Democratizing federal contract process with sunlight

This is kinda cool.

Über transparency advocates the Sunlight Foundation is crowdsourcing a federal contract bid to redesign the economic stimulus oversight Web site, Recovery.gov, through it’s open source development lab.

Clay Johnson describes Sunlight’s approach to submitting a collaborative proposal to improve government transparency of federal contracting:

On Tuesday afternoon, someone handed us a copy of the Recovery.gov 2.0 RFP and we thought: what if we try something truly radical here,” said Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs. “What if we opened up the process of government contracting by bidding and allowed anyone to edit our proposal online? We together—not just we meaning the Sunlight Foundation—are going to bid on redoing Recovery.gov to learn more about the process of government contracting, and to try and build what is perhaps the biggest federal transparency-related Web site.

The group said in a written statement that the project is “a way to draw attention to the need for more transparency about the way the federal government allocates spending for its technological needs … and to demonstrate how the Internet can help democratize the government contractor bidding process.”

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