WASHINGTON — Let’s say the Department of Health and Human Services wanted to begin an online dialogue with citizens about the obesity epidemic in this country.
Simple, you might think.
The agency could blog about the latest research findings on exercise and nutrition, administer a forum for community discussion or even initiate a challenge asking citizens to design a healthy eating iPhone application. Piece of cake (pun intended), right?
Well, not so fast. Until recently, a project like this could have taken months of painstaking bureaucratic hoop-jumping or, in some cases, was not even possible. But thanks to an ongoing initiative by the General Services Administration, federal agencies can now create these social media tools in a matter of minutes.
Under the auspices of President Obama’s open-government initiative — intended to create a heightened level of transparency, public participation and collaboration with government — the GSA created Apps.gov NOW. The service, available at citizen.apps.gov, is currently in beta testing but is expected to be ready for full launch by the end of the year. It dovetails with Apps.gov, a service launched last year that offers a one-stop shop of third-party-hosted applications and social medial tools for federal agencies.
“One of the key things in GSA’s mission is to create technologies and tools in a way that can help other agencies to up their mission so they don’t have to spend their time doing this front-end work to make these tools policy compliant,” said Betsy Steele, a business development specialist at GSA who worked on the project.
“The way that GSA talks about Apps.gov NOW is pretty straightforward,” explained Alex Howard, a new-media expert at O’Reilly Media, which reports on the government technology sector. “Their software is a service and it’s a storefront. So you go here, you sign up and you can decide to use various things. They’re trying to create simple turnkey access for government to use online web applications.”
Those Web applications, offered free of charge to federal agencies, include blogs, wikis, forums, challenge tools and the accompanying analytics to measure traffic flow.
“[Having the analytics] is a huge plus for us,” said David Hale, a social media strategist at the National Library of Medicine, who has been beta testing the NOW service. Hale is the project manager for the library’s Pillbox project, a joint venture with the Food and Drug Administration. The project focuses on creating a comprehensive image-based solid tablet drug identification and reference system. Although the NLM had been publicizing the project via Facebook and Twitter, Hale said it didn’t feel like they were reaching a wide enough audience.
“The conclusion we came to was, we really need a blog,” he said. “Well we don’t have blogs available to us yet at the National Library of Medicine. We don’t have them available at the NIH. So immediately, GSA steps up and says, ‘We’re going to create this emerging technology platform. We’re going to do all the heavy lifting. We’re going to the do the clearances for it. We’re going to do the 508 compliance. We’ll do the IT security.’ Everything that’s become a bottleneck at agencies, they’re doing for us and they’re providing it to us for free.”
Securing Section 508 compliance, a task notorious for giving federal employee’s headaches, requires that federal agencies’ electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities.
What might seem like a minor, common-sense improvement could actually prove to be a game-changer for agencies because it offers security — the tools are hosted on a secure GSA cloud — as well as savings in time and money. Freeing up precious resources gives agencies the luxury of focusing on the actual problems at hand.
“It essentially costs me nothing more than my time as project manager,” Hale said. “All we have to do here is what you’d call ‘the work.’ We don’t have to do any of the set-up or the maintenance on this.”
To date, 277 federal employees have registered with NOW since the project beta-launched in August and 41 different federal agencies, including the EPA, FDA, USDA and FCC, have already deployed tools from the platform.