CityPayments: a new resource for citizen journalists interested in Chicago city government

Take a look at CityPayments, a database of all vendors, contracts, and payments that have been posted by the municipal government of the City of Chicago to the Vendor, Contract, and Payment Search lookup tool maintained by the Department of Procurement Services. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• All of this info comes directly from the City of Chicago. The Department of Procurement Services Web tool has been around for a long time, and investigative journalists have made great use of it to uncover lots of interesting facts to support reporting. The mission of this site is to make this info more readily available to all
• This is a beta release of this site– we expect there to be some bugs, missing data, and hiccups. Please email info@citypayments.org with any suggestions, fixes, or improvements
• You can leave a comment on any vendor, contract, or payment page. Please do leave civil, constructive, and relevant comments. The idea is that with such a large amount of information, we can help each other get to the germ of things quickly. You can subscribe to the comments RSS feed as well
• Another way to do this is to “flag as goofy“.  You can get this as an RSS feed as well. Anyone can flag a contract as goofy. When you do, please comment on the contract and give some sort of reason for it. Hopefully, it will be instructive and enlightening enough so that someone will see it and say, “man, that’s goofy”. Again, the hope is that with the large amount of records on this site, we can help surface some of the more interesting bits without making people click all day

Let us know what you think!