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FCC.gov Announces Open Source Redesign

September 22, 2010 at 6:13 PM ET by
Summary: 
The FCC announces a major overhaul of FCC.gov, leveraging the same open source technology powering WhiteHouse.gov.

The Federal Communications Commission just announced the start of a major overhaul of FCC.gov, aiming to seize a "special opportunity to become an expert technology agency in the federal government." The redesign focuses on making the FCC's web content more relevant and discoverable to the public, as Managing Director Steven VanRoekel writes:

We have been hard at work in redesigning FCC.gov: defining personas of citizens and business both current and potential, building our data infrastructure (as I mentioned in my O'Reilly Media Gov 2.0 Summit talk), combing through first-ever site analytics and user surveys, and talking to people both online and off about how they would reimagine FCC.gov.

At its core, the FCC's new online platform will leverage the same open source technology powering WhiteHouse.gov, and they're planning active engagement with the open source community. We've found open source technology to be a great way maximize the scalability and accessibility of WhiteHouse.gov, and we've even contributed some of the custom code we've written back to the public domain.

For more information about the White House's engagement with the open source community, read more or watch the video from a keynote talk I gave on this topic.