Perhaps this was a project who’s time has not yet come. We had high hopes and we had some good times, but alas, for various reasons we were not able to get the data sets for the Stimulus spending.  Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, if the guy who’s job it is to get them can’t do it, why did I think we could?

So we’ll be pulling the site and the wiki. We’ll keep the blog for a while longer, to let others know about the project lessons learned.  Although we didn’t reach our desired end state, we did accomplish a few things along the way. Part of our goal was to raise the profile of open data and get people talking about it, and some could say we did that. Mind you, we weren’t the only ones who had come ready to talk open data at ChangeCamp.

I learned so much working on this initiative.  I learned about open data, open source, drupal, the Parliamentary Budget Office and other mechanisms of government,  collaborative project planning and new ways of working with cloud-hosted apps.  I didn’t learn how to make budget data more available or less political though, so I still have a long way to go.