So the new recovery.gov site is up and running, allowing anyone and everyone to dig into data around the massive Recovery Act. As ever, by the time I get ’round to blogging anything, the whole rest of the internet has done it already so I’ll leave the detailed analysis to others and, as with any internet-government thing these days, if you want all the opinion on this, all the time, just stick ‘recovery.gov’ into Twitter search and reading the resulting stream can pretty much be your job for the next week.
Still, just ‘cos I don’t have time to say *everything* that could be said about this doesn’t mean I don’t have *anything* to say; here’s my very broad brush appreciation of this supersize effort:
Are the American government running an absolutely enormous bit of public policy?
Yes
Are they trying to make the spending data available to the public (for both accountability [public benefit] and assistance [government benefit] reasons)?
Yes
Are they making it available on the open-to-tons-of-people world of the internet?
Yes
Is everyone absolutely happy with absolutely everything they’ve done?
No
Did they ask people about their plans for the site before making it?
Yes
Have they, in your opinion, got a lot of things right?
Yes
Have they got a lot of things wrong?
Probably
Does their bravery and effort and willingness to attempt to do this, and do it right, make them deserving of praise far more than scorn?
Absolutely
Will other people follow their lead?
Let’s hope…
‘Nice job’, I think they say.
