Years ago I worked on an knowledge portal for a group of hospitals. These slides were the result of interviews with a number of group on what they need in a portal. These are fairly preliminary but it was a very useful exercise.
According to the GSA, Recovery.gov will be rebuilt over the course of five months for a total of $9,516,324. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board then has the option to exercise options that can take the contract through 4 more years for a total of $17,948,518.
While I am shocked by the $9.5m in the first five months I’m certainly not shocked by $8.4 million to manage and maintain a government site for four years. I have done enough government work to know that warrenty commitments, change requests, uptime guarentees and managing a client in a bureaucratic culture costs a lot of money.
Sunlight Labs hits the nail on the head when they say:
The real problem is transparency. The real problem is that while many are outraged at the cost, you can’t presume that the government isn’t spending its money wisely unless you know both what Government is paying and what they’re paying for. We don’t know what they’re paying for, yet.
I hope that this gets rectified soon and that the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, along with Smartronix works with our community to make sure of three things:
That people know what every dime of that $18MM is being spent on,
That Smartronix works with the community to make the process of building Recovery.gov open and transparent, and
That Smartronix works with the Sunlight Labs community to make the data published on Recovery.gov accessible and machine readable to developers.
That last point is a little self serving but I’m willing to let that slide.
My two cents on this whole thing is that facilitating this transparency should be mostly on the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board plate. The public servants should serve the public. This transparency also needs to apply to the processes and commitments of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board as well as to the work of the vendor,Smartronix.
So let the people know what their government is doing in addition to letting them know how their tax money is being spent.
I tried out TweetPsych. It is an interesting idea but I’m not sure what the results below based on my tweets mean. It is good to see twitter analysis that goes beyond managing followers.
Cognitive Content
Present tense
Self reference
Similes
Senses
Future tense
Positive emotions
Negative emotions
Media, entertainment & celebrities
Insight
Primordial, Conceptual and Emotional Content
Abstract thought
Visual sensations
Affection
Cold sensations
Constructive behaviors
Oral fixation
Concreteness
Moral imperative
Order
Anxiety
TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets.
DISCLAIMER: This is a personal blog. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer. The information that I present will often be created by others and they would be the owners of that content, I do not presume any ownership of their content.