Project MyUSA

Presidential Innovation Fellows

Project MyUSA: Welcome to Round 2!

Posted on July 03, 2013 by Greg Gershman

Hello! I know it’s been a while, but seeing as how we just kicked off the second round of the Presidential Innovation Fellowship, I thought I’d take the opportunity to post a quick update on Project MyUSA. Things have been going quite well, and we’ve got some amazing stuff in the works over the next few months.

First, let’s address the name change. We are now Project MyUSA! From the earliest days of the project, we discussed what the ideal name for the project should be, but we wanted to focus our energy on coming up with great ideas, and so we put it aside. Towards the very end of the first round of Project MyGov, we revisited the subject and, after much consideration, decided to rechristen the project as MyUSA. We think MyUSA more effectively captures what we’re trying to accomplish and how we’d like to present ourselves to the public. We hope you like it!

Let’s recap where things are; in the first round, we (Phil, Ben, Danny, Kara and I) were given a challenge: how could we make a citizen’s experience when interacting with government better? To answer that question, we took a hard look at the current state of things, identified what we felt were the key issues, and set about to come up with solutions.

The problems we identified were:

It’s hard to navigate government to find the information, tools and services relevant to your needs;
Interacting with the government is done through multiple channels with no consistent user experience, and no way to control or manage how government access your information;
Engaging the government to do something for you, typically by filling out and submitting a form, is still an antiquated and cumbersome process.

The solutions we built to help solve them were:

MyUSA Discovery: a toolbar that can be added to any government website to help connect visitors to resources across federal, state and local government websites, so they can quickly find what they are looking for;
MyUSA Account and MyUSA API: a single account that citizens can use to sign into any government website, giving them control of how government interacts with them and their information. The MyUSA API captures common ways in which government interacts with citizens and makes those available as web services for agencies to use in building citizen-centric web applications.
MyUSA Forms: a tool to enable agencies to create and publish forms online, and make every form an API.

The solutions we built, which are all open source on Github, were essentially prototypes; the next step is to take those prototypes, get them production-ready, and start testing them in the real world. Which brings us to today.

We’ve just brought on a new group of outstanding fellows, and our main goal is to take those solutions and scale them out so that America can begin to use them. Once the tools are in production, we can begin to collect feedback and improve what we’re offering based on what makes sense for users.

To do that, we’ve put together two teams, all part of the greater MyUSA initiative. The core MyUSA team will be focused on improving and scaling out the existing solutions, while the BusinessUSA team will be focused on building a killer example of what kinds of applications and interactions are possible with MyUSA’s tools and services.

We’ll post more in the coming days and weeks with details of what we’re rolling out. In the meantime, let’s introduce the team.

First off, I’m very happy that I was asked to lead Project MyUSA after my fellowship ended in January. This project is very near and dear to my heart and I’m determined to see it succeed.

Our new fellows are:

John Felleman (BusinessUSA)
Justin Grevich (MyUSA)
Hillary Hartley (MyUSA)
Claire Holroyd (BusinessUSA)
John Kemp (MyUSA)
Alison Rowland (BusinessUSA)
Amos Stone (BusinessUSA)
Raphael Villas (MyUSA)

More information about the fellows (scroll down to MyUSA)

In addition, we’re very happy to have the support of the USA.gov team at GSA and BusinessUSA at the SBA. We’ll be working very closely with them over the coming months to benefit from their skills and experience.

And with that, let Round 2 of Project MyUSA begin! Please be in touch if you have any thoughts, ideas or questions, and keep your eye out for more regular updates soon!

Twitter @ProjectMyUSA
Facebook Project MyUSA

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Open Source All The Things

Posted on January 30, 2013 by Team MyUSA

When we first set out to reimagine the relationship between government and the people, our goal was not simply to build the next generation of citizen-facing tools and services, but to also fundamentally change how these tools are built. We started by looking closely at at our own process and quickly committed to architechting an open platform from day one.

Today, MyGov would not be possible if it were not for countless open source projects, from our own internal tools to the very servers that power MyGov itself. For those unfamiliar with the term, open source software is simply software for which the underlying, human-readable instructions are made publicly available for others to use, re-use, and submit improvements. Think about it as analagous to the “give a penny take a penny” tray at your local convenience store, or asking a neighbor if you can borrow a screwdriver.

Why open source rocks

Open source offers government many advantages. For one, it provides opportunties for cross-agency collaboration that avoids duplication of efforts — after all, many of the challenges faced are common across government. Shared solutions like MyGov allows agencies to concentrate on tackling mission, as opposed to trying to solve the same problem time and time again. Likewise, without having to reinvent the wheel each time, agencies can bring services to market faster, cheaper, and often with better quality. Last, open source forces developers not to bake in bespoke solutions or couple interfaces too closely to underlying logic. This allows for better modularity and fungability over the lifetime of the code, meaning individuals systems can more easily communicate with one another and the initial investment can last longer and be more easily upgraded over time.

It’s about the community, people

At its core however, open source is about community, not technology. Today we’d like to take a moment to give back — to put a penny back in the tray — and more importantly, to add to the ongoing dialog around improving the digital delivery of government services. Both with our colleagues at other government agencies, and with the public more broadly. As with all open source software, feel free to adapt the code for your own projects, but with this code especially, we encourage you to take a moment to improve it by submitting a pull request.

MyGov

MyGov Account
MyGov Discovery Bar and API
MyGov Forms
MyGov Apps - Change Your Name and Benefits

Behind the scenes

Jump right in

MyGov began its journey by setting out to improve the way citizens interact with government, but to continue, we need your help. The code is just the start. It is our hope that these MyGov projects can serve as one example of a greater joint effort — citizens and government collaborating to improve our shared experience. After all, unlike many other sites on the web, it’s your code. You paid for it. If you’re a coder or a designer or even just an involed citizen, we encourage you to take a critical look at MyGov, and get involved on our developer page.

Farewell

This is our final post as Team MyGov. It’s been a great 6 months, and we appreciate all your help, support, and feedback along the way as we worked on our project. There’s more to come from MyGov in the future, but for now: so long, and thanks for all the fish.

Regards, Phil Ashlock, Ben Balter, Danny Chapman, Kara DeFrias & Greg Gershman Presidential Innovation Fellows v1

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Introducing the MyGov Discovery API: Come Build Something Cool

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Benjamin J. Balter

Last week we announced the MyGov Discovery Bar. This week we’d like to dive a bit deeper by taking a look at the API that powers it, with the hope that developers within the open-government community can help make it better.

Thy Discovery API exposes all the information that’s normally available via the MyGov Discovery Bar (code) in an open, machine-readable format. In fact, the Discovery Bar itself consumes the API — we eat our own dog food. Why would we do this? Two reasons: first, exposing an API to collect and retrieve information at the outset and then going back to build the layer to display it forces us to separate data from presentation and allows the application to be more flexible.

The Discovery Bar may be how the information is used today, but that doesn’t mean it’s always going to be that way and we encourage members of the community to build apps using it. Second, by using the API to power the Discovery Bar, we can see the data from the perspective of an outside developer and can hopefully, in the end, produce a better, more useful API.

Using the API

So what can the Discovery API do? Currently, the federal .gov footprint is organized around how government is structured. If a citizen wants to complete a given task, they have to know what agency to go to, and often times, what office within that agency. The Discovery API layers a folksonomy on top of the entire .gov landscape, allowing developers to query pages by keyword, or more importantly, to find content related to a given page.

Think about it this way: if you decide to change your name (perhaps you’re getting married), you’re probably going to want a new passport. But if we knew that task was also closely related to getting a new social security card or driver’s license, at least we could point you in the right direction. But that’s not the only way the Discovery API can be used. What if you want a listing of the top government content by tag, or a timely subject? Just query the Discovery API by tag.

Under the Hood

The Discovery API breaks the .gov space into pages, each represented by a uniqiue URL. Pages can have tags which in turn provide related pages. Each page is organized by domain (the part before the .gov in the URL), and domains can be queried by reverse domain name (e.g., gov.whitehouse.). This way, if you want all the subdomains of a given agency, you can get that list in a machine readable format.

The Discovery API launched with some core seed data, namely each federal executive .gov, and those pages available within one click of the home page, but over time, as people use the API, it can grow to become a comprehensive index of the most popular government pages.

Interested in giving it a try? Kick the tires in our API Sandbox or take a look at the code powering it.

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Introducing the MyGov Account

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Team MyGov

(This is the second in a series of posts introducing each of the products we’ve been working on as part of Project MyGov.)

In your life, you’ve probably filled in your name, address, and date of birth hundreds of times when renewing your passport, applying for financial aid, filing your taxes, or any other of the multitude of interactions with the government. We’d like to ask you to do that one more time – and then never again.

In approaching the general challenge of improving the relationship between the government and the people, we look at two things:

How can we improve the user experience for the public?
How can we make the implementation of that experience easier, better, and less expensive for the government?

With the growth of government’s online presence, and the increase in online services offered, people currently have a separate account for each government agency they interact with. This means people could potentially have dozens of accounts for different government services, and the associated proliferation of logins, passwords and functionality leaves a lot to be desired. From the perspective of government as a whole, the duplication of effort required to implement the same account features over and over is wasteful.

As a solution, we’d like to introduce the MyGov Account. The MyGov Account acts as a single place for the public to manage their interactions with the government. Anyone can create an account and use it as a central point for the vast array of services offered by federal, state, and local government. Any agency can integrate the account and its features (available via an API) into their site or application.

In building the MyGov Account, we took a step back and tried to answer the question: how do governments interact with their citizens? We researched both current and historical examples, and built upon those best practices, which drove what features we built into the MyGov Account.

Let’s take a look.

Profile

The core of your MyGov Account is your profile, which contains the basic, important information about you, and the type of things that you’re going to need when interacting with government. When you fill out just about any form, you need to put in your name, address, and date of birth. When visiting a government website, the types of services and content you are looking for will be dependent on your personal situation (such as whether you’re married, a student, retired or a veteran, to name a few use cases).

With your MyGov Profile, you can store this information securely in your MyGov Account. Then, when interacting with agencies, you can use this information to speed up filling out a form, or personalizing a website. Agencies have to request access to your Profile – putting you in charge of who can access your MyGov profile information, and allowing you to revoke access at any time. We think that’s really important. After all, part of our core principles is to put the public’s needs first, and we think this fulfills that.

Tasks

In interacting with government, things can get a little complex. Sometimes you need to fill out a whole bunch of forms just to accomplish what is, from your perspective, a single simple task. We want to make your life easier, and at the same time provide tools that help agencies do their job better. So, we introduced the idea of Tasks into your MyGov Account.

With Tasks, an agency can create a dialogue that walks you through a complex set of steps to accomplish a goal. Let’s say you need to renew your passport. It’s a hairy process, but with a little information and the MyGov Tasks feature, you get personalized step-by-step instructions to follow to complete your transaction with the government. And, since this is part of your MyGov Account, you have control over which agencies can create tasks for you.

Notifications

Every time you sign up for a website, you’re taking a gamble that the site isn’t going to spam your inbox with emails that are only marginally relevant to you. You often have control over this, but managing email from hundreds of sites is a pain – not to mention a horrible experience. While we can’t fix this problem for the whole internet, we can do our best to address it within government.

With MyGov Notifications, agencies can send you a notification, but you control how you get notified and which agencies can contact you. You can enter multiple email addresses or phone numbers, and choose to get updates daily or weekly, via email or SMS. We view this as essential to moving beyond simple government/citizen interactions to creating a relationship between the government and its citizens, but with the latter setting the terms of that relationship.

As an example, let’s say you use a MyGov-enabled website to figure out which federal benefits you qualify for. Six months later, a new benefit is made available that you’re eligible for. Currently, there’s no way for the government to let you know you could be taking advantage of this new program. With Notifications, the benefits app can update you with the new information and hopefully make your life better.

Forms

Forms are the primary way by which a government interacts with its citizens: if you need some service from the government, you fill out a form. We think of forms as an API into government: provide some input, it gets processed, and returns a response. We’ll go into detail later with more on the full scope of what we’re working with forms (because it’s big, trust us).

If you’ve ever had to fill out the same form twice, you know that most of the information is going to be the same. So it’d be great if you had a history of the forms you filled out, and could re-use any applicable information. And what if submitting a form was more than just “fill it out and send it in” (stay with us here). What if you received status updates to your MyGov Account when your form was received, or processed, or if more information was required. All these things will be possible with your MyGov Account and forms history.

Apps

With the MyGov Citizen API, we envision a rich ecosystem of services available to users: what we’re calling MyGov Apps. From within your MyGov Account, you’ll be able to browse MyGov Apps (we’ll also do our best to connect you with apps that are relevant to your needs), and manage the access those apps have to you through your account. If you decide that you don’t want a particular app to have access to your Profile, or to be able to send you notifications, just revoke the app’s access.

Local, state, and federal Info

American democracy is complex, and your MyGov account gives you the information you need to navigate it. While most people are well acquainted with the basics of their national government and the Presidency, many are less aware of their governing bodies, services, or officials at the state, county, and municipal level. The MyGov account helps bring you all of that information in one place. It’s essential to know who your representatives in government are. From the President of the United State (POTUS) to your local county and state representatives (in some cases even city mayors and council members), we’ve included this information for you in your MyGov account, and will continue to provide more valuable and personalized information as we grow the service.

For Agencies: MyGov Citizen API

That’s the MyGov Account from the citizen perspective. From the agency perspective, these features are available as the MyGov Citizen API, which is an API for government to interact with citizens. Agencies can create apps that, after authorization from a citizen, can access their profile, assign them tasks, send them notifications, and submit forms on their behalf.

In closing

The above summarizes what we’ve built out in the context of our six month Presidential Innovation Fellows project. For the public, you can sign up and you’ll be set up with a new account once we’ve gone through all the legal requirements to allow access to the public. For developers, you can check out the source code on Github, and we’ll be publishing details on how to get an API key and begin working with the MyGov Citizen API to create apps.

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Introducing the MyGov Discovery Bar

Posted on January 15, 2013 by Team MyGov

This is the first in a series of posts introducing each of the products we’ve been working on as part of Project MyGov.

MyGov Discovery Bar shown seamlessly integrating on USA.gov

The government web is two things: big, and distributed. (Did we mention big?) The General Services Administration (GSA) runs USA.gov, a central site that provides a top-level view into the government web. That works well if you’re on USA.gov, but what if you’re on some other part of the government web? Shouldn’t you be able to see other resources, programs, benefits, services, forms, etc. from across the federal government if they are relevant to what you’re trying to accomplish?

Here at Project MyGov, we think the answer to that question is: “Yes.”

So we built the MyGov Discovery Bar, which acts as a persistent tool to help you navigate the government web. When looking at a government web page, the Discovery Bar uses its knowledge of what the page is about to recommend other related pages. Just like when Amazon says, “People who bought this item, also bought this one,” we recommend other pages across the government web footprint (regardless of what site or agency they live on) to you, when you need it most.

To do this, we’ve built the Discovery Bar to unobtrusively slide into view as you reach the end of a page. (We figure if you’re that far down the page, you’re ready for more information.) We’ve tried to make it easy for you to control the experience, so if you feel like the bar is in the way, you can minimize or close it completely.

We also want to help improve your overall experience when visiting government websites. If you expand the bar, a few options present themselves. You can view tags associated with the page you’re looking at. You can even add or edit tags to help make our service better. You can provide feedback to the government on the page you’re viewing, and help us figure out which are the most helpful of our pages. And if you’re just not finding what you’re looking for, you can do a search across all the government web sites.

All right Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up.

We’re working with agencies to get the Discovery Bar set up as a standard across the federal web; state and local governments are welcome to participate as well. In the meantime, we’re doing testing as part of our private beta, and will update here when the bar is more generally available. You can sign up for the beta.

We’re pretty excited about the Discovery Bar, and think it’s a great step toward making the federal web even more user-centric.

Keep an eye for for Part II of the series: Introducing your MyGov Account.

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Project MyUSA

Presidential Innovation Fellows

Project MyUSA: Welcome to Round 2!

Open Source All The Things

Why open source rocks

It’s about the community, people

MyGov

Behind the scenes

Jump right in

Farewell

Introducing the MyGov Discovery API: Come Build Something Cool

Using the API

Under the Hood

Introducing the MyGov Account

Profile

Tasks

Notifications

Forms

Apps

Local, state, and federal Info

For Agencies: MyGov Citizen API

In closing

Introducing the MyGov Discovery Bar

What we're saying

Follow Us

What we're working on