Finding Stimulus Feeds turns out to be quite a challenge. starting from our current set of 29 Agency Recovery Sites (i would not expect to find any feeds on the 50 State Recovery Sites), i started looking for stimulus feeds. not entirely unexpected, it is quite a challenge to simply locate those feeds that exist (most sites don't had feeds i could find). some sites support feed autodiscovery, but most don't, and sometime the links to feeds are hidden deep inside of some text or even on sub-pages of the recovery page.
just browsing these pages that have been set up according to the Initial Implementing Guidance for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
guidelines makes it clear that more guidance would have been better. most sites don't have feeds and simply post links to PDFs and/or Excel files, which makes it hard to get to the data. my favorite example for a site that tried to use feeds but really did not succeed too well is NASA's recovery site, which on its weekly reports page has a different feed for each published report. i decided to call this pattern the monofeed
(unifeed
was another idea), and finding this was simply proof of the fact that more guidance (and maybe simply a well-designed sample site) is required.
after looking at all sites, we ended up with a total of 25 feeds, but because every site would be required to carry three feeds (major communications, weekly reports, and formula block grant allocations), this result is not all that great. our list of Agency Recovery Sites now contains links to all these feeds. we have also set up a page for new items from all feeds, grouped by feed type, and on this page you can see that so far a grand total of three formula block grant allocations have been published via stimulus feeds from all agencies combined.
so the dataflow through the feeds currently is more a trickle than it is a large amount of information that we could use for starting to work with that data, but once we get to the weekly reports, there should be a bit more to work with. however, the information we will be able to get through the feeds will be substantially less than what we could get by scraping recovery sites, and that probably also is substantially less than what has been emailed to the OMB so far (our 29 Agency Recovery Sites still have to be matched up against the 587 agencies we scraped from usa.gov).
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