2007 Government Web Managers Workshop -- Lunch Roundtable Discussions
About the roundtables
At the workshop, hundreds of government web managers met to talk about ways to collaborate on developing and maintaining content across agencies. They discussed topic areas such as health; environment, energy, and agriculture; money and business; science; culture and recreation; social services; defense and security; and education and jobs.
Below are the ideas that came out of these discussions:
Ongoing grassroots communication
- Train and educate new staff about the importance of collaboration.
- Know your audience for marketing and communication.
- Collaborate with USA.gov team to help build links in their topic areas that will point to agencies’ top tasks.
- Identify hot topics and discuss them as a community.
- Continue to use Forum listserv to ask for help and communicate with each other.
- Suggest topics for future Forum calls
- Work more closely with state and local governments
- Continue and expand grassroots efforts to collaborate and network with agencies that service similar customers (having lunch and other get-togethers).
- Identify (or appoint) a senior level champion to encourage cross-agency collaboration.
- Create website for federal internships and scholarships (NJ State and HHS agreed to get this started).
Social media
- Develop our own social media tools (blog, wiki, etc.) for our community to collaborate and share ideas.
- Create blogs.gov that would:
- Serve as a platform for government blogs (like blogspot)
- Support an interagency workgroup to develop standard policies and procedures for blogs, standard disclaimers, address institutional obstacles, etc.
- Highlight best practices
- Establish a wiki around certain topics (such as blogs) so web managers can learn from each other.
- Create a collaborative space where agencies can share content suitable for mashups (maps, data, etc.)
Managing content across agencies
- Encourage and collaborate on developing RSS feeds on a given topic.
- Collaborate on developing and implementing taxonomy and information architecture across broad topics.
- Develop content and features around a particular topic that are of current interest to the public.
- Share health risk assessment tools (such as self-assessment tools for breast cancer), make them available in one central place, and improve their usability (Inova and HRSA volunteered to initiate)
- Create library of customer personas that agencies can share (NIH and Usability.gov will do for Health personas).
- Adopt a unified language around common topics. Create thesaurus and glossaries. Create “one language” to use during in-person discussions and digitally.
- Establish topic based forums
Regular meetings of subject matter experts across government
- Create working groups around major topics. Have web content subject matter experts (SMEs) on a particular topic/task meet once a month to discuss how to present government-wide information to the public. At monthly meetings, content SMEs should:
- Share their metrics (survey data, call center data, search logs, most visited resources, etc.) that show the top tasks for that month, and any expected changes for the future.
- Establish baseline goals for how quickly people should be able to accomplish those top tasks -- and monitor progress in meeting those goals at each meeting.
- Discuss ways to increase public awareness around those top tasks (do better SEO, improve usability, write a blog, write email alerts, etc.)
- Monitor how well the public can access top tasks via major search engines (including the search engine on USA.gov).
Collaborate and leverage USA.gov as central point for government services
- Request USA.gov share top search results, top clicks, etc.
- Identify content on USA.gov related to a particular topic and work with the staff of USA.gov to be sure the content reflects the most critical information the public needs, based on their top tasks. The content owners of each topic on USA.gov should meet regularly with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) from across government.
- Request SMEs from across government review the FAQs that USA.gov posts about a given topic and ensure they're accurate and up-to-date
Information sharing
- Post contact list of government web managers on Webcontent.gov—by topic—to help us find each other.
- Periodically share what agencies are doing. Have a place where we can show current projects, accomplishments, etc.
- Submit agency web standards to Webcontent.gov. Identify agencies that have standards, which will increase comfort in linking to each other.
- Share case studies and data about common groups (e.g., kids, seniors, etc.)
- Work together to survey our customers (do it despite the obstacles in surveying the public).
Reviewing government-wide policies
- Collaborate on addressing government-wide policies that affect government web managers (such as cookies policy).
Page Updated or Reviewed: May 14, 2007
