Recovery.gov: transparency and its complications

Yesterday, President Obama signed the $800 billion economic stimulus bill, and as announced a couple weeks ago in his YouTube address, his web team has created Recovery.gov to allow people to track where the money goes. Some observations:

1. There isn't much there yet. Not too surprising, but there are very few pages on the site so far. They haven't even yet copied the whole bill text over from its place on WhiteHouse.gov, letting people see the plan and its implementation in one place.
2. Lots of interactive items. I particularly like the scrolling timeline (apparently a Drupal module). The jobs map's pop-up information blocks look far more utilitarian than the rest of the (lovely) site design, and I can't click through for more specifics, but perhaps they'll come. The challenge with providing lots of data (which the site will do) is to also allow people to effectively visualize it.
3. Consistent design with WhiteHouse.gov and Change.gov. Very smart. You know you're on an Obama administration site the moment you land there, and with Obama's approval ratings high, the new site will have an automatic boost in people's trust. Branding was a strong point of the campaign, so much so that it inspired copying.
4. It's built on Drupal. (Announcement by project founder Dries Buytaert.) This is a technical point, but with sociological implications. Drupal is software designed for community sites, not for one-way information flow. Hopefully the site will take advantage of crowd-sourcing, building a community of news gathering like the one that made Talking Points Memo Time's best blog of 2009. Change.gov included discussion, but it would be nice to see a post-inauguration site allowing more input than a comment form - though the privacy policy doesn't offer evidence that will happen, alas.
5. How many sites can the White House manage? The stimulus is an unusually important bill, but I could see them also launching sites for health reform, for energy policy, etc., along with the already-announced FinancialStability.gov (and AStrongMiddleClass.gov, but that redirects to the main White House site). They'll need to consider how much staff time it takes not just to build but to manage each site: adding new information, guiding any discussion, and communicating with users who've requested updates. Updating WhiteHouse.gov has already proven challenging, though most of those issues seem to have been worked out.

A few reactions from the political technology community:

Nancy Scole of Personal Democracy Forum's TechPresident: What's Missing: (1) A Responsible Party. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board which will oversee Recovery.gov, hasn't been formed yet. So, email away! But know that there isn't really yet anyone on the receiving end. (2) Data. Data. Data. Of course, with the act three hours old, there just isn't much yet. That said, whether Recovery.gov will give open-government advocates the raw data that they're hungering for is still an open question. The site is, thus far, populated by the shiny consumer-end charts. A that's good start, but no replacement, advocates say, for raw XML data then can then use for mash-ups and number crunching.

Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation blog: The basics are pretty simple. Recovery.gov must make the raw data available and it must be housed in system so that data can flow in and out easily. There should be open programming interfaces that allow developers to share and analyze data. Timeliness is key, so is accuracy. That, plus a few simple tools for easy citizen access would be a great place to start. A little blogging now might help with a few of the basics: What data is getting collected and how often? Who has to report? How often will the data be updated and how often will it made available to the public? What’s the database going to look like what’s the relationship to USASpending.gov? What kinds of content will Recovery.gov produce around the data? (Will there be regular emails when new information is available, blogging with analysis, etc.)?

Dennis McDonald: It’s not just the performance of the “stimulus” package that will be interesting to track, though. How the Administration develops the systems and processes that are needed to track and report on progress in an open and interactive fashion will also impact the recovery. Whether you call these systems and processes “e-government” or “government 2.0” or something else entirely, they will need careful planning as well as speed and experimentation. No one has ever tried to do “open government” before on such a massive scale. As I’ve pointed out already, the challenges that must be faced are great.

Micah Sifry of Personal Democracy Forum: I'm sure Obama's pronouncements on the shape of Recovery.gov are probably keeping his new media team awake 24-7, but his political team ought to be paying attention too. Imagine if citizens take his exhortations to heart and start monitoring their local government(s) to track how the money is being spent, and the site makes it easy for them to visibly share and pool those reports. Who exactly is responsible if, say, a school construction grant isn't being used properly? Recovery.gov could be a great tool for making government work, but along the way, it might also make a lot of existing government workers pretty unhappy.

Hopefully I can add more later - I'm particularly waiting for Colin Delany's take, as well as Patrick Ruffini's and Mindy Finn's.

Why create an integrated advocacy campaign

An individual advocacy action can be successful on its own, but a campaign that reinforces its message using a variety of channels, media, and communicators can build greater momentum and involvement. In a world flooded with more and more information, your constituents will be most enthusiastic if you're available where they are and interact with them on their terms. If you understand them, they'll join your efforts.

On the corporate side, integrated marketing communications and multichannel marketing are responding to the same trends, and companies know that "Users who interact with your company over multiple channels are more loyal than single-channel customers." The trick is to become part of people's lives, something they choose to become more involved in over time - and keep reaching them in different ways, so they don't get bored.

We think about integrated advocacy campaigns as including:

• traditional public affairs - Hill briefings, media relations, coalition building;
• conventional online tactics - petitions, email newsletters, tell-a-friend forms;
• and new social media tools - virtual events, micromedia, social networks.

It's not easy to coordinate everything, but each piece increases your impact. Why not add something your constituents will want to tell their friends about?

Social media "expert" evaluations

Dave Fleet has an excellent post this morning on 8 Questions to Ask Your "Social Media Expert", building on Ike Pigott's on finding useful Twitter "experts". Dave is offering a guide to "weeding-out the pundits from the practitioners," so I figured I'd answer his questions for Amplify's Internet practice.

1. Can you give me an example of social media work you’ve completed for a client recently?

Sure. We're working with a religious organization to promote education about and understanding of other faiths, using Facebook and YouTube among other avenues.

2. How do you go about pitching bloggers?

We research an issue area, finding influential and interesting bloggers who would care about our topic (usually they've written about something related in the past). Often we already have relationships with some bloggers who fit those criteria. Whether we know a blogger or not, we write offering information and say we hope they'll consider blogging about it.

3. How do you monitor what people are saying about you?

Google Alerts, Twitter search, comments from clients and friends at other organizations (offline conversations count too). We're investigating several social media monitoring services but haven't made choices yet.

4. Where can I find you online?

Our website, our other blog Disruptive Women in Health Care, Facebook. Our staff is on LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and lots of other places as well.

5. Can you write my blog for me?

We do blog training and work with our clients so they can easily keep something fresh on their blogs - create publication calendars, set up Delicious so they have a recent news feed, etc. Writing a blog is a valuable process as well as a way to promote your work (listen to Tom Peters and Seth Godin), and having someone else write it makes no sense.

6. How do you measure results?

Usually number of actions taken - advocacy lends itself better to hard numbers than marketing generally does.

7. How would you define social media?

People interacting online. I'm waiting for a better way to say "and I include mobile services in that too," but no one's invented a good word yet.

8. Can you just pretend to be me online?

No. See (5) for some of the reasons. We actually don't have people ask us this, so either we're just lucky or most advocates want to convey messages themselves.

All right, now go look at Dave's post and see if I got the right answers!