USA.gov launched “Your Voice Matters” this week. It’s a “public dialog” asking people “What do you think of USA.gov?” It’s a surprisingly blunt question, and it’s getting a wide variety of answers, entered as comments on the dialog website.

I’m answering the question here because my thoughts won’t fit well into a single comment, and I want to provide plenty of links to the thinkers who have inspired me and informed these thoughts. That said, if you have thoughts about USA.gov, I strongly encourage you to share them on the dialog website.

In the interest of openness and transparency (and because they asked), it’s time to say what I really think about USA.gov. As a government contractor, I feel like I occupy an awkward space between public servant and taxpayer—not as noble as a real public servant, and not qualified to be an indignant taxpayer because I’m paid with tax dollars. Nonetheless, I am inclined to public service (I’m just extremely disinclined to living in DC), and I can’t help being indignant.

USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov, here are five things I think about you. This is from the heart, by which I mean the opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent those of my employer. Also, when I say USA.gov, I mean “USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov.”

I think USA.gov needs to recognize its inherent value #

Every way I look at it, USA.gov—as an organization, as a domain, and as a brand—is poised to be immensely successful. What stands out to me:

• Its staff is skilled, passionate, and recognized across government for its leadership and knowledge.
• USA.gov is probably the best URL on the Internet. I’m serious. USA.gov is:
• Easy to say, spell and remember
• Authoritative (.gov!)
• Descriptive
• Flexible (extends nicely to GobiernoUSA.gov)
• Intuitive (worldwide)
• Short
• It represents the government as it exists in most people’s minds—that is, as “the government” rather than a series of agencies and individual governments (This is a common assumption, and I have no research to back it; if anyone can support or refute this statement, please let me know)
• PageRank of 10 (for what it’s worth)

I think USA.gov should stop being a portal #

Despite all of the above, USA.gov risks becoming irrelevant because of its insistence on being a portal. It’s structured to work as a citizen’s starting point to find government information online. This is problematic because it assumes that people will look to the government as the best source of the information they need. That is, if a person is trying to figure out how to buy a house, we hope he will go to USA.gov before asking his parents, searching Google, or asking friends on Twitter. That’s unrealistic.

Andrea DiMaio announced the irrelevance of government portals back in 2001, recognizing that people do not interact with the government very often and that they are more likely to look to commercial portals that include “government” information alongside other services and information. Why would you look for swine flu info at USA.gov, when you can get it from Yahoo! and get the 411 on celeb tattoos at the same time?

The viability of a government portal is further eroded as people continue to look to social media outlets as their primary source of information. Betaworks’ Andrew Weissman has astutely observed that real time social distribution is conditioning people to assume that “if something is important, it will find me.”

I think USA.gov should embrace search #

Confession: I rarely use USA.gov. I almost always use Google. I spend several hours each month looking for useful government information to distribute through USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. I Google “[search term] site:.gov” and instantaneously get a list of quality .gov resources in return, complete with descriptive blurbs.

The preface to Marti Heart’s Search User Interfaces says that search engines are the second most frequently used online computer application, behind email. There’s a reason for this: they work. Search engines work so well that they’re obviating almost every earlier system designed to organize information—including USA.gov’s system of compiling, categorizing, and organizing lists of links. Josh Levy told me to read Everything Is Miscellaneous to grasp the significance of this.

Because it’s so convenient, search is undermining the government’s attempts to create an online mirror of its byzantine structure (~24,000 .gov URLs and counting) and USA.gov’s attempts to explain that structure.

For USA.gov to compete with the convenience of Google, its links would need to lead to the Internet’s most awesome websites that are unavailable through Google. Furthermore, unlike on search engine result pages, most links on USA.gov do not include descriptions or any clues about where they lead, creating an uncertain browsing experience.

One solution to this is to turn USA.gov into a content site, making it more likely for people to visit it via search engines. Which brings me to my next point…

I think USA.gov should be a content site #

Currently, visitors to USA.gov are guided through lists of links until they’re handed off to another site, where we hope they find what they were looking for. This precludes us from finding out if our visitors found anything useful where we sent them—we can’t ask them to come back and tell us if we guided them to the right spot. The way around this is to create useful content on USA.gov.

USA.gov lists 10 topics that its visitors search for most frequently on the What’s on Americans’ Minds page. Here’s the list as I write this:

• Grants
• House Resolutions
• Green Card
• Passports
• Jobs
• Taxes
• Public Records
• Unclaimed Assets
• Unemployment
• Energy

These top topics don’t change very often. We should start by creating a pilot content strategy and write a brief series of explanatory articles for these topics. They should be written in plain language. They should be search engine optimized. They should each have a distinct URL, which will make them easy to share on Facebook, or Twitter, or IM, or email, etc. None of them will require mashups or anything fancy.

We should include opportunities for users to provide actionable feedback on these articles using a tool like 4Q (which is free). And we should continually optimize and refine those articles until we’re getting consistently positive feedback.

This doesn’t have to be a big thing (I just offended all my content strategist friends). There’s no need for a public dialog to enhance these articles. Rather, invite users to complete a brief survey specifically about the content they’ve encountered, and make sure someone is tasked to analyze and act upon the results of the survey. We could start piloting this in a month (as long as we dutifully ignore the Paperwork Reduction Act and existing cookie policy). If we’re successful, we could add more articles.

For a more in depth look at this approach, read Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics Success Measurement For Government Websites.

Candi Harrison’s post Time for a Re-Think of USA.gov argues the need to create content as well. Candi goes further and recognizes that this is an opportunity to “start downsizing the inventory of government websites and consolidating government web content.”

There’s a chance that this effort would displace traffic from other government sites. That would be great. Competition for traffic among sites could foster the creation of better content, or a successful USA.gov may free up agencies to focus on their missions rather than maintaining duplicative websites.

I think USA.gov should put citizens first, zealously #

Google’s first article of faith is “Focus on the user and all else will follow.” The Federal Web Managers Council echoed this sentiment when they published a white paper titled Putting Citizens First: Transforming Online Government (pdf) last November. If any team within government is poised to create the bold vision outlined in Putting Citizens First, it’s the team at USA.gov.

Every initiative carried out under the USA.gov name should be created with the interests of citizens in mind, based on what we know about them from research. In some instances, this will require writing in clearer language. In others, it will mean not creating a mashup just to create a mashup or starting a blog just to start a blog. This should be governed, as Putting Citizens First recommends, by USA.gov’s editor in chief.

I often feel like government agencies are caught in an arms race to have the glossiest blog, the most fans or followers (Mark Drapeau wrote a great piece on why focusing on fan numbers is misguided), or the most engaging transparent streaming citizen feed widget. This competition has created an explosion of opportunities to interact with the government online. This is probably a good thing, but it’s becoming overwhelming and I often feel that the average citizen (who Andrea DiMaio calls Joe Smith) is forgotten in all the excitement.

USA.gov has an opportunity to drop out of (or rise above) the arms race and be the sensemaking arm of government—the brand citizens recognize as the best source of official government information that matters to them, that makes sense, and that they can apply to their lives. I believe that if we can do that, all else will follow.

Foreign Policy posted the following statistics on their blog last week in a post titled Food for Thought (I’ve added the source information):

• Percentage of Americans who believe in angels: 55 (Washington Times article)
  Source: Baylor University “survey of 1,648 adults, who were asked 350 questions on their religious practices [in fall of 2007].”
• Percentage of Americans who believe in evolution: 39 (U.S. News & World Report article)
  Source: Gallup poll “based on telephone interviews with 1,018 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted Feb. 6-7, 2009.”
• Percentage of Americans who believe in anthropogenic global warming: 36 (Guardian UK article)
  Source: Pew poll “conducted Sept. 30-Oct. 4 among 1,500 adults reached on cell phones and landlines.”
• Percentage of Americans who believe in ghosts: 34 (MSNBC article)
  Source: Associate Press poll, “conducted Oct. 16-18, involved telephone interviews with 1,013 adults”
• Percentage of Americans who believe in UFOs: 34 (same MSNBC article as above)
  Source: Same as above

Most of the responses to the post I’ve encountered across the web have involved some variation of alarm or disgust at how stupid these Americans are. Some people are ashamed. Others are scared!

Come on.

My take: no one can comprehend the entirety of the human experience and not everyone is convinced by empiricism.

These are cosmic topics—difficult for almost anyone to grasp. Because I haven’t dedicated years of scholarship to evolution or anthropogenic global warming, my belief in them is buoyed mostly by faith in the scientific community. I’m ok with that. There’s plenty of evidence for me to trust science (like the computer I’m using to write this).

Other people place faith in other communities—perhaps ones that believe in angels or are skeptical of global warming. I’m ok with that too, even though I think they’re probably mistaken.

There’s value in considering how much these people want to believe in angels, and how much they want to believe that they’re not destroying the planet by living the way they always have. I say there’s value in this because it helps us understand a bit more about why people believe what they do. This understanding is essential if you’re interested in making policy and persuading people to support it.

This is, ultimately, my problem with the elitist responses to Foreign Policy’s post: scoffing at people who disagree with you will not help you win them over. It seems defeatist (if not dogmatic)—if you care about global warming, you should think seriously about how to persuade people to change their behavior. It’s hard—much harder than scoffing.

Also, I really want to believe in UFOs.

Bonus reading:

Scientific American published a great little article by Michael Shermer in May called Why People Believe Invisible Agents Control the World that posits that the human mind may be predisposed to believe in supernatural forces like angels or “the government.”

You really should read the article, but the idea is summed up in two parts:

1. Humans often identify patterns where there are none. Shermer calls this “patternicity,” and he explains it’s origins like this:
   

   The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real.

2. Humans also tend to assume that the patterns we observe (whether real or not) are the result of some intentional action. Shermer calls this “agenticity:”

   As large-brained hominids with a developed cortex and a theory of mind—the capacity to be aware of such mental states as desires and intentions in both ourselves and others—we infer agency behind the patterns we observe in a practice I call “agenticity”: the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents. We believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down (as opposed to bottom-up causal randomness). Together patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms.

Foreign Policy’s statistics reveal how patternicity and agenticity may be problematic for policymakers who try to base their decisions on empiricism—particularly in a democracy.

It’s also fun to watch parties on both sides of the global warming debate create “agents” out of each other—i.e. how the skeptics decry “the scientists” while global warming defenders fret about “the rubes,” as if either group were a cohesive and intentional entity.

Also, Nudge is a very fun book that examines why humans make poor decisions in the face of evidence and even past experience.

Destroyer at the Fun Fun Fun Fest on 7 Nov 2009

Shannon and I visited Austin last week to go to the Fun Fun Fun Fest with our friends Paige, Kevin, Michael, and Chris.

Destroyer (Dan Bejar) headlined the “Yellow” stage on the first night of the festival. He performed unaccompanied, singing and playing an acoustic guitar while hospital helicopters flew overhead. I interviewed him after the set:

What is your favorite Destroyer song?#

Bejar: I’m fond of “Certain Things You Ought to Know”

What is your favorite city?#

Bejar: …Lisbon is an amazing city.

Big thanks to Paige for getting us into the fest.

Listen to “Certain Things You Ought to Know.”

Orchestra at square dance in McIntosh County, Oklahoma – from the Library of Congress

As I walked home with some friends from a Radiohead concert in 2006, I asked a girl what she thought of the show. “It was great!” she said, “I love live music.”

Her answer bothered me, and I never forgot it.

The concert was great, but I wondered if she would have said the same thing if we were walking back from a Matchbox 20 or Pussycat Dolls or Animal Collective concert. I had to wonder if she “got it.”

The next year I went to the SXSW music festival. I was walking down 6th street with my friends Paige and Kevin when we heard a hackneyed blues solo float from the windows of a nearby bar. It prompted me to exclaim “This is great! I love live music!” and we all had a good laugh. Paige and Kevin got the joke—they both have a deep understanding and appreciation for music, and they know that some of it is better than the rest.

I don’t know how many times I’ve made the “I love live music” joke since, and I’m writing this essay largely to explain that I don’t keep repeating it just to get some laughs (in case any members of my vast readership are getting bored with it). I keep pulling it out because it’s the safest way I’ve found to reveal my particular brand of snobbishness—that is: I admire quality, I believe that quality is rare, and I like it when people recognize quality. Inversely, I’m leery of people who don’t seem to care about quality, or even know it exists.

The joke is a litmus test that tells me if I’m talking to someone as snobby as myself. When people get it, I know I’m in good company. When people don’t, I’m simply embarrassed and slightly ashamed by my pretentiousness—it’s a small price to pay, but I think it’s worth it.

P.S. I acknowledge that taste in music is relative. I know and respect people for whom listening to Radiohead is a form of torture. I’m glad these people acknowledge a preference for something over something else. I’d be just as leery of a person who claimed to love movies, restaurants, or paintings, etc.

Earlier this week, Chris clued me into Carl Malamud’s campaign to be be appointed Public Printer of the United States. The first thing I noticed upon visiting his campaign site, yeswescan.org, was his “committee to reboot .gov”—a short list of people including a few of my personal heroes: Lawrence Lessig, Brewster Kahle, Ellen Miller, and Adrian Holovaty. Below the list is a link asking me if I want to join the committee. I can’t imagine a more effective way to get me involved.

So I did some research. It turns out that I really like Carl, and no matter the results of his campaign, I’m eager to participate in the conversation he’s starting.

It is, of course, not a new conversation. Countless people are trying to influence the sea change affecting government domains across the country (a bunch of my colleagues are talking about it right now at Transparency Camp). However, what I like about Carl’s version of the conversation is, for lack of a better term, his style.

He’s a printer

He might not be a trained printer, but the fact that he’s running for National Printer indicates a healthy regard for the craft. As an amateur screen printer, I am obligated to recognize the value of a good printer: a person dedicated to a complicated craft, who does a job requiring exceptional attention to detail, who produces the media that educates, informs, and inspires us.

There is evidence of a printer’s touch on Carl’s various websites, all of them easy to read and elegantly laid-out. This isn’t trivial. I wish more websites were built with the care of a printer.

He gives librarians the props they deserve

The #2 issue that Carl wants to address in his campaign is librarians, saying that “librarians are the bedrock of the public domain and the defenders of our fundamental right to access knowledge.” I almost fell on the floor when I read this. Ever since my tenure trying to wrangle the world’s event information at Eventful, I’ve been convinced that librarians hold the key to the future. There is no way the Internet, .gov or not, is going to reach its full potential without tapping into the long-term and profound thinking of librarians.

The rising generation of Internet librarians are the people who are going to guide the world through the necessary changes required to organize our data and make it useful. Adrian Holovaty gives an excellent explanation of what kinds of changes I’m talking about in his piece A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change.

He’s doing the right thing

Carl’s been publishing government information on the Internet for over 20 years, but he got some press recently by mobilizing a small army of volunteers to download roughly 19,856,160 of federal legal papers from the Federal Judiciary’s outdated Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system for him to repost for free at his site, Public.Resource.org. He didn’t do anything illegal by doing it, but it freaked out some people at the Judiciary and, more importantly, it got some press.

The solution on Public.Resource.org is not ideal (it raises some important privacy concerns), but his work highlights the fact that voters are beginning to expect a lot of the Internet, and the government needs to rise to meet those expectations. Imagine how much more he could do at the helm of the Government Printing Office!

What really has me convinced that Carl’s doing the right thing, however, is this quote: “If [appointed as Public Printer], I will certainly serve. But if not called, I will probably serve anyway.” I consider myself very lucky to be able to work as a pseudo-public servant (are consultants public servants?), but Carl’s work is an inspiring reminder that I can always serve no matter what.

Let’s get to work!