Can you match the colors in the pie chart with the legend below?
From usaspending.gov
Continue readingThis Week in Transparency – July 2, 2009
Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and allies from the week:... View Article
Continue readingOpen notebook: Following stimulus contracts
Recovery.gov might not be useful yet for "following every penny" of stimulus spending, but with a telephone, Google, USASpending.gov and some luck it might not be that hard. Pretty much at random, I picked out a bunch of congressional press releases touting stimulus dollars going to local communities, and started making calls. Here's some notes on where one inquiry led me.
Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper of Pennsylvania's 3rd district (roughly the northwest corner of the state) put this press release on her Web site on March 24, announcing that, "The Mercer County Housing Authority is slated to ...
Continue readingRecovery.gov Bid — a Good Failure
Last week, we announced that we were going to bid on Recovery.gov. Here, 9 days later we have a few pages of information on our bid, but I don't think it makes sense to turn anything in tomorrow. So I'm declaring this experiment a failure. Most people confuse "failure" with being "wrong" but here in the Labs, we're into experimentation -- and you can't experiment or push the ball forward if you're afraid to fail.
This was a completely worthwhile experiment and we've learned a lot. I want to share some of the reasons why we failed, and what we've learned with all of you:
Continue readingTwo Questions from the RFP Worth Noting
Here's two interesting questions from the Recovery.gov RFP Q&A we just posted. These questions were asked by people who are eligible to bid on the Recovery.gov RFP that we're presently creating a community bid for. The questions:
Continue readingQuestion 101: The requirements for XML firewall appear to have been copy/pasted from the IBM website (see http://www-01.ibm.com/software/integration/datapower/xs40/highlights.html). Is government looking biased towards an IBM solution for XML Firewall?
Answer 101: No, the government is not biased toward IBM or any vendor. The value of XML firewalls is technology dependent. The capability to provide XML firewalls is pervasive throughout industry and is proven to increase the security of Web Services. Technology descriptions were pulled from several Internet locations as a part of market research.
Question 103: The requirements for data Warehouse appear to have been copy/pasted from the IBM website (see http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/warehouse/enterprise-new.html). Is government biased to an IBM solution for data warehouse?
Answer 103: No, the government is not biased toward an IBM or any other vendors’ solution. Technology descriptions were pulled from several Internet locations as a part of market research.
Questions and Answers about Recovery.gov
We've just been given the answers to the questions posed to the Recovery board about the bid. We put them up on Scribd. Check it out
Continue readingSome stimulus recipients to report in Excel?
Just reading the new guidance from Office of Management and Budget for recipients funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to report information to the government: "This Recipient Reporting spreadsheet template is to be used for non-machine recipient reporting. It enables manual data entry and collection of recipient reporting information in a familiar excel format."
There's also some XML schemas for those submitting machine readable data.
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Recovery.gov 2.0 Bid Status Report
The Recovery.gov bid: What's happened so far
So we're busily cranking out ideas and materials for the Recovery.gov bid over on the labs wiki. I wanted to catch you all up on what's going on, and what we know so far.
Continue readingThis Week In Transparency – June 19, 2009
Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and grantees from this week:... View Article
Continue readingWE are going to bid on Recovery.gov
We've decided to do something crazy. On Tuesday afternoon, someone handed us a copy of the Recovery.gov 2.0 RFP and we thought: what if we try something truly radical here. What if we opened up the process of government contracting by bidding on this thing? We together-- not just we meaning The Sunlight Foundation-- are going to bid on redoing Recovery.gov to learn more about the process of government contracting, and to try and build what is perhaps the biggest federal transparency-related website.
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