The study Show Us the Stimulus (July 2009, Good Jobs First) is one of the most comprehensive and systematic assessments of US state "recovery" websites. The authors of the report analyze the effectiveness and transparency of state websites in providing information on the different categories of stimulus spending, the allocation of funds across different areas of the state, and individual projects carried out by private contractors and their respective impact on employment levels.

The study shows that, while some websites achieve satisfactory levels of transparency, others are largely failing to provide online transparency with regard to the use of crisis response funds. Such variance among the websites per se is not particularly surprising. But why do some states perform better than others? Are there any factors that can help to explain these differences?

My favorite thing to complain about is government systems: how bad they are, how unnecessarily expensive major contractors are, and how everyday Web developers could do much better work for a much lower price. But it's so hard for those everyday people to get a foot in the door. Maybe if a group of them got together and bid on a project collectively...

Clay Johnson, the director of the Sunlight Foundation's Sunlight Labs, had this idea today: let's all put in a bid for the Recovery.gov job.

There are few profiles of Earl Devaney, Obama's pick to head oversight over the spending of those $787 billion in recovery funds, that don't either lead with or quickly note the notion that Devaney looks just exactly like the former Secret Service enforcer that he once was. And that's because Devaney looks exactly like a Secret Service enforcer, down the fitted charcoal suit that he looks like he wants to grab with one fist and yank off his body at the earliest opportunity.

Devaney was once the Inspector General at the Interior Department, too, where he uncovered that Secretary Gale Norton's deputy was lying about his connections to Jack Abramoff, working to block a casino that Abramoff was interested in having built on behalf of a client. Related obstruction of justice charges put J. Steven Griles behind bars for a time. You might also know Devaney from his work uncovering the sex, drugs, and other assorted hanky-panky that went down in Interior's Minerals Management Service. Neither high-profile investigation earned him the undying gratitude of higher ups at Interior.

Devaney's propensity for old-style go it alone investigatin' is one of the reasons that this week's "National Dialogue" to build the best possible Recovery.gov website is so intriguing. As the head of the Recovery Act Accountability and Transparency Board (or RAT Board for short) Devaney has an enormous -- and, frankly, quite possibly close to impossible -- task of eliminating waste, fraud and abuse of those federal dollars as they're spent from coast to coast, from Alaska to Hawaii. Tough job.

And so he's turned to the Interwebs. All this week, NationalDialogue.org is hosting an online forum for the submission and evaluation of ideas for quickly building a Recovery.gov that both keeps tabs on the spending of recovery funds and creates a forum in which the public can help to spot bad behavior. In the community forum, anyone can submit an oversight idea and rate others' ideas on a scale of one to five stars. Comments are also welcomed.

The National Dialogue on Information Technology is open to vendors, advocates, and plain old citizens alike, and is focused on five key tasks...

• Washington is going crazy over snappy domain names. First there was Change.gov, and now this...
• Remember that Silicon Alley Insider post a few weeks back that reported President-elect Barack Obama was looking to appoint a first federal CTO who was a Silicon Valley-rooted doctorate-holding scientist? Hmm, not so much...
• Silicon Valley congressman Mike Honda (D) was eager to use the Internet to "follow the exciting trail blazed by our next President." So he challenged his constituents to a Facebook contest...
• And more.

• Washington is going crazy over snappy domain names. First there was Change.gov, and now this...
• Remember that Silicon Alley Insider post a few weeks back that reported President-elect Barack Obama was looking to appoint a first federal CTO who was a Silicon Valley-rooted doctorate-holding scientist? Hmm, not so much...
• Silicon Valley congressman Mike Honda (D) was eager to use the Internet to "follow the exciting trail blazed by our next President." So he challenged his constituents to a Facebook contest...
• And more.