Thursday, July 21, 2011

Save.gov and USDA

In effect the White House's Save.gov is the government-wide suggestion site for federal employees. As a retiree I can't participate, but I can offer comments here:
  •  there's a total of 5300 suggestions on the site, maybe 400 or so for USDA.  The 5 "hot" ideas include 3 which are perennials or nonstarters (pay Congress for performance--come on now, be serious).
  • the 80/20 rules seems to apply, a few suggesters seem to be providing many of the suggestions (1 person 80 suggestion). IMHO there's lots of unrealistic and trashy suggestions; perhaps limiting people to their 10 best suggestions would work better.
  • an FSA employee suggested the "dislike" button be added, similar to what FSA has.  Sounds good, but I wonder why FSA needs a separate suggestion site--why not kill all such sites and rely on save.gov
  • the rating algorithm is faulty--it privileges the earliest suggestions. I'd add a percentage of viewers who liked it index.
  • sounds to me as if USDA needs shared calendars (to eliminate emails on schedules)
  • I don't see why there shouldn't be a separate comment/like operation for nonfederal employees
  • I don't know why NASCOE didn't start a quiet campaign on some of their legislative suggestions (like FSA doing all back office work).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The suggestion box sounds like a good idea at first, but there needs to be some immediate action on the easier suggestions if they have merit, and some communication on the outcome of others, in order to keep the process believable. I would say that it would be better to have suggestion boxes attributed to individual agencies rather than the government as a whole as people are not familiar enough with other areas to go much beyond generalities.