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

http://websitesoft.biz/products/video2site/pricing.php
With more than 12 years of experience in trackinvggovernment spending, Onvia (Nasdaq: ONVI) is giving away a piecer of its usually proprietary data to make the publi aware of its information-gathering capabilities, said Nate spokesman for the Seattle-based company. “We launched recovery.org to show what we can Wilcox said. Nearly half of Onvia’sd 170 employees are tracking the funding daily and on thelocak level, clipping news storiews and collating information to build a databasew in an accessible The signing of the American Recovery and Reinvestmentr Act in February prompted not only the Obamqa administration’s Web site recovery.
gov but also many civic and state sitesa such as Florida’s flarecovery.com. The appearance of the sites focused on stimulus money is the resulty of the growth of Internet accesz since the 1990s and a recentf emphasis on transparency infederal spending, observers said. Being able to accesw data on stimulus spending whether througy a private or public entit y is an advantage tothe public, said Greg Elin, chief evangelist for the , a Washington-based nonprofit dedicated to politica l transparency. “That’s the main point of the Web. Anyone can Elin said.
“You aren’t stuck with a single governmenrt organization or commercial vendor that has a monopoly over a piecwof information.” The strength of recovery.org is its abilit y to track federal spending at the localo level, which is a greater challenge than at the federal level, said Under the law, cities and counties that receivee federal recovery funds are not requiredd to report to the state, said Don special adviser to Gov. Charlie Crist for the implementatiojn of the federalrecovery act. The best way to obtainb a comprehensive picture oflocakl spending, therefore, is through the federal system. The hope for Flarecovery.
comk is to take the information that goes into the federall reporting systems and develo ways to extract and displa itthrough flarecovery.com, said Winstead. “We are every bit as interesterd because it means jobsfor Florida,” said “We need to capture all of that.”