Luis Derechin: Hello everyone and welcome! My name is Luis Derechin. I am the 
CEO here at JackBe and today we have a very special webinar that I am very proud 
and very happy to introduce.  The topic of today’s webinar is how to get involved 
in government spending with real-time intelligence.  We have two very special 
guests who are going to be speaking during this webinar. So let me get to the 
introduction. 

So, first of all, about today’s webinar, there are three organizations that will be 
participating. The first is the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and 
what they are, I’m sure most everybody knows by now, but they are an 
independent agency chartered by Congress to ensure transparency and 
accountability in Recovery Act Spending. In addition, we have Smartronix, who in 
July 2009 were awarded the Recovery.gov 2.0 project along with some partners 
who stand-up an easy to use web information management.

Here at JackBe – JackBe is the leader in providing real-time intelligence solutions. 
Our technology has been deployed to over 100 enterprise customers and 
government agencies.  You can see some of the names on this slide and we have 
won numerous awards among which Read Write and Web chose us as one of the 
top 10 Enterprise products for last year.

Allow me first to introduce the people who will be participating on the webinar.  So 
I am very happy and this is an honor to be able to introduce Michael Wood.  He is 
the Executive Director of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board.  
Mr. Wood is responsible for providing transparency through managing website 
content and providing executive leadership for the board’s FederalReporting.gov 
and Recovery.gov systems and the technology behind the Recovery Operations 
Center. Mr. Wood is a senior executive with over 30 years of experience with the 
Federal Government, he has managed IT activities at three federal agencies and he 
holds Masters degrees in technology management and in environmental biology. In 
addition, Mr. Wood is one of the most experienced web 2.0 technology partitioners 
in the public sector and has led the effort regarding the use of social network 
capabilities for most government transparencies. The Recovery.gov site, which 
we’ll be looking at today, has won a series of awards and is the preeminent 
transparency site for the government. So it is a unique pleasure that we have the 
opportunity to have Mr. Wood on today’s webinar.   In addition, as I said, we have 
someone from Smartronix, Gaurav “GP” Pal is the Program Manager of 
Recovery.gov for Smartronix and has been a fabulous partner to have the 
opportunity to work with.  And lastly, JackBe’s own John Crupi, he’s our CTO and a 
master of many of these webinars and he’ll be walking us through a few 
technology assets.

So, for today’s agenda, we’ll be talking a bit about the Recovery Accountability and 
Transparency Board’s mission.  We’ll be talking about why it is important to have 
an open, transparent, and accountable government.  We’ll then go and talk about 
how government agencies and citizens are leveraging the Recovery.gov Developer 
Center.   We’ll demonstrate how to use the ‘State Data Summary’ widget and 
‘Recovery API’ in the Recovery.gov Developer Center.  And Lastly, we’ll be talking 
about how citizens can measure the economic impact of government-funded 
programs in their local area.  And with that I would like to turn it over to Mike 
Wood. Mike, thank you very much for joining us today.

Mike Wood: Well thank you very much, it’s my pleasure to be here.  I would just 
second that part of the success of the board and our technologies is because of our 
technology partners and we’ve got two great examples of the folks here on the 
webinar today.  Both JackBe and Smartronix are doing a fantastic job with 
Recovery.gov and our ability to provide information to the public.  I just wanted to 
go through a few slides quickly to talk about some of the background – if people 
aren’t familiar with the Recovery Act or the work of the board ends or the concept 
behind the development center and some of the tools we have available to produce 
widgets and applications.  Back in 2009, the Recovery Act was passed. It provided  
787 billion dollars to essentially try to jump-start the economy as you recall at that 
time, and we still have a lot of economic problems, but the economy was in severe 
distress in 2009. This was an attempt to move a lot of federal dollars into the 
economy very quickly, to create jobs, to stimulate development, and to see if we 
could jump-start the economy. The interesting thing in that law is that a board was 
created, and I worked for that board, it’s the Recovery Accountability and 
Transparency Board.  It’s composed of thirteen inspector chairman and twelve 
inspector generals. We’re independent, we’re not a part of OMB we’re not a part of 
the treasury department, we’re an independent group that oversees the spending 
and try to ensure that there is both, transparency, all the information on what’s 
being spent, where it’s being spent, how it’s being spent, is reported openly and 
also on accountability, ensuring that there isn’t fraud, waste, abuse or 
mismanagement of dollars. So that was the board’s mission. It was set up in 2009 
and has actually been very successful.  

If we go to the next slide…  What we did, one of the major roles for the board is 
essentially two-fold. One is we worked with OMB in collecting the data and the data 
on who receives contracts, grants, and loans. We also collect data from the federal 
government on what money has been dispersed and so forth out of federal 
programs and there’s information on tax benefits. We really had to do two things, 
one build a reporting system, which was done, federalreporting.gov and second, 
build a presentation website, recovery.gov, to show the American public what has 
happened with this money, where did it stand as far as the distribution of the 787 
(7:10) billion dollars and some of the highlights of that are shown on this slide. 
One- recipients report data on contrast ransom loans and it’s real-time reported. 
We also collect information from both primes and sub-recipients. Sub-recipient 
recording is a new feature for the federal government. There was some question at 
the time of whether it could be done; it has been done. The speed of the reporting 
is very interesting. We collect information every quarter; recipients have 10 days 
to report then there’s a 20-day queue period. So, every 90 days we basically post 
information on what’s happening with the 787 billion dollars in recovery.  We did 
some unique things in the reporting process including putting quality processes in 
place. We report jobs on a quarterly basis. All the information is very transparent 
and downloadable. You can download PSD files; you can download Excel 
spreadsheets, you can download the full data set and we’ve created some APIs. 
We’ve done a lot of technology firsts. Recovery.gov is the first government wide 
financial system that moved into the cloud we’re operating in the cloud 
environment. We’re one of the first sites to create a developer center and we’ve 
got APIs that actually exposed both data and the mapping data. We have, as we’ve 
mentioned, a social media platform and we’ve got a lot of advanced mapping.  Next 
slide please.

One thing we did early on and we were able to put it up this year, was to work on a 
Developers Center. The idea was in this transparency information we’ve got a lot 
of good displays on recovery.gov, but we don’t pretend to be the most 
knowledgeable group in how this could be presented easily for the American 
public to see. We do the best job we can. I think we do a pretty good job and as was 
mentioned we’ve won a lot of awards for the website, but the idea is can 
developers in the development community come up with better presentations, 
things for mobile devices, iPhone, Droid, whatever, that would allow us to present 
this to a wider audience and let the American public, sort of, see this in different 
ways, in different places with different comparisons.  So, our goal was to have 
everyone be able to see the data and have everyone be able to access the data and 
I think it’s very, very important in today’s environment that developers can get into 
the data, access the data, and use it to put into their own applications and their own 
widgets and move forward that way. So hopefully today’s webinar is going to cover 
some of how that can be done using JackBe products and using the APIs to create 
some useful and innovative approaches to display my stand-up.

Let’s move on to the next slide.  This is just, sort of, a high-level view of where our 
technologies stand and what the different pieces of the open architecture are and 
then we’ll move on to either GP or John to cover some of those.

Luis Derechin: Thanks Mike. We’re going to move on to GP so he can cover the 
architecture and background of the technology.

GP:  Mike, thank you so much for the introduction. I’m giving an overview of the 
board and the program. Thanks also to our wholesome sponsors, JackBe.  By way 
of background, I’m GP, short for Gaurav Pal. I’m program manager for 
Recovery.gov at Smartronix. We were absolutely honored to be selected as the 
prime systems integrator in July of 2009 and what I’ll do is I’ll give you a display of 
some of the stuff that has to be done from a technical engineering standpoint on 
what you see today on recovery.gov. From a technology partner’s perspective, 
we’ve worked with some of the best vendors and companies to provide the 
solution and what’s interesting is a key element of the challenges that we overcame 
on this project were the board had a pretty finite and complete vision of what they 
wanted to develop but it had to be done in an intensively incremental and agile 
manner. So the challenge that we had was how do we go and build a data 
architecture that not only met the current requirements in front of us at that point 
in time which was intentionally to stand up a complete new web information 
management infrastructure, but also be able to support some of the ongoing 
initiatives as part of this vision and so what you see in front of you is a high-level 
solution architecture that we came up with in concern with our partners and of 
course the recovery board IT team. We implemented what we call an “open data 
architecture” implying that the underlying data that drives different visualizations 
or the different kind of analytics should be covered in any shape or form such that 
we don’t have to keep re-architecting and re-engineering the underlying 
foundation and I think that model has worked out really well so what the chart 
shows you is the data infrastructure that drives the public website, that drives the 
data API and the widgets or the mapping functionality that might do the talking 
about and then finally the mobile app that the board just released the iPhone and 
iPad app, and finally, the internal business analytics using SAP Business Objects all 
of them are using the same underlying data architecture and data construct. 
Bottom line, it results in ensuring that what you see or the information that you get 
is timely and accurate and you don’t have typical data latency issues. And I think 
that was one of the key challenges and that’s why we are pretty happy with being 
able to now leverage the open architecture using a public cloud construct using 
Amazon Web Services in this case and we would now just be adding more and 
more visualization and interaction services and I’m very happy to talk to you about 
today in delivering the solution that was put in place using JackBe’s presto platform 
that John will be talking to you about.

Next slide please.  So as part of the developer center, that again, Mike talked about, 
the board was looking for a solution that allowed them to cater to a specific 
audience and the audience is a pretty important e.g. the mashups, the developers 
focus on new media that might be interested in taking this information and not just 
using the information the way its presented on the Recovery.gov website, but 
create their own value-added mashups or widgets to marry this information with 
other kinds of information be it demographic information or a local information 
and that’s how the developer center concept was stood up. And basically it’s the 
one stop place where you can go in and get information on Widgets, the API, the 
Mobile applications and also applications that other people have developed using 
the API.  Hopefully as a part of this webinar and once you know about this 
resource you’ll take the time to go in there and hopefully send feedback and 
suggestions. There is a contact us form at the top of that screen, so if you have any 
ideas, thoughts, or problems, please share them with us and we will make sure to 
get you the response you need.

Next slide please.  And so what’s interesting is we are always looking for adoption 
and so here are some websites that we’ve actually found of value from the 
recovery widgets we have what we call the state summary widget and the idea 
there was to make sure that folks that are interested in this information are able to 
customize it and then present real-time authoritative information in real-time 
fashion that you can use and that’s why the JackBe’s Presto widget platform came 
in real handy and that’s why we use that as part of our solution. So these are some 
of our representative sites and the state of Michigan, for example, uses it to display 
recovery reward recipients and projects in their state. We have a new media outlet 
that shows information recovery programs relating to their account in Montana. 
And again, this is just a flavor of different types that are using the widgets. We have 
Senator Udall from New Mexico using the widget, so again, it’s the same widget 
technology and you can see all of these people have just customized it to show this 
information on their site. Finally, the city of Philadelphia is severely interested in 
making sure that you are able to use these widgets and use them right and also 
gather feedback. One of the very interesting things I was talking to John Crupi and 
the board, what we find is it is a tremendous opportunity to use some of these web 
2.0 technologies to make some existing prophecies a lot more efficient. One of the 
things that happens a lot today is you have agencies, whether it’s federal, state, or 
other stakeholders that just spend a lot of time trying to download files, upload 
them and then process them and that just leads to a lot of latency and quite 
honestly a lot of labor. Instead if you use a data API or a widget you are able to 
really get qualitative, real time information delivered onto your application in 
absolutely real-time. And so where we find applicability of this kind of a solution is 
in the program management area if you are an agency or a state that’s trying to 
track this money and reconcile it, etc., you might find the API or the widget to be 
useful in helping you do that. There is a lot of reconciliation, matching, and 
mashups going on with different kinds of financial information, be it budget 
information or a reconciliation of the information, so again, by sort of moving away 
from the traditional file based downloads we think you can achieve profit 
efficiencies in getting this information literally delivered to your doorstep and 
you’re sure that it is accurate information so, you know, a lot of the data changes 
on a periodic basis and so you can save yourself a lot of labor involved in trying to 
update that information so I think this technology is something we are extremely 
happy with. I’ve had the pleasure of working with JackBe’s technical team and John 
Crupi certainly has had a very strong influence on driving the solution and I’d like 
to introduce John and let John talk to you about the specifics of the technology and 
how you might leverage it. 

John Crupi:  Thanks GP. There have been a bunch of questions that have been 
coming in on the technical architecture too on Widgets and what they are. I’m 
going to cover those and what we’ll do is we’ll begin the solution and we’ll start 
showing demos of how things have been implemented, the APIs that are available, 
and also what you could do in the future to build your own apps on top of these 
APIs. I think the reason why we were such a good fit for this type of solution is that 
our concept for Presto is really plugging into live data sources and providing real-
time information.  Where it’s really a device and it’s a plug in to the system as the 
data is coming in rather than just getting files, so as many of you know there’s 
many sites that have large XML files or large CSV files that they make their data 
available, but the problem is that that data you have to upload it, process it, and as 
things change, you also have to go and get the changes.  So what the Recovery team 
wanted was a way that was open standard space, not only a way to make the data 
available but make it available in a standard-based way and an easy way and to be 
able to build applications or widgets on top of it. And this is what we’re going to 
talk about so you’ll see me switching back and forth between widgets and apps. 
Ultimately you can think of them as the visualizations or the little pieces of software 
that you are interacting with and showing you information.
As part of the architecture really we’re a plug-in architecture and this was also a 
requirement. We had to conform to the standard architectures of the recovery 
team architecture. That meant we had to be able to run on the cloud, we had to 
plug into the security mechanism, we had to essentially consume information as it 
was available, not requiring any changes on the existing system. So part of our five 
tenets of our platform which are also key in the solution is that live is really being 
able to plug into the sources of information and you can think of the difference as 
we don’t have copies of the data, we don’t take the data and download it, we’re 
actually plugging into the live system that Recovery is providing, that means as 
things get changed, whether it’s every quarter or there’s QA updates or there’s any 
type of pictures or updates since the data, you’ll have it immediately affected in 
your app and the API without having to make any changes. It had to be fast so we 
had to come up with an API and the ability so that developers and users to be able 
to build these things very quickly. We didn’t want it to get to a complete large 
development cycle in order to use this information. So not only did we want to get 
the data out as fast as possible in real-time, but we wanted you to be able to build 
things very quickly. And the whole social and collaborative side was key. We 
wanted people to be able to get to the information, to share it with others, but 
probably more importantly be able to customize it on the fly and take it with them 
wherever they are, which means it has to be able to take it and share with others 
and it has to be very collaborative meaning that others can recommend it and be 
able to share, but ultimately we needed the personalization that everybody could 
have and we’re literally talking about anybody who accesses Recovery.gov. And 
portable is a very important term now in that you can’t have a proprietary 
architectural technology that just runs in one place. Everything that was built was 
designed to run within the Recovery.gov site, but also be taken and published 
wherever you need it. And we’ll show demonstrations of that. That means that you 
have to adhere to the standards, you have to be portable in that if I have an app or 
a widget that is built within Recovery and I go and I take it, I should be able to run 
it on a tablet, I should be able to run it on my website, I should be able to run it in 
SharePoint and have the latest information at any point in time. And of course, we 
want security and we want authoritativeness. Recovery teams said that we want 
people to get the data as it is in our system. We don’t want to take it and transform 
it and copy it. We want them to have the authoritative source. And this is part of 
the security story for the solution.

So now I’m going to switch into a demo and show you how this works and show 
you the architecture into it. Everything we’re going to be doing now is live on the 
system. We’re going to be showing you how these things are done and what’s 
available to you, as many of you may or may not know, within Recovery.gov. and 
then we’re going to show you examples that GP spoke about and then we’ll show 
you some samples of what we built and then just a quick demo of how we can build 
something on the fly and make it available and ultimately how you can build things 
and use it wherever you need to. Ok, so in the Recovery.gov site there is the 
developer community and the developer center and there are a few things that 
you’ll see here. You’ll see the state summary widget, which is what we’ve been 
talking about. And let me start there. When you click on this you’re going to be 
brought into the site. This was designed to be somewhat of a configurator, where 
anybody can go in and they can put in any information that they need to whether a 
state code or congressional district – so let me just choose something here, I’ll 
choose California. And then the system is smart enough to pick a congressional 
district that’s relevant. And I’ll run it, now when I run this what it will do is it will 
specifically go out and get all the information from the live system and create a 
widget or an app for you and this is live meaning that it’s actually getting the data 
on-demand and it’s customized so you’re looking at just the information that you 
need and as you interact with it here, this is something that just you are looking at 
so this is custom to me right now and as I’m clicking around I can see the different 
awards and the different amounts. I can zoom in or zoom out on this. This is live so 
as I’m moving around it’s showing me the area of interest, which is for the 
congressional district. If I wanted to do something a little different and just show all 
of California, I can just go out and do this and now it’s going to show me everything 
that has been awarded throughout California. You can see 30 billion dollars plus 
here and you can see the data as it’s represented. And you’ll see as we drill in, we 
can keep drilling in to the individual awardees and then you can see the 
information and the prime awards and then you can click on any of these and get 
information about these.  Well, what’s really powerful in this is that you’re able to 
right here just rate it, you’re also able to share it and when you share it out to net 
five to Google, you can just get the html code, you could see it as a standalone page 
and then when you actually go and take this information you can go and actually 
take this script back here and embed it anywhere you want and you’ll get the latest 
information that’s available to you.  Let me show you a few examples of doing that. 

So here’s the first site we talked about in New Mexico. The team over in New 
Mexico, they built this specifically for themselves and this is a Widget that was built 
and you see how its specific to New Mexico and all this information is still pointing 
in from the same architecture and same sources of information the difference is it’s 
customized for them and this is really just an effort of taking the script tag like we 
showed before and putting it in their website, which means that you can go and 
build your own custom app that’s specific to your own area of interest and go and 
take that script tag and put it in your webpage. 

And this one is for Michigan doing the same thing but this is Baraga County and it’s 
showing inside the county the different awards that were available to it. And again, 
as this information changes, as new information comes in in the quarter everything 
will be updated as soon as it’s loaded and when you click.

Here’s Philadelphia, same thing, exact same widget or app, just customized with 
their information.  

And lastly, you can take this and not only just put it on a website, you can put it on 
any webpage or here’s the Billings Gazette that has it in an article that they read 
where its the live information that’s running as people see it they get the latest 
information. 
So now we see it from a Widget perspective, now what I’m going to do is I’m going 
to show you how you can go back and how this is built in terms of the data. So 
underneath it all what we needed to do was we needed to have a way for you 
easily to build this Widget or app and get it, but then underneath it all is the data, 
so you may want to build your own app or take it and run it into your own pool 
and use the information. What we did is we created an API and the API was 
designed to go and allow you to just get the data if you want but also to build the 
applications on top of it.  It had to be powerful enough that we could go and query 
the information that you need and that means that you have to be able to 
essentially put in whatever parameters you want to certify but at the same time get 
the data customized to be information you need. So what was developed was a 
sample called Rest API, which you can think of as just a standard url and it allows 
you to put in information such as the different award types whether its contracts 
or a grant, you can search for awards that are between a certain amount of dollars, 
you can look for a specific award number if you want, even a DUNS number or the 
recipients of the awarding agency and by calendar year, now we have three years 
worth of information of multiple quarters. And what you get is essentially this URL 
or this REST URL and when you click on it or look at it you’re getting xml 
information back.  Ok, so this is not necessarily for an end-user but what this is 
very valuable for is this is what a developer would get in lieu of having to get a 
downloaded large file uploaded in that processing. 

Now we're going to show you how you can use the information in the recovery API 
with a dashboard that we built for another government agency, USDA. This 
dashboard was built on the recovery API to show government funded programs 
sponsored by the USDA. But not only do we want to get information about 
recovery programs funded by the USDA but we also want to be able to drill down 
and look at specific information about the recovery recipient and the status of the 
recovery project. What you see here are widgets or Apps that were developed to 
be used independently or together on a dashboard. Now we'll discuss some of the 
use cases that GP spoke about. This specifically relates to the program tracking use 
case but you can easily see how these dashboards can be repurposed and used for 
budget tracking or agency reconciliation.
 
Here we have an App that lists all the states and the total number awards granted 
to each state. Now if you want to be able to drill into the dashboard and look at 
specific information, you can really get a sophisticated set of information about 
these government funded recovery projects. This dashboard was built in a day or 
two on the recovery API, we're not doing anything beyond surfacing the live real-
time information coming from the recovery feed. These apps can be built and 
wired together so they are interactive and event driven, allowing you to click one 
App and refresh other connected Apps in the same dashboard. In the top right 
App, you can see a detailed view of each award recipient along with the year the 
project was funded, the amount, how much funding the recipient received since the 
project started and the agency that funded the project. You can also see these same 
recovery projects geospatially or on a map. Along with the project status and 
project name by project amount.
 
Ok so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to show you how you can customize 
these dashboards by changing the search parameters in the API. The recovery api 
is a simple REST url but for those of you who aren't comfortable with the full API, 
what you'll see is an 'Advanced Recipient Search Widget which allows you to 
customize the information you want to see returned from the Recovery API. If I 
select VA, you can see the API will only pull back recovery project information 
related to VA. You can see various search parameters that you can configure in 
here and it’s very easy for you to use. I just pulled in an app that was built on top 
of a platform, so everything that we had to do was according to the design of the 
recovery team was to make sure were open in standard space and that whatever 
we were building anybody else could build and you’ll see that not only are you 
building this information, but you’re also seeing this information as it’s coming 
back, so you have some sense if it’s the right information for you. 

Alright, so let me show you a little bit about how you can even do more 
sophisticated things with this if you have access to the API. So, what I did here is 
this is inside Presto, this is a URL that I created through that configurator and this 
is specifically looking for a grant of this recipient’s DUNS number and when I click 
on this I’ll get the information, but really what I wanted to do is I wanted to go and 
look at this information and see what this looks like and I wanted to start creating 
visualizations on it. So this in particular is running against the real system, and by 
the way this is a cloud-based architecture so only systems are running on the cloud 
and you can see how optimized the performance is as I’m running these things. It’s 
really running against the live data and it’s very, very fast so the Recovery team has 
done a great job of making sure that everything that is tuned in and optimized 
because quite frankly this is open to the world, so they have to make sure that 
anybody can access this data and get important information. Well, as I see this 
information that’s coming back, I want to see it in different ways, so I may want to 
see it in a grid or I may want to see something that’s a little more interesting to me 
in a doughnut chart here where I can see the breakdown by the different counties 
and where this money’s going or if I want to go and see this spend here I can see it 
by column, I can see it by different areas and where that spend occurs. And then 
lastly, I just created a funnel chart. Well, the point is that I shouldn’t have to be 
locked into any one visualization of any of this information. I should be able to take 
the visualizations that I have and literally point and click and create these and be 
able to save these as an app. So, what I’ll do here is I’ll create a simple app from 
this information and if I wanted to just configure this so that I can have the 
visualization in multiple layouts I can do that and then what I see here is I see 
information that’s coming back and I see my app and if I finish this out, I’ll give it a 
name and now what I have is a full working app that anybody can use and you’ll 
see it here and when I run it, you’ll see exactly the same information that could be 
used by anybody else because ultimately its pointing to the same source of 
information and here is the script tag that we were talking about that’s very web 
2.0-like, much like YouTube and Facebook where you can get the script tag and put 
it anywhere and have this exact app running wherever you want.  So that’s really 
the power behind this, is that it’s simple in creating those APIs. In an instant you 
have the ability to go and make this information available and to start building 
these apps and building these dashboards and be able to go and essentially build 
whatever type of intelligence that you need. And by the way, this information just 
doesn’t have to be visualized itself. You can take this information and match it up 
with other information, even your internal information, if you wanted, and go and 
get analytics and real-time information on it. And it has a vast amount of 
information all different organizations in there from the members of the CEOs that 
you can look and correlate and mashup to get the very, very sophisticated 
dashboards. 

Ok, so that’s kind of a quick look into what you can do and what you can do with a 
platform and now we want to go back to the presentation and we want to cover 
some of the questions that have been asked and we want to talk about the 
architecture a bit more.  Ok, so this API essentially can be – people were asking 
about the API and how it can be used and the API is fully documented, it’s available 
for you to go and look at it and try it and it’s also very tool centric meaning that 
any tool that can handle a REST API can consume this information. This also means 
that you can take this and use it with a mashup environment like Presto or you can 
use it with Yahoo! Pipes or use it with any type of system that can handle this 
information.

We also want to talk a little bit about some of the other apps that are created. 
Sunlight has done a really good job taking the information and creating some 
iPhone apps that are available and this is another value is that when we said 
portable when didn’t mean that you could just go on any website. We meant that 
this information can go and be used in native apps such as iPhone or Android 
devices and it can also be used on different devices like tablets such as iPad. And 
you can get this you can actually go to iTunes or Apple’s app store and download 
the app, it’s under Sunlight Labs and then there’s also a Recovery app that’s there.  
So if you go to the app store you can download the Recovery app and then as your 
going even sensing where you are from locations you can get all the different 
awards in your particular area.

So let’s see, we have another question here that’s talking about data services. Are 
they pre-defined in terms of drill down or is this dynamic.  Actually, these are very 
dynamic, that’s the key element here. We didn’t have the ability to go and answer 
the questions in advance per se, we had to write these so that the system was not 
only real-time and giving us the real-time information, but the system was real-time 
in being able to query. You can literally query in any type of theory you want and 
the system is optimized so that if you had an extremely sophisticated query that’s 
looking at everything from counties to ranges of award amounts to different 
calendar dates, you’d be able to get this information and you’ll be able to get it just 
as fast as if you’re doing a normal query. This is the power in this is that not only is 
the information available to you as you need it, but the ability to go and create 
these dynamic queries is essentially unlimited.

Ok, I’ll do one or two more questions here. So are the Twitter and Facebook, blogs, 
etc., integration on the homepage done with JackBe.  I don’t believe they are.  GP, 
you may want to talk a little bit about the architecture and what’s behind the 
Twitter and Facebook and blog integration. 

GP:  Sure John, thanks for the question. Yeah, the social media integration is 
integrated into the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and we have custom SharePoint 
widgets or code elements that go in and interact with these social media, be it 
Twitter and Facebook, etc., but, again, from a technology perspective I think that 
demonstrates, again, the power of using APIs and that’s the key piece. So, we are 
not just making APIs available, we are also beneficially of APIs that other systems 
make available. 

John Crupi:  Great, thanks GP, now here’s the question for you, Mike. Are there 
efforts to apply the ARRA tracking tools to broader government money flows 
beyond stimulus funding?

Mike Wood:  Good question, John. Thank you. Yeah, there’s been a lot of talk about 
that. We’ve been looking at the board and OMB, Congress, the White House, and 
others have been looking at it, we’ve had some real successes here. I think both in 
the technology and showing things transparently and being able to collect data 
from recipients and some tools that we use for accountability which are kind of 
unique in our Recovery Operations Center, ROC, the amount of noncompliance, 
people that don’t report, and the level of fraud is very, very low. So this has been 
successful from that standpoint, whether people agree that the Recovery Act a 
success or not is a separate question, I guess. But there are a lot of groups looking 
at how we can capture the lessons that we’ve learned and the technology that 
we’ve developed and move those on in the future. The recovery board itself 
sunsets in 2013, so there’s an interest in saving these technologies and using them, 
or replicating them, or expanding them even and I think right now it’s not clear, it 
may become clear over the next several months but there is a lot of discussion in 
groups I mentioned there’s ideas like perhaps some of the reporting and 
presentation should be moved to Treasury, perhaps the accountability piece ought 
to be moved to a group called Cigie which is an IG community’s panel that works 
across the inspector generals. I’m not sure where it’s going to go another idea is to 
just to create an accountability and transparency board, get rid of the word 
“Recovery” and continue the board on. I believe something will happen because 
these have been successful, there has been a low rate of fraud and some of the 
technologies are things since we’ve been reporting something that the states have 
been pretty appreciative of because it’s easy to use, we’ve got response with the 
help desk, and so forth, so I think it will carry on, but how that will happen is very 
unclear at this point.  I think it will resolve itself over the next six months or so. So 
that we can come up with a plan for if there is a need to transition it some place 
else or if there is a need to continue, there will be a plan to do that.

John Crupi:  Great, thanks Mike. There is another question for you.  This is kind of 
extreme transparency and a lot of unknown here in terms of firsts. So was there 
any concern about when you opened up the APIs and information to essentially the 
world that how to maintain some sense of authoritativeness so people know 
they’re getting the real information versus information that might be altered?

Mike Wood:  Yeah, we tried to put good security in place. The nice thing about the 
data is there is no confidential information, there’s no personal identifiable 
information so from that aspect on security we didn’t have the concerns, but the 
authoritative data is a concern we are running on the cloud. I think that if someone 
were to modify something then we could actually get in and make corrections very, 
very quickly, but I think the spirit of transparency sort of requires that you take 
that leap of faith and just make information available and I think there is a sort of 
self-correcting behavior in that if someone were to try and modify data and so-
forth, others that have access to the data would be able to correct the 
misimpression that the false data was correct. So, I think we thought through that, 
we put the best security we could in when we moved to the cloud and I think it’s 
pretty good you’ve got a combination of the board’s security and Amazon security 
and some other things. I don’t want to go into much detail on that, but it works and 
I think yeah, it’s a concern, but I think it’s something when you’re dealing with 
transparency it’s not for the faint of heart by the way. There are some real 
challenges, different than typical government bureaucracy in action, you know, 
we’re not very … things are happening very fast, this is sort of an approach that is 
closer to perhaps some silicon valley approaches and what you see in Washington 
and we’re pushing for that. That’s one reason we’re pushing for the Developer 
Center and use of apps and so forth. We use products like JackBe to try and get as 
many people as possible involved.

John Crupi:  Thanks Mike. So we’ll just finish up here. One other question that came 
in is who would I talk to about taking this to the next level? So, we’ll finish it up with 
this slide, which gives you access to the demo links that we have that we showed 
where you can go and look at those. Also, you can go to the Recovery.gov 
Developer Center. There’s a FAQ that’s there that you can access and there’s 
information there where the e-mail address is and that would be the best place to 
talk to the Recovery team on things that you’d like feedback on maybe taking it to 
the next level and what that might mean and how it can be used and I think 
everybody is open to suggestions and insights and probably want to know about 
success stories and where you’re using this information and where your apps are 
published. The flexibility here is huge and with that we don’t even really know 
where some of these apps are and this is a good thing. This means that people 
were able to do these things very quickly and get the information out and they’re 
not asking for a lot of help. So, because of that everybody likes to hear the success 
stories and uses of the technology and here are all the links that you have and we’ll 
be posting this webinar in the next day or so and we will make it at jackbe.com and 
we’ll also hand it over to the recovery team and if they choose to make it available 
on their site, then it will be there too. So, thank you everyone for your time, thank 
you Mike, thank you GP, and we hope you all enjoyed it and we look forward to 
talking to you in the future. Thank you.

- Great, thanks John. 

- Thank you John. 

- Thank you.