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

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With more than 12 yearsw of experience in tracking government Onvia (Nasdaq: ONVI) is giving away a piece of its usualluy proprietary data to make the public aware of its information-gathering capabilities, said Nate Wilcox, spokesman for the Seattle-basexd company. “We launched recovery.org to show what we can Wilcox said. Nearly half of Onvia’sd 170 employees are tracking the funding dailyt and on the local clipping news stories and collating informatiohn to build a databasre in anaccessible format. The signing of the American Recovery and Reinvestmentg Act in February prompted not only theObama administration’s Web site recovery.
gov but also many civic and statre sites such as Florida’s The appearance of the sites focused on stimulus moneu is the result of the growth of Internet access sincer the 1990s and a recent emphasis on transparency in federak spending, observers said. Being able to accese data on stimulus spending whether through a privater or public entity is an advantage to the saidGreg Elin, chief evangelist for the , a Washington-based nonprofit dedicated to political transparency. “That’s the main pointy of the Web. Anyonw can participate,” Elin said.
“You aren’t stuck with a single governmenft organization or commercial vendor that has a monopoly over a piece of The strengthof recovery.org is its ability to track federao spending at the local level, which is a greater challenge than at the federa level, said Wilcox. Under the law, cities and countied that receive federal recovery funds are not requires to report tothe state, said Don Winstead, speciak adviser to Gov. Charlie Crist for the implementatioh of the federalrecovery act. The best way to obtai n a comprehensive picture oflocal spending, therefore, is througyh the federal system. The hope for Flarecovery.
com is to take the informationn that goes into the federal reporting systemse and develop ways to extract and display itthroughh flarecovery.com, said Winstead. “We are every bit as interested because it meands jobsfor Florida,” said Winstead. “Wd need to capture all of