I'm looking forward to giving a little talk on open government + Freebase + Recovery Act data tonight at the Freebase meeting.  I'm deeply excited about the potential of open government data to change how we work with government (not to mention how we understand its workings).   Here are some slides that will help […]
Tagged freebase, open governmentIn July, I wrote about why I've been looking for Recovery TAFS and appropriations. In an attempt to get an official list from the US federal government, Eric Kansa and I sent a FOIA letter to OMB to request the release (in electronic form) of a complete and up-to-date list of all Recovery Act (ARRA) […]
Tagged ARRA, FOIA, OMB, Recovery Act, recovery.gov, stimulus, TAFS, TAS, treasury account symbols, treasury appropriation fund symbolsToday, my colleagues Erik Wilde, Eric Kansa, and I are pleased to announce our new report "Web Services for Recovery.gov" and its companion website recovery.berkeley.edu.  Last week, the redesign of Recovery.gov was made public to much fanfare. Recovery.gov is the U.S. government’s official website for publicly documenting how funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment […]
Tagged recovery.gov trackingThere is a huge amount of government and socio-economic data in general gathered at the county level. It would be nice to be able to plot that data on an desktop or online map (e.g., Google maps). This morning I posted a question on the Sunlight labs mailing list asking for some help: I would […]
Tagged demographics, Google Maps API, maps, US countiesI'll be at TransparencyCamp 2009 tomorrow (You can follow the conference tweets at #tcamp09, whether or not you'll be in physical attendance.) Since TCamp09 is an unconference, any formal agenda will be determined at the conference by sessions attendees propose there. I'd like to see and attend sessions on the following topics: projects/techniques to track […]
In response to a question I received on a mailing list in response to my query Does anyone know of a complete and up-to-date list of Recovery Act accounts? concerning why I was looking for amounts appropriated and not just obligated an spent for the Recovery, I wrote the following clarification (which I have edited […]
Does anyone know of a complete and up-to-date list of Recovery Act TAFS — basically a list of all the basic accounts of money flowing from the Recovery Act? There was one published by ProPublica on April 1, 2009 (from the post Recovery.gov Falling Short of Expectations So Far – ProPublica ) and one buried […]
When I started trying to understand how the US Government works, I've been trying to find a chart that would list all the different department, agencies, and other organizational entities that comprise the government — and show how they are related to each other. I can't believe that I'd be the only person to find […]
Tagged budget, OMB, OPML, org chart, US governmentOn the "noise list" at the School of Information at Berkeley, we recently got into a discussion about the copyright status of The Official White House Photostream's Photostream on Flickr.  Some of us would agree with the argument presented on the blog of the Creative Commons (Why Did the White House Choose Attribution and not […]
Tagged copyright, creative commons, Flickr, public domain, White HouseI wish I had time to follow the TARP carefully — following the Stimulus already keeps busy enough. However, I learned a lot from Jon Stewart's April 15 interview with Elizabeth Warren the head of the Congressional Oversight Panel: Part 1 and Part 2.
Tagged Congressional Oversight, Elizabeth Warren, Jon Stewart, TARP