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OMB Watch has RSS feeds
OMB Watch "exists to increase government transparency and accountability; to ensure sound, equitable regulatory and budgetary processes and policies; and to protect and promote active citizen participation in our democracy." They have been around form more than 25 years and are an excellent source for information about government openness and transparency and information policy. Their redesigned web site has a page listing their RSS feeds including one on Government Openness. They also have a blog, The Fine Print. Continue reading
Watch the dollars with ShovelWatch
Here is another non-government site about the economic bailout/recovery. This one is put together by investigative journalists. They are citing the stories they have done on the largest domestic spending bill in U.S. history and highlighting the best reporting from around the Web on the stimulus. ShovelWatch.org
ShovelWatch is a joint project of the non-profit investigative outfit ProPublica, the morning news program The Takeaway and WNYC, New York’s flagship public radio station. With investigative reporting, interactive features, and (not least) help from you, we’ll be tracking the stimulus bill dollars as they travel from Congress to your neighborhood. With your help, we’ll make sure that one of the biggest, fastest appropriations ever has a big, fast army to track whether it is well spent.Continue reading
Congressman Twitters secret trip to Iraq
Congressman Twitters secret trip to Iraq, by Rafe Needleman, CNet, February 6, 2009. Continue reading
Recommendations on Open Government from computer scientists and computing practitioners
The Washington policy committee of the Association for Computing Machinery, the professional association that represents computer scientists and computing practitioners, released its Policy Recommendations on Open Government today. The really important thing about these recommendations is that they reflect an understanding that there is a difference between "presenting" information, usually in the form of a web site, and providing the underlying data that anyone can then "present" or use or re-use. As David Robinson said in an earlier proposal, "[I]s a government monopoly on 'presentations' of the data the best way...? Probably not. If Congress orders the federal bureaucracy to provide a web site for end users, then we will all have to live with the one web site they cook up" (The (Ironic) Best Way to Make the Bailout Transparent, By David Robinson, Freedom to Tinker, January 27th, 2009) Among the recommendations:
- Data published by the government should be in formats and approaches that promote analysis and reuse of that data.
- Citizens should be able to download complete datasets of regulatory, legislative or other information, or appropriately chosen subsets of that information, when it is published by government.
- Citizens should be able to directly access government-published datasets using standard methods such as queries via an API (Application Programming Interface).
Today's statement puts the weight of America's computing professionals behind the push for machine-readable government data.Continue reading
A Guide To Bailout Transparency Sites
CJR has an article that lists and describes some of the sites on the web that have bailout information. The number of sites that are disclosing information that you might expect to find at a government site or a library seems to be growing quickly! The article didn't catch Stimulus Watch for example. One of the main benefits of these sites is that they make the information easier to find and use. There are some government sites listed in the article as well. A Guide To Bailout Transparency Sites, By Elinore Longobardi, Columbia Journalism Review, January 30, 2009.
Now that taxpayers have become financiers, we have a right to know where the money is going. In search of organizations with the curiosity and resources to help figure that out, we trolled the Internet for good, easily available bailout information and came up with several sites worth looking at.Continue reading
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