Communities

Transparency, Participation, and Collaboration

Sunshine Week: How GSA Supports Open Government Principles

Sunshine Week (March 13-19, 2022) celebrates the Government in the Sunshine Act, which promotes greater transparency in government activities. Our mission at GSA is to deliver effective and efficient government services for the American people. To do so, we have to be transparent and accessible—by opening meetings to the public, ensuring that federal buildings and facilities are fully accessible to all people, and making information on documents or pages (web pages, PDFs, newsletters, etc.) open and accessible. Learn about some of our initiatives that best display these principles.

GSA Blog Team

Mar 17, 2022

From Fellowship To Full-time: How a CFPB Software Engineer Helped Protect Consumers and Built a Career in Civic Tech

Anselm Bradford, a front-end engineer at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), is using his tech skills to protect American consumers.

Chris Kuang

Mar 07, 2022

Celebrating Digital.gov Communities: 2021 in Review

Happenings, milestones, and data points from the past year.

Toni Bonitto

Ammie Farraj Feijoo

Jan 11, 2022

User Experience

Building a Bureau-Wide Usability Collaboration Group: Lessons Learned from the U.S. Geological Survey

Learn about the U.S. Geological Survey’s Usability Collaboration Area in this short interview with the group’s organizer.

Holly Chandler

Sep 01, 2021

Join the U.S. Web Design System Community

Are you and your team working with the U.S. Web Design System on your site, or have plans to start using it? The USWDS team has a public Slack channel where you can meet other government engineers, content specialists, and designers who are working with the USWDS to build accessible, mobile-friendly websites. — via U.S. Web Design System

Oct 08, 2019

A Conversation With ITIF About the State of Federal Government Websites

Since it’s been nearly six months since their report was released, we wanted to check in with ITIF and see what they’ve learned, what they’ve heard from agencies and what their future plans are to build on this research.

Andrea Sigritz

Sep 20, 2017

Federal Pilot to Integrate Public Services Into Intelligent Personal Assistants

The demand for more automated, self-service access to United States public services, when and where citizens need them, grows each day—and so do advances in the consumer technologies like Intelligent Personal Assistants designed to meet those challenges. The U.S. General Services Administration’s (GSA)

Justin Herman

Apr 24, 2017

Color in Digital Design

How do we choose color in digital design? In print, we have the Pantone fan and what you see is what you get — as long as your printer is color calibrated. With computer monitors, one does not get such precision, even within one office. So how much time and effort do you spend on color selection?

Angela Y. Smithers

Apr 04, 2017

New ITIF Report Inspires a Closer Look at Website Performance and Security—Here Is Where to Begin

The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) recently published a report, Benchmarking U.S. Government Websites, that looks at the performance, security, and accessibility of the top 297 government websites. ITIF is a think tank in Washington, D.C. whose mission is to formulate, evaluate, and promote policy solutions that accelerate innovation in technology and public policy.

Digital.gov Team

Mar 24, 2017

Buzzwords for 2017

Along with the New Year comes new buzzwords. Here are some that you are certain to hear about and see this year. Chatbot Short for ”chat robot,” a chatbot is a computer program that simulates human conversation, or chat, through artificial intelligence. They are commonly found on web sites and used to communicate with a person—you might have seen them

Christen Geiler

Mar 16, 2017

DigitalGov University in Review: 2016 Training Trends

DigitalGov University (DGU), the events platform for DigitalGov, provides programming to build and accelerate digital capacity by providing webinars and in-person events highlighting innovations, case studies, tools, and resources. Thanks to your participation, DGU hosted over 90 events with 6,648 attendees from over 100 agencies across federal, tribal, state, and local governments.

Janelle Thalls

Jan 11, 2017

I’m taking a break from sorting through dozens of concepts from federal agencies about how they want to use artificial intelligence and virtual reality for citizens in the coming months in order to share with you just some of these groundbreaking initiatives of tomorrow that can be explored at a DigitalGov University workshop this week.

Justin Herman

Nov 30, 2016

GSA launches new AI, Virtual Reality, and Authentication Programs

Today we’re launching three new initiatives powered by GSA Digital Communities that leap federal agencies ahead on some of the most innovative new capabilities becoming available to our programs — Artificial Intelligence, Virtual/Augmented Reality, and the U.S. Digital Registry. These new Communities and portal are products of inter-agency collaboration and our shared commitment pushing the

Justin Herman

Oct 26, 2016

GAO to Congress: Federal Agencies Are Making a Difference Through Open Innovation

Federal agencies confront tough problems every day. In searching for solutions, agencies will want to attract different perspectives, test new products, build capacity and communities, and increase public awareness. How do they do it? The answer: open innovation. Federal agencies need to engage and collaborate with all sectors of society, a task made easier by

Eric Beidel

Oct 21, 2016

What is Citizen Science? A Recent Webinar Explores How the Federal Government Engages the Public via Crowdsourcing

From the National Park Service (NPS) to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the use of citizen science has become a prominent factor in the science community and a critical tool for the federal government.

Zohaa Ahmad

Aug 23, 2016

What’s All The Fuss Around Customer Experience?

Have you been hearing the terms “Customer Experience” or “CX” a lot lately? Maybe you’re wondering how they relate to customer service, or maybe you want to learn more about CX and how it can help your customers. Whether you directly interact with customers, support front line employees, or manage program operations, your work has

Alison Sturgeon

Jul 29, 2016

Introducing the Digital Audio/Video Community of Practice

Tech giants have changed the world of broadcast forever. In a little more than a year, video on Facebook went from being a seldomly seen media type on a user’s timeline to a strategic priority for Mark Zuckerberg. The platform now serves over 8 billion video views a day and Facebook continues to roll out improvements

Randy Abramson

Jul 08, 2016

How Agile’s Being Done in Government

The concepts of agile may not be new, but there is a renewed push across government to embrace this customer-feedback driven methodology, in everything from software development to project management. A government community has even sprung up to help feds learn from one another what it takes to incorporate agile into more efficient and effective

Andrea Sigritz

Apr 08, 2016

An Overview of Digital Communities

Digital communities of practice come in many stripes. DigitalGov communities span eight (and counting) focus areas and have thousands of members, but strong collaborations exist in all corners of government. In honor of this month’s communities theme, we are offering a list of communities that foster connections and strengthen the digital capabilities of federal agencies.

Ashley Wichman

Jul 31, 2015

News and Events on Communities