"There is no parent-child relationship between the Federal, State, County, and Municipal governments." That Eric Gillespie of the private company behind Recovery.org, testifying before Bart Gordon's House Science Committee yesterday and speaking the words on Recovery.gov that still dare not be spoken in polite company. Conducting the kind of oversight set forth by the stimulus package is as messy as knowing when, where, and how to discipline other people's kids. But oversight of the over $700 billion in public funds pumped out into the country as part of the recovery package, though, is going to be but an hollow shell of accountability without some mechanism for tracking monies from the federal purse all the way down to the tiny non-profit in Montana or obscure state highway commission subcommittee in rural Alabama. Surface-level tracking might make us all feel great about the noble commitment to transparency we've made. It will certainly provide for a steady stream of lovely charts and graphs on Recovery.gov. But it won't, you know, provide a meaningful check on waste, fraud, and abuse on a tremendous outlay of taxpayer money.

Recovery.gov's Earl Devaney admitted as much to the committee, saying, according to reporting by Federal Computer Week's Alice Lipowicz, "If I could wave a magic wand, I would like to follow the dollars from cradle to grave." Reassuring. It's unclear what the going rate is on magic wands these days. But even with $84 million in operating funds, Devaney is being tasked with what may well be an impossible mission: tracking the ripple effect what happens when one trillion dollars is dumped into the American economy. That kind of contract-subcontract-subsubcontracting oversight is difficult enough in any situation. Couple that with the fact that the money is leaving the federal treasury more or less in one bulk dump, and that the office responsible for following the money has been in existence for just about long enough to grab a copy machine and figure out where the bathrooms are. Trying to round up appropriations for a magic wand might be the most reasonable approach.

Devaney's less enchanted solution? Ask for outside help architecting an IT system that makes the most of the data that the Recovery.gov team is able to collect. That's what last week's national dialogue was all about. Step two: set up a public hotline, so that we the people can report on when something is amiss.

UPDATE: Scientific American's Eugenie Samuel Reich has more on the challenges of stimulus oversight in the science sector in particular.

There's an interesting head-to-head happening in Congress today that will once and for all settle the question of whether Washington should leave complex technical projects to those outside of government with the resources, experience, and super ninja skills often lacked in DC. Okay, perhaps that's overstating things. But this afternoon's House Science Committee hearing on "Government and Public Resources for Recovery Act Oversight" should shine some light on the competition between Recovery.gov and Recovery.org, both of which aim to track more than $700 billion in stimulus spending. Testifying on behalf of the public project is Recovery and Transparency Board chair Earl Devaney. And in the company-run site's corner is Onvia VP Eric Gillespie. The Recovery.org team argues that the bureaucrats simply can't handle the job of top-to-bottom, granular oversight of recovery contracts. Devaney and his team say, well...you know, that they can.

Tune in for the death match informational congressional hearing on a matter of considerable public importance (2pm EST).

You might have been popping around the web lately and run into references that the Recovery.gov website we see before us today cost taxpayers $84 million. If so, you've no doubt thought to yourself, "Um, that's insane." Yes, of course it is. It's complete nonsense. Recovery.gov didn't cost $84 million. You'd have to be using gold-plated pixels, favicons made of diamonds, and a server farm built entirely out of saffron to ring up a bill like that already on a site that doesn't accomplish all that much of yet. Now, that $84 million figure isn't out of thin air. But it's the total 2009-2011 operating budget for the operation of Earl Devaney's Recovery Act and Transparency Board, and its staff of "30 IT experts, auditors, investigators and aides," according to the Washington Post's Ed O'Keefe.

In the hopes of using that money wisely, Devaney and the National Academy of Public Administration have just wrapped up a week of online discussion over the nuts and bolts of how to run Recovery.gov. Devaney and NAPA had been hoping for a "vendor-neutral" experience. They didn't get it. Many of the top ideas were for specific technologies, like data warehousing solutions and mapping programs, though ones that might be helpful in creating the best possible oversight site.

NAPA reports that the week-long dialogue drew in just under 470 ideas and just over 2,600 users, and attracted about 3.7 million hits.

One of the ideas that drew the most ratings and comments was one from participant "timbl" proposing a system of "linked open data." The idea is to construct Recovery.gov data with an eye to how it can interact with the rest of the web: "People will be connecting this data with scientific data, community data, social web data, enterprise data, and government data from other agencies and organization, and other countries, to ask all kinds of interesting questions not asked before. This data must be put up with an awareness that it is one among many data sources with which it will later be linked together."

If that sounds a lot like the idea of the semantic web that's been bouncing around the web world for years now, that's because "timbl" is Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and the semantic web's lead evangelist. The RAT Board's adoption of a linked-data model could just provide the push that the semantic web needs to get off the ground once and for all. "The recovery data is a great opportunity," writes Berners-Lee, "to set an example for future government data." From there, the world.

There are few profiles of Earl Devaney, Obama's pick to head oversight over the spending of those $787 billion in recovery funds, that don't either lead with or quickly note the notion that Devaney looks just exactly like the former Secret Service enforcer that he once was. And that's because Devaney looks exactly like a Secret Service enforcer, down the fitted charcoal suit that he looks like he wants to grab with one fist and yank off his body at the earliest opportunity.

Devaney was once the Inspector General at the Interior Department, too, where he uncovered that Secretary Gale Norton's deputy was lying about his connections to Jack Abramoff, working to block a casino that Abramoff was interested in having built on behalf of a client. Related obstruction of justice charges put J. Steven Griles behind bars for a time. You might also know Devaney from his work uncovering the sex, drugs, and other assorted hanky-panky that went down in Interior's Minerals Management Service. Neither high-profile investigation earned him the undying gratitude of higher ups at Interior.

Devaney's propensity for old-style go it alone investigatin' is one of the reasons that this week's "National Dialogue" to build the best possible Recovery.gov website is so intriguing. As the head of the Recovery Act Accountability and Transparency Board (or RAT Board for short) Devaney has an enormous -- and, frankly, quite possibly close to impossible -- task of eliminating waste, fraud and abuse of those federal dollars as they're spent from coast to coast, from Alaska to Hawaii. Tough job.

And so he's turned to the Interwebs. All this week, NationalDialogue.org is hosting an online forum for the submission and evaluation of ideas for quickly building a Recovery.gov that both keeps tabs on the spending of recovery funds and creates a forum in which the public can help to spot bad behavior. In the community forum, anyone can submit an oversight idea and rate others' ideas on a scale of one to five stars. Comments are also welcomed.

The National Dialogue on Information Technology is open to vendors, advocates, and plain old citizens alike, and is focused on five key tasks...