

US govt IT spending dashboard - vijayr
http://it.usaspending.gov/

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TomOfTTB
So going through this I now know that the Department of Health and Human
Services Invests in something called the “ACF Expanded Federal Parent Locator
Service” which in turn has a project called “Effective Management of Human
Capital/Information Technology/Resources” whose goal is to “Maintain FPLS
Benefit-To-Cost Ratio greater than 75:1”. A goal that Michael Carleton, the
CIO of that agency, considers met so far.

But I don’t know how much money was spent on that particular project or where
that money actually went or what the individual goals were or why the CIO
thinks those goals have been met thus far. So while I’m still willing to give
Mr. Kundra and the Obama administration some leeway to do better in the future
this doesn't impress me.

Right now it’s just some pretty Ajax wrapped around overall department info I
could have already gotten in PDF format from the congressional budget office.

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pavs
Maybe you should read this:

<http://it.usaspending.gov/?q=content/upcoming-features> and
<http://it.usaspending.gov/?q=content/faq> and
<http://it.usaspending.gov/?q=content/faq-agencies>

As it clearly mentions right next to the logo, the site is in beta.

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TomOfTTB
A beta test is supposed to show you functionality. Otherwise there would be no
point (why give something to others to test if it lacks the lion share of the
functionality). In fact, a Beta Test is designed to illicit user feedback
about the program's functionality which is exactly what I gave.

I'm saying "if this is the promised functionality then it is insufficient"

Beyond that the upcoming features page doesn't address anything that I said.
Under the "More Data" section they do just the opposite, they promise more of
the same by saying " Agency CIOs will continue ranking their investments in
the coming months" and "linking more investment data to awarded contracts"

(I didn't even address the FAQ pages because they're so vague that they
basically don't say anything)

I was saying the assessment of the CIO in charge of a project and the fact
that I can see what contract an investment is linked to is insufficient
without knowing why the CIO approves and how much money is actually
represented by each award contract.

One last point, the info I'm talking about is just "how much money was
allocated to each project" That's not a functionality issue it's just another
field in a database. Don't you think the CIOs who are doing these assessments
needed the total money spent to do them? Couldn't they just have put the
totals in the database while entering their assessment values in? Doesn't the
fact that they didn't mean the actual totals are purposely being withheld?

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anigbrowl
Well, it's more like an alpha than a beta at the moment, but I like where it's
going. I think the key benefit here is that it's _not_ something compiled from
a static .pdf like an NYT visualization, but something based on feeds which
aims to provide a dynamic window into what's going on. Considering how opaque
government spending and budgeting is for most people, this constitutes
significant progress in transparency and timely reporting, even though as
presented it's rather clunky. Personally, I'd be happy if this met the goals
of being comprehensive and responsive by the end of the administration's term.
I note too that they've got feeds for everything so if you had better ideas
for visualization the data sources are being made available.

BTW you want to 'elicit' user feedback; 'illicit' would be spending the
project funds on tickets to Disneyland instead of building out the website.

