Information about federal spending can affect national priorities and government processes, having impacts on society that few other data sources can rival. However, building effective open government and transparency mechanisms holds a host of technical, conceptual, and organizational challenges. To help guide development and deployment of future federal spending transparency systems, this paper explores the effectiveness of accountability measures deployed for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 ("Recovery Act" or "ARRA"). The Recovery Act provides an excellent case study to better understand the general requirements for designing and deploying "Open Government" systems. In this document, we show specific examples of how problems in data quality, service design, and systems architecture limit the effectiveness of ARRA's promised transparency. We also highlight organizational and incentive issues that impede transparency, and point to design processes as well as general architectural principles needed to better realize the goals advanced by open government advocates.

The "Initial Implementing Guidance for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009" provides guidance for a feed-based information dissemination architecture. In this report, we suggest some improvements and refinements of the initial guidelines, in the hope of paving the path for a more transparent and useful feed-based architecture. This report is meant as a preliminary guide to how the current guidelines could be made more specific and provide better guidance for providers and consumers of Recovery Act spending information. It is by no means intended as a complete or final set of recommendations.

One of the main goals of the Recovery.gov Web site is to provide information about how funds for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 are allocated and spent. In this report, we propose a reporting architecture that would focus on the reporting services rather than the Web site and page design, and that uses these Web services to build the user-facing part of ARRA reporting. Our proposed architecture is based on simple and well-established Web technologies, and the main goal of this architecture is to provide citizens and watchdog groups simple and easy access to machine-readable data. Our architecture uses a more sophisticated framework than simple downloads of data files. Our proposed architecture is based on the principles of Representational State Transfer (REST) and uses established and widely supported Web technologies such as feeds and XML. We argue that such an architecture is easy to design and implement, easy to understand for users, and easy to work with for those who want to access ARRA reporting data in a machine-readable way.

This special section stems from discussions that took place in a forum at the Society for American Archaeology's annual conference in 2017. The forum, Beyond Data Management: A Conversation about “Digital Data Realities”, addressed challenges in fostering greater reuse of the digital archaeological data now curated in repositories. Forum discussants considered digital archaeology beyond the status quo of “data management” to better situate the sharing and reuse of data in archaeological practice. The five papers for this special section address key themes that emerged from these discussions, including: challenges in broadening data literacy by making instructional uses of data; strategies to make data more visible, better cited, and more integral to peer-review processes; and pathways to create higher-quality data better suited for reuse. These papers highlight how research data management needs to move beyond mere “check-box” compliance for granting requirements. The problems and proposed solutions articulated by these papers help communicate good practices that can jumpstart a virtuous cycle of better data creation leading to higher impact reuses of data.