"Transparency 2.0" an IT Cover Story

The May 11, 2009 issue's cover story for Information Week is Mary Hayes Weier's "Transparency 2.0." Weier concludes a fairly detailed analysis of the White House's recovery.gov project by calling it:

". . . the government's most modern and complicated attempt at transparency, and it will say much about the administration's ability to turn vision into action. If it can build recovery.gov and the web-based information supply chain behind it, it will be a platform for more disclosure. But if Recovery.gov becomes the Web version of a Potemkim village, with an impressive graphical Web front end to flat spreadsheets, unpredictable data updates, and an army of manual maintenance, it'll add nothing but costs" (p. 60).