Sunlight’s bid is so interesting and different. As I said, “[T]he contract award will now be subject to public scrutiny. Value-for-dollar to the taxpayer will be easily discernible, and that will raise the political risk if the contract is awarded based on cronyism or go-with-whatchya-knowism.”
Government contracting officials aren’t used to encountering public scrutiny and political risk for their award decisions. They’re going to experience it here, and they should get used to it for the long haul. I am eager – nay, giddy! – to report on what happens.
I think Sunlight stands a pretty good chance, simply because the contract award will now be subject to public scrutiny. Value-for-dollar to the taxpayer will be easily discernible, and that will raise the political risk if the contract is awarded based on cronyism or go-with-whatchya-knowism.
Kudos to Sunlight for taking this bold and fun step!
It’s fascinating to continue watching developments in Iran via Twitter and other social media.
The fact that Twitter delayed a scheduled outage to late-night Tehran time was laudable, but contrary to a growing belief it wasn’t done at the behest of the State Department. It was done at the behest of Twitter users.
Twitter makes that fairly (though imperfectly) clear on its blog, saying, “the State Department does not have access to our decision making process.”
As my Cato Institute colleague Justin Logan notes, events in Iran are not about the United States or U.S. policy. They should not be, or appear to be, directed or aided from Washington, D.C. Any shifts in power in Iran should be produced in Iran for Iranians, with support from the people of the world – not from any outside government.
People are free to speculate that the State Department asked Twitter to deny its involvement precisely to create the necessary appearances, but without good evidence of it, assuming that just reflects a pre-commitment that governments – not people and the businesses that serve them – are the primary forces for good in the world.
. . . you’d think that you would follow the “Speeches” link from the home page on Whitehouse.gov. If you do, today you see just four speeches.
I went looking for the text of his national security speech at the National Archives today. The New York Times has it but Whitehouse.gov doesn’t? What’s going on here?
According to respected Guatemalan lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg, Guatemala’s government is infested with corruption. His message is carried very powerfully to fellow Guatemalans and the world in a video he taped before his murder last week.
YouTube has a role as a powerful engine of dissent and government transparency. It’s a commercial, profit-making business, and it is laying bricks on the path to human rights and the rule of law worldwide.
The Cato Institute’s Juan Carlos Hidalgo writes briefly about developments since then on the Cato@Liberty blog.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.