DotGov

Dear Santa,

I hope you were able to enforce Web Accessibility on State & Local Government levels. My second wish is as challenging as the first one.

Each time I need a government service, I need to wade through numerous of websites to find out if it is offered by my city, county, state, federal or some other government agency.

Please put effort in offering a solution where I can access all services that are offered by THE government. I would like to have an Amazon.com-like “Government Services Catalogue” that contains all services offered within my zip code area, where I can shop around and find more information.

Here’s my suggestion on how to fix this:
a. Get someone on top level involved to bring out a vision on One Stop Government,
b. Go shop around in Europe. They’ve been doing this stuff for almost 10 years(!) now, so it is just a matter of copy & paste best practices,
c. Define a Government Services Catalogue XML scheme, which contains basic info like the service name, description, where to get it, what is costs, wait time and a link to the page with more info,
d. Set up laws and regulations that requires each government to publish its services in this XML file on their website,
e. Create a website that harvests these XML files and makes this stuff searchable (or ask Microsoft and Google to do it) per region.

I will post my third Santa wish tomorrow.

This is a series of 4 Santa Wishes for a better e-Government:
-eGov Santa Wish #1: enforce web accessibility for local government.
-eGov Santa Wish #2: an One Stop Government.
-eGov Santa Wish #3: benchmark all Government websites
-eGov Santa Wish #4: It’s the Local Government, Stupid!