Last Saturday, I attended an Organizing for America discussion about President Obama’s Economic Recovery Plan. During a lively discussion, we talked about how we could make sure that the best projects get selected and that they get done in as effect a manner as possible. In my blog post, A Stimulating Discussion, I asked:

Can volunteers from Organizing for America and other groups gather and discuss projects that would be most beneficial for our country? Can they make these discussions available online so everyone can participate?

Well, a group of people have created a website called Stimulus Watch. The website lists 18,750 ‘shovel ready’ projects from the U.S. Conference of Mayors. You can use the website to find projects in the cities near where you live, comment on them and vote on them.

There are a few things I dislike about the site. You vote simply on whether a project is ‘critical’ or not. ‘Critical’ is a poor choice of words. Personally, I probably would not call any of the projects ‘critical’. ‘Important’, ‘beneficial’, or other words might work much better. In addition, it does not seem like it should be black or white. It isn’t ‘critical’ or ‘not critical’, the real question is how beneficial do people think a project is. A scale of one to five would probably make much more sense.

Beyond that, the voting appears to be anonymous. I’m not sure what is done to make sure that the system is not being gamed by people with certain political agendas.

The other thing I would like to see is ability to get other projects added. I’m sure that there are plenty of other projects from Connecticut, besides those from the fifteen cities participating in the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

In spite of the shortcomings of the project, please, take a look at some of the projects, and a little information and vote. We should get good discussions going about different projects.