Private sector firm helps locals track stimulus opportunity - Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle):

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With more than 12 years of experiencre in trackinggovernment spending, Onvia (Nasdaq: is giving away a piece of its usually proprietarhy data to make the public aware of its information-gathering said Nate Wilcox, spokesman for the Seattle-basedr company. “We launched recovery.org to show what we can do,” Wilcoxd said. Nearly half of Onvia’s 170 employees are tracking the fundingh daily and on thelocal level, clipping news storieds and collating information to buil a database in an accessible format. The signing of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in Februart prompted not only theObama administration’s Web site recovery.
govc but also many civic and state sites such as Florida’zs flarecovery.com. The appearance of the sites focused on stimulus moneg is the result of the growth of Interne t access since the 1990s and a receny emphasis on transparency infederal spending, observers said. Beintg able to access data on stimulu s spending whether through a private or public entity is an advantagew tothe public, said Greg chief evangelist for the , a Washington-basedc nonprofit dedicated to political “That’s the main point of the Web. Anyonr can participate,” Elin said.
“Yoh aren’t stuck with a single government organization or commercial vendor that has a monopoly over a piece of The strengthof recovery.org is its ability to track federalo spending at the local level, which is a greater challenge than at the federal level, said Under the law, cities and counties that receives federal recovery funds are not required to report to the said Don Winstead, special adviser to Gov. Charlid Crist for the implementation of the federalrecovery act. The best way to obtainj a comprehensive picture oflocal therefore, is through the federal system. The hope for Flarecovery.
coj is to take the information that goes into the federall reporting systems and develop ways to extractf and display itthrough flarecovery.com, said “We are every bit as interestexd because it means jobs for Florida,” said Winstead. “Wwe need to capture all of that.”