Slashdot Mirror
Serious Design Failure At USAspending.gov?
theodp writes "Over at Intelligent Enterprise, Seth Grimes declares the Federal Government's USAspending.gov website a travesty, calling it 'almost a parody of a government-transparency site.' Among the faults cited by Grimes is a botched 'Federal Spending FY 2009 YTD' pie chart that graced USAspending.gov's home page. Not only were the sizes of pie segments not in proportion to the percentage labels (due to a Google Chart API error), the colors in the pie chart didn't even match the colors and values in the table immediately below the chart. Lucky for the Feds, Grimes didn't get a chance to look behind the curtain at the Federal IT Dashboard, where they forgot to remove a (commented) reference to a Google spreadsheet that states 'These totals are pretty poor numbers' (Google workbook). Oops!"
Having never done this before, the government is bound to have problems. All of them do when they try new things. I can bear with them for some incorrectly rendered pie charts or -- gasp! -- an informative comment about the numbers being pretty poor. Sorry to sound so apologetic but I'll give the idea of transparency and A and the implementation a C-. So what? The numbers are there.
Because what did we have before? Data via third parties that had to use a FOIA and sit and wait for it? Numbers that were years old? Or we had to visit 50 state sites that were all laid out differently and aggregate the data? And we're ripping on usaspending.gov for design flaws? Okay, from a web developer's standpoint these are pretty egregious errors but so what?
At least it reads "These totals are pretty poor numbers." and not "We really had to cook the books to get this to look right." Hell, now you know where to start looking if you want to do what you should be doing: criticizing the government based on their spending and IT (mis)management!
How would you react if the next president did away with usaspending.gov? Happy that the travesty of a parody site is gone?
My work here is dung.
Read the blog article, and I think that a better title for this slashdot article would be "minor design failure."
It's good enough for Government work.
Why do I care about the details of US Snake-bummers?
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
In terms of government it is considerably harder to make bring these things into existence and to remove them once they're already there. Changing it after it already exists is trivial. And that's what's important and significant about this: it exists. The general population has facilitated access to something that was obscure and hidden behind a wall of government before. This may not seem like much but I think the successful creation of this type of transparency throughout the government, and if possible embedding it systemically into government processes, that we will see a great improvement in terms of freedom, success, and efficiency of our government.
It's similar to the way open source applications always get bugs patched faster than commercial implementations--crowdsourcing is a good way to catch errors. That will undoubtedly apply to government as well, especially when many politicians make their living relying on their practices being obscured from the public.
One of the first items on USAspending's page states "A journey towards greater Transparency and Accountability...". Seems to me like the site is a work in progress and will improve with time.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
If you can't count the Internet as one of the most revolutionary things in the past 50 years, shit in flat out all of history, then I don't know what you can.
Light you say? Folks I think we have an Illuminatus in our midst.
So, a bug in the charting API and comments indicating that the data is flawed. I'm not a big city fancy web developer, but maybe someone should add to the discussion a definition of the terms "design" and "design failure"
its not like they are out to be serious. If they were the same government promising more openness would not be ramming near trillion dollar bills through Congress without a chance for public discussion, let alone reading of by the voting parties.
then again, change might mean soliciting bids for a system to systematically scrape all non-hidden data on popular sites like facebook and myspace https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=eec856940efb75b2b1c11e2b1d5660a4&tab=core&_cview=0&cck=1&au=&ck=
Change we can believe in, with all these CZARs the only thing apparent is that the public isn't paying attention to the other hand
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
If you're in IT long enough, you've probably seen a million sites and software packages like this in use at large companies. In my experience, this is usually the result of a low-bid IT contractor getting a last-minute request to slap something together. Of course, in-house resources can screw things up badly too, but high-dollar consulting/contracting deals seem to have a special knack for it. Some places have great results with outsourcing/contracting, but others make it impossible to get high-quality work done in a reasonable time.
It sucks that something as public as the federal spending-accountability website has obvious problems, but how much time do you think whoever won that contract got to get the site live?
I'd be interested in hearing from an MBA-type about what the actual rationale for hiring third party IT help is. I know it's usually driven by raw costs and the fact that "IT's not strategic." But what is it that's actually taught in business school that has every executive that drives the whole outsourcing push? Or is it really just "my golf buddy is doing it at his company."?
Disclaimer: In the government case, I can definitely see the need for contract help. Projects would probably have a really hard time surviving administration changes, internal squabbles, etc.
The site's pages don't even have a proper BODY or HTML close tags..
Jeez.
Eric
Eric Aitala
www.f1m.com
How about adding Bugzilla to that site? Here is one feature request: I would like to see contract sums by company (yes, I am interested in overall amount going to Microsoft).
839*929
Can someone remove the 3D pie chart from existance?
I'm surprised the guy rips into the bug calling the Google API and even says "Here's the government's chart done right" without mentioning that piecharts are a bad way to represent comparative data like this in the first place 3D pie charts may look fancy, but they make it more difficult to compare the actual data (which is supposed to be the whole point of plotting it). They are even worse than 2D barcharts, at least with 2D you are only looking at data being relative to slice area, and not being rendered at an angle - look at the edge in the plot he uses, there's as much if not more purple on display as the supposedly larger green slice. What's wrong with a bar chart for visualising comparative data like this? Surely it would give the reader a much more informed quick overview of spending?
Of course! This is true about Obama himself — the man has never had any executive experience, except for chairing a failed charity project (together with an ex-terrorist, khmm...).
But whenever this lack of experience was pointed out last year, the shrieks of the "we are the ones we've been waiting for" crowd drowned it out, who wanted their n00b elected without questioning, what the "Change" is going to mean...
Now, when the most technologically-advanced Presidency — remember all the endearing stories about his Blackberry, and the ridiculing of McCain's reluctance to use e-mail? — can't put a web-site together, "having never done this before" is an excuse...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Uber conservative, I don't like Obama or Pelosi, but seriously this? This is not an issue. Complain about how the demorats want to set up panels to decide who lives and dies. That's what matters not some silly color scheme! Shesh.
Yea really, who cares?
a) Nobody expects competent work from governments.
b) Even if it works, it's only for show and data is forged.
So, who cares? The worse it is, the less tax money was wasted on it. After all the budget went down the drain due to nepotism and other frauds, they'd have had to request even more to get it done by a real developer. So yea ... good for taxpayers ... at least relatively good ...
Software has bugs! Software rushed out the door doubly so. In other news, the grass is green and water is wet.
This story would have been a lot more appealing without the hyper-ventilated media fishbowl aspects (serious design flaws! total failure of web 2.0 principles! complete lack of transparency! they didn't respond to my wiki posts!).
As regards transparency, compared to what we had before, just having numbers like this up in the public puts government CIOs in a very hot seat, indeed. Just imagine if your own CIO had to do likewise with your own firm's numbers! Yow.
Let's help them out here, not bash them in for small coding errors.
Oh wait. What am I thinking? This is /. Nevermind.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Don't mean to be a prick, but isn't this the new "transparency" site that the gov. supposedly spend 18M on?
The company they hired to do this could have at least had the courtesy to double-check their work!
How do I get a government contract!? Crazy.
"blah blah blah... failure... blah blah blah... dot gov"
In other breaking news, the sky is blue.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
It could be argued that the statement meant: "Comment here if you agree with this statement. OR If this is true check here." If someone is putting out honest numbers, there has to be a way the he or she can have feed back.
That guys trolls about "major design flaws" on a website that was slapped together within a month of President Obama taking office... gimme a break.
The fact that a government operation was able to put that information out that quickly is just impressive and unprecedented.
I wonder if TFA author would be able to put together a website of such scope and functionality in such short amount of time... and without any bugs when he claims to have "spent way too much time" troubleshooting just the pie chart.
Maybe he works for the shop that came second on the bid?
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
Might I add, there's little "transparent" about a pie chart. How about a spreadsheet listing exact vendors and amounts?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The govt. always gets highly critizied. Or even when someone is just making a simple obersvation it all of the sudden becomes a "slam".
Can you imagine if companies had to bear this sort of total public critisim. How many companies have stupid errors on there website, menus, marketing, or anything else and we don't get upset.
I just take it with a grain of salt and hope things get better. The govt. isn't going to be perfect becuase it's ran by human beings...just like everything else.
I work at the Sunlight Foundation, where we're pretty familiar with the people and data systems powering USASpending.gov. I've seen a lot of comments here saying that the important thing is that the government is publishing something, and that it's understandable that their first pass might not be perfect.
But this isn't their first pass. The underlying data systems -- FAADS and FPDS -- have existed since the 90s, and have been riddled with errors throughout their existence. Instead of fixing the problems, OMB continues to slap new coats of paint on the same lousy data.
It's nice that we've got a new USASpending.gov, and I agree that it would be a mistake to put too much emphasis on a buggy visualization. But the underlying data is terrible, and so far no one is showing the will to fix it. Just look at USASpending's "data quality" tab -- it talks about the completeness of each row. Well, that's great, but it tells you nothing about the thousands upon thousands of missing rows, nor about the rows that massively under- or over-report their dollar amounts.
At Subsidyscope, the project on which I work, we've delved into these problems in more depth. Those who'd like to learn more about the shortcomings of the data systems powering USASpending can find a discussion of the relevant issues here.
"they forgot to remove a (commented) reference to a Google spreadsheet"
Sounds like transparency to me. Another promise kept. Working as designed.
You CANNOT make this stuff up.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
.. so long as you say that "due to the difficulty of measuring total spending in a single year, these numbers are reasonably approximate".
I suspect they didn't.
The whole exercise is a political manipulation anyway. The largest government outlays - the so-called entitlements - are omitted from the chart. Medicare, Social Security, and reimbursements to states for social services are not shown on these charts. Those items constitute more than half of Federal spending - that's where your tax dollars go - but they're completely omitted in this analysis.
Probably bid to lowest US contractor who in turn had outsourced it abroad. When you rush these jobs the specifications scrambled and the testing is sloppy as the results show.
actually, the contractor that maintains USASpending.gov is REI Systems, based in Herndon, VA. They're not faultless, but the real problems with the site have to do with the underlying data; unfortunately, REI can't do much about that.
The biggest problem of the website is that it fails to disclose the location of these other pending USAs, when they will be available, and whether they have a better class of politicians.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Pay attention -- these are the same people who want to run your health care.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Well, if the numbers are also wrong, who would be surprised? State-run media wants you to shrug and think, "The economy's down: must be George Bush' fault." So why would the numbers be right?
And just because you voted for Obama, don't mod me down again: Hear me out.
This isn't Republican versus Democrat; it's Liberal versus Conservative. And the Liberals have put us behind the 8-ball.
Remember "The most transparent administration in history"? Remember "All legislation would spend 5 days in the public before voting on it"? Remember "Earmarks will be outlawed"?
I remember "Don't read it, just vote on it!" by Pellozi. I remember TARP came with something like 8,000 earmarks. I remember Obama talking about "his version" of healthcare reform which he doesn't have.
TARP was suppossed to get us out of mad debt by offering a TRILLION dollars on things like monuments and ACORN (whose founders believe everyone on Welfare is utopia) doesn't help America. This is clearly against what's been proven SIX TIMES ALREADY.
Six times now America has learned that supply-side economics is the way out of a recession. Only the THIRD time it was tested did anyone call it "Reganomics". Point is: not experimental; not opinion.
Clearly posting accurate numbers are now a way of life. (Well, they match what the state-run media has been told to portray)
But this hypocrisy isn't out of place; it's part of the plan:
The pattern's pretty clear:
1. Congress writes code making the life of companies in an industry crazy.
2. Parts of that industry collapse. (like 74 banks this year)
3. Congress swoops in to "save" the industry with bailout money with "congressional oversight" because "capitalism ran wild" and:
-Bailout means congress OWNS that industry
-Congress decides how much money people make there
-Democrat buddies get perks, the rest get screw out of life savings
Step the above pattern on mortgage companies, then banks, and now car makers.
When it was done to lenders via the Community Re-investment Act, *any* ethnic person could ask for a $200,000 loan while jobless, then cry to congress when he gets turned down. That ethnic person could contact a congressman to shut down the bank, all assisted by ACORN. So what happened? Those banks started giving away money in buckets. Capitalism gone wild! (not)
But Obama's just the current Bobble-Head doll at the helm: the five, 1,000+ page units of legislation couldn't have been written in the months since he arrived. It's the Democrat-controlled congress. They've wanted to take these country-changing steps for decades.
Please, Slashdot-Army of Neos: think this out. The Fed can't cross it's legs without spending a million dollars and getting it wrong. These people need to pass NOTHING this term. Look at the dismal state of Medicare, Medicade, Social Security all broke by billions. And most recently the incompentence of Cash for Clunkers.
These are not the people to do these things. They've never done anything right, ever. Don't expect them to tell you how wrong they are with a "transparency website".
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Well, I think Grimes is getting his panties in a bundle over something that's not overly important, but he's right about one thing: they don't get it.
myspace.com/johnnyfreakingcocaine
My guess, and I have not RTFM, they hired MS Windows people. If you hire Windows people you will usually get dog shit as a result. I'm sure there are exceptions, I've never seen any personally.
I'm betting most Windows stuff goes through middlemen - think outsourcing companies like HP, IBM, EDS, and smaller. You pay the company to purchase, install, configure, and babysit, and Microsoft gets the money, without it being tracked.
You'd probably want to see how much was spent on operating systems, if they have it broken down to those type of purchase. Sadly it looks like no.
I'm a contractor for a DoD R&D organization. Like many science and technology organizations within the DoD, my customers are on a so-called "experimental" (although it's been in place forever) payscale (not the GS scale that many people are familiar with), that allows them a large amount of flexibility in what they pay people. While it's not quite as much as folks can make on the outside, it is enough that when combined with the higher degree of job security offered within the gov't, they have no trouble recruiting and retaining people. The really good ones can make considerable amounts of money - certainly into the six figures, and that's for those below the SES equivalent grades.
Sure, should have outsourced it to Halliburton.
This post is consists of 100% pure recycled right-wing talking points, most of which have nothing to do with the topic at hand. What do congressional rules for bill approval and the number of so-called "czars" have to do with the presentation of contractual data (to say nothing of the fact that these criticisms are stupid in themselves)? Who rates this stuff?
I really don't like capitalization in domain names. I kept on reading is as "US Aspending", and thought it was some sort of parody site. Yes, we're aspending a lot of money. Enough to make my head asplode.
Try Google News for "recission" - it's quite easy for health insurance companies to rescind your coverage for any reason or no reason at all (although it's almost always couched in terms of a pre-existing condition that you failed to disclose). And frequently, when signing up for insurance, you waive your rights to a trial, agreeing in advance to go to arbitration - with an arbitration company that's picked and paid for by... your health insurance company. Surprisingly, these arbitration outfits find for the plaintiff something like 99% of the time. Who would have guessed.
I don't think the Cignas and Blue Crosses of the world are doing much quaking over individual policyholder suits.
The part that bothered me is that someone had to have looked at this page, and said "Yes; This is what I want the world to see."
Does anyone proof-read their work anymore? Or bother to look at what they're about to present to the world at large? Why is it that, if it comes out of a computer, we just assume it's all correct and ready to go? Someone had the choice to not publish this page with the mistakes left in it. That person failed their job by allowing it to be seen on the Internet at all.
site, built, by, lowest, bidder
Luckily, I have karma to burn.
It just goes to show the government run websites are just as bad as anything else run by the government...cutting corners at all costs, no matter what the ramifications are.
It should be "Serious Design Failure At U$A.gov".
RR