Greenversations

About the author: Larry Teller joined EPA’s Philadelphia office in its early months and has worked in environmental assessment, state and congressional liaison, enforcement, and communications. His 28 years with the U.S. Air Force, most as a reservist, give him a different look at government service.

With decades of EPA service under my belt, I’ve been a part of, and sometimes led, dozens of workgroups aimed at improving how EPA does business. Almost all bore fruit—some with longer shelf-life than others—and it’s easy for me to say that EPA is a good place to raise and lend a hand.

Our initial experience this summer producing the Mid-Atlantic region’s series of podcasts shows what a talented group can do, from scratch and on a shoestring budget. We carefully chose the name “Environment Matters” for our podcast series, knowing that “matters” is both a noun and a verb: we’re providing diverse information about the environment and, we hope in an interesting way, convincing people that what they do everyday makes a difference.

What’s a podcast? Webcontent.gov says it’s “a way of publishing MP3 audio files on the web so they can be downloaded onto computers or portable listening devices, such as iPods …. ” (Please note that they can be video, too.) A best practice to grow an audience is to publish the podcasts regularly. We started on July 25 about saving gasoline, followed on successive Fridays with a unique environmental program for students, water quality monitoring at beaches, a baseball stadium built on a brownfields site, and back-to-school advice for the green-minded. We expect to post two or three a month, and so far there’s been no shortage of topic ideas (and if there’s a little healthy competition among our environmental programs to feature their topics, good).

Back to the collaboration that’s made our quick learning possible. I know, there’s an element of show biz that must be at work here. But “Star Wars” this ain’t, so that intriguing factor can’t explain the enthusiasm and creativity that a dozen people have brought to this environmental education project. The jobs and roles of our podcast team reveal the skills needed to launch “Environment Matters”: senior management for the go-ahead and (surprisingly modest) budget; managers in public affairs and IT to energize and select people for each podcast; communications experts to write scripts, host the podcasts, and coach subject expert speakers; web developers to design and feed our multimedia website; transcribers who make the content accessible to deaf people; and one aspiring movie director with an IT day job; he and his boss are audio editing mavens. (You don’t know your colleagues’ hidden talents until you ask.) And help from our headquarters gave us some needed encouragement. Most of us have known each other for years, but our podcasting has quickly boosted our teamness. Do I sound a bit gushy, after all these years?

Two requests of you: ideas for making better podcasts, and topics you’d like us to cover.

About the author: Jeffrey Levy joined EPA in 1993 to help protect the ozone layer. He is now the National Web Content Manager.

Today, we launched a new design for our Web site’s home page and a bunch of pages that support it. (This is where I was going to thank everyone who contributed, but I ran out of space.) I’m pretty excited about it, but why should you care?

The #1 reason is that it’s easier to do whatever it is you wanted to do. We know your idea of fun isn’t cruising EPA’s Web site. So how have we learned what you want? We looked at our search logs, conducted focus groups, and did surveys. And we talked about what each of our many audiences would want to do on our site.

Now, we haven’t yet converted the entire site. That’s because we’re working to clean up the rest of the site (which is more than 500,000 pages), getting rid of old stuff, rewriting material that looks like it was pulled from a legal textbook, etc. As that gets done, we’ll see about using the new design.

Enough theory. Here are some things I think are especially cool, most of which we’ve never done before:

• Right on the home page, you can search for information about your watershed, learn how your electricity is made, and get the UV Index to protect yourself from the sun. And one click away are a bunch of other resources based on your ZIP code.
• You’ll find all kinds of tips about what you can do at home, at school, in your office, etc.
• We’ve also made it easier to support our mission in a more formal way, whether it’s working for EPA, getting a grant, or joining one of our partnership programs.
• You can watch our latest video, listen to our latest audio, or check out our latest photo, with easy access to the whole collection.
• You’ll also always find a link to our latest Blog Question of the Week (this is a personal favorite - it’s very interesting reading all of your responses!).

I hope you enjoy the new look; it’s just one of many projects we’ve got in the works, like creating a site for mobile phones and exploring social media like YouTube. And let us know how we can use the Web even better to help you get things done, either in a comment here or using the form on our sneak preview page.

About the author: Larry Teller joined EPA’s Philadelphia office in its early months and has worked in environmental assessment, state and congressional liaison, enforcement, and communications.

My favorite anthropology professor at the University of Pennsylvania years ago, David B. Stout (famously, in his playful words, “not a Leakey lover,” but that’s another story), insisted that scientists are culture bound by their own culture—unable to fluently interact with, or even fully understand, other cultures. This teaching came to mind yesterday during a meeting in EPA’s mid-Atlantic regional office to begin defining a new website about “green infrastructure;” make that “natural infrastructure;” no, perhaps it’s “limited impact development?” or was it “green communities,” or “green buildings.”

My sincere motto at such meetings, of course, is “I’m from the public affairs office and I’m here to help.” Indeed, as the regional web content coordinator, my job is to help make our websites useful, targeted communications tools that follow EPA’s web standards and best practices. One of these best practices is content coordination, to minimize repetition, confusion and gaps among related agency web content.

I tried not to show how much the conversation made my head hurt, among a group of earnest, cooperative colleagues who are eager to help developers, planners, elected officials, public works managers, environmentalists and the public guide sustainable development. With such a diverse audience, and so many EPA programs individually focused on different slices of the green development pie, it unfortunately wasn’t my first experience where web communications considerations (the tail) forced us to confront the overlap or gaps between policies and programs (the dog).  Shouldn’t it work the other way? Wouldn’t it better serve EPA, our stakeholders and the environment if related programs were more clearly defined, or combined before turning our attention to public outreach? (These questions aren’t rhetorical; please answer them.)

Our group yesterday didn’t know enough about policy integration our agency may be doing to bring the principles and virtues of these green initiatives together to better serve the many concerned external people. As a result–and this is more intriguing challenge than complaint—we’re seeking some manner of content integration as we conceive and write a new website.

Professor Stout wouldn’t be surprised by what we face, but may I ask, dear reader, do you, too, see what we face as the tail wagging the dog?