The average person on the street may have no idea how huge this is, but it’s a big, big thing: the stimulus package’s implementation instructions require each government agency that spends stimcash to provide an Atom/RSS feed detailing who received the contract, the amount, and so on.
For each of the near term reporting requirements major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports agencies are required to provide a feed preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription.
from the Initial Implementing Guidance for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
Each agency has the freedom to either stuff the feeds with raw data or just link to static HTML, so it isn’t a perfect system yet… but wowza! Talk about making life easier for amateur journalists and watchdogs!
(hat tip to Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought)