A vocal cross-section of technology experts, academics, good government groups and federal employees weighed in this week on the future of Recovery.gov, the Obama administration’s Web site that officials promise will eventually track every single dollar of the federal stimulus.
Since the site’s late February launch, observers have raised concerns about its design, the technologies used and whether it will ever serve its promised purpose. At stake is the government’s accounting of the $787 billion stimulus package and the administration’s first big experiment in adapting technologies it successfully used during the 2008 last year’s presidential campaign to the task of government oversight.
The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RAT), in partnership with the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) on Monday launched “The National Dialogue,” an online forum that continues through May 3.
Users of the site can post an idea, comment on others and then vote on their preferred suggestions.The forum received more than 300,000 visits in its first seven hours and more than 1.5 million by the end of Tuesday night, according to Earl Devaney, chairman of the RAT Board, who serves as the site’s defacto managing editor.
Ed, this is a good idea but I wonder how 1.5 million comments will be processes and analyzed.
Will a tiny voice of 1.5M actually have any voice at all or will it get lost in the masses?
Do you have any suggestions on how to make suggestions stand out effectively in the masses of visitors?
Onvia’s http://www.recovery.org site has a better user-interface and I think would be a good one to model…of course the RAT Board’s http://www.recovery.gov version could and should take the data to much deeper level.
Here’s a link to the dialogue: http://www.thenationaldialogue.org/