To commemorate the 2010 federal budget announced today, I have installed a new feature at the Capitol Hill in Second Life 

Using the APIs available from USASpending.gov, the Show Me the Money! piggy bank will shower $100 bills down on the Capitol Hill legislative chamber. Each bill has the name of one of the top 50 recipients of government funding during 1Q 2009. The size of the bill is proportionate to the amount of money received, at a scale of $1billion = 1 Second Life meter.

To start the shower, chat "/2009 funding" and the rain of bills will last for 5 minutes, or until you type "/2009 stop"  The money soon disappears, just as in real life.

 

While I applaud the Obama administration’s creation of recovery.gov to allow more transparency about the effectiveness of stimulus dollars, it still isn’t there in terms of mashability.  The site acknowledges this gap, and its encouraging that enough people asked the same question I did that it was added to the FAQ since I first looked. The FAQ also points us to a (without hyperlinking to?) another web site, USASpending.gov, that does have a good API for government spending information. I've aleady used that one (see my next blog post). 

I have been working with a number of APIs to governmental information including the Sunlight Foundation’s Sunlight Labs APIs and Capitol Words APIs. GOP.gov also exposes interfaces to get information from the House Republican Caucus.  Dems.gov, on the other hand, is decidedly Web 1.0.

One suggestion for sites that don’t have formal APIs using access methods such as SOAP is to present data in text with some straightforward formatting. As effective as a flash presentation of information (or even a static jpg like the one above) may be to convey meaning to a site visitor, it is not useful for the purpose of ripping and reusing the underlying data.  With a little planning, your site may be scrapable by a programmer or using a service such as dapper.net.