Show HN: The Public Tab – See every federal dollar flowing through your district

Show HN: The Public Tab – See every federal dollar flowing through your district(thepublictab.com)

1 points by jaaacckz 87 days ago | 8 comments

Early in my career I worked on DataLab, the sister site to USASpending.gov before it got merged into it. I then worked on USASpending a bit. Datalab had more of a "for the people" storytelling vibe to it which I liked a lot more and I feel that spirit got lost when we "merged" into USASpending. I built The Public Tab in response to this feeling.

My core idea: The district you are in is a more relatable measure of analysis for federal spending for the average person. You want to know what is going on around you. You can more easily "follow the money" this way.

I have a pipeline that runs nightly/weekly with data digest from USASpending, SAM.gov, and some other big players in the space. You can subscribe to changes and get updates daily/weekly on spending in your district. You can map that to lobbying, new contracts that pop up, as well as what your rep is voting on.

The client libraries are written in ruby and are open source here: https://github.com/govapi-rb

You can also check out the API Docs here: https://thepublictab.com/docs/api

It is deemed "beta" for now.. I'd love any feedback and to hear what is cool and what is not.

Thanks!

codingdave 87 days ago |

Truly a good idea, but it is somewhat hard to evaluate this when all we get are a couple high level graphs, and everything else is marked as "Unlock with Pro"

The freemium model is in and of itself interesting because most tech leaders in the public sector are quite allergic to the idea of monetizing the public view of data and content. They want the organizations who produce the data to fund the platforms, with the public views being a key piece of the puzzle, but not the funding source. I'm actually with you on it, that if the public wants deep engagement, it is worth some small fees. But we're the minority - most folks with whom I've discussed projects vehemently reject the idea.

As you are also asking for a "Pro" subscription for API access, I'd open up the public view and rely instead on API fees.

jaaacckz 87 days ago | |

I hear ya. I'm just unsure that people will even use the API enough. That is assuming that most of the people that would use this/hangout here are programmer-y.

Perhaps I can make more things seen in the "Free tier"

dlcarrier 87 days ago |

It's like 90% social security. The one thing that has a bipartisan lack of support.

jaaacckz 87 days ago | |

https://thepublictab.com/districts/VA-08

You can at least drill down onto what the spending is all about! Where I'm near its not mainly social security (^:

dlcarrier 86 days ago | | |

My district has only one defense contractor, and yours has like all of them. It's not really local spending.