The first time I ever saw a Web site was on a Saturday morning in the West Wing of the White House. Jock Gill, the Clinton administration’s point man on getting the White House itself online, was giving me a cook’s tour. He had a Sun workstation, and called up a page from a site in Japan.
“That’s Japan,” he said, pointing to the screen. Sure, whatever, I thought.
It must have been shortly after the first browser was published and put into hands of regular people. Within a few years, every federal agency had rushed to establish an online presence, years before transactional capability came to the Internet and spawned the e-government movement.
Fast forward to now, and the federal landscape is littered with thousands of sites. Like kudzu, it requires trimming back. Enter detailed guidance from OMB on making inventories of sites, site governance surveys, cost analyses, value metrics, redirect maps. It’s all a fairly dreary come-down from the high of nearly 20 years of planting Web sites.
But the federal government does have too many sites. The Clinton, W. Bush and Obama administrations launched sites of their own, unconnected from any particular agency, for a variety of policy purposes. At least two separate sites track federal spending, with a third tracking recovery spending. Data dot gov falls into this pile. Sites have also proliferated via updates. For example, the FCC is running parallel sites, old and new, in the belief that long-time users learned to navigate and therefore prefer the old one.
The guidance makes no mention of to-be states for updated federal web sites. I have a few suggestions. How about if every department had the same elements in the same place on its home page? Leave a spot or two for developments particular to each department, for sure. But imagine how much easier it would for the public if sites were more predictable.
Another suggestion: Each site should have a people locator, similar to the one at gsa.gov. And each should have a list of people in public affairs – specific people, their areas of expertise, and their phone numbers. Info@xyz.gov similar dead-letter box doesn’t cut it anymore. In practice, most agencies are responsive to messages left in these boxes, but it’s a less-than-best practice. Agency leadership bios should have links to e-mail addresses, even if minions do open and answer the e-mails.
Above all, OMB should issue further guidance that federal Web sites, including that of the White House, should be as free as possible from partisan politics and propaganda as possible. Most agencies in the three Web-era administrations have followed this doctrine to a reasonable degree. But not always. Instances of partisanship are always repulsive. Propaganda can be more insidious because it’s harder to detect. This is where federal career workers can have a braking effect on the tendencies of whomever is in power at the moment.
Federal web sites can and should be great sources of information, portals to the inner workings of government, and places people can get things done. For the most part, they’ve done remarkably well on all counts. Housecleaning and attic-clearing are never fun, but they do provide a good chance to reset expectations and get back to the basics.
Temin on Tech
