<== Site of the Week for 2009-04-06 ==>

Teetering Property Market © scargut

Recovery.gov

Recovery.gov is a site by the Obama administration in conjunction with the The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act aimed at using the Internet to help improve transparency in government.

The recovery is an effort to stimulate the economy in wake of problems in the housing and financial markets.

The administration is actively soliciting help from the American people to oversee the expenditures of recovery funds to help weed out waste.

Many of the provisions of the stimulus package are being coordinated with state governments. As such, most state governments are setting up their own sites to report on their use of the recovery funds.

Recovery.gov is an unprecedented effort at using communication technology to report on government spending. The recovery effort itself is a bold experiment in Keynesian economics to see if government is able to intervene in the economy and ward off recessions. I have personal doubts that borrowing and spending is the correct way to ward off economic troubles created by borrowing and spending; However, I find the coordinated effort at open government to be intriguing.

From a design perspective, I question the long term viability of pegging the transparency effort to a single piece of legislation. A stimulus bill, by its nature, should be an extremely rare occurrence. I have a hard time imagining people reading this site 4 years from now and the name is data. I would have preferred seeing the government develop the name Transparency.gov or use an existing site like USAspending.gov.