News and Updates

Booking a Discount Bus Ticket? Check Carrier Safety Records with QCMobile

The new app from the Department of Transportation’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration called “QCMobile” empowers U.S. motorists to make safety their highest priority on the roadways this spring. This is a continued theme in DOT’s mobile strategy, as they have also recently released the SaferRide app. QCMobile (QC stands

Kevin Downey

Mar 26, 2015

The API Briefing: Free Federal Energy and Economic Information Delivered Straight to Your Spreadsheet

Back in November 2014, I wrote about the Federal Reserve of St. Louis’ FRED® (Federal Reserve Economic Data) API. A user can access 238,000 economic trends through FRED® through a website and mobile apps. What is unique about FRED® is that a user can pull economic data directly into an Excel spreadsheet. Now, the FRED®

Bill Brantley

Mar 25, 2015

HTTP vs HTTPS: Is it Time For a Change?

Data. Security. Privacy. These are the cornerstones of many discussions concerning technology. The security of citizen information when interacting with the federal government will be increasingly important as we progress into the future. A few agencies have begun to use Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) in lieu of the standard HTTP. For these agencies,

Kendrick Daniel

Mar 25, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: Big Data Equals Big Challenges

According to an article from Readwrite, the amount of money going to big data projects is steadily increasing despite widespread failure to achieve many results. For big data-related projects in global organizations, a total of $31 billion was spent in 2013 and that amount is expected to top $114 billion by 2018. The recognition that

Kendrick Daniel

Mar 24, 2015

Usability Design for Kids: Things Federal Workers Should Know

I used to teach 8th grade science in inner city Denver in the 1990s. After that, I supported special education students and their teachers in North Carolina. Around that time (mid-late 1990s), the Internet wasn’t really designed for kids –most of the electronic materials I

Justin Dopke

Mar 24, 2015

Web Metadata Publishing Using XML

Metadata for website content is usually managed as part of the editorial process when documents are created and published with content management systems. There may be another source for this metadata, especially in regulatory agencies: internal databases that reference Web content in support of record keeping processes. These databases may contain public and non-public information

Bob Rand

Mar 23, 2015

The Content Corner: Building a Content Strategy

I recently read a disheartening statistic which stated that only 32% of B2B organizations and 27% of B2C organizations had a documented content strategy. When you combine these results with the general assumption that the federal government lags behind in areas such as this (especially since content strategies have a marketing basis), then the number

Tyrus Manuel

Mar 23, 2015

Structured Content in Government: How HHS and NCI Are Getting Started

Metadata, tagging, content modeling … they’re not identical concepts, but they’re driven by the same basic principle: when you structure your digital information, it can be more easily searched, reused, connected, shared, and analyzed.

Hannah Gladfelter Rubin

Mar 20, 2015

Turning Government Data into Better Public Service

Every day, millions of people use their laptops, phones, and tablets to check the status of their tax refund, get the latest forecast from the National Weather Service, book a campsite at one of our national parks, and much more. There were more than 1.3 billion visits to websites across the federal government in just

Mar 19, 2015

Getting Started with Usability Testing

At the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), our new open data policy will begin making more Agency-funded data broadly accessible to the public. It completely changes the way we do business, and it also means that in the coming years, the amount of data we

Laura Hughes

Mar 19, 2015

DrugShortages App Accelerates Public Access to Drug Shortage Information

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s new “DrugShortages” app gives the public access to important—and sometimes critical—drug shortage information easier and faster than ever before. Drugs in short supply can delay or deny needed care for patients. Shortages may also lead health care professionals to rely on alternative drug products,

Kevin Downey

Mar 19, 2015

Like private sector organizations, U.S. public sector organizations have experienced shifts in how they use both the Internet and social media to interact with the public. The mid-1990s onwards saw an increase in the number of websites helping individual members of the public learn more about various public sector organizations and initiatives directly from

Corina DuBois

David A. Bray

Mar 18, 2015

The API Briefing: Introduction to Web Components

Instead of writing about a specific federal API this week, I want to talk about a new, evolving way of building Web interfaces and complete applications. Web Components allow developers to create their element that extends the HTML5 set of tags. Developers can create a Web Component

Bill Brantley

Mar 18, 2015

Showcase Your Innovation Program at the 2015 Spring Summit

Here is another other opportunity to show DigitalGov innovators what you got! The spring Digital Citizen Services Summit will host an expo, like we did in 2014, where you can showcase your program or service.

Alycia Piazza

Mar 18, 2015

At Last: User Experience Performance Descriptions!

To improve your digital systems with user experience (UX), you need people. And to get people in government, you need position descriptions. While DigitalGov has collected a wide variety of position descriptions,

Jonathan Rubin

Mar 17, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: Big Ideas from Mobile World Congress

Mobile World Congress, the world’s largest mobile infrastructure, software, hardware, product and app show, took place in Barcelona, Spain, and I attended for the fifth time. This year’s show shattered previous records with more than 93,000 attendees across

Will Sullivan

Mar 17, 2015

The Content Corner: A World Without Web Pages

Imagine a world without Web pages, only intelligent, self-assembling chunks of content waiting to respond to your needs. The page is irrelevant, there may be no context beyond what is included in your content. The content has to survive on its own, perform its goals on its own. Originally when creating content, you would take

Tyrus Manuel

Mar 16, 2015

Why Your APIs Need Design Help

Anything built should be built right. It doesn’t matter if it’s built of wood, carbon nanotubes or code. So it’s encouraging that the practice of User-Centered Design—getting customer feedback at every stage of a project—is catching on with

Jonathan Rubin

Mar 16, 2015

US, Canada, and Mexico Collaborate to Improve Open Government and Digital Services

Many forces are converging to strengthen the political, economic and commercial ties that bind the United States, Canada and Mexico. The GSA Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies (OCSIT) has anticipated this drive toward collaboration for decades, building a network of links among the three nations’ Chief Information Officers and other national technology and data experts.

Darlene Meskell

Mar 13, 2015

GoodGovUX Addresses UX of IT Contracts

How do you define user experience (UX)? That was the question posed to more than 100 people at the GoodGovUX event at the Artisphere in Arlington, Virginia, on February 24th. Attendees learned how government can improve the user experience of digital products, from

Jordan Higgins

Mar 13, 2015