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The White House released its Digital Government Strategy, entitled Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People, on May 23, 2012. You can also download the Digital Government Strategy as a PDF (download Adobe Reader).
The strategy is a plan for delivering better online service to the American people, with three main objectives:
The Digital Government Strategy was created from a broad range of input across government: the Mobility Strategy and Web Reform Task Forces, the Office of Management and Budget, the General Services Administration, Federal CIOs, new media directors, and web managers. The Strategy also draws on research from the State of the Federal Web Report (PDF | download Adobe Reader) and public input from the National Dialogue for Improving Federal Websites and the National Dialogue on the Federal Mobility Strategy.
The .gov reform effort began in 2011 as part of President Obama's Campaign to Cut Waste, identifying unnecessary websites that can be consolidated into other websites to reduce costs and improve the quality of service to the American public. The reform effort led to the development of a federal web strategy, which was merged with the federal mobility strategy to create the Digital Government Strategy. This broader initiative focuses not only on website consolidation, but also on innovating with less and delivering better quality content and information to the public across multiple platforms and devices.
In the June 13, 2011, OMB Memorandum M-11-24, Implementing Executive Order 13571 on Streamlining Service Delivery and Improving Customer Service (PDF | download Adobe Reader), agencies are directed to improve online services and eliminate wasteful spending. They must work to manage web resources more efficiently and assure that valuable content is readily accessible and available online. To date, the reform effort has:
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the General Services Administration (GSA), the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the Chief Information Officers Council, and the Federal Web Managers Council are working with agencies to manage this effort. The .gov Task Force, whose members are listed below, is leading this effort.
The list of federal executive branch .gov domains was published July 12, 2011 on Data.gov. It does not include .gov domains/URLs in the federal legislative or judicial branches or from state, local, or tribal governments. It also does not include sub-domains that are below the root domain, such as ers.usda.gov or niaid.nih.gov.
Since each domain can have an unlimited number of potential websites and URLs under them, the total number of websites in the entire federal government is much larger than the number of domains listed on Data.gov. The inventory will allow us to more closely identify the total number of federal websites over time.
The list of domains will be regularly updated and published on Data.gov. Putting the list on Data.gov will have several benefits:
The Federal Chief Information Officer selected the members of the .gov Task Force, representing a broad range of agencies and a mix of perspectives and skills.
Task force members:
We plan to consult with additional subject matter experts, customers, and others as needed, to provide expertise on such areas as user-centered design, search, information management policy, privacy and security issues, and overall Internet trends such as the growth of mobile and social media.
During this initiative we’ve invited you to join the conversation about improving federal websites. Releasing the .gov dataset on Data.gov was the first step. We enabled commenting on the dataset, and considered your ideas and comments as we developed the domain inventory.
As we've seen in other efforts, making government data transparent can spark the creativity of many bright minds across the country. We hope the public will continue to explore, discuss, and remix this data, and maybe even use it to map the .gov domain in ways we haven't seen before.
From September 19–30, 2011, we hosted a "national dialogue"–an online conversation that brought together experts, innovators, and ordinary citizens who rely on federal information every day. We discussed how federal agencies can learn from, and contribute to, the best practices of the modern web. It was a discussion filled with ideas and energy.
If you have questions about the .gov Task Force, contact Alycia Piazza at alycia.piazza@gsa.gov.
Page Last Reviewed or Updated: September 17, 2012