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

[synthparadox]

I agree. When I first read the title, "Serious" jumped out at me (possibly with the assistance of being the first word), and luckily for me I actually RTFA'd. Speaking for myself and more than likely any one who's done any web programming, a minor mistake of data passing being in the incorrect format for the Google APIs to digest is much much less than a "serious" design failure. In fact, its not a design failure at all. Its a code error, and luckily (or possibly unluckily) for the guys at USAspending.gov, Google's APIs don't just segfault out and crash the page, instead they try to parse it in a "is this what you wanted?" sort of way.

TL:DR - its not serious, its not a design failure, its a coding bug, and as TFA says its a 2-3 line fix. Not newsworthy if you ask me.

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

[Gazzonyx]

Seriously.

We should be happy that they even were aware that their numbers were poor. That means that someone is, at the least, paying attention if not objectively analyzing the data. The fact that it is a government agency makes it that much more astounding (IE. it's not going to make a difference in their paycheck or pension most likely).

Re:Criticize the Numbers Not the Presentation

[Runaway1956]

Heh. I read the bit about incorrect colors and sizes of pie slices, and laughed. I can't read a color coded chart anyway. GIVE ME A BAR GRAPH DAMMIT! Better yet, just post the numbers. ;^)

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.

oookay

[nomadic]

Read the blog article, and I think that a better title for this slashdot article would be "minor design failure."

Whatever.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's good enough for Government work.

The Important Thing is Existence

[steve_thatguy]

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.

A step in the right direction

[proslack]

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.

Re:A step in the right direction

[sakdoctor]

Seems to me like the site is a work in progress and will improve with time

Then where is the digging_man.gif? Where is are the road cones with flashing beacons, or the web 2.0 equivalent, the beta status?
No. This must be assumed to be a finished website and judged "as is"

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

Re:They are merely tallying points

[M. Baranczak]

a system to systematically scrape all non-hidden data on popular sites like facebook and myspace

Did you even read that link? The job it describes consists of archiving all the web content produced by the EOP (Executive Office of the President). Where does it say anything about facebook or myspace? Is it after the secret paragraphs that talk about the death panels and hiding the President's birth certificate?

Can't write HTML....

[aitala]

The site's pages don't even have a proper BODY or HTML close tags..

Jeez.

Eric

Re:Can't write HTML....

[themacks]

Not to mention the 253 errors from the W3C Validation site.

Pie Charts

[chrb]

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?

Re:Bugzilla?

[kevinNCSU]

You mean something like this?

Microsoft Contracts

I mean come on, the search by contractors was only one click from the main page ;)

With a grain of salt

[Twillerror]

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.

newness is not an excuse in this case

[sbma44]

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.