USA Spending: IT Dashboard

IT DASHBOARD: http://it.usaspending.gov/

Has anybody taken a good glance at this and noticed the difference a word can make? “Investment”

I pulled up the “IT Dashboard” to try to figure out what it was telling me about US government and the new administration has decided to show us how much they are spending and where the money is going. But rather than call it spending as the site domain says, they have listed it as investments.

Dashboard: http://it.usaspending.gov/?q=content/dashboard

If GIS were more often considered an investment it would certainly help!

Each “investment” is rated by the agencies CIO and is reported as a stoplight Red, Yellow, Green which provides a quick scorecard to the public.

Investment List: http://it.usaspending.gov/?q=content/investment-list

As a citizen – I don’t want to see any of my investments in red. (note the change in my language to “my investments”)

DOA (Agriculture) has an investment Geographic Information Services (GIS) #84 (Yellow, 4.7).  An immediate red flag on the investment is because it is late and not rated by the CIO. Further investigation and several indicators (all 28) were not rated. This has the potential to make the Prime Contractor look bad (our sponsors).

If I don’t like this rating I can contact the Agency CIO by email, phone or snail mail.

http://it.usaspending.gov/?q=content/cio-information&agency_id=005&buscid=4042

Looking at this further and I think this is in part NAIP contracts, and I’m sure we have a bunch of angry citizens if the NAIP imagery program is getting poor ratings. According to the site this investment “needs attention”.

What does NSGIC have to say about this GIS “investment”?

Big kudos to the Obama administration to get me thinking about my government and its spending as an investment.

Michael A. Vanhook

"Free Economy"

I have been doing some "research" on the "free economy" or "free" economy as I have seen it often online. I'm not sure why only free is quoted because it seems that the Free Economy is here to stay and is a proper phrase. Google, Amazon, Ebay, and other services using their free services are building a new economy at an escalating rate. The model seems pretty simple. Join a free site like Google or Amazon and consume services, then build services on top of their services, and apply cloud resources as needed. With little effort and added extensibility from the "free" sites on can build a simple (and it has to be simple) tool that reaches a niche market and takes advantage of the richness of information to provide a tool that opens up information in a completely useful and dynamic way or that allows users to customize their use of information for micro transactions. Micro transactions can be one of many things, and may actually represent a free market, where rather than trading rabbits and chickens, we are trading consumption and accessibility. Each user consumes services and exchanges information which serves as some kind of credit system, and the more traffic a site or service has the more exchange occurs. Google's term for this in part is to monetize a site or video and  pay the author for the traffic it generates and accessibility to advertising niches. So even if it is a funny movie or a satire comic there is a micro economy there that can be exploited if accessible and the free economy is making that happen. Your blogs about life, pictures of a beloved place, or videos of adventure are demonstrating value that can now be "monetized" to drive the Free Economy.

http://adage.com/images/bin/image/large/fourkindsoffree100608.jpg

BTW: I started this research by googling the phrase "free economy" with restrictions and other key words to find its definition and relationships, but I only found a few articles to start from. Here they are:


http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2009/07/Chris_Anderson_on_Microsoft_vs_Google_in_the_Free_economy_50883782.html

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5939331.ece

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=21741

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free

Another economic term that has become proper because of Google and Amazon is "The Long Tale", here it is as stated on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail

Y: $ per Sale and X: Number of Occurrences ---- http://blogs.idc.com/ie/wp-content/LongTail_01.jpg

And I found these graphics and a blog that points back to Chris Anderson, featured in the above articles. I found the blog by accidentally placing "the long tail" in the address bar rather than the search bar, then searched images for the graphics. The blog "The Long Tail":
http://www.thelongtail.com/




Best regards-
Mike