The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board is a new kind of agency with a new kind of mandate. And last week, its first annual report was posted on its website, Recovery.gov, for the world to see.

The board's marching orders are to make sure there is transparency and accountability for the $787 billion in stimulus money being blasted into the economy. Just as important is its mandate to establish and maintain a user-friendly website showing exactly how the stimulus money is being spent.

And the agency did just that. If you look at Recovery.gov any day of the week, you will see remarkable details about where the money went, who got it and how it is being used.

You can see it by state, by company, even by zip code. Users can employ a state-of-the-art mapping system to dig out data and other information on spending projects. There are graphs and quick-glance listings of such things as "most funds available by states" or "which agencies have paid out the most money.'' There are also artful graphics that direct visitors to detailed statistics and data.

In the introduction of its first annual report, the Recovery Board outlined how it wanted the transparent website to encourage millions of "Citizen IGs" all over the country to look at the product and identify fraud, waste and misspent money. By the end of September, the board received 382 complaints about possible fraud or waste, according to the report, with 11 of those complaints being sent for prosecution.

The website, which went live on February 17 when the stimulus bill became law, had a number of headaches absorbing and displaying all of the data coming from different agency systems and in different formats. The site was re-engineered and launched anew at the end of September as Recovery.gov 2.0, with a redesign and additional tools to capture large amounts of data from recipients of grants, loans and contracts issued by 28 federal agencies.

In an effort to maximize public input for this redesign, the Recovery Board teamed up with the Office of Management and Budget and the National Academy of Public Administration to conduct a week-long electronic town hall meeting during which participants were encouraged to provide their ideas on how the website could give them the most information possible about spending and contracting.

More than 500 people--including average citizens, IT specialists and website development experts--registered and offered ideas. Some of these ideas were included in the new 2.0 version of Recovery.gov and others will be considered in future redesign initiatives, the board said in the annual report.

The board also contracted with Mitre Corp., a prominent national research organization, to do an independent review of Recovery.gov. The annual report said "Mitre pulled no punches" and "made clear that a second generation version of Recovery.gov was needed to give taxpayers deeper insight into reporting data, along with tools for greater analysis of data and searching capabilities."

The current redesigned site pulls together spending data from federal agencies and recipients of stimulus money in a more comprehensive and usable form. The FederalReporting.gov site collects data from recipients of stimulus money who log in and fill out their reports, and that data is transferred to the public website, Re­covery.gov.

This first-of-a-kind website likely will serve as the blueprint for future accountability and transparency for the federal government that once kept the public in the dark. With details available for everyone to see, it will be harder for our government to spend $600 on a toilet seat ever again.

This week, we also highlight another example of the federal government starting to make smart use of technology with Drupal, an open source platform, now being employed by Whitehouse.gov. Drupal provides a mix of traditional web content management features as well as social features that enable open communication and participation. Drupal refers to this combination as social publishing. Read our interview with Dries Buytaert, Drupal's founder, about its work with WhiteHouse.gov and other federal agencies.

It's clear that technology is not only bringing government into the 21st century, its websites are keeping it accountable. - Judi