As of July 10th, more than $64 billion in stimulus spending has rolled out of the federal treasury, and construction projects are taking place across the country. At least we think they are. Under the law, reporting on Recovery.gov won't be fully implemented until October, and even then, we're relying upon federal agencies, states and other local entities to update the federal government on the progress of construction. And even that will happen only once a quarter. ProPublica's Reporting Network has a different idea. They've picked out 520 road and bridge construction projects of the 5,800 or so projects funded by the stimulus, and are asking for help. "We need to figure out only three things about each project," writes Amanda Michel, who heads up citizen journalism for ProPublica. "Whether a project has started, what company has been awarded the contract, and how many jobs have been created or saved by this project so far." The goal is to do a spot check to get a sense of the stimulus' overall impact. "When we’re done," writes Michel, "we’ll have a detailed look at a good sample of transportation projects nationwide." Participants can research projects from afar -- making a few phone calls, confirming what they find with a few web searches, and then reporting back to the Reporting Network. The motivation? Both civic mindedness and a bit of glory. "When we publish a story based on your research," blogs Michel, "you'll get generous credit." (Photo by Michael Kappel under a Creative Commons license)

Here's what caused the White House to tweet out a celebratory "FTW," as mentioned below. CIO Vivek Kundra writes on the IT Dashboard's blog that, thanks "in part" to the data-driven oversight site, the Department of Veterans Affairs is calling a temporary halt on 45 tech projects worth about $200 million. The IT.USAspending.gov site visualizes and otherwise slices and dices the tracking data federal agencies provide to OMB on their IT spending. Kundra, in his second ever post to the blog (a post I can't link to directly because the blog -- bad blog! -- lacks links to individual posts): "During the next few weeks, the VA will audit these 45 projects to determine whether additional resources or new management teams can get them back on schedule. If they can’t be fixed, the projects will be canceled."

The VA is one of 12 federal agencies with 85% or higher compliance with government requirements to rate major IT investments. The Small Business Administration and Treasury Department hover near 10% compliance. Thirteen other agencies still score a zero on IT oversight compliance, giving Kundra and his team no data on high-dollar projects with which to work.

An interesting Recovery.gov-related detail bubbles up from our comments. I noted in a post yesterday that the Recovery and Accountability Transparency Board had posted the Statement of Objectives for the multi-million dollar overhaul of Recovery.gov. But the Sunlight Foundation's Luigi Montanez pointed out in a comment that the Scribd document I had linked to was actually a copy of the SOO that posted by Sunlight Labs.

I scratched my head for a minute, and then figured out where the confusion came from. In discussing the contract on Recovery.gov, the RAT Board -- the official government entity charged with overseeing the $800 billion federal stimulus -- is not using its own internal materials. It's instead linking off to a version that Sunlight scanned in from a hardcopy and posted to Scribd. (See the last line on this Recovery.gov page.) Montanez points out that Sunlight's hardcopy scan is no replacement for a digital version of the source document. Montanez also has some great info on what's next in the Recovery.gov redesign process:

The contract is [FOIA-able], and Devaney has indicated that he wants to publish it even without a FOIA request, as soon as the mandatory "Award Dispute Period" is over, which is today. The strange irony behind that is the contract is forbidden to be published during the period when it is supposed to be able to be disputed.

Stay tuned.

Recovery.gov, it seems, had very few invitations to the dance to chose from.

InformationWeek's J. Nicholas Hoover has a great recapping of what we now know about the potentially $18 million contract to overhaul the site, and it seems that winning bidder Smartronix was one of only three firms to pursue the contract. Why might so few be interested in so much money? For one thing, only the 50-odd firms pre-approved under the government's Alliant umbrella contract could apply. For another, the deadline on the redesign is coming fast and furious: the law requires the site to be functional by October 11. For another, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board has high hopes for the site: think the New York Times meets IBM's Many Eyes meets the CDC disease tracking site, with a dash of Edward Tufte tossed in. Seriously. The 47-page Statement of Objectives released by the RAT Board cites the design guru as an inspiration. (Full SOO is below.)

The Washington Examiner's Mark Tapscott is exploring the angle of whether Smartronix's donations to Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer has something to do with the awarding of the high-dollar contract, but that doesn't seem to be panning out.

We might know more soon. Information Week reports that both Smartronix and GSA are planning to release a "version" of the Recovery.gov reboot contract next week...

Good, because frankly, those pie charts and bar graphs aren't all that intuitive. Team Vivek Kundra has launched a blog late yesterday to accompany the new IT Dashboard site. If done well, the blog could become a powerful oversight tool, turning numbers into narrative and making some meaning from the spending data that drives the site:

[W]e can’t simply make this an exercise in federal agency reporting. That is why we started this blog. We want to hear from you about what works and what doesn't with the site. Is there a more innovative approach that an investment should consider? Does the contract data look incorrect to you? Is there an application that we should add? This is a site to serve you, and to do that, we need to hear from you.

Factoring in the expense of design work, reasonable labor fees, fixed hardware costs, and a rushed six-month development window, is $9 million unreasonably pricey for a new and improved Recovery.gov? Smart and informed people are having that debate in the Sunlight Labs discussion group. Join in. Meanwhile, though, the RNC has quickly pounced on the $18 million overall price tag on the redesign contract in a new web spot hitting Obama on the effectiveness of stimulus spending. And it's bubbled up to Fox News, outrage meter stuck on about 9.

Worth noting is that Recovery.gov isn't going to succeed if it's little more than brochureware. In the best light, the site is itself a powerful mechanism for oversight on far huger sums of money than $18 million -- like, say, the $9 billion that disappeared in Iraq a few years back. The site, for example, is right now promoting webinars to demonstrate to both federal agencies and down-the-ladder recipients of federal dollars how they can conduct responsible reporting of where the money is spent.

In a half-hour live chat conducted on the White House website and Facebook, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra and White House new media director Macon Phillips explained the inspiration for and mechanics of a new federal tech spending oversight site that debuted at PdF '09 earlier this week. IT.USAspending.gov offers a portal onto agency spending data on high-dollar federal technology investments. During the live chat, Phillips pulled in questions from the Internet. (One the chat got rolling, Facebook questions, said Phillips, were coming in "fast and furious.") Kundra answered them -- including an intriguing little riff on how every new historical transformation in the nature of technology compels government to adapt, either to merely survive or, hopefully, to thrive.

Coming in at just under 30 minutes, true geeks are going to want more detail on the Kundra approach to data-enabled management. Most normal human beings are going to want less. But this lunch-time sized session of engagement is a low-bar way to include the greatest possible swath of citizens in the changing nature of government.

Over on NextGov (which, if you have an interest in tech policy, you really should be reading rather regularly), Gautham Nagesh reports that with Recovery.gov struggling to get its footing, some are recommending that the two-year-old USASpending.gov site step into the breach.

USASpending, created as a result of legislation jointly authored by Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn and a then junior Democratic Senator from Illinois by the name of Barack Obama, is not without its own troubles. The site has struggled to get timely data reported from agencies. But the Obama Administration isn't junking its old and more-or-less reliable car in favor of the sporty new Recovery.gov. U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra has just issued a directive instructing agencies to submit spending the reports required by USASpending.gov on the 5th and 20th of each month, instead of the 12 times a year previously mandated.

"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.