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?

Because who would attend a "Summit on Customer Service," even if it was at the White House?

Today the White House bought together a bevy of CEOs to Washington to a forum on the somewhat sexier Forum on Modernizing Government. The Obama Administration wants to know what business knows about serving customers and clients, and streamlining operations. "Those are well known sciences" in the business world, promised Whirlpool CEO Jeff Fettig at the event, the opening and closing sessions of which were held in a small auditorium on the ground floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on a surprisingly spring-like January day in Washington.

The CEOs in attendance represented companies both long established and somewhat newer. In addition to Whirlpool's Fettig, the generally dark-suited crowd included Craig of Craigslist and Angie of Angie's List, as well as executives from Alcoa and Adobe, Microsoft and Trader Joe's, Southwest Airlines and Yelp. Microsoft's Steve Ballmer held animated conversations in the aisles as attendees moved between sessions. Their counterparts in government were in plentiful attendance too. Seated just in front ahead of me and to the direct right of Facebook's Chris Hughes was U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra, and to Kundra's right, U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra. When Kundra and Chopra were joined on stage during the day's closing session by U.S. Chief Performance Office Jeffrey Zients, a Defense Department official made the crowd laugh by saying that the panel resembled "sort of the male version of The View."

And then there was Barack Obama...

If you can sign an electronic pad at the supermarket to pay your credit card bill, why can't you sign the touch-screen of your iPhone to sign a political petition? That question is now being put to the test by the Citizen Power Campaign in California, working with technology developed by a company called Verafirma.

I'm really pleased with how everything went at PdF Europe's first conference in Barcelona. We had a great mix of political hacks and hackers from all over the Continent, and the conversations buzzing in the hallways before, during and after each session are the best proof that people were connecting to each other in all kinds of fruitful ways. (Indeed, the continuing buzz on Twitter around the hashtag #pdfeu is the best proof to me that we planted many productive seeds at the Torre Agbar.)

As previously blogged, we are building an Open Declaration on Public Services 2.0 (http://eups20.wordpress.com), to be presented in Malmo at the EU ministerial conference.
We have now published the draft version of the declaration, which tries to summarize all the good ideas submitted in a short and readable text (http://eups20.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/draft-declaration-published-and-t...).

The Senate's ad hoc Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight held a hearing this morning. The subject: "Improving Transparency and Accessibility of Federal Contracting Databases." Senator Robert Bennett spoke for many of us today when he sat up on the dais in room 342 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building and rubbed his temples over, and over, and over, and over again.

What prompted the subcommittee to convene today (if you can call attendence by two senators, Bennett [R-UT] and Chair Claire McCaskill [D-MO], a "convening") is a particularly difficult problem: what the American public, watchdog groups, and even Congress' own investigators know about the thousands of firms and individuals who make their money as federal contractors is trapped within electronic databases. Eight databases. Or a dozen database, depending on who's doing the counting. Databases with names like FPDS and ORCA and PPIRS, the last of which goes by the adorable nickname of "Peepers."

All told, there are a million lines of code involved. But there's really no all told here, because the databases don't talk to one another. For example, FPDS, the Federal Procurement Data System doesn't communicate with EPLS, which stands for Excluded Parties List. Which means that the FPDS-powered USASpending.gov website -- heralded as the American public's window into the inner-workings of government -- doesn't even know that contractors contained within it have been banished from government service for defrauding the United States government or otherwise behaving badly. What's more, on some of these legacy systems, a search for Contractor X, Inc. won't return results for Contractor X Inc. The shorthand for that particular wrinkle came to be, during the hearing, "the comma problem."

In fact, GAO's William Woods explained to the senators, the poor state of those databases meant that when his agency was asked by Congress to detail how many contractors were billing the United States government for work in Afghanistan and Iraq, the government watchdog group was forced by technology to admit its ignorance. "We could not answer those questions," said Woods. How many KBRs are at work in American war zones, being paid with taxpayer dollars? How many Blackwaters? Dunno.

Everyone was in agreement that that status quo is unacceptable. And so the question became, what do we do now? Enter problem number two...

The final set of presentations at the Gov 2.0 Expo focused on "Government as a partner." This, hopefully, is where we'll hear about some cutting-edge examples of government opening up to involve citizens as co-creators of better government. (If you follow me on Twitter, you'll know that I complained earlier in the day that many of the examples being showcased here today were either of government using social media internally to share information--like the intelligence community's A-Space, the TSA's Idea Factory, or NASA's Spacebook; or government using social media to better inform the public--like EPA's MyEnvironment, or CrimeReports.com; but we hadn't yet heard much about government working as a platform to connect citizens to each other to better solve problems with (or without) government.

As with my previous post about today's gathering, what follows are rough, semi-verbatim notes, along with my first impressions and comments. Unless I've put something in quotes, it's a paraphrase.

What could a future White House 2.0 look like? How could millions of people collaborate to help govern the country? Jim Gilliam's web site, White House 2, is one possible answer, but there are many others. This session is going to start off with a presentation from Jim looking at the top challenges that came up when building the application, to see how his lessons learned might be applied on a larger scale. In an email note to his fellow panelists, Jim said he was going to focus on seven areas:

-virtual ballot stuffing

Jim Gilliam is a geeky activist with big ideas. Shortly before the 2008 election, Jim started WhiteHouse2, a website imagining how the White House might work if it was run completely democratically by thousands of people over the internet. He is currently turning this into NationBuilder, a platform anyone can use to bring democracy to their government, business or non-profit in a radical and fun new way.

Shortly after the Iraq war started in 2003, Gilliam hooked up with award-winning filmmaker Robert Greenwald to research Uncovered: The War on Iraq, and tell the stories of dozens of government insiders, from CIA officers to weapons inspectors, all desperate to tell the world that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Released in just four short months, the film reached millions of people worldwide without any corporate distribution, based entirely on activists holding thousands of free screenings in their homes, churches, and small businesses. The grassroots political documentary was born, and Jim later evangelized the model at numerous film festivals and created a free web service, Brave New Theaters, enabling any filmmaker to use the same techniques to tell stories the traditional media is too afraid to touch.

Hear what Jim says is the biggest story of our generation. He talks about the promise of the Internet, and why his Dad's advice just can't be beat.

PdF Chat Time, new feature here at Personal Democracy Forum, gives you a behind the scenes glimpse into the lives of the politechnorati. Hear what inspires them, what keeps them up at night, and who throws the wildest parties. Get informed by the most knowledgeable players in the world of politics and technology.

To read the interview interview conducted by IM on June 15th click read more below.

Public figures are learning that when they say something stupid, ugly or just plain wrong, someone with a video camera may well capture it and make it widely available. We need to organize to ensure that public figures — especially politicians and business leaders — are asked key questions, and not let them off the hook the way the traditional media tend to do.