Civic hacking for '100% .gov'

Re-imagining the government domain name registry experience.

Luke Fretwell By Luke Fretwell · January 21, 2022

Screenshot of .gov search tool.

Image: USA.GovFresh

I’m a huge proponent that all government websites should end with the .gov extension. If they don’t, the public will continue to be confused as to whether a website is legitimately managed by a government entity.

There are thousands of local government websites that should be leveraging the U.S. government’s .gov domain name services that currently don’t. At ProudCity, we’ve heard numerous stories of rogue websites created by community members that appear to be official, but are not.

Much like the HTTPS protocol, which verifies that a website is encrypted, we must build a standard that validates a website is officially government operated. While there is a role that browsers play, as they do with encryption, universal government adoption of the .gov extension is fundamental to this.

The more governments adopt .gov, the more we’ll have an understood trusted point of public sector information, and we’ll also begin to unify and standardize the fundamentals of what’s expected from a government website, such as encryption, accessibility, plain language, user-focused experiences.

The good news is that we’re hearing there’s an increased demand for .gov services. But, given the volume of government websites that still need to adopt .gov domains, we need increased advocacy and an overall more inviting user experience.

I’ve always felt the .gov registry program could be less bureacratic in its presentation and make a more welcoming and compelling case for its adoption. As we did with the COVID dashboard, my son and I built an alternative dotgov.gov front door (repository) that attempts to do just this. To prototype a different approach, he created a .gov domain look-up tool that pulls from the data provided by .gov, and I wrote copy and designed a simple page to accompany this.

Hopefully, this is an inspiration to those who manage the .gov service that we can be less bureacratic in the .gov registry user experience. Many local governments are less technical and have little resources to apply for a process that appears to be cumbersome. The experience should be welcoming, compelling, simple and seamless.

Let’s set a goal that all U.S. government websites have a .gov extension by the end of 2023. And let’s re-imagine the experience so that we realize this ‘100% .gov’ goal.

If you are responsible for an official government website, please go .gov.

Photo of Luke Fretwell

Luke Fretwell is the founder of GovFresh and co-founder and CEO of ProudCity.

Topics

License

This work by GovFresh is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Thoughts

Ideas, opinions, observations.

Joyful democracy and the virtuous civic circle

By adopting a simple public engagement framework, we can build a more inspired government, together.

Luke Fretwell

Screenshot of USA.GovFresh notifiable diseases page.

Civic hacking CDC notifiable diseases

Building a map of weekly notifiable disease cases across the United States.

Luke Fretwell

Screenshot of USA.GovFresh jobs page.

Civic hacking USAJOBS

Re-imagining federal government job openings with the USAJOBS API.

Luke Fretwell

Thoughts

Support

Thank you for supporting our work.

Support

Subscribe

Stay updated.

Subscribe

Suggest

Help make GovFresh better.

Suggest