Earlier this year, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation published an assessment of federal government websites that includes rankings around page load speeds, mobile friendliness, Domain Name System Security Extensions, Secure Sockets Layer and accessibility.
With the help of GSA and the brand power of USA, the opportunity to truly scale impact is endless.
As of 20 January, President Obama signed the TALENT Act of 2017 (H.R.39) into law as one of his last acts as President.
The White House released an official Federal Source Code policy that green lights the use and free distribution of software code developed for and by the U.S. Government.
Government Technology’s Jason Shueh finally brings to light the core impetus surrounding backlash against 18F efforts to fix federal government technology development and procurement practices.
Hillary Clinton released her technology and innovation agenda that promises to expand the U.S. Digital Service and agency-specific digital teams, encourage the continued adoption of open source and open data and bring a more user-friendly approach to federal government operations.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report on the fiscal and administrative state of 18F and the U.S. Digital Service, both established to make federal government websites work better for users, and it appears the agency could use some help from the two on its own site, gao.gov.
The White House extended the Federal Source Code Policy comment period to April 18 and, to date, there there are 147 comments with much of the discussion centered around licensing and security.
The White House has published a federal source code policy that requires custom code paid for by the U.S. government be made available to all federal agencies, and a portion be released to the public.
Ethan Marcotte and Karen McGrane have been on a roll lately featuring federal government design leaders on their Responsive Web Design Podcast.
The White House continues to roll out a better mobile experience with a newly-designed White House blog.
In an effort to help entrepreneurs get businesses legally established without the red tape hassle, the White House, Small Business Administration and National League of Cities are rallying cities to provide simpler online tools and processes for those applying for licenses and permits.
Starting with its homepage, the White House is moving to a more mobile-friendly design.
The most brilliant viral video of the week is of First Lady Michelle Obama dancing to “Uptown Funk” to promote the fifth anniversary of her childhood obesity “Let’s Move” campaign, and it’s a great opportunity for federal agencies to both support this initiative and promote engagement around their respective citizen services.
In his announcement Goldman asks citizens (using the hashtag #socialcivics) to share their answers to the question, “How can we — our government and you and your communities — better connect online to make America better?”
Despite a digital strategy issued by the White House two years ago calling for more mobile-friendly citizen services, the top four most-visited federal government websites over the past 30 days fail this test according to new analytics numbers released by the General Services Administration.
As momentum around appointing public sector chief data officers grows, it’s time for the federal government to get ahead of the curve and create a formal chief data officers council similar to, but more inclusive, proactive and public than the already-established U.S. Chief Information Officers Council.
After getting some grief for not having a strong public presence, the U.S. Digital Service is beginning to open itself up with a new website, video and Twitter account.
The White House has officially released the write version of the “We the People” application programming interface that now allows developers to feed data back into the petition platform via third-party applications.
The White House is looking for input on how it can improve the open government section of its website, located at whitehouse.gov/open.
The White House is now accepting applications for the 2014 Presidential Innovation Fellows program.
I was asked to provides some thoughts on what is next for the U.S. government’s application programming interface strategy. I’ve put a lot of thought into it during my work and travels over the last couple months since I’ve left Washington, D.C., and I keep coming back to one thought: strengthen what we have.
With a single subpoena to one of the most admired public servants in America, Congressman Darrell Issa has managed to rankle the ire of open government leaders and alienate a key constituency in a movement he co-founded his own organization around.
The White House will soon open a limited beta test to developers on a new We the People Write API that allows third-party applications to submit information to official petitions.
A new We the People petition opened Sunday calling for the federal government to make the healthcare.gov source code publicly available “so we may help fix any found issues.”
PBS NewsHour features the White House New Media team in a segmented titled Wired White House Looks to Harness New Media.
Earlier this week, President Obama took questions from YouTube via CitizenTube. The event was part of an effort to crowdsource citizen questions to the president after his State of the Union speech. According to YouTube, 772,350 votes were cast on 14,456 questions from 64,969 people.
By now, most people in the Gov 2.0 community have heard of Drupal, the popular open source social publishing system powering close to 500,000 websites ranging from big government to Britney Spears. Drupal has seen steady growth from its inception as a Belgian grad student’s experiment in 2001 to one of the most heavily used open source content management systems in the world, downloaded by a quarter million people per month. A growing trend the Drupal community is following closely this year is government interest in the platform to further open government initiatives and broaden adoption across government.
President Obama’s Cabinet taped ‘Year One’ videos to highlight their respective department or agency’s 2009 accomplishments and or goals for the next year.
What do you think? Which are most informative? Authentic? Is this an effective way to familiarize citizens to public servants and put a face on government?
Everyday Banter created a parody video of the new White House iPhone app. (HT OhMyGov!)
Best line: “Haven’t heard from Obama in the last six minutes and need to make sure he’s still in charge? There’s an app for that.”
