Internet forum

The new version 2.0 of the Recovery.gov site was launched today. I’ve been tracking recent happenings on Twitter and elsewhere, so here are some recent developments:

The new site is available here.
Rusty Talbot from Synteractive, the developers of Recovery.gov version 2.0, has posted a thread on the Sunlight Labs discussion forum asking for input from citizen developers regarding ways to make data available from Recovery.gov.
Nextgov have a great summary article about Recovery.gov’s call for data provision ideas with some interesting quotes from the individuals concerned.
Raymond Yee, a colleague of Eric Wilde and Eric Kansa at Berkeley, has published an interesting blog post with advice for Recovery.gov. They co-authored the report “Proposed Guideline Clarifications for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” earlier this year.
You can now follow Recovery.gov on Twitter.
The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB) also has a YouTube account. The first video message was posted featuring RATB Chairman Earl Devaney.
From a SIOC perspective, I thought this quote from Nextgov referencing Chairman Devaney’s statement was interesting, as there is an opportunity to semantically link the social media contributions from many users to the financial grants in question:

Board Chairman Earl Devaney will appeal to his so-called citizen inspectors general — or anyone interested in rooting out fraud, waste and abuse — through social media outlets, including the video-sharing site YouTube. Individuals who would like to broadcast miniblog entries about the site through Twitter can do so using hash tag #ARRA. “Our goal here is to provide the facts and the tools for the public to decide whether that is a good use of the public’s money,” Devaney said in an interview with Nextgov earlier in September. “We’re going to put the facts and the tools up so that people can mash it up.” The functions should allow citizens to draw useful observations, such as, “That’s the mayor’s brother in law — I’m going to call the Recovery Board,” he said.

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I previously gave some initial ideas about how grant feed data (following the Wilde / Kansa / Yee model) can be linked with user contributions using SIOC and FOAF. See this picture for an example. We also have a recently-created Linked Government Data initiative at DERI, NUI Galway carrying out research in this area.