Stimulus Watch: A New Watch Dog Website for Government Spending on Projects
Can private citizens get together to watch and comment on government spending? For the past three weeks an independent group of developers without any institutional support has been making it possible.
The passage of the Democrats American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to a large extent depended upon a report put together by the United States Conference of Mayors who made a list of community projects. Although the Obama Administration has created a site that shows accountability by outlining where taxpayer money is being spent and also allows readers to send in comments this was not enough for some.
Jerry Brito is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. His research has focused on government transparency and accountability, specifically how the internet can be harnessed to crowd source the task of keeping officials accountable. After attending the Mayors Conference he came up with the idea of creating a database that would allow citizens to keep track and comment on projects funded or aided by the stimulus plan. He was joined by three other developers:Kevin Dwyer, Senior Computer Scientist at White Oak Technologies, Free Software contributor, and GNU/Linux zealot, Eileen Norcross, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Her research has focused on state and local budgets, economic development, and the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, and Peter Snyder, contract programming. He specializes in Web 2.0 projects and Cocoa programming in Chicago, IL. According to Joshua-Michéle Ross at Oreilly Radar none of the developers had ever really worked together till they came together for this project. They have founded the project out of pocket without any outside bias or influence.
The intent of the developers is to create a site that allows for more interactivity about the projects beyond what the government has done. They created a database based upon the Mayors report. Specifically they want to get the benefit of “local knowledge.” On individual project pages there is a “wiki” where you can vote yes or no for the project, comment on it, or edit the page. There is a running vote ratio score on whether the project is critical or not. The site went live on February 2 and is called Stimulus Watch
The image above shows a typical chart graph on the site. Already the site has caused communities to begin discussing projects in their local media. Another effect has been the publicity generated for the project has brought out that many projects have significant errors or were poorly put together proposals. For example a request for $ 1 billion instead of $1 million was mistakenly given to the Federal government for a Mississippi project. For the “Doorbell” project to give improvements to public housing it was reveled that much of the project’s projected costs were inaccurate.
Although according to several recent polls a majority of Americans still support the idea of a stimulus plan many Americans remain skeptical that the funds will be wisely spent. On Stimulus Watch at the time of this writing, the most critical project listed was building a nursing home for Veterans in Tennessee for $4,300,000 which would yield 310 jobs while one of the least critical was building a “disc” golf course in Austin TX for about $ 1,000,000 which was listed as a “water” project and would give 2 jobs.
I applaud the developers of Stimulus Watch. Their website is worth more than one visit. This type of project can be very useful to keep the public both involved and informed in an unbiased way.
Tony Magaña grew up in McAllen Texas, attended Texas A&M University, served as an officer in Army Reserve, and holds a doctorate from Harvard University. The co-founder of Contempo Magazine has participated in Valley business for over 20 years.He is a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
