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!"

Comments

Criticize the Numbers Not the Presentation

[eldavojohn]

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?

Re:Criticize the Numbers Not the Presentation

[garcia]

In the end, the graphical representation of data is nearly always skewed, whether intentionally or not and in the end, as long as the underlying data is available (and many time, especially in government it is not) you can do you own charts to determine what is correct.

While the layperson (or CEO) likes pretty pictures and big flashy dashboards that have little green and red and black arrows to show what's going on, it's not transparent until you can get your hands on the data itself. Being that I have fought with local governments and state/federally funded groups for years to give me the underlying data (and not some self-created aggregation), I applaud any effort to give us what we need.

Yay.

Re:Criticize the Numbers Not the Presentation

[ljaszcza]

I agree that the title is inflammatory. But. I'll take issue with the statement "The numbers are there". Well, the numbers are wrong. So, they are not useful unless you do a lot of work to figure out the errors. Then there is the issue of the govt. releasing the contract to revamp the recovery.gov website. Almost entirely redacted and given to someone (Smartronix), a company that specializes in security, does not even mention web design on it's page... (http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20090803_2176.php). A $18m contract. All this does not bode well for transparency and accountability. I suppose what really bites is that if I were to produce incorrect data for a IRS inspector, my life would probably be destroyed by fines and reprisals. I can just imagine giving the IRS redacted copies of my business contracts. The fun would be short lived. Why do we, the citizens and taxpayers, accept this crap from people that want to run more and more of our lives? /rant

Re:Criticize the Numbers Not the Presentation

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Government managers don't routinely get hundred-million-dollar golden parachutes for losing billions of dollars and costing tens of thousands of people their jobs, either. If you really think industry is any better at rewarding good performance and punishing bad performance, you're delusional.

Re:Criticize the Numbers Not the Presentation

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Private companies pay executives for the associated risks for being executives.

Risk? What risk, exactly? Company does well: executives get fat bonuses and their stock options increase in value. Company does badly: executives get giant golden parachutes. There is no penalty for failure at the boardroom level.

They are merely tallying points

[Shivetya]

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