This Blog is Worth $800 Billion

The last 2 years have marked a historic period of significant federal technology milestones, including the appointment of Federal CTO Vivek Kundra, the Open Government Initiative and numerous other 'openness and transparency' efforts -- all of which underscores our government’s commitment to enhance visibility and ensure accountability.

Mr. Kundra said it best: "We've moved to a model of co-innovation, where the American people can help create value in a way that we've never been able to do before." One great example is Recovery.gov. This site is the US government’s one-stop-shop for reporting data of the $787 billion in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) spending.

And Recovery.gov just got a major upgrade, transparency-wise.

A very innovative part of Recovery.gov went live last week. They call it the 'Developer Center', but I think it is very friendly to non-developers. It makes available the Recipient data (i.e. the people who receive ARRA funds for their projects) to the public as pre-built widgets and dynamic user-defined data feeds. The widgets are easy to ‘take home with you’. The dynamic feeds can help reduce the $800 billion in spending data to a more manageable, relevant data set that can be mashed with other data. It’s a great 1-2 punch.

Here’s a snapshot of a App Dashboard we built from Recovery.gov feeds using Presto Mashboard. It only took a few minutes to create:

There is a lot of value in the data provided by transparency efforts like Recovery.gov. But it's even more encouraging to see Recovery.gov go beyond a simple 'data dump'. Their take-home widgets (and the App Dashboard) illustrate how we can empower even non-technical users to obtain rich visuals and deeper meaning from complex data sets. We can empower the citizen developer to easily create and share dynamic Apps and Dashboards from the data.

Data is good. Easy, powerful tools to work with the data is even better. +1 for Recovery.gov.