Acquisition

How Open and Transparent Will Reporting of State Level Stimulus Spending Be?

By Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D. I’m almost finished building my list of state government stimulus reporting web pages. Next week I’ll begin a more detailed state by state review of what these pages reveal about how “open and transparent” states are being about how they use ARRA money. Below I discuss why I’m doing this,Read… Read more »

Who’s your NCAA Cinderella, baby?

Cinderella (a.) – resembling Cinderella in being elevated suddenly to a position of honor, glory, etc. a Cinderella team in a basketball tournament Enter the North Dakota State University (NDSU) Bison. The Bison earned the state of North Dakota’s first ever bid to the Men’s NCAA Division I Basketball Tournament by defeating Oakland University inRead… Read more »

The Hokie Guru on AIG

Gettin’ close to Spring, Govloopers 🙂 It’s that time when the weather gets warmer and the cherry blossoms bloom in the Washington, DC area. The Hokie Guru rarely talks politics on this site because he’s always thought of Govloop as an online community that is about improving government. However, when it’s in the public interest,Read… Read more »

Project of the Week – “Around the Corner”

Over the past year or so, blogs in the federal space have become more common and are increasingly being used to share information and ideas both internal and external to the agencies. Some great examples are Air Force Blogspot, Navy CIO, and NASA Blogs. OMB Director Peter Orszag just started a blog and the ObamaRead… Read more »

How Will U.S. Government Procurement Processes Handle the Stimulus Spending Surge?

By Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D. The Obama Administration has made it official: spending Federal stimulus money is being scrutinized and reported on very carefully and in great detail. This is called “oversight.” The organizational and publishing infrastructure for doing this are evolving rapidly. At the Federal level the public web portal is Recovery.org. Experienced no-nonsenseRead… Read more »

Memo to Our New Federal Chief Information Officer

By Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D. Vivek Kundra, Washington DC’s own CIO, has been appointed Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO). According to a Washington Technology article, Kundra “… plans to make the massive volumes of government data that isn’t sensitive available to the public through a new Web site, www.data.gov. With more data available to theRead… Read more »

Open Source Government Transparency Projects

A whole cadre of folks inside and outside government are awash with figuring out how to address the government transparency question brought on by the President’s Transparency and Open Government memo. At the end of last weekend’s TransparencyCamp, Clay Johnson, Director of Sunlight Labs, brought up the issue of bringing open source developers into theRead… Read more »

Federal Eye: USDA Contractor Disputes Charge of Political Favoritism

The man singled out during Wednesday’s White House press briefing as the beneficiary of a now-terminated contract with the Agriculture Department today disputed any suggestion that he was awarded the contract because of connections to the Bush administration, and cited his decades-long career as an agricultural economist as the main reason he earned a six-figureRead… Read more »