What You Missed: Live Chat on Improving Federal Websites

On Tuesday, July 12^th the White House Director of Digital Strategy Macon Phillips, Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra and Director of the GSA’s Center for Excellence in Digital Government Sheila Campbell answered your questions from Facebook, Twitter and WhiteHouse.gov on ways to improve the online experience with Federal websites.

Watch the live chat on improving federal websites here.

As part of the continuing efforts of the Campaign to Cut Waste, an initiative launched last month by the President and Vice President to root out wasteful spending, the Administration has put a halt to the creation of new websites and set a goal of halving the number of separate, stand alone sites over the next year, through consolidation of existing sites or shutting down sites that are no longer needed.

As a first step towards understanding what’s working and what isn’t, the Administration posted the list of existing dot gov domains, invited feedback from the public, and will reach out to experts from the public and private sectors to develop an efficient and effective Federal government website policy that will ensure the American people can easily access the information they need. Moving foward, the .Gov Task Force will oversee all of these efforts, always looking for more ways to keep the conversation moving.

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The questions below are paraphrased from the questions asked by participants during the live chat:

• Why doesn't the federal government consolidate the dot gov ecosystem to one portal,content management system,and consistent brand under USA.gov?
• What happens to sites that get consolidated?
• What are you doing to ensure that when you eliminate websitesinformation content is not lost? How do you ensure that if you have fewer websites that they don't get too complicated or organizationally difficult for American's to use? What criteria will you be using to determine which websites you will be eliminating?
• Search is the way people search for info now, so why isn't that the default?
• What is being to done to ensure the process of consolidation is done quickly?
• What will happen to sub-sites?
• How can the public give input into the process?
• Domain consolidation seems like a good idea but it doesn't really address cost cutting. Wouldn't Data farm consolidation save money?
• Can we help by providing .com websites that are actually .gov websites?
• Is consolidation a foregone conclusion? Why would we want school kids and tax lawyers going through the same site?
• Review of .gov site top tasks needs to recognize that some tasks are not actions, but providing basic information and publications.
• It feels difficult to get in touch with White House directly, what are you doing to improve that?
• Where do content creators and owners fit into these consolidation efforts?
• The initial announcement said that 2,000 urls fanned out to 24000 websites. Can you talk about how were consolidating websites?
• How can IT and web managers better collaborate across government to leverage best practices,and lessons learned to improve services together?