Intranets are similar. In March 2007 I was asked to redesign the intranet for GSA’s National Capital Region. I worked on a team with Ann Everett, NCR’s Regional Administrator, and Terry Forline.

The first task was to establish our goals. We decided to improve the layout, brighten the color palette, and reposition links to improve the functionality of the intranet for our users. We also wanted our intranet – which we call NCR InSite – to save users significant time and money. Dell estimates that its intranet creates annual productivity gains of $36 million. Government intranets are different and it’s hard to see what is done behind their firewalls – but we found Australia has some excellent oldie but goody intranet best practices online.

Our second task was to learn what tasks GSA staff wanted to accomplish on NCR InSite, and what they hated the most. We sent out an email to over 1,200 employees to ask for their help to make NCR InSite better. 1 We got back over 135 responses – a response rate better than 10% which is stellar.

Within a month our team had made most of the changes pinpointed in the survey. We made significant headway towards implementing most of the changes people had asked for. And the best outcome was that our employees were pleased with the results and proud of their InSite, bragging that it was one of the best within GSA. We couldn’t make all of the changes that everyone asked for, but we did at least ask people what they wanted. Listening to users can be very powerful.

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Email to NCR InSite users sent March 2007

Help us improve NCR InSite

We are committed to improving NCR InSite to ensure that it meets your needs – provide basic information and tools that you need to do your job effectively, information about jobs, pay, benefits, and services; and help employees learn more about GSA’s businesses, policies, and programs.

Recently, work has begun behind the scenes to expand and improve NCR’s Insite. For example, events have been added to the NCR calendar. Users can more easily NCR’s shuttle schedule, cafeteria menu, and remote email address, as the icons on the horizontal navigation bar are now identified with text reflecting their purpose. The cafeteria menu is up-to-date.

However, we need your help to ensure that the revisions reflect your needs. We would like your opinion and feedback on your visit to our website so that we might redesign it in a manner that is more user friendly and is more efficient for you and for others. We hope you take the time to help us by completing a brief survey. All information collected from the survey will be kept confidential and only will be used in support of improving NCR’s InSite.

Based on the feedback we receive, we will improve NCR’s InSite to make it easier to use. We expect to be implementing these changes over the next few months and will inform you in advance of the changes so as to minimize any disruptions or inconvience.

We are looking forward to the opportunity to hearing from you, and helping you have a more productive experience using NCR InSite.

NCR InSite Survey Results

Survey conducted from 3/21 – 3/30/07

3. What is the most important content you would like to see developed for future inclusion on the NCR InSite?

Search

1. Better Search Engine that is effective for valuable info retrieval.

2. A reasonable and simple search system – maybe modeled after google.

3. Not content, but a good search engine for the site

4. Search features and the documents they produce need to be more relavent

5. A search engine that works better would help.

6. A better search engine

7. Better search results

8. Better Search String

9. Search feature needs improvement, old pages need to be updated or removed

10. Search effectiveness is poor.

11. Word search database

12. There needs to be a better search function for locating topics within InSite

13. Better search function for finding regulations and related memo(s) and interpretations of GSA/NCR relevant policies particularly for the financial/budget and real estate communities.

14. I would like my searches to require no more than 3 clicks. I also think that it will help the user to know what information is included in the words shown in the screen. The best websites allow you to run the cursor over a “title” and see in a summary of what it refers to. A final suggestion is to make the GSA Form database user friendly.

Organization charts

1. NCR Directory with photographs and Office

2. Org chart related to personnel locator with a link to the PBS Portal

3. A more detailed organization chart

4. Organization guide to show all employees by organizational unit

5. Provide organizational charts for the NCR that provide links to information on services and contacts in respected organizations. example, in the PBS area, Potomac Service center. What customers and buildings are they servicing-a map of their area using GUI may be useful, what are the key projects with points of contact, being worked on or are in the planning phase. Overall find our Web site to be useful and easy to access. Also, linkage across all our business lines may make it easier to locate key contacts on projects. Hope this information is useful.

6. There needs to be a quick way to find Organization Charts along with names of key players. A photo of each party would be even better. I saw this on another regions InSite and found the Org. Charts invaluable.

Events and News

1. Homeland Security and COOP advisories should be featured in a Breaking News format – maybe consider text messaging.

2. More NCR internal news.

3. Put all event announcements in right side following other news announcements.

4. Regional Happenings

5. Cafeteria and Lunch time specials.

6. Employee news.

7. Upcoming events, with background information.

8. Need to make the calendar of events more visible and usable.

9. Future developments – please feature this.

10. Different manner of presenting “what’s going on in NCR.” Current look is old and boring

11. Stop lights on how we as a region are doing with performance goals.

Human Resources

1. This may have been corrected, but the HR tab within NCR Insite are not user friendly and information should be updated

2. HR Guidance for Supervisors

3. This is not very important. But I would like to have the calendar that shows the shows the holidays and pay dates for the year.

4. GSA Jobs website – Ready & available for GSA associates

5. I would like to see more job information on the quick hire process.

6. HR info should be current and complete. Associates should be compelled to fill in complete details and update them promptly when there is a revision. Announce relocations of persons like contracting officers and project managers.

7. Would be nice to see Performance Review / dates of APPAS actions somewhere – maybe on calendar – so employees and managers could plan ahead of time for this process. A simple how to guide, with a phone number of someone in HR concerning APPAS issues, would be wonderful.

8. Create a section for the new employees so we know who they are when we see them and they feel welcomed. Also create a section for retiring employees so we are aware of this and can make plans ahead of time.

Conference Rooms/Hotels/Restaurants/Meeting Resources

1. Prop Dev. Conference Rooms and other support

2. Listing of conference rooms.

3. A list of nearby restaurants, cafes, eateries, etc. would help out employees, contractors and visitors.

4. List of hotels, conference rooms, and meeting facilities for planning future meetings.

Employee Locator

1. Phone book could be more user friendly. You have to have the correct spelling or it will not find items.

2. I recommend that a cleanup be made of the Employee Locator database. There are multiple problems with hyphenated names, middle names, initials added to the first name, as well as nicknames.

Credit Union

1. GSA Credit Union Information

Navigation/Links (specific)

1. Phone numbers for the building manager’s office and the IT help desk should be MUCH easier to find (should be one click away from the home page). Link to Current Clips would be helpful. Occasional graphic, pictorial and-would liven things up a bit. It’s a helpful, well-run site, though. Thanks!

2. Links to other GSA Region’s intranet sites

3. Need better layout, make easier to find things (example – PBS customer list is hidden in PBS organization)

4. I like the fact that you can now see the icons. Please add the Motor Pool to the icons.

5. Make the overseas travel in E2 work.

6. Link to Central Office pages with contacts or organizational structure

7. Direct links to other regional offices

8. When titling resources, please ask the users to assist in the actual naming. Too often, names are dreamed up that no one knows what it might refer to. Experienced persons such as our contractor, Mark, can give some insights in this regard.

9. The links to policy documents needs to be clearer. There should be links to GSA Insite for National Policy on the same topics, while you looking at the regional information.

10. Please underline links! It is so annoying that you have to mouse over stuff to see if there is a link in it.

Social Networks/Communities of Practice/Knowledge Management

1. I believe each office should have a Questions Aswered and Comments staff to share information that may not trickled down to staff from management and for those employees who are not invited to attend informative meetings to be aware of recent policy, and procedural changes.

2. Communities of Practice – Social Networks

3. Isn’t there a Toastmaster’s club that meets regularly in the NCR ROB cafeteria?

4. It might be nice to know who/where/ are the residential experts on a variety of topics. . Such as “need information on” hoteling, where can a notary be found, carpooling, and other information that our colleagues might have a need to know

5. ‘Virtual library’ with form and other info, better-organized links (categorized)

InSite Design/Graphics/Images/Updates

1. The homepage needs to be more creative. Suggestions: along with the GSA symbol and flag at the top, make the main page a little more colorful, maybe changing according to the seasons (cherry blossoms for the Spring).

2. More images (very boring looking now)

3. Home page needs to be more attractive and colorful with graphics

4. I think the site is outdated and it appears from the surface (front page) to offer very little real value. I am sure there is a lot of useful information on InSite, but the site appears to static and hard to believe that it’s being updated at all.

5. Employees who use the tools and features need to be on the main page in bold. Easier to read, no searching, and the important features are on the front page instead of listing all tools on the side, they become very confusing.

PBS Specific

1. Samples of A&E Solicitation using the 2 step process

2. Being able to search by building address on the Building Locator search page would be nice. Thank you!

3. A continuously updated list of all the building managers and their assistants in all the GSA-operated buildings.

4. As an engineer I would like to see more topics on being more energy efficient.

5. Is it possible to access the database for lease files through Insite?

6. The site should be easier to navigate, the colors are boring and provide users with links to more in-depth information about and for the different PBS divisions

Miscellaneous

1. IT

2. Can’t think of anything at this time

3. More timely content – and less broken links.

4. None

5. Don’t have any suggestion.

6. The site is very well developed

7. Better organization of site.

8. Better organized – – terrible way to locate anything the site is confusing

9. Maybe an icon you can click on that give a short description of all of the different locations on the website so that it would be easy to see what is available.

10. I have none in mind.

11. At this time I can not think of anything that will improve InSite, it is very useful in its current format but taking this survey has encouraged me to take the time to surf through more topics to learn to better for navigating purpose.

12. Hot Links

Annette Cheek (USA), plainlanguage.gov, presentation – Google docs

Annette gave an insightful and amusing history of Plain Language and an overview of how a small group of people decided to make a federal law and how they did it. That alone was worth the trip across the Atlantic. I asked how will agencies be measured if their websites are written in Plain Language? Maybe the ACSI survey could ask users to rate the simplicity of the writing? Maybe it will

Helena Haapio (Finland) – Communicating Contracts – when text alone is not enough.

Because so many of my agency’s staff are contracting officers, I was eager to learn more. Helen’s handout had many tips on using tables, illustrations, and examples of succinct and simply written phrases. She also talked about the well known example of The Comma That Costs 1 Million Dollars (Canadian).  Rogers Communications and Aliant had a contract dispute over a contract containing  a sentence with 45 words, with a comma that a court interpreted as meaning that Aliant could renegotiate it’s five year contract after only one year.   My contracting officer coworkers have found it useful and intesting.

Thomas Mueller (Germany),  of Siegel + Gale, the cost of complexity

This presentation stated that brands who provide customers with simple communications and processes have great ROI.  Also available is the 2010 Global Brand Simplicity Index: United States.  An alternative title could be – if you aren’t writing in plain language and providing excellent usability to your customers you could be leaving money on the table. The lowest ranking brands for simplicity were utilities and financial institutions. If you invested your own money in companies rated highest in providing simplicity in their communications and interactions, your investment would outperform all others. Siegel+Gale has a blog with entries on simplicity – worth reading.

Sue Owen (Australia) , Using plain language in emergency warnings.

Sue spoke of how – tragically – many people did not understand that they should evacuate due to bushfires and floods in the Victoria province and subsequently lost their lives. A hearing determined that the warnings were written in dense, unclear, and ambiguous terms. Afterwards new guidance was issued requiring disaster warnings issued in Victoria to use clear language, avoid euphemisms, and contain specific information in relation to:
• the severity, location, predicted direction and likely time of impact of bushfires on specific communities and locations; and
• the predicted severity of impact of the bushfire and whether a specific fire poses a threat to human life.

The warnings must address and answer these questions:

• where is the threat?
• when will it be here?
• how bad will it be?
• what they can/should do

Cathy Baskerfield (Australia) – A synopsis of research when writing for people with limited literacy skills. Her presentation covered research on how to better reach the population with low literacy.  Much of any country in the world has at least 20% of its population coping with low literacy (immigrants, disabled, the elderly, indigeneous) . She postulates that Plain Language and information design is inherently interdisciplinary. Slides 26 – 33 show that combining good graphics with text:

• Can improve comprehension
• Support relationship among ideas
• Show spatial relationship
• Change adherence to information, for example, taking prescription tablets

Retention how many users are still present (i.e. % of 7-day active users in a given week still active 3 months later).

Task success efficiency (e.g. time to complete a task), effectiveness (e.g. % of tasks complete), and error rates. It makes sense to add a scale to UX measurements. Couldn’t it go to 11? Is it wrong to apply usability metrics to UX?
Title of Study
Results Notes 7. Large organizations need to track and compare their online sales, customers and trends such as shopping cart abandonment. http://blog.goecart.com/index.php/proven-website-conversion-tips/ Creation of overall framework to measure several factors to better identify causality. PULSE metrics: Page views, Uptime, Latency, Seven-day active users (i.e. the number of unique users who used the product at least once in the last week), and Earnings. Most of this data is proprietary and unavailable. Large ecommerce firms (Amazon, Ebay, Facebook) do have inhouse models and ongoing studies but this data is not shared nor publicly available. Title of Study
Results Notes 8. How can Blackboard, Inc. better capture feedback and improve the UX on its web pages and software products?Presented at UX BarCamp DC in Jan. 2011http://www.slideshare.net/bbuiax/design-for-the-rudes Blackboard created a framework for capturing user feedback. RUDES: Reliable, Useful, Delightful, Engaging, Simple. Users rate each experience as the RUDES and is asked if each component exceeds, meets, or misses.Unknown – appears to be a work in process. Unknown. Blackboard staff stated that scaling factors were necessary to make better design decisions. They did not disclose how this data would be collected, analyzed or used. Worth noting that the desired answer is positioned first. How good is a survey if one tries to influence it so strongly? Title of Study
Results Notes 9. Fornell, Claes. (2011) “Citizen Satisfaction with Federal Government Services Plummets While Satisfaction With Government Websites Remains Strong”. News release and commentary.http://www.theacsi.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=236&Itemid=259 Nonsensical – agencies mission’s vary so widely that to compare satisfaction rates means nothing. Can one compare NASA to IRS? TSA to DOI? The popup survey ACSI reports scores on a scale at the national level for more than 225 companies, and over 200 federal or local government services. causes and consequences of customer satisfaction. The surveys vary among websites so comparing one federal agency’s score to anothers is not comparable – yet it is widely done.
]]> http://joyrenee.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/usability_ux/feed/ 0 joyrenee http://joyrenee.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/greatweb/ http://joyrenee.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/greatweb/#comments Fri, 25 Mar 2011 11:03:28 +0000 joyrenee http://joyrenee.wordpress.com/?p=201 ]]> Your web page is the front door to the public and to your customers. It’s the first thing that most people see. Your web pages creates impressions and brands your agency. I agree with Candi Harrison that we must strive to create a positive image and provide great customer service.

To create a powerful, positive brand as a caring, proactive customer oriented agency we must create government web pages that follow these rules:

1. Audience - specify your audience – in the first sentence if possible:
a. Citizens/Industry/Agencies/Contracting Officers/Attorneys/Industry can find . . .
b. If its unclear – use “Are you looking for . . . ?”

Boring pages start with xxx agency provides aaaa services to bbbb. Defining your audience puts your customers first – where they belong.

2. Task - identify the tasks someone can complete. Make easy for your users to register for an event, sign up for a newsletter, buy your products/services, contact you, or fill out a form. Easy means just that – a user unfamiliar with your page should be able to figure out who its for and what they can do on your page within ten seconds. Usability testing is available from GSA’s First Fridays. Also refer to usability.gov for guidelines your pages should follow.

3. Readability – your pages should be readable at the 8th grade level – use the SMOG index to check them. Do this now as all federal web pages will have to be written in Plain Language by Oct 2011.

4. Brevity – are your web pages concise? Short so users don’t have to scroll? Be considerate of your busy user’s time.

5. Current – are your web pages up to date? Check to be sure that announcements within news releases, publications, powerpoint presentations, speeches and/or blog posts are also included on your web pages. This is also an OMB requirement.

If your web pages meet all of the above – congratulations! If not, don’t worry about it – do something about it. Take steps to address these problems. Most web pages are constantly evolving. Call it continuous improvement, agile, six sigma, or whatever you like – but do keep working on your web pages to ensure that your customers get the very best that your agency and you can give.

And yes – federal web policies, best practices and guidelines – apply to all web pages including yours. Everyone appreciates an easy to read page. No one has ever read a web page that gave guidance on an important issue and thought – “Wow, I wish that was harder and more complicated.”

We all search for information, stumble upon pages and need to quickly decide if we are following the right information path. Help your customers, and help your agency make a better impression on how well it delivers great customer service.

1. Our users did not read our homepage to navigate or follow links. Instead, they just searched. We’ve spent so much of our resources on crafting navigation paths and menus. Our users want only quality search results.

2.  When our users searched, the search results were not optimal. We need to reallocate our resources to ensure our search results help our users complete their tasks.  Now that we know how important search is – we need immediate resources dedicated to ensuring search engine optimization.

3.  Users scanned our pages, looking for keywords that made sense to them. Their keywords were not our keywords. We assumed that users used our jargon but users searched using simple words and not our program names. If the information was at the bottom of the page the users questioned why it had been put there – it seemed that they thought important information (to them) belonged in only one place – at the top of the page.

4.  Users sometimes didn’t trust the links on our pages even when it seemed that it was the correct one for them to select to complete the task. They would look at us and ask if they should click it. Why wouldn’t they just follow the link? Why were they hesitant? We don’t know the answer to this question.

So we’ve learned a lot from our users, and need to put the information together in a presentation for our program managers. I’ll write more about that in my next blog.

(excerpt from an at work “Brownbag” working lunch. Presented via this blog to take advantage of links to real time conversations – which is part of the attraction of Twitter).

Twitter: ITS’ Twitter account is GSA_ITS.

Background and experience: I became acquainted with practical uses of Twitter – vs. the useless ways – when I used my personal Twitter account – joyrenee - to publicize GSA regional events. This strategy was so successful that we formally adopted Twitter at GSA FAS ITS, and as of March 2010 it is the third most followed Twitter account at GSA.

Best uses for Twitter: Outreach, search engine optimization, brand awareness and surveillance.

Outreach: To promote events, training, conferences, conventions, speeches by senior management, news releases,  job openings, blog posts by senior management, and other noteworthy GSA or GSA-related people and activities. Not everyone will come to your website to learn about these things – but millions of people are on Twitter. Fish where the fish are.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): tweets show up in a Google search. Tweets also show up in a Twitter search. So by tweeting you are exponentially increasing the possibility of this tweeted information to be found. NOTE: you must tweet a url for this to work. Hint: tweet the url with a link shortener that will provide a count of the number of times users clicked through your tweets. Include the appropriate hashtag(s).

Brand awareness: often organizations have a name or image that is problematic – one that doesn’t fully convey who they are or what they do. Tweeting regularly with noteworthy accomplishments, did you know? factoids, that link directly to web pages about those programs can help deepen understanding and awareness.

Twitter strategy: An organization should create its own Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for tweeting, retweeting, and responding to tweets and direct messages. Generally tweets should:

1. Include a url so a user can accomplish a task (register for an event, training or conference, learn more about an organization (be a donor, buy something, find their address or contact information, etc.) or attend a speech or press conference). Use URL shorteners that provide tracking of how many times a user clicked on the link that was tweeted.

2. Be scheduled all at once by 9 a.m. with tweets occurring every half hour. The earlier you tweet in the morning the more likely it is to be retweeted.

3. Be funny, snappy, and personable. Boring tweets that are blatant advertisements are a waste of your time and your users’.

4. Follow those with an affinity to your organization and many of those followers may follow you back. Advanced Twitter users create lists of Twitter accounts and curate those lists. For example, @GSA_ITS has Twitter lists: Cybersecurity, Cloud, Telecommunications, Government Agencies. @GSA_ITS is itself listed on over 100 Twitter lists. This topic deserves its own blog post.

Surveillance: involves searches twitter conversations to find out what is being said about one’s organization, program, or self in the twitterverse. GSA = http://search.twitter.com/search?q=gsa Corporations and organizations such as DHS and the Air Force mine Twitter for rumors and disinformation.

I have a personal example of how Charter cable reacted to my tweet that my cable service was out =

Screenshot of Charter's conversations to me on Twitter

Twitter, as you can see, is not a one way conversation, but more of a collection of many multi-threaded conversations.

Hashtags: an illustration of a conference currently underway now and using the hashtag g2e

Twitterfall: an illustration of a GSA Expo Twitterfall

Biz case for Events – after the GSA.gov home page was revised in Jan 2008 and the listing to all GSA events disappeared.  Regions became inundated with calls from people looking for events, specifically the “How to get on a GSA Schedule” which is offered monthly by almost every one of the GSA regions. Almost magically, when these events were tweeted, the attendance at the events increased, and sometimes exponentially. Small business training courses at NCR, which usually had 40 – 60 attendees, zoomed to over 100 attendees.

Metrics:Link statistics from URL shortening service http://go.usa.gov

Link statistics from URL shortening service http://bit.ly

Changes to the ITS Twitter approach: recently we reached out a team approach where poc’s can tweet directly through the GSA_ITS Twitter account. This was announced on Tuesday and we look forward to proving usernames and passwords to poc’s so the GSA_ITS Twitter account outreach reflects the wisdom of the hive.

Viewing the statistics I’ve noticed when comparing visits to web pages vs. files – web pages get significantly more traffic. Users prefer web pages over files. Every website I’ve ever worked on, the users visit web pages much more than they click on and download any file on that same website.

Or to say it a different way, if you share info via word, pdf, excel, or ppt – few users will view it because they won’t download it. Users will view that same information on a web page, however, if you offer them that choice.

Based on this observed behavior, I counsel my internal clients to share info via html / web pages whenever possible.

But I needed statistics – a measure, a margin, a percentage that expressed users’ file hating behavior.

Yesterday an intern crunched our January 2010 WebTrends visitor data for web pages and files. The result?

For our webpages, a user is 37.94 times more likely to click on a web page than a file. Or, there are 37.94 visits to a webpage for every one file downloaded.

Now that metric – 37.94 – may vary from site to site, but I thought it was a metric worth sharing.

This user behavior can be explained in many ways. Web pages are:

- faster, and users are impatient;
- more accessible for mobile phone users;
- less likely to carry a virus/worm (you really don’t know the file type is what it says it is);
- easier for the disabled users to view with assistive technology;
- better optimized for search engines;
- more usable as user does not have to reframe content in new rendering; and
- serves a greater number of users (not all have the plug-ins required to render word, pdf, excel or ppt files).

I hope this mantra – 37 times more likely – will help all of us when we get a request from our internal clients who want to post a ppt, word, excel or pdf file.

–
Joy Gatewood Fulton
Facebook: http://profile.to/joyfulton
Linked in: www.linkedin.com/in/joyfulton
Blog: joyrenee.wordpress.com/
Twitter: www.twitter.com/joyrenee
Twitter: www.twitter.com/gsa_its

The discussions in the hallways were often as interesting as the official classes. Sometimes the students in the atrium couldn’t hear over the animated conversations taking place and someone would have to shout for everyone to be quiet.  Some people attending that I knew included Bev Godwin, Leilani Martinez and Sheila Campbell of USA.gov, Jeffrey Levy and Kay Morrison of the EPA, Gwynne Kostin of DHS, Lisa Wolfisch from the Census, Claudia Isaacoff from the Coast Guard, and Mark Drapeau of the NDU (@Cheeky_Geeky). Lurita Doan was there, as a reporter, as was Daniel Mintz, acting as a volunteer. I met some amazing people who I had only known through Twitter – yes that’s you Sarah Bourne (@sarahbourne)! And it was cool to meet a neighbor I’d met only through Twitter – Noel Dickover (@NoelDickover).

I feel grateful for all those who made this Gov 2.0 Camp possible, and am so inspired by the brilliant presentations of people who are so knowledgeable and passionate about finding better ways to use technology and trying to get us all feeling that Gov 2.0 groove. I’ve included an overview of sessions I took notes on, with links. Enjoy!
======================================
Highlights

-Twitter: the Air Force led a fascinating session where they presented case studies on how they actively use Twitter for outreach AND continually monitor it to find rumors, stop them immediately, avoid a crisis and to respond to bad information being promulgated. The Air Force had some good examples of why they think this is mission-critical. There is a follow up Crisis Communications camp – how to use Twitter and similar services in crisis communications. Many people in the class recommended Ragan Communications for their great seminars on Twitter and how organizations (Ford, GM, Comcast) monitor it for customer complaints – learn more here.  Identi.ca and SMS were mentioned as Twitter alternatives, with SMS being the best proven alternative. Presentation: Rumors Quashed at the Speed of Light. Tips: Air Force uses Hootsuite.com to monitor Twitter. The Mass. State government creates an RSS feed from search.twitter.com, and O’Reilly Media uses TweetGrid. Bit.ly – was recommended as a url shortener and clickthrough counter.

Macon Phillips and Bev Godwin at Gov 2.0 Camp Wash. D.C. Photo courtesy of Eric S. Brown (@ericsbrown), http://www.politicalactivitylaw.com

Macon Phillips, White House Director of New Media, and Bev Godwin, White House Director of Online Resources and Interagency Development. Tweets from this session:@macon wants to inspire innovation stuff outside whitehouse-’we’re not the hub’ very encouraging. RECOMMENDATION: Create a cache of “White House Approved” methods for engaging citizens that any given agency can follow. We want top down endorsement to encourage us: “Go!”

Tweets for Macon Phillips and Bev Godwin to answer or comment on appear on stage with them. Photo courtesy of Eric S. Brown (@ericsbrown), http://www.politicalactivitylaw.com

Tweets for Macon Phillips (@macon) and Bev Godwin (@bevusa) to answer or comment on appear on stage with them. While at first the commentary was related to the first-of-its-kind Internet town hall meeting at the White House, camp goers could and did ask other questions and make other comments. Typical of many, one questioner asked if her agency had to wait to use new media? What permissions were necessary before they could start? Should they wait for a new agency head to be hired? The audience was told that all agencies should use new/social media now. “The White House is HERE at #gov20camp” that’s an endorsement of social media right there. ( Steve Raddick @sradick).

-Video: people who worked on Obama’s campaign and were in charge of creating YouTube videos for that campaign talked about that experience. They said that video was no longer just an add-on, but an important media component that helps citizens visualize important concepts. Without it, all citizens have is text. The class talked about the challenges that federal/state/local agencies would face creating video content. Bev Godwin was there, and made it clear that Section 508 applied to all videos and that all videos made by agencies must be captioned before publishing. They (sorry I did not write down their names) mentioned that the Google Audio Indexing Tool: GAUDI – automatically created transcripts of Obama’s speeches, which was very helpful for their needs.
-Wikis: the EPA talked about how they used wikis to quickly create and maintain documentation internally. The OMB wiki has over 11,000 users. There are over 108 open source engines for wikis at wikimatrix.org Using wikis to develop new employee orientation materials was mentioned as an excellent example – one wiki for new employees (policies, forms, transportation, etc.), one wiki for managers (how to hire, how to request an office, pc, etc.) The Coast Guard mentioned that they are using wet paint as their internal wiki. The media wiki is powering wikipedia. The social media survey indicated that many citizens would prefer to get gov’t information from wikis – over web portals.

-Social Media Survey: Lead by Jed Sundwall of Captura (@jedsundwall) this session was a compelling survey of over 500 users, asking them what type of social media they would want to use to get information from the government, and what kind of info. they would want to receive. Ambient intimacy was mentioned as a term that people feel when they develop online friendships, and something the government should cultivate with citizens. Highly recommended: Social Media Survey.

-Disability: Census has created a fully accessible flash player (Lisa Wolfisch). There is an Accessible Rich Internet Application (ARIA) standard API that can be used for social media sites like Facebook, so why isn’t anyone doing that?  Steve of Maine(@steveofmaine), a self-identified blind guy on twitter, routinely tests and comments on his experiences with various new media applications like Facebook.  Ian Lloyd of WGBH.org is an expert on captioning. Firebox is a free screen reader for Firefox browser. Note: could not find, however try Accessibar for Firefox. There is a Google Accessible Web Search for the Visually Impaired – finds sites that work well with screen readers – and the class wondered if the Google Audio Indexing Tool: GAUDI – could be used to create transcripts for videos or podcasts. If transcripts could be generated automatically, captioning would be faster. Jacob Nielsen recently wrote an article on a new flyout mega dropdown menu done in AJAX which is better for the disabled than flyovers. The Census has figures from 2007 of the numbers of the population that are disabled. Nat’l Fed. Blind has a page where people can report access problems with any page Note: I could not find this.

-The US Now film(actually a UK film production) was premiered at the #gov20camp. Just clips are available now and it is expected to be more available in April 09.

Links to the Gov 2.0 Camp Produced Stuff
Friday, 3/27/09 and Saturday, 3/28/09 sessions.
Murals
Andrew Rasiej of Personal Democracy
Friday Photos
Saturday Photos
#gov20camp Flickr Group

Blog/News coverage:
CNET, Craig Newmark (Craigslist) SFGate.com, and Huffington Post, Air Force, Dorobek Insider, Network Solutions, Federal Times, Nextgov, Personal Democracy, Poynter Online, Seattle’s CTO, Sarah Bourne, Future gov, You2Gov, 13th Floor Governing.com Ellen Perlman (videos of agenda making), (videos of posters, Gov 2.0 Camp Recap, Steve Radick BAH, Viget Labs, Gov Social Media, Diane Cline Mural Maker Extraordinaire, Doug Watson, Future Fed – Microsoft Federal Blog – Trip Report from Gov 2.0 Camp, Paul Canning, Tony’s Place – an Outsider’s Take on Gov 2.0 Camp, Blackstone Technology, Devost, Mindtouch.

Groups for the Gov 2.0 Camp:
Facebook
Gov 2.0 Bar Camp
Linkedin
Twitter
Gov 2.0 Google Group
Govloop

Upcoming events (similar):
MuniGov 2.0 April 10, 2009 Online only
She’s Geeky, Sat. 4/18/009 in McLean, VA.
Coders for Charity – Geeks Giving Back 4/24 – 4/26/09, Kansas City, MO
eDemocracyCamp2 4/19/09, Wash., DC
Enterprise 2.0: Social learning strategies GCN, 4/21/09 Wash., DC
Crisis Communications camp June 13-14, 2009, Wash., DC
Online Social Networks to Support Community Collaboration, Penn State, PA June 25-27, 2009
Gov 2.0 Summit (O’Reilly) 9/2009, Wash., DC
Bar Camps in the USA
Social Media Club event near you – (Google Search)
eGovernment at W3C

*Aliza Sherman founder of Cybergrrl, Webgrrls and Femina.com. Webgrrls paved the way for DCWebgrrls, which morphed into DC Web Women. Aliza founded the first full-service Internet company owned by a woman (1995, Cybergrrl, Inc.

*Shellie Holubek and
*Debbie Weil, co-founders of DC Web Women (formerly known as DC Webgrrls)

Shellie Houbek and Debbie Weil, both tech-savvy women living in Washington, DC, decided to co-found a DC chapter of DC Webgrrls in 1995. Now known as DC Web Women, this group,  which has never charged for membership, supports over 2,000 women in the greater Washington, DC area.

-Shellie Holubek now resides in Paris, France where she oversees her family and her consulting practice there.

-Debbie Weil has become a corporate social media consultant and trainer (specializing in blogging and Twitter) and a sought-after speaker based in Washington DC. Her clients include Global 100 and Fortune 500 companies. She is the author of the widely praised The Corporate Blogging Book published in the U.S. by Portfolio, and also in Italian, Mandarin Chinese and a UK edition. Since 2003 she has written BlogWriteForCEOs, a leading blog on social media marketing. She is also a Top Twitterer in Washington DC with over 3,800 Followers.

*Emma Antunes, one of the original members of DC Web Women, was interviewed by Chris Dorobek about social media at NASA. Listen online

*Jamila White, an active member of DC Web Women, was recognized as belonging to the elite group, 50 of the Most Powerful and Influential Women in Social Media

All of these women are so inspiring – some of the coolest women you’ve never heard of! DC Web Women rock!

A little about me: Joy Gatewood Fulton

Questions for you: How many of you are on
Facebook?
LinkedIn?
Twitter?
Have a blog?
Have commented on a blog?

Futures for English Undergraduates

Library of Congress: Electronic Research Products Editor, Technical Writer-Editor

USAjobs.gov: search for Writer-DC, search for Editor-DC, New Media – Communications & Outreach Specialist

Skills for now and the future -Always be learning

Networking: DC Web Women, LinkedIn, Facebook – groups that hold meetings, such as: