Reporting rules needed to make open government work

Federal agencies must establish a common set of public reporting rules to achieve President Obama's vision of an open government, in which the disclosures of accurate information drive decision-making, said the head of a large geospatial company that does business with the government.

When accurate reporting of government activities is combined with data produced in the private sector, graphics driven by geographic information systems can reveal telling patterns about public spending and improve public services, Jack Dangermond, president of ESRI, said in an interview with Nextgov on Tuesday.

Wednesday marks the one-year anniversary of the enactment of the $787 billion economic Recovery Act Congress passed during the recession to save jobs and boost spending. Its success remains in question.

Dangermond was in Washington for ESRI's annual federal user conference, which runs from Wednesday through Friday. Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, will appear at the conference. The board oversees stimulus spending and manages Recovery.gov, the official site for tracking recovery spending and the jobs saved or created by the program. The site and the board's internal analysts rely on ESRI software to map where federal dollars are being spent.

Currently, Recovery.gov is limited by the sometimes inconsistent, incorrect or incomplete data reported to the government by recipients of stimulus finds, board officials have acknowledged. Part of the problem is recipients are not always required to report how the funds are spent and the number of jobs saved or created, Dangermond said.

ESRI, which provides nearly every federal agency with applications to visualize information, was a subcontractor on last year's overhaul of Recovery.gov. The site's interactive maps pinpoint the location, status and cost of recovery projects in neighborhoods nationwide. The public can search recovery projects by state, county, ZIP code or congressional district. Dots pop up on a map representing specific projects. Visitors also can search by recipient, such as by a contractor's name, or by topic, such as inputting the word "highway." Points on a map indicate where the specific contractor is working or where all the highway projects are located. Project summaries appear when a user clicks on a dot.

The maps are generated using ESRI's geographic databases, which are populated by reports from recipients, Dangermond noted.

"ESRI's systems will read almost anything" that a person or machine feeds into the software, he said. To improve public disclosure on Web sites, recipients need "to adapt to and adopt the federal standards for reporting," Dangermond added. "That's easier said than done, because at some levels [of reporting], that's voluntary."

To address concerns about the accuracy of data in maps and elsewhere on Recovery.gov, board officials fixed errors on Feb. 10 that recipients made when originally submitting reports for the quarter ending Dec. 31, 2009. The updates were made in response to the board's new policy allowing recipients to continually clean up data online. Recovery.gov will post corrected data every two weeks, board officials announced on Feb. 9.

The purpose of Recovery.gov is not only to show where the government is spending money, but also to indicate where the government should be spending money by giving users the ability to mix spending data with other statistics, Dangermond said. For example, maps flagging congested highways in the United States combined with a map of where stimulus money is funding highway projects show the public and federal officials if the recovery program is targeting spending where it is needed most.

"The first step in open government is showing where you're putting money," Dangermond said. "The second way GIS can help is overlaying maps of where there are problems. That's where you start to get into an information-driven government."