It will be a working weekend for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and the contractor it hired to quickly rebuild recovery.gov in anticipation of this Saturday's state American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) reporting deadline.
The countdown to October 10 has been a particularly intense fire drill for Maryland-based Smartronix, Inc, the company that won the contract to get the federal recovery spending site ready for prime time. (The contract is worth an initial $9.5 million through January 2010, with the option to almost double in value - $18 million - by 2014.)
The initial roll up of stimulus dollars comes with a myriad of challenges. On the operational side, as recently as a month ago, only 14,000 of an expected 200,000 ARRA recipients had registered to report. Also during the countdown, even registered recipients confronted still ambiguous data standards.
On the expectations side, the much anticipated inaugural recovery.gov rollup is a key test of whether the Obama administration can deliver on its promises of transparency. What's more, the administration is also betting the mid term elections that the data will demonstrate that the huge $787 billion stimulus package is putting people back to work and goosing a moribund economy. It will be judged by the administration's own data -- regardless of how clean or complete they are.
That is a lot to put on the shoulders of a website. To further complicate the expectations game, recovery.gov has head-to-head competition from the private sector. The data aggregator and reseller Onvia has built recovery.com (which it mirrors for the time being at recovery.org) through data mining and old school clipping services. NPR compared the dot-gov and dot-com sites, and any unique value of the federal government effort was not clear to the reporter.
The board, working with the General Services Administration among other federal agencies and a handful of technology companies (including IBM, SAP and Microsoft), has been helping states and localities get ready for this Saturday's reporting deadline.
Stuart McKee, a former state CIO in Washington and now National Technology Officer with Microsoft, has been part of that campaign. In criss crossing the country, he came to a number of conclusions about what we are about to see,
Acknowledging that there are no second chances to make a first impression, McKee thinks the effort must begin again come Monday morning,
Ever the optimist, McKee sees a promising second act for all things transparency,
To hear more of my conversation with McKee, listen to the most recent DS-50 podcast. Download it here or subscribe to the series on iTunes.
The countdown to October 10 has been a particularly intense fire drill for Maryland-based Smartronix, Inc, the company that won the contract to get the federal recovery spending site ready for prime time. (The contract is worth an initial $9.5 million through January 2010, with the option to almost double in value - $18 million - by 2014.)
The initial roll up of stimulus dollars comes with a myriad of challenges. On the operational side, as recently as a month ago, only 14,000 of an expected 200,000 ARRA recipients had registered to report. Also during the countdown, even registered recipients confronted still ambiguous data standards.
On the expectations side, the much anticipated inaugural recovery.gov rollup is a key test of whether the Obama administration can deliver on its promises of transparency. What's more, the administration is also betting the mid term elections that the data will demonstrate that the huge $787 billion stimulus package is putting people back to work and goosing a moribund economy. It will be judged by the administration's own data -- regardless of how clean or complete they are.
That is a lot to put on the shoulders of a website. To further complicate the expectations game, recovery.gov has head-to-head competition from the private sector. The data aggregator and reseller Onvia has built recovery.com (which it mirrors for the time being at recovery.org) through data mining and old school clipping services. NPR compared the dot-gov and dot-com sites, and any unique value of the federal government effort was not clear to the reporter.
The board, working with the General Services Administration among other federal agencies and a handful of technology companies (including IBM, SAP and Microsoft), has been helping states and localities get ready for this Saturday's reporting deadline.
Stuart McKee, a former state CIO in Washington and now National Technology Officer with Microsoft, has been part of that campaign. In criss crossing the country, he came to a number of conclusions about what we are about to see,
If the attempt is just to expose the data, I think that would be disappointing - just to say, 'here's the data - do with it what you want.' I think government has fiduciary responsibility to organize that information and present it in a way that people can digest.
Acknowledging that there are no second chances to make a first impression, McKee thinks the effort must begin again come Monday morning,
If the key stake holders at the federal and the state level particularly will gather together and create the next set of requirements with the lessons learned and set the expectations [for what comes next]. This is a learning process. This isn't going to be perfect. And we are going to get better and better incrementally each time.
Ever the optimist, McKee sees a promising second act for all things transparency,
If we can set that expectation, I think two things will happen. One, government will continue to improve and get better; and, two, citizens will be very, very pleased with the results.
To hear more of my conversation with McKee, listen to the most recent DS-50 podcast. Download it here or subscribe to the series on iTunes.
There is also some chatter occurring beneath the surface about the high level of recipients who are not reporting their ARRA money. RAT Board spokespeople are being mum about the total number of registrants to FederalReporting.gov, but rest assured, it will be one of the bigger stories come Oct. 10.