Welcome to Stimulus Watch 2.0. While our original site featured proposed stimulus projects taken from the U.S. Conference of Mayors survey, this new version contains actual stimulus spending in your neighborhood. We get our data from the official recipient reports available at Recovery.gov. We will update the data quarterly when Recovery.gov makes new data available.
You can search for contracts and grants awards by state and city, by awarding agency, or by recipient. (Keyword searching is coming soon.) When you find an award that interests you, you can vote on whether you are satisfied with it or not, add to the wiki description of the project, and join in the conversation about the award in the comments section.
Let us know what you think! If you have any suggestions on how we can improve the site, please put them in the comments below. And please help us by sharing the site with friends, posting it on your Facebook page, and tweeting about it!
Stimulus Watch was inspired in part by Washington Watch, a site that lets you find, rate, describe, and discuss legislation being considered by Congress. They have now begun a project to crowdsource earmark tracking and they need your help. As an added bonus, one lucky earmark tracker will win an Amazon Kindle. From Washington Watch:
Earmarks – they’re how members of Congress and senators steer federal funds to special interests and projects in their districts. It’s often called “pork barrel” spending because the money is divided up based on seniority and insider deals rather than the general welfare of the country.
For years now, earmarking has been conducted behind the scenes, but the House and Senate recently required their membership to reveal earmark requests. The door to the smoke-filled room has been unlocked, and now we’re going to kick it down!
The problem is that earmark information is spread out across congressional Web sites, and it’s in many different formats. The solution? We’ve created a system for compiling earmark data in one place—actually, for you to compile it.
We want you to add earmarks to our database through our earmark entry form. Pick your hometown member of Congress or Senator, your favorite representative—or your least favorite—and put their earmarks in the database.
Check it out and lend a hand at
www.washingtonwatch.com.
We haven’t said much here in a while, but be assured that we’re still planning revamp the site to include actual stimulus spending projects once we have access to the data. In the meantime, you can catch Stimulus Watch co-founder Eileen Norcross tonight on C-SPAN discussing online efforts to track the stimulus. She will be on a panel discussion at 8:20 along with Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight. Hope you can catch it!
If you are interested in how we built Stimulus Watch, check out a profile in O’Reilly Radar of the real heroes behind Stimulus Watch, developers Peter Snyder and Kevin Dwyer, who built the site from off-the-shelf parts and some ingenious coding. Here’s a bit:
None of these people knew each other previously. They were brought together by [a] blog post into a common effort. They used open source tools in rapid development. They plugged in off the shelf online social technologies (disqus, tumblr and mediawiki) to create a forum to discuss these local projects. They achieved this in seven weeks. In fact, according to Peter, “the real effort here was more like two weeks”
Stimulus Watch has been getting some great attention from the media and blogosphere, and we note some of it below. Thank you all for visiting, participating, and spreading the word. If you’d like to help a bit more, please 
