Leaders in Alabama thought it was important to take steps to make sure their Recovery Act website provides "a more comprehensive view of results-based information.”  

With a program as multi-faceted, multi-layered and politically explosive as the Recovery Act, a major challenge for government officials has been to present information in a way that is interesting to citizens, clear, informative, timely and balanced.  As if that weren't enough, government transparency should go far beyond reporting  the number of jobs created, dollars spent, projects launched, etc.  It also should let citizens know what they're getting for the money spent.

Back in the days when we evaluated governments for a now-defunct business magazine called Financial World, we often found ourselves explaining that our interest was in government and not politics. We could tell you about performance measurement systems, accumulated deficits and levels of deferred maintenance for scores of states, counties and cities; but we were kind of proud of the fact that we could not say for certain which governors were Republicans and which were Democrats.

We recently interviewed Chris Patton, Recovery Act director in Wisconsin, to find out more about the improvements to the Wisconsin stimulus website. Q. Wisconsin did very well on the Good Jobs First evaluation of state Recovery Act websites. What motivated you to make more improvements?

Back when we started to evaluate the management of state and local governments about twenty years ago, we noticed a curious phenomenon. Governments that were weak in this field, tended to be relatively satisfied with what they were doing. By contrast, ambitious governments were often the most aggressive at figuring out how to improve still further.

Beth Blauer is director of the Maryland Executive Department’s StateStat office. In that role, she oversees Maryland’s much-praised efforts to manage the state through widely disseminated performance measures. This was modeled, to some extent, on ground-breaking efforts in Baltimore, when  Governor Martin O’Malley was mayor there.

Though we found the website rankings done by Good Jobs First really interesting, it didn’t surprise us that some state officials think the effort missed the mark.

All fifty states have set up websites that report on the way they’ve implemented the stimulus bill. Anyone who visits more than a handful of these sites will be immediately struck at the remarkable variety in quality. Some have clearly taken a great deal of thought, time and effort. Others seem like afterthoughts.