During the entire process of standing up this tool, we did a lot of work looking at Section 508 accessibility, usability testing, as well as some of the policy compliance things I talked about. Working with Idea Scale, working with the vendor, we actually baked that functionality into the platform. So now, anybody who goes into IdeaScale.com, signs up, and looks at the back-end, sees a check box that says “Enable Government Compliance”. And that triggers 508 compliance, P.R.A. compliance, all those things that you need to get to action quickly with a platform like this.

In other words, IdeaScale allows an agency web manager to make the social collaboration portions of their Open Government Directive websites almost instantly compliant with section 508 mandates.

“You go to the social media portion of apps.gov. When you find a tool that you want to use, you just click on the enroll button. This will send an e-mail to your agency’s point-of-contact. Your point of contact will let you know if your agency has signed a terms of service with that particular vendor, and how to proceed.”

Sigritz says the New Media office has complied a list of all the points of contact for all the major cabinet-level agencies and independent agencies on the WebContent.gov website, complete with contact information. A link to this list is also on the social media page of apps.gov.

FedSpace will be a social media-enabled collaborative intranet for the federal government. This will provide broader, and yet more secure options for everyone who needs them. There will be an integrated suite of tools that will make it easier for employees to connect to others, and to share knowledge across the federal enterprise. These are the useful web tools we have come to depend on to get our work done. There will be tools for teams to have conversations and to share authoring, and to find information across the federal workforce.

Smith says FedSpace will closely resemble public blogs or wikis now popular with many internet users. In recent years, the nation’s Intelligence Community led the way in implementing social collaboration sites for employees including Intellipedia and A-space.

Its a .gov URL shortener, that you can find at Go.USA.gov. Anyone with a .gov or .mil e-mail address can use it to shorten government URLs. It’s still in beta, but we already have over a thousand users across government who, as you can see by these stats, have been shortening lots of popular URLs.

Godwin says the New Media team created Go.USA.gov for three reasons: first, to allow web managers to maintain the official government brand when you shorten URLs for Twitter, Facebook, text messages, or where ever you have character limitations. She says the shortener “maintains the authenticity of government information, and users can tell it’s government information before they click.” Second, she says its a matter of long term viability. Because its hosted on federal servers, there’s no chance that the short links will go away, as they might with some of the commercial link shorteners like bit.ly and tinyurl.com . Finally, she says, because the link is a .gov URL, it makes it easier to compile information across the federal government, and make that information more valuable.

Godwin also says her group is also developing web tools following a request from the Office of Management and Budget that would allow agencies to use “citizen challenges” or “prize contests” as a tool for citizen engagement. A current example of such a competition is the “Apps for Healthy Eating” contest, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Citizens are being encouraged to help prepare software applications and tools designed to encourage children to eat more healthily.

And they are being enticed by the prospect of a range of prizes.

Finally, Gwynne Kostin, Godwin’s second in command in the New Media office invited fed web managers to apply to be detailed to the GSA Center for New Media, and join what she euphemistically calls “the superhero team.”

“We have people from NASA, we have people from CDC, as well as Tiffany from the State Department. There are opportunities for coders, for project managers, for writers, for people who want to get this stuff for their agencies together. You learn from us, you spread the word in your agency, we spread the good word. Its an awesome thing!”

The Center for New Media also unveiled its new Twitter handle: govnewmedia.

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