The General Services Administration recently announced it will create FedSpace, a ‘new social intranet for federal employees and contractors.’ The project will be managed by the agency’s Office of Citizen Services and the initial version is expected to launch late summer.
I wrote this post to explore a question: how could normal, everyday citizens be as passionate about and engaged with their government as they are with companies like Apple or Google? Here’s what I’ve come up with: government needs a Citizen Development strategy.
Government, developers need to build a more structured, scalable approach to leveraging technology
The time has come to build a reliable, open platform that allows local governments to post development requirements and give private developers the ability to respond and build these applications for free.
Going a step further, we need to build a free, open source platform specifically for government, making it easier for government to install and implement and leverage plugins or modules for anything from standard contact forms to 311 citizen requests applications.