ProPublica's Reporting Network is the non-profit news group's nascent attempt to tap into the eyes and ears of interested amateurs. Or at least interested reporters not on ProPublica's payroll. We're keeping a close eye on the networks first major project, a "spot check" of stimulus-funded construction projects from California to New Jersey, Alaska to Texas. And we're doing that because unlike many citizen/pro-am/unfunded journalism projects, the three-month-young Reporting Network is doing something that otherwise couldn't be done. There's no way ProPublica staff assigned to the project -- which numbers more or less one, in the form of editor Amanda Michel -- could do a real reporter's work on the hundreds of project's in the spot check sample. It's making the impossible possible. Neat, no?

And unlike other citizen journalism experiments, ProPublica is asking its network of reporters to pull together mostly quantifiable details. That opens up the pool of potential participants, since it can take only a few minutes and a some basic research skills to play along.

ProPublica is now out with its first reporting on the on-the-ground progress of Recovery Act construction projects that, pulling from a sample of 520 of the 6,000 or so approved projects, finds that while construction is more or less on track, there's a wide disparity between how far along states are. (The margin of error between that sampling and national patterns, writes Michael, is 4.5 percent.) Cold weather states, for example, are rushing along mightily, while those short-winter states like Florida are being a pit pokier about breaking ground. Read that and other finding's in Michel's report. (Photo credit: Wayne National Forest)

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)

CJR's Clint Hendler profiles what ProPublica has been up to regarding amassing and posting the White House ethics and financial disclosure forms that the executive would rather dribble out upon request. From the White House's perspective the trouble is a little something called the law. The post-Watergate Ethics in Government Act, writes Hendler requires that anyone getting a copy of a completed disclosure record certify that they aren't going to use it for commercial purposes. The 1978 law also requires that the Office of Government Ethics keep tabs on who have gotten their hands on the documents. Those requirements tie OGE's hands -- at least in the opinion of OGE. But it isn't exactly clear whether OGE is completely in the clear handing out documents to ProPublic's interns, knowing that they're going to end up freely available on a publicly accessible website -- aware that the intention is second-use by people who haven't pledged to uphold the covenants first requesters did.

You see a certain operating principle at work here that could be seen as both (a) very powerful and (b) not used nearly enough. Many of of us have jobs that involve collecting documents and extracting some utility from them. But we tend to toss them in a corner when they cease to be of use to us. ProPublica and the New York Times have a grant in the works to compile and share FOIA-requested and other useful documents once reporters are done with them, and Carl Malamud's PACER recycling project has a similar thing going with court records.

The White House recently took a sizable step in the direction of openness by putting up a handy online form through which anyone can request the financial and ethics disclosure forms for White House officials. Type in the name of an official, and zip! A pdf of the documents is soon waiting in your inbox. But the Internet, she's not so fond of waiting, nor one-off requests. Like OpenCRS did for Congressional Research Service reports, ProPublica is compiling a one-stop shop for those docs. It's a project under the direction of Amanda Michel, ProPublica's new editor of distributed reporting who was formerly with the Huffington Post's Off the Bus.

The White House disclosure forms collected by ProPublica list in which mutual funds officials have money, from where they're collecting paychecks, and other accountings of their assets and income -- distributed out across wide bands of dollar value. The ethics letters detail which stock options they have to give up, boards they have to leave, and consulting shops they have to shutter. Also marked are the notes of "reviewing officials" on whether the official's financial status is on the up and up. Scrawled on the form of one assistant to the president: "Per [illegible] representative, all conflicting stocks have been sold as of 4/1/09."

• Politico asks "Are Politicians Spamming YouTube?" Um, Is the Pope Catholic?
• Federal Computer Week is on Vivek Kundra watch duty.
• So is InformationWeek, but befitting their name, their information is weak...
• Ellen Miller on Sunshine Week and the power of internet-driven transparency
• Transparency-squared: ProPublica is tracking states' stimulus spending trackers
• "Imagine listening on your cell phone to any policy body as it meets in city hall." In San Francisco, that could be reality, soon, writes Kimo Crossman.
• Obligatory Twitter ref: "If President Obama Twittered..."

With help from Shaun Dakin.

If you follow me on Twitter, you probably noticed that I spent my lunch hour at the Open Society Institute today for a talk on "The Future of News" by Paul Steiger, the longtime managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, who is the head of ProPublica, an "independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest." It was a mostly gloomy session, framed by the news that 11,000 professional journalists have lost their jobs in the last two years, and all the bad news currently coming out of the newspaper industry. Well, instead of beating a dead horse, here are three ideas for projects that could help sustain investigative journalism however it is practiced going forward: