Sunlight Labs

The Republican National Committee shelled out $1.4 million dollars over the last six months for Web sites and services, much of which was spent on GOP.com, the party's major Web presence that was unveiled this month, new Federal Election Commission expense reports show.

The figure is far higher than what experts estimate it should have cost, and five times the amount its Democratic counterpart spent to host and maintain Democrats.org.

The biggest disparity seems to be bandwidth costs--the RNC paid Smartech Corp., a Republican-focused hosting firm, more than a million dollars, plus $22,000 to Eloqua, compared to the DNC's $203,000 to Sprint, Switch and Data and Servint Corp.--despite the fact that the two sites' traffic, which determines bandwidth usage and, largely, hosting costs, was the same.

But the design of the site itself was costly, too. In the months prior to the October 13 launch of GOP.com, the committee paid $328,000 to 11 firms for Web development. (The Democrats, which did not completely overhaul their site during that time period, spent $45,000 on Web development.)

Read the rest at Sunlight's Real Time Investigations

The final honorable mention among our Apps for America 2 contest entries, Employment Market Explorer, helps users assess the labor market in a region, watching unemployment over time at the city, county and state level. It contains only two measures—employment and unemployment—so it falls short of providing a more drilled-down look at the labor markets, including sectors, and I'd like to be able to compare regions or states head-to-head. There is a lot of potential here, and as the financial turmoil continues, employment issues will be important to watch. Perhaps a future app will mine the data for some interesting conclusions on the national scale, or highlight areas where change has been particularly notable.

Thanks to everyone who helped make our second Apps for America contest a success, and remember, the fun doesn't end with the competition. Our volunteer community of civic-minded developers—which we hope contest entrants, as well as everyone else, will join--is always hard at work on new projects, and it would be great to see a more in-depth look at labor issues in the future.

Two simple maps making environmental hazard data more meaningful round out our list of Apps for America 2 honorable mentions. GreenSpaceMap highlights six categories of sites identified by the Environmental Protection Agency on a Google Maps overlay within a slick Java applet, including Superfund sites and Toxic Release Inventory flags.

The great thing about the Federal Register is that is has everything—it's the historical record for the entire federal government, and outlines the decrees coming out of various agencies in near real-time.

The problem with the Federal Register is that it has everything, and it's virtually impossible even for experienced researchers to spot what they need in the massive reams of blocky, sparsely-formatted text.

That's where Bernie the Federal Register Watcher comes in—an Apps for America submission so pragmatic that some of us in the Sunlight Labs have been singing our own accompanying jingle for the app, named in honor of the Register's first director.

Bernie scrapes the register and turns it into a virtual newsfeed, allowing you to monitor just the areas you're interested in, drilling down by department, agency name and announcement type, and browsing digestible summaries, which are also available as Atom feeds.

Though the register, in its raw form especially, has a largely deserved reputation as a repository of dry bureaucrat-ese being shoveled daily into a void, resting in little-perused booklets by the Government Printing Office, Bernie seeks to build a community around the notices, allowing users to flag and comment on the less-monotonous dispatches.

In the end, this application achieves the measure of success we like to see most. It uses technology for a specific goal: To make a government tool that was hard to use, suddenly useful.

Apps for America 2 runner-up USASpendingWatch.net is a visually appealing and ambitious take on the mounds of data on federal contracts at USASpending.gov. It aims to create an online community where readers can flag contracts they deem interesting or suspicious--though because the data provided by the government can be vague and misleading, participants in the best position to spot impropriety might be locals with their boots on the ground.

The site is easy to navigate and chock-full of information, but its designer's greatest obstacle may be one for which he can scarcely be faulted: The data sets being combined--the politics of local leaders and federally awarded, often competitive contracts--belie an incomplete understanding of the United States government; the author, Sven Regel, is German.

Our friends at the Center for Responsive Politics today unveiled a new feature, long in the works, mashing up campaign contribution and lobbying data with fiscal year 2008 and 2009 earmark data compiled by Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Choose your representative or senators and view all earmarks sponsored. Where CRP or TCS has identified a beneficiary of the earmark, such as a municipality, university or defense contractor (indicated in bold, where identified), you can easily see contributions from that entity's political action committee and employees to the sponsoring lawmaker, as well as the amount of money the entity spent lobbying the federal government.

In a post today at Sunlight's Real Time Investigations, I report that the General Services Administration has promised to provide online a censored version of its $9.5 million contract with Smartronix, Inc. for the redesign of Recovery.gov.

The contract had been withheld, the Recovery and Transparency Board had said, pending a "protest period" where losing bidders on the contract could cry foul.

Two companies put in unsuccessful proposals and neither filed complaints, and the board chairman said last week that it would release the contract to pre-empt public records requests from watchdog groups--a recourse that could seem ironic for a board founded on transparency. (Incidentally, Sunlight had filed already filed a FOIA request for it the prior week.)

Sunlight Labs and its citizen-coder community worked on drafting our own proposal, you'll recall, on the project that eventually turned into the shrouded contract (worth more than $18 million if it's extended).
We turned our efforts elsewhere after it became clear that, due to a lack of time, resources and fluency in bureaucracy, submitting a bid would be a shooting for something we'd never win.

Perhaps the only conceivable benefit to submitting a futile proposal--and Sunlight would have to be a subcontractor in all this, not being on the approved-contractor list--would be the retention of petitioning rights. Any written petition from a losing bidder would have immediately stalled the contract--despite its urgent deadlines--until it could be considered, barring a special exception. What does a petition entail?

Forty-five troubled Veterans Affairs Department projects have been suspended as a result of the Office of Management and the Budget's IT Dashboard. The newly launched Web site collects data on technology contracts as reported by agencies and provides it to the public along with visualizations, such as red bars indicating late or over-cost products, to aid officials and citizens in spotting wasteful spending and contract abuse.

Some projects' ratings were so bad that as VA administrators were preparing the metrics for the OMB, they spotted the projects and suspended them before they ever appeared as red flags on the IT Dashboard site. One project was 17 months behind schedule.

Government watchdogs were pleased that the IT Dashboard project has already led to real instances of accountability, though the fact that the problematic VA contracts were spotted only when statistics were required by another agency suggested a lack of contract oversight at some agencies.

But the IT Dashboard shows that many more contracts with abysmal ratings are still in place.

The Obama administration unveiled its “IT Dashboard” last week—to significant fanfare, including a write-up in The New York Times—as a symbol of its commitment to openness and understanding of technology.

But is it more than a flashy gizmo?

The Web site is only the first step in a broader effort to make government contracting data available online, and the tech-minded workers tasked with designing a system made the natural choice to start with what they know best: IT contracts.

And as an early (and rushed) prototype, we won’t fault it for the bugs and crashes that were prevalent for the first several days, most of which appear to be fixed.

But if the challenge for central agencies is coordinating across the wide federal bureaucracy, the sometimes narrow focus of technophiles may be the site’s shortcoming. There is little explanatory language placing information in context—understandable given that it’s being drawn from many different departments.