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Recovery.gov Not Very Transparent
Bob the Super Hamste writes "CNN is reporting that the page recovery.gov is
not as transparent as it claims to be. The examples pointed out are:
1. The user is greeted by a large pie chart that show the breakdown of money spent by 2 categories, state government distributions and local government distributions.
2. Finding projects involves a complicated search, information on projects is not actually hosted on recovery.gov
3. The format of the information available is of poor quality (the article specifically mentions a PDF document that was created from a scanned sideways copy of roadwork projects from New York state).
Given that this site was meant to make the spending of the new stimulus money more transparent to the citizens of the Unites States of America it seems oddly opaque. CNN does seem to praise the ability for government agencies to be able to exchange HTML based information between systems, which for government I would call a massive accomplishment.
I tried to find information for my state and searched for Minnesota. I got 4 matches, 2 of which were generic ones: one was the Minnesota state certification that is required for a state to receive funds and one that lays out public transportation spending for all states of which Minnesota gets $94,093,115."
You can rotate PDFs in Adobe Acrobat Reader, right? I thought CNN had a tech segment on their network? Couldnt they just ask the mail boy or someone how to spin the PDF so they could read it instead of have this melt down at their desk?
If you look at the time line you will see that July 15th, 2009 is when "Recipients of Federal funding to begin reporting on their use of funds."
They implemented drupal on a winders server. By default, drupal comes with htaccess files that protects against this; however, since this is IIS, the htaccess files are no in effect. The windows administrator on the site never set the correct permissions in IIS. So no it has nothing to do with the distribution of the Drupal framework.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
Heck, I would love to see every Congressman's page on Wikipedia updated with all the earmarks for their districts and states and their vote on the bill which funded them.
You mean like this?
Congressional rules already require members to report their earmarks. More such rules are in the works.
And why such hating on earmarks? Earmarks in and of themselves are a good thing because they allow members to bring very local concerns and needs into the federal budgeting process. Sometimes the executive branch doesn't quite understand the local situations on the ground. That's why Congress controls the purse strings.
As long as earmarks are disclosed and go through some kind of vetting process (which they do now), I have no problem with them.
The information is there; you just have to spend several minutes to find it. Of course, it's a massive challenge to bring all this info together -- I'm sure that's why they have only general summaries on the main page and leave the details up to the state pages (since the states have the nitty-gritty details). That's the lazy route, but it requires more work on the part of your visitors. For example, here's my state's highway projects and our local road projects. Apparently they're going to be doing an overlay on 218, which I take whenever I drive to/from Cedar Rapids; fixing the pedestrian bridge on US 1 that was damaged by the flood that I sometimes walk on; doing some repairs at the Melrose and Sunset intersection on the UI campus, which I drive through perhaps once a month; replacing a bridge I drive over fairly regularly in Coralville; and doing some reconstruction up in Cedar Rapids on a road I drive on about once a month. But I had to follow the link to the Iowa site and navigate around in there to get those documents.
Tough challenge = slow implementation.
"WANTED: Sinking ship seeks rats."
3D pie charts that show only 2 numbers are the devil's work.
What this tells me more than anything else is that although they want to be transparent, the people who put this together know almost nothing about presentation of data.
Please, everybody, read Tufte. Even if you don't agree with everything that he says, think about his points.
Then, for the love of God, never, ever, create a 3D pie chart again.
Obama's CIO didn't "step down because of corruption in his home team". He stepped aside for a few days after someone in his "home team" was suddenly and without warning arrested for charges that had nothing to do with the CIO. An arrest that was somehow timed to happen days after the CIO started, though the investigation was going on for months.
The CIO has no evidence against him, nothing indicating he ever did anything related to the arrest (which itself is not proof of that other guy's guilt). All he did was delay his start as CIO for a few days so that could all become clear. And now he's back, because it had nothing to do with him. Except perhaps he spent some time helping the investigation find its way around his old office, since he'd just been running it.
I understand you're not American. But if you're following the rest of our thrashing as closely as you evidently followed the "America's CIO's rocky start" story, you should look closer before you jump to conclusions. Because you were pretty wrong on that one, and the other one is much more important, and much more complex.
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make install -not war