I like the idea of ExpectMore.gov as setting yearly goals that the program is measured against. However there are many areas for improvements. I’m cautious about political motivations for claiming that a program has unclear goals (like the pell grants) or isn’t meeting expectations. This type of thing needs to partnered with outside the government organizations for developing metrics and the ratings. There is also a need for a full list of metrics and deeper analysis then what’s listed on the detail page for each program. Then there is granularity; Medicare and it’s drug benifit is one entry. If you roll up such a huge program into a single line item with no breakdown, then what’s the point? Ineffective programs will just get attached to giant effective ones. At least FEMA was broken out a bit. Next there is the lesson of a balanced scorecard. What is the organizational health and goals? I’ve heard about a number of people leaving the government in some form of protest, where is the good/bad attrition numbers? Last there is some design aspects of the site that aren’t great. The site doesn’t give me the summary line item views when organizaing by topic, instead using the search snipit view. When I look at a topic like ‘Foreign Affairs“, I want to see the same type of view that I get when see the list of “Adequate“. As a bonus, the data should be available with some XMLRPC/SOAP interfaces. You can see the schema right off the page, let some people build some cool tools on top of this.

Today The White House released a list of government programs that were deemed either effective or ineffective. Curt Nickisch browsed the site to figure out how the government’s doing.

[Via APM’s Marketplace]