Start With The Basics
idea
What is the idea?
(1) A project impacting so many aspects of the government is not undertaken without some level of risk. Data will never be perfect. Accept that and get on with it. Adopt an implementation framework that is designed for nimbleness, such as Agile Scrum, to facilitate speed.
(2) A good user experience is paramount to success. Consider the many needs of the audience and distill them into a few basic, representative personas around which the site can be designed. View transparency and accountability as a leading “brand” with constituent touch points, of which Recovery.gov is perhaps the most significant in terms of its appeal.
(3) Define a simple common vocabulary for constituents, developers, Congress, the Administration, States and Cities. This should include terms like appropriation, obligation, approval, certification and award, among others. Establish a standard corpus of entities and information about them. With the vocabulary and the entities, begin to develop simple data architecture concepts.
(4) Choose a basic data format as standard. This doesn’t require a significant amount of research as there are many excellent choices available; as long as an open, non-proprietary format is chosen it will be hard to go wrong.
(5) An initial dataset is requisite. Get a centralized database up and running quickly and begin processing and standardizing larger volumes of data. It doesn’t need to be perfect, and the broad interest from the user community that has already been demonstrated will help to hone the approach.
(6) Implement a basic search engine so that spending can be filtered by variables like geography, Federal Supply Codes, and program area. Provide businesses with an easy way to access projects on which they can bid; at a time when businesses are struggling, providing details of Recovery-funded projects serves to create and preserve jobs in local communities. With this, government agencies will get more qualified contractors bidding on contracts and as a result taxpayers will get more value for their dollar - a transparent system that is more efficient.
(7) Operate a Recovery Act program assistance center to assist Federal, State and Local agencies with compliance, and assist potential recipients of funds by answering questions about securing grants or contracts. Learnings from this center should be used to inform further development of the site.
(8) As the data set grows, provide raw data feeds via APIs to the public at-large. It is not incumbent on the Federal government to create unique and interesting views of the data and, instead, by providing data to developers the public at-large can create engaging user experiences with the underlying data.
(9) Look for best practices and pockets of innovation across the public and private sectors which can be adopted. To be successful this can’t be onerous on either State, Local and Education entities or the private sector contractors and subcontractors. It is also important to not create an inefficient parallel universe of data and systems.
Why is it important?
At its most fundamental level, this is a data problem not a technology problem. There are some great ideas posted here, many from great vendors with track records of successfully executing on sound strategies. The strategy, however, should start with a basic data set and then layer on these terrific ideas and technologies.
