Help build open inter-agency Communities, the U.S. Digital Registry and more

[Justin Herman - TAE]

Greetings Open Government colleagues, 

I hope your week is moving along productively -- and would like to invite some collaboration on how to build more publicly transparent inter-agency Communities. 

Last week we announced the launch of two new inter-agency programs -- Artificial Intelligence for Citizen Services and Virtual/Augmented Reality -- and while all our 16 inter-agency Communities work to varying degrees to make sure their projects are publicly shared, I thought this would be a great fresh start to build these from their inception as open as we would like to see them, serving as a model that other projects can then follow. 

If you'd like to discuss what that could look like, or have other models to share, please let me know -- I think this is a great opportunity to crank up the dial on what we think is possible moving forward, and while I have some ideas on it, I bet together we can build something better. 

Also of Open Government interest in that announcement (but got drowned out by the AI and VR attention) was the launch of the public-facing dashboard of the U.S. Digital Registry. For the first time, anyone can now browse the authenticated, official U.S. federal government accounts in the Registry by platform, agency, tag, and language. This is just the first iteration, and we certainly look forward to refining both the interface and most importantly the data itself in the coming months. If you're not aware of the U.S. Digital Registry or the vision behind its development, here's a good start. 

Thanks everyone, and have a great day. 

Best regards, 

Justin

Justin Herman

Digital Communities + U.S. Digital Registry + Open Government

Technology Transformation Service

U.S. General Services Administration

**To join more than 8,000 managers across government in one of our Communities -- 16 inter-agency collaborative platforms for analysis, development and implementation of innovative policies and programs -- visit our homepage.

[Lucas Cioffi]

Hello Justin,

Thanks for your public request for feedback on how to improve some of the federal communities of practice.  It's great to see that many of them have strong momentum.

From what I can tell from the link you shared, most of these communities are based around email discussion lists.  Email lists are certainly useful and easy for people to use, however I would recommend making several other tools available for each of these communities.

1. Video Chats: There's no better way to build deep member-to-member relationships online.  A community is the sum of its relationships.

2. Shared Calendar: This makes it easier for people to know about upcoming in-person and online events while reducing email traffic.

3. Weekly Email Newsletters: Letting each member share one link per week is an efficient way to distribute a large amount of information while further reducing email traffic.

4. Slack: Live written chat is a great complement to email discussion lists when certain conversation topics require many rounds of quick back-and-forth.  I've built a "standup" bot where community members share what they're working on and whether they have any obstacles, just like agile software teams often do.  With Slack's interface for building bots, the sky is the limit.

For the past year, I've been experimenting with integrating all of these tools.  Here's an example community for civic innovation (90 members) and the corresponding Slack community (146 members) that it is integrated with at an app-to-app (API) level.  We hosted an online conference with video breakout rooms last week with 45 registrants and as you're well aware the unconference format is very empowering for in-person and online communities (so I'd say that your communities should each try hosting one).

Being very transparent, I'd love to help stand up some new communities for the GSA; please let me know if I can help.

Lucas Cioffi

Founder, QiqoChat

Founder, Civic Tech Code School

Charlottesville, VA