On Monday, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board launched its $18 million redesign of Recovery.gov. The site is meant to allow citizens to track the $787 billion in stimulus spending. It’s a fine upgrade with lots of data, but there’s much more to be done.
Right now, the site is just a new front-end for the existing USASpending.gov database that already reported federal contracts (although not always grants). In that sense there’s nothing new here except the skin. The real test will come later this month when stimulus-specific reports from recipients are included.
The site’s real value will come not from how it displays spending data, but in making the raw data available in order to foster a hundred different displays by third-party developers. StimulusWatch.org, the crowdsourcing project I help lead, would like to take the new spending data and allow citizens to rate, describe, and comment about individual projects–something the official government site does not do. Right now, however, there is a dearth of downloadable structured data available on the site. We hope this will change soon, and we hope they give use the raw data they’ve promised:
“Our goal here is to provide the facts and the tools for the public to decide whether that is a good use of the public’s money,” Devaney said in an interview with Nextgov earlier in September. “We’re going to put the facts and the tools up so that people can mash it up.” The functions should allow citizens to draw useful observations, such as, “That’s the mayor’s brother in law — I’m going to call the Recovery Board,” he said.
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