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We’ve wanted to try out artificial intelligence (AI) for a few years. We get tons of questions from the public, and wanted to see if automation could help us answer them quicker. We also knew that scams are one of the top tasks for our website and contact center audiences. In late 2018, we blended our exploration of AI and expertise in scams to launch our chatbot.

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 requires federal agencies to create products and information that give employees and members of the public with disabilities access that’s “comparable to the access available to others.” But 45 years in, many teams and organizations across government still struggle to meet this mandate.

After 15 years, GobiernoUSA.gov, the trusted source of government information in Spanish, begins a new era. As part of our fifteen year celebration, we are announcing our new name: USAGov en Español.

The outreach team has been partnering with federal agencies for years to share government information with the public. Recently, we launched our partnership toolkit to demonstrate exactly what our team does, show which agencies we’ve teamed up with in the past, and initiate conversations with potential new partners.

But, once you visit the toolkit, you may be asking yourself some key questions: How does that partnership really begin? Who will I be talking to? How will I know what to expect?

We scheduled an online workshop to discuss how to improve and reorganize our Military and Veterans section. We all were teleworking the day the event was planned, so it became a 100 percent virtual session – which ended up being remarkably successful! We wanted to share some of what we learned to be best practices.

How We Organized the Workshop

The tools we used: