Jerry Brito
Impulsively redesigning since 1999.
Jerry Brito is a policy wonk and web developer in Washington, DC.
the Transparency category
Yours truly speaking at the Congressional Transparency Caucus launch event last week. I’m on at about minute 6.
NY Times: Take $787 Billion. Now Show Where It’s Going. 
I was quoted yesterday in this NY Times article about Edward Tufte joining the RAT Board:
Jerry Brito, a senior research fellow at George Mason University, has been monitoring the stimulus at his site, stimuluswatch.org. “What we want is the raw data. We don’t need a beautiful site,” Mr. Brito said. In fact, he says that recovery.gov is too flashy and too crowded, and uses maps too much instead of simple tables. “Tufte can do a lot of good here,” he said. “There is a lot of low-hanging fruit.”
I was on NewsChannel 8’s “Federal News Tonight” talking about EarmarkData.org.
EarmarkData.org
Happy Sunshine Week. This is a project a couple friends and I have organized to demand machine readable earmark data from Congress. Please check it out, sign the petition, and tell your friends!
I have a chapter in the new O’Reilly book “Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice,” which you can get from Amazon. Abstract of my contribution:
Jerry Brito calls on hackers—in the sense of brilliant programmers rather than computer criminals—to liberate government data for the masses. If the government won’t make data available and useful, it is up to technologists to do it for them.Here’s a free 7-chapter sneak peek of the book (PDF), and here’s my chapter (PDF) titled “All Your Data Are Belong to Us: Liberating Government Data.” Check out the whole thing because there are some amazing folks in here who contributed some really remarkable pieces.
Jerry Brito — Watching the Stimulus
Me on the Cato Daily Podcast discussing Stimulus Watch 2.0.
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Me on WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi show talking about StimulusWatch.org.
If I sound like I don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s because I specifically told the producer I couldn’t address local stimulus projects, but could talk about the transparency and accountability effort nationally and, of course, the show was all about local impact.
NYT: Government Offers Data to Miners
Many local governments are turning over big chunks of data to programmers to create useful Web sites and apps.
Me on Federal News Radio discussing the new features available on Stimulus Watch 2.0. Check out our new advanced search!
This is me on WUSA Channel 9 News last night talking about government transparency and the new StimulusWatch.org which went live today.
While the original site featured proposed stimulus projects taken from the U.S. Conference of Mayors survey, this new version contains actual stimulus spending in your neighborhood. We get our data from the official recipient reports available at Recovery.gov. We will update the data quarterly when Recovery.gov makes new data available.
You can search for contracts and grants awards by state and city, by awarding agency, or by recipient. (Keyword searching is coming soon.) When you find an award that interests you, you can vote on whether you are satisfied with it or not, add to the wiki description of the project, and join in the conversation about the award in the comments section.
Check it out, blog it, tweet it, and tell your friends!
Against faith in government
A libertarian critique of Lawrence Lessig’s argument the “naked transparency” that justifies public cynicism about politics.
Recovery.gov verdict: half-baked
The newly released raw stimulus spending data on Recovery.gov leaves much to be desired. This is not the unprecedented transparency we were promised.
OMB has released its new guidance to agencies on recovery fund reporting. Looks like it’s final that they will only mandate reporting two levels down from the federal government. Also, it’s not clear at all where the public and sites like StimulusWatch.org will be able to get the raw data. As this chart from the guidance shows, the recipient reporting site FederalSpending.gov will (somehow) publish the data that Recovery.gov will use for its public presentation. My questions is, Can I haz public API?
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