Private sector firm helps locals track stimulus opportunity - Washington Business Journal:

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With more than 12 years of experience in trackinfgovernment spending, Onvia (Nasdaq: ONVI) is giving away a piecw of its usually proprietary data to make the publidc aware of its information-gathering capabilities, said Nate Wilcox, spokesman for the Seattle-basede company. “We launched recovery.org to show what we can Wilcox said. Nearly half of Onvia’s 170 employee are tracking the funding dailty and on thelocal level, clippingv news stories and collating information to build a database in an accessible The signing of the American Recover and Reinvestment Act in February prompted not only the Obamqa administration’s Web site recovery.
gov but also many civix and state sites such as Florida’s The appearance of the siteds focused on stimulus money is the result of the growtnh of Internet access since the 1990x and a recent emphasis on transparency in federal observers said. Being able to accesz data on stimulus spending whether through a private or publid entity is an advantage to the saidGreg Elin, chief evangelist for the , a Washington-base d nonprofit dedicated to political transparency. “That’z the main point of the Web. Anyon e can participate,” Elin said. “You aren’ stuck with a single governmenft organization or commercial vendor that has a monopol over a pieceof information.
” The strengthh of recovery.org is its ability to track federal spending at the localp level, which is a greater challenger than at the federal level, said Wilcox. Underd the law, cities and counties that receive federal recovery fundd are not required to report to the saidDon Winstead, special adviser to Gov. Charlie Crisgt for the implementation of the federalorecovery act. The best way to obtain a comprehensivd picture oflocal spending, therefore, is througb the federal system. The hope for Flarecovery.co m is to take the information that goes into the federal reporting systems and develop ways to extract and displag itthrough flarecovery.com, said Winstead.
“We are every bit as interested becaus it means jobs for said Winstead. “We need to capture all of