Monday, June 13, 2011

How Many FSA/USDA/Gov Websites Are Needed

At one time (circa 1997) I was assuming each county office and each state office would have its own website. Later I had an exchange with a county executive director on the issue.  Currently if I understand correctly, in FSA the states have their own sites but the counties no longer do.

Today the White House announced an initiative to cut the number of federal government websites. They've frozen the URL's, they're studying what they have, and trying to determine what they should have, as follows:
While it’s pretty obvious that we don’t need thousands of websites, what we do need is a little trickier. Should there only be one federal website? Is a more practical solution a common set of templates and standards so that sites are better connected to one another and more consistent to the public? A task force will consult with experts from the public and private sector to develop a policy for government websites moving forward. If you’re interested in participating in this process
 I'm not sure what I think. In part there's the matter of definition: does USDA have only one website, since fsa.usda.gov is a sub of usda.gov?  Does the user really care, so long as they can find stuff easily?  What about update authority; how widely should it be spread?  My 1997 starting point was one office = one site = one update authority.  That's simple, but it's also very much stuck in the mud of the past.   As a user I'm not terribly concerned with offices.  For example, I don't care whether it's the White House, OMB, the OCIO's, GSA, NIST, or what; I want to find the documents and information I'm interested in.  How the government does that best I'm not sure.

The new Utah.gov website is interesting--it got some rave reviews at govloop.com.  I thought maybe it'd be instructive in the context of reducing the number of websites, but I'm not sure it is.

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