Trust is a valuable thing online, and being able to know that the information you’re receiving is reliable and accurate is difficult yet essential — especially so for government websites, where people go for critical information, like health services and public safety. That’s why it was great to see the federal government roll out 1.USA.gov earlier this year. 1.USA.gov is a URL shortening service that automatically creates .gov URLs whenever someone uses bitly to shorten a URL that ends in .gov or .mil.
What great is that each click generates data — which, according to recent stats, happens about 56,000 times each day — there’s now a huge and growing resource for new and really interesting apps. See, this data gives a lens into how people are interacting with government, online; an increasingly important lens as citizen/government interaction moves from the front desk or the phone line to the web browser. And now USA.gov is tapping into citizens to help it take shape: they are making all of the data freely available to and even hosting a nationwide 1.USA.gov Hack Day on July 29 to jumpstart the process:
- Washington, D.C. – Hosted by USA.gov
- San Diego – Hosted by Measured Voice
- New York City – Hosted by bitly
- San Francisco – Hosted by SimpleGeo
We’re excited to be partnering them to help bring together passionate developers, designers, and really anyone interested to see what we can hack together with the data. And before and after the event, if you have an idea or an app you made that you’d like to share with us and the USA.gov crew, let us know! Leave a comment here or tweet it out @codeforamerica or with hashtag #1USAgov.
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