Recovery.gov site goes live
There’s been a plain placeholder for more than month now, but with President Obama putting his signature on the new stimulus bill today, Recovery.gov has gone live.
From the site:
Recovery.gov is a website that lets you, the taxpayer, figure out where the money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going. There are going to be a few different ways to search for information. The money is being distributed by Federal agencies, and soon you’ll be able to see where it’s going — to which states, to which congressional districts, even to which Federal contractors. As soon as we are able to, we’ll display that information visually in maps, charts, and graphics.
At first blush, the site architecture looks a lot like that of the White House site, which is to be expected.
Depending on your political persuasion, the recovery.gov site is either a brilliant piece of Web-spin or a useful tool to track federal stimulus spending. Since there’s not much of substance there right now, I guess we’ll have to make that determination later. Watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense has its take on the accountability and transparency built into the stimulus bill here.
One thing that I was hoping might be on the site was some help to make “mashups” of the data with other types of Web applications. Sadly, that doesn’t appear to be a priority right now. From the FAQs:
Q: Is the spending data on recovery.gov available in a format (like XML) that developers can use to create mashups and gadgets?
A: Not at this time. But, as new systems are developed to capture the allocations and expenditures under the Act, we plan to make that data available in exportable form.
–Paul
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[...] we be able to track it? I’ve already blogged about the federal site, recovery.gov. But it appears the same kind of transparency at the local [...]