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.
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.
Light you say? Folks I think we have an Illuminatus in our midst.
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
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?
"most revolutionary things - - all of history"
Somehow, I don't think the internet is nearly so revolutionary a thing as something like the Magna Charta, or the US constitution, or even the abolition of slavery. Given some time, I might prepare a full list of the "most revolutionary things" in history. The intartubez might make it onto that list - maybe between pages 5 and 10. Hell, public education ranks higher, as screwed up as that is!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Certainly any real problem, no matter how minor, is more important than a non-existant problem you just made up, right?
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
ASSuming that your claim about the "death panels" were correct - that would be worse than the present corporate death panels, HOW?
Face it, Bubba. When the insurance companies decide that you are no longer profitable, they can cut you off anytime. The only thing stopping them is PR.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
How's that *any* different than now? See, what I see is people crying and whining that we shouldn't have any form of government/universal health coverage (even a 'basic' health plan, which could then be supplemented by private insurance, or if you prefer, completely opt out of the public program and buy fully private healthcare), because you make the claim that resources are finite, so therefor, someone's gonna die because the government decides it's 'not worth paying for'.
How exactly, do private health insurance companies get around the lack of infinite resources? Your statement can easily be turned around and directed at the private insurance companies: "There are not infinite resources. Some people will have their health care yanked so others will live. Surely you don't think that resources are infinite?"
It appears that, in your world, the lack of infinite resources is an insurmountable problem for a public healthcare plan, but magically, private insurance companies have infinite resources? What about all the people who are getting sick and/or dieing simply because they have no healthcare, so the only option for them is to go to the emergency room when it's already too late, and too expensive? What about the people who get screwed by the penny-pinchers at the health insurance companies who deny their legitimate claims?
Surely, a problem which universally affects both private and public healthcare plans, cannot be used as an argument against *either* of them?
"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.
Actually, there is this thing called a 'policy suit' and you should keep it in mind if any insurer tries to 'cut you off'.
They usually quake in their boots just at the mention of same.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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.
Google doesn't offer much on "policy suit". I added the term "insurance", and fared little better. Maybe I need a more obscure term?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Now, when the most technologically-advanced Presidency â" remember all the endearing stories about his Blackberry, and the ridiculing of McCain's reluctance to use e-mail? â" can't put a web-site together, "having never done this before" is an excuse...
Pretty sure he's still the most technically advanced president.
He didn't put the website together himself obviously, unless you think he spends his afternoons in the basement of the whitehouse installing Linux and playing X-Box?
Odds are not.
It's more of a failure of the "Office of E-Government & Information Technology" than a failure of the man himself.
And I can pretty much guarantee you that since the site hit slashdot's news, he probably knows about it, and somebody at e-gov is going to get smacked.
Seriously though, do you really think McCain would have done better at this?
Seriously??
"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.
A policy suit is basically just a lawsuit asserting breach of terms of an insurance policy. Consult a lawyer when the time comes, they will explain (and probably think you are an informed client at that point). Policies are minefields of legalese because of these, but just because an insurer can write a lot of boilerplate will not absolve them from a good faith interpretation of the policy's terms.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
There is not such thing as a 'policy suit', you loon.
You can, in theory, sue an insurance company if they fail to cover a procedure and you can demonstrate they should have covered it under their policy.
But a) that's going to be very hard and expensive to do, and b) won't stop them from ending your policy with them, it would just make them pay for expenses you incurred before they kicked you off their insurance rolls.
I.e., if you appear to have lung cancer, and they refuse to test you, and you go and pay for a test yourself and can demonstrate that, under your own policy with them, they should have paid for said test...you can sue them for the cost of the test, and maybe recover it, although they have a whole army of lawyers so it's an interesting trick to recover it for less than the cost of the test.
Actually, probably not. You need to sue them in advance to make them approve the test...the scenario I just laid out is rather unlikely.
But, regardless, you can't magically make them keep you as a customer, though, if you have cancer.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
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.
It's not hard OR expensive to file a policy suit, i've done it on at least two occasions and it happens every day.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
BTW, you're full of crap in general, but the above was just a direct rebuttal. You don't know an iota of what you speak about. Once a policy commitment is made, they don't have a choice but to cover you, barring negligent activity, which is a high bar. They can fiddle with policy terms, but you can sue them and most likely win in most environments. If you are a member of a group health insurance policy, they literally cannot drop you individually. They have to drop the whole group, which is one of the reasons why such groups exist, aside from spreading the risk.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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.
I think the important part of the project was the numbers, not the website. From what I have read, the contract was given to a security company. For all of this stuff to be updated automatically and regularly, the server would have to be pulling information from MANY sources. Security seems like an important aspect in that. I could care less about the pie charts. I care that they compile all of this information (to one spot) with speed, accuracy, and security. Then they should filter out information that should not be available to the public. And then let me see what I am meant to see (and not show me what I am not). I am not sure that they are actually doing this well (so they could have been way overpaid or whatnot), but a stupid pie chart does not prove that they don't.
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.
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
Yes, because the current system of "Sorry, the procedure recommended by your doctor was not deemed appropriate by Accountant #24 of your health insurance. We wish you luck with your blocked arteries. The procedure would result in more payout from us than we can recoup from you. Oh, and we can't renew your insurance for next year if you still live. Cheerios!"
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.
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?
If only laws existed that required insurance companies to adhere to the terms of their policies. States should set up 'Departments of Insurance' to audit compliance. I'm going to write my Senator... After I invent a time machine or find some other way to go back 50 years into the past. Stay tuned!
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.
So tell me, how much transparency do you get from your insurance company?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
Once a policy commitment is made, they don't have a choice but to cover you, barring negligent activity, which is a high bar.
By 'high bar', I suspect you mean 'They'll suddenly discover the fact you didn't report a sinus infection when you were twelve and cancel your policy for that'.
They can fiddle with policy terms, but you can sue them and most likely win in most environments.
Man, in your universe filing lawsuits must be in an incredibly easy thing. You're filing 'policy suits' here and 'suits' there.
What's more, you appear to be winning against multi-billion dollar companies.
Most people would have to pay hundreds of dollars to a lawyer just to file any suit, with hundreds or thousands of dollars more in legal fees, with no assurance to win, to get the insurance company to pay for a thousand dollars worth of care.
I guess you have some sort of magical lawsuit-filing genie somewhere.
But, hey, I'll freely admit I'm just repeating what I've heard about insurance companies, as I have very little interaction with them. Insurance companies do not stoop to the level of actually allowing me to purchase insurance from them. Perhaps someone they actually will sell insurance to could chime in?
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Hmmm. I believe that the following developments were revolutionary:
Human speech
Written language
The printing press (Thanks Gutenberg!)
Wired long-distance communications (telegraph, telephone)
Wireless long-distance communications (radio, television
The Internet
Each one of these vastly improved our ability to communicate for all purposes. Each of these improvements in communication has led to amazing leaps in technology, culture, etc. due to the improved diffusion of knowledge.
Public education, for example, has been around in various forms for along time. What makes it work so efficiently and effectively is the availability of teachers, themselves educated via books, and the books themselves that contain the knowledge to be taught. Without them, we would have an oral tradition. Even that oral tradition would depend on human language.
I think a strong case can be made that revolutions in communications are the driving force behind every other type of revolutionary change.
Luckily, I have karma to burn.
Right. And our problems in Iraq were due to Pentagon's incompetence — nothing to do with Bush... What happened to "The Buck Stops Here" attitude? Appointing a "czar" does not lift responsibility... Sorry, the executive is responsible for everything — if a particular failure is not his fault directly, then his fault is in hiring the wrong person. This is why CEOs get paid big bucks...
But Obama has never been an executive — except for the aforementioned charity, which failed in its mission to improve Chicago's public schools. Seriously. That's it... He's been an employee (a lawyer), and a law-maker (simply voting "present" most of the time, though). He never ran anything...
I don't know, what McCain would've done on this — as things stand, having this web-site up is worse than not having it at all.
Although McCain was a lackluster candidate, he certainly has more life experience than Obama. If he thought, that such a web-site is necessary/useful, I'm pretty sure, he would've been better at appointing qualified people to create it. One needn't be "technologically advanced" in person to be able to do this — witness Rupert Murdoch's success with MySpace, for example.
And if McCain ever felt wanting in executive experience, Sarah Palin alone — having been a mayor and a State Governor — has more of that than Obama and Biden together... But the electorate was better informed of the gaffes attributed to her (she never claimed seeing Russia from her window — Tina Fey's character on SNL said that), than of Biden's real idiocies (such as: "When we, along with France kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon...") and past plagiarism.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Snake-bummers? Asp-enders? You could just say "asshole". This is slashdot; we don't have censorship here.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
And if McCain ever felt wanting in executive experience, Sarah Palin alone
Wow. You are defending Palin.
Ok, I actually had a nice big long rebuttal typed up... but you're defending Palin.
Nevermind...
There were no bidders. If there were, I would have lowballed the 18,000,000 bid for a 17,000,000 bid and it would have been perfect -- with $16,995,000 left to burn.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
So your value to society is determined by the size of your paycheck? Keep that in mind when one of your family members needs it...he or she is merely the sum of their paycheck and is otherwise a worthless piece of meat.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Pretty good actually, I can see exactly how much I'm paying on each paycheck.
I've yet to see an itemized bill from the IRS.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
No, you hadn't...
She needs no "defense" — she was never credibly attacked. But, to paraphrase a certain Obama supporter: you are about to be ruled by a white woman, cracker. And it ain't gonna be Hillary...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It just goes to show the government run websites are just as bad as anything else run by the government...cutting corners at all costs, no matter what the ramifications are.
It should be "Serious Design Failure At U$A.gov".
RR