Feds Use Crowdsourcing to Improve Government Websites
The White House recently held an open dialogue online to allow citizens to make comments and discuss ideas as part of a scheme to improve the efficiency and helpfulness of government websites.
This was a major government crowdsourcing effort. The consequences of direct popular opinion and the strength of the crowdsourcing method will be seen in the final report. With the tag ‘Help create the .gov you deserve,’ the site employed a simple democratic process for introducing the best ideas. Users suggested ideas and then the community decided on their validity by a simple vote. This theoretically leads to the best ideas passing through the process and becoming a reality.
The commenting and voting period is now closed but users are encouraged to read through the published ideas and prepare for the full report and road map to web reform later this month. Ideas covered a wide range of topics including improving the readability of government sites by switching the jargon-heavy script for plain English. Individual Agencies will also post their Web Improvement Plans on their Open Government Pages on October 11th.
The mission statement on the Web Reform site promises to “eliminate and improve websites that are redundant, out dated, hard to use, or have poorly maintained content.” The scheme is part of the Obama administration’s “Campaign to Cut Waste”.
The rampant proliferation of .gov websites and the resulting confusion has made them the focus for efficiency cuts. “With thousands of unique federal .gov domains and websites, sometimes it can be difficult to find the content you need,” states the Web Reform site. The anti-waste campaign is planning to halve the number of .gov websites over the next year.
Less formal crowdsourcing has already taken place on Facebook and Twitter with discussions about which sites should be closed.
