CorpComms Magazine

The White House has run an online campaign encouraging citizens to help it improve US government websites.

Organisers of the project called it the first major government crowdsourcing effort, with the tagline 'Help create the .gov you deserve'.

The online crowdsourcing effort took place from the middle of last month to the beginning of this month. A summary of the suggestions will be posted on USA.gov/webreform by the end of the month.

The initiative allowed users to suggest ideas, which members of the community then voted on. Less formal feedback was initially gathered on Facebook and Twitter with discussions about which sites should be closed.

There are currently thousands of unique federal .gov domains and websites. And supporters of the anti-waste campaign plan to halve the number of .gov websites over the next year.

Suggestions included improving the readability of government sites by swapping jargon for plain English. Commenting and voting has now finished but users are encouraged to read through the ideas when they are published later this month.

The mission statement on the Web Reform site pledges to 'eliminate and improve websites that are redundant, outdated, hard to use, or have poorly maintained content.'

The scheme is part of the Obama administration's campaign to cut waste.

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