Frequently Asked Questions
- 1. What is Virginia Stimulus?
- 2. Why Virginia?
- 3. Isn't this duplicative of Virginia’s Stimulus.Virginia.Gov?
- 4. How do these projects fit in with the stimulus bill?
- 5. How do I use the wiki?
- 6. How do you tally votes?
- 7. Could you give me the complete dataset so I can sort it myself?
- 8. Who are you?
- 9. Can you create one of these sites for my state?
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1. What is Virginia Stimulus?
"The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works—whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. Those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account—to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day—because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government."
– President Barack Obama in his Inaugural Address
The Commonwealth of Virginia was the first state to collect proposals from the public about how to spend federal stimulus dollars. Governor Tim Kaine announced, Stimulus.Virginia.Gov will give everyone in the Commonwealth a forum to submit and exchange project ideas. Every locality and citizen has a stake in our economic recovery and should have a voice in deciding how this money is spent."
Virginians submitted their ideas for how Virginia should spend federal stimulus money and the Commonwealth of Virginia made this information available to the public. Making citizen requests available to the public is one small step toward making the inputs that government considers in making spending decisions more transparent. This creates useful data to be used by researchers and others concerned with the accountability of public officials. VirginiaStimulus.org was built by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University to take this data and apply innovative ideas developed at Mercatus about how Web 2.0 technology and transparency in government can help improve public policy decisions.
VirginiaStimulus.org uses technology to elicit knowledge about projects and opportunities from the people who know the most about them, and harnesses the wisdom of crowds to learn about how taxpayers and the people affected feel about potential projects.
VirginiaStimulus.org can help the leaders of Virginia, as well as researchers and citizens alike, better understand how federal stimulus funds might be spent and to hold public officials accountable for their spending decisions.
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2. Why Virginia?
VirginiaStimulus.org was built by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University to apply ideas developed at the Mercatus Center about how transparency can improve public policy decisions.
Since Virginia is the first state to take this approach, Mercatus is seizing the opportunity to gather information and make it available to other researchers as well as stakeholders so that we can better understand what the stimulus means in practice.
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3. Isn't this duplicative of Virginia’s Stimulus.Virginia.Gov?
Stimulus.Virginia.Gov is an important step in the direction of transparency for the Commonwealth. It provides the raw data for researchers and others to analyze.
VirginiaStimulus.org takes that data and elicits additional information. We are gathering knowledge from you about the projects proposed for your state, county, and town before they are funded.
After a project has been funded we would like to continue to harness local knowledge about how the funds were spent and the projects managed in order to continue to generate information about how well these programs achieve their intended goals, and how well public officials are accountable to their promises. Stimulus.Virginia.Gov does not provide that information yet – but we hope the Commonwealth of Virginia will continue to advance transparency in government by making this information available.
Finally, we will be tracking the projects that are actually proposed and designated by the Commonwealth as federal stimulus projects that includes both the projects proposed by the public on Stimulus.Virginia.Gov and those that will be put forward by the local and state government leaders.
To date, Stimulus.Virginia.Gov only tracks the public's recommendations and not actually what government has planned for the federal stimulus.
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4. How do these projects fit in with the stimulus bill?
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act does not list specific projects to be funded. Instead, it will appropriate money for federal grant programs, such as the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) or Surface Transportation Program, which will then use the appropriated stimulus money to make grants to states, cities, and towns. In the case of CDBG, for example, the Department of Housing and Urban Development will be the agency that will decide (using a formula) which of the projects will be funded.
That said, the funding Congress approves for these programs, and thus how much money cities will actually receive for their projects, may exceed or fall short of state and local leader requests. This means that not every project suggested on Stimulus.Virginia.Gov or even those requested by the Commonwealth’s leaders will be funded. There is value in understanding how allocations are made--how well they reflect the opinions of citizens, where projects originate, and whether the projects align with the goals of the stimulus plan. VirginiaStimulus.org helps researchers better understand these questions.
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5. How do I use the wiki?
On an individual project page there are three things you can do:
- Vote on whether a project is critical
- Edit the project's wiki page
- Post a comment about the project
How you vote on a project is completely up to you. Comments are there for free-wheeling discussion about the project and you can express any opinion you'd like there. However, there are some ground rules for the wiki portion of each page.
The wiki section exists so that citizens with knowledge of the project can describe the project and place it in context. Therefore, the wiki description should be comprised of only factual assertions and be written in what Wikipedia has called a neutral point of view style. A great tutorial on neutral POV writing is available from Wikipedia.
That said, apart from a general description section on the wiki, we provide a section for "points in favor" and "points against." This is not a place to write opinions; that's what the comments are for. Instead it's a place to safely place factual assertions that tend to support one side or the other more strongly.
These rules may make it sound scary to edit the wiki, but don't worry. Anyone can edit the wiki and we encourage you to do so. There's no wrong way to do it, and anything you do can be easily reverted to a previous state. For a quick intro on how to edit a wiki page, see the Wikimedia editing guide.
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6. How do you tally votes?
On each individual project page users can vote on whether in their estimation the project is critical or not. On the project page we show the results, including the number of votes cast and the percentage of votes on each side. We further rank all projects based on the vote ratio they've received. For example, 10 votes in favor and 15 against will give a project a vote ratio score of -5.
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7. Could you give me the complete dataset so I can sort it myself?
You can either grab the original data at Stimulus.Virginia.Gov or our data here in Excel format.
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8. Who are you?
This site was built the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and inspired by a similar project, Stimulus Watch, that was started independently by Mercatus Senior Research Fellows Jerry Brito and Eileen Norcross. The development of the site was led by Peter Snyder who coded the site in PHP and MYSQL and implemented the MediaWiki integration. Peter was assisted by Kevin Dwyer, who helped scrape and format the report data.
Jerry Brito, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. His research has focused on government transparency and accountability, specifically how the internet can be harnessed to crowdsource the task of keeping officials accountable. You can read his paper on the subject, "Hack, Mash, and Peer: Crowdsourcing Government Transparency," published by the Columbia Science & Technology Law Review.
Eileen Norcross, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Her research has focused on state and local budgets, economic development, and the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program. For more information, you can read her paper, "The Community Development Block Grant: Does it Work?"
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9. Can you create one of these sites for my state?
As a university-based researach center, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University is supportive of groups that want to contribute to the accountability and transparency of stimulus spending. We will be making the code for this site available. If you are interested please contact Carrie Conko at cconko@gmu.edu.