Friday, February 13. 2009

Federal Government Contract Spending: A Look at Geospatial

Poynter.org tipped me off that FederalSpending.gov has been updated and renamed USAspending.gov. There you can query to hearts delight and learn where federally money goes. You can search by type of contract, congressional district, name of contractor...

I queried for how much a few big companies involved in geospatial received in federal contracts for 2008. Here's what I found:

ESRI: $54,342,900 Top contracting agencies: Army, DHS, USGS, Navy, BLM
Intergraph: $48,380,48 (as COBALT HOLDING COMPANY), Top agencies: Navy, State, Air Force, NASA, Army
Autodesk: $26,805 Surface Mining, Army, Veterans Affairs
Microsoft: $63,210,421 Customs, Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Navy
Google: $81,046 State, Army, FERC, Veterans Affairs, NIH
Hexagon AB: (owns ERDAS): $6,901,657 Army, Forest Service, Navy USGS, Air Force

You can dump out the data of interest, so expect some interesting mashups.

Invitation to Push U.S. Gov to "Show Us the Data"

Open The Government and the Center for Democracy and Technology have partnered on a website to identify "the 10 Most Wanted Government Documents, Reports or Data Sets that should be available on the Web." Visitors can submit datasets of interest, then vote on up to three to register their preferences. The deadline to submit documents and vote is March 9, 2009.

Perhaps there's some geodata you want shared?

via Government Technology

Education Tidbits

Good news for potential summer GIS and engineering interns in Wausau, WI: Joe Gehin, the city's director of public works, can offer between $8.19 and $10.84 per hour for the four open positions. The hope is the move will attract quality candidates.

- Wausau Daily Herald

Bowdoin College has six new tenured professors including Computer science professor Laura Toma who teaches courses on data structures and geographic information systems (GIS) algorithms and data structures. Much of Toma's work addresses scalability issues in GIS. She was responsible for grant that helped build the college's GIS lab.

- Bowdoin Orient

The Northern Virginia Community College received a $492,458 grant from the U.S. Department of Labor to prepare students for work in the field of geospatial technology.

- Leesburg Today