Adapt successful federal data exchange programs to ARRA recipient reporting
idea
What is the idea?
A key factor to enabling the public to monitor Recovery Act spending is to get accurate and timely reports from contract, grant and loan recipients in a format that is highly reusable on the web. This is a massive challenge, with tens of thousands of state and local government entities alone among the universe of potential recipients required to report to the federal government.
The good news is that the federal government has tackled similar reporting and compliance situations before -- in partnership with state and local governments -- and can adapt successful models to enable efficient and effective recipient reporting.
The federal government could build upon the successes of existing federal information exchange programs, such as the Environmental Protection Agency’s Central Data Exchange (CDX). The idea is to adapt free open source data exchange tools that the government already uses for other mission purposes to aggregate and publish the required Recovery Act recipient data. EPA's CDX applies this approach with the help of open source gateway technology that helps states report data required by environmental regulations. This approach can be adjusted at relatively low cost to convey the data called for by the Recovery Act.
An April 15, 2009 executive forum co-hosted by the CGI Initiative for Collaborative Government and George Mason University dove deeper on this topic. Featured speakers included:
- Kshemendra Paul, Federal Chief Architect at OMB’s Office of E-Government and IT, who is actively involved in establishing a central governmentwide system for Recovery Act reporting.
- David McClure, Managing Vice President at Gartner Government Research, who has consulted with numerous federal, state, and local government executives about the Recovery Act.
- Stan Czerwinski, Director of Strategic Issues at the General Accountability Office, who coordinates GAO’s work on stimulus programs.
- Lisa Schlosser, Director of the Office of Information Collection at the Environmental Protection Agency, who heads up EPA’s collection of environmental data submissions from state and local governments.
For top-of-mind takeaways from the April 15 session and other related postings, see the following links:
Tackling Recovery Act Transparency
Coverage from the DorobekInsider.com
Cracking the Tough Nut of Recovery Act Reporting
www.collaborativegov.org
Why is it important?
The fact that this approach is open source means it’s available to federal agencies, states and local governments to reuse to report and aggregate data from both very old and more modern systems.
This model could enable efficient quarterly recipient reporting of accurate project results for reuse and display on Recovery.gov. It also could offer at least three bonus benefits:
-First, it provides the ability to capture valuable data in a format that can be reused many ways for better decision-making –- both by citizens and government.
-Second, it has high potential for reuse by states to help manage the challenge of sub-recipient reporting (for example, see www.cgi.com/recovery).
–Third, it offers flexibility to change over time (as the meaning of “transparency” evolves).
