Jerry Brito

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!

Joshua-Michéle Ross, who previously wrote a profile of Stimulus Watch for O’Reilly Radar, has also made a short video walk-through of the site that highlights how quickly and cheaply the application was built. This is well-worth viewing for folks who must make decisions about investments in technology—especially at small non-profits with limited budgets. The money quote comes at around 5:00,

“This is an example of how quickly people can be moved to collective action, and how low are the costs to create very powerful software[.] So, the punchline there for businesses is that if you’re paying a million dollars for customized software, or you have relationships with very large consulting firms that tell you it’s going to cost millions of dollars to get something done, you really need to take a step backwards and look to whether or not that’s the best idea.