Today at Fedtalks in Washington, the General Services Administration’s director of citizen engagement, Gwynne Kostin, talked about its new open government platform, Apps.gov NOW. Apps.gov NOW launched in beta in August but the Gov 2.0 community hasn’t heard much about it until this morning.
The new platform, available at citizen.apps.go, allows federal employees to choose from technologies that enables them to create blogs, challenge tools, wikis or forums. Kostin talked about how employees can then upload a banner, add plug-ins or traffic reporting, and import data feeds. It’s essentially turnkey technology, with the regulatory compliance backhaul simplified for usage. 508 compliance for disability is particularly relevant to many feds, along with security and network infrastructure plumbing.
“We cleared away a lot of the issues with policy,” said Kostin. “We expect this tool to be especially important to small agencies or for projects that need to get market fast.”
Wow! Congratulations to Gwynne and the entire team that put this together. I remember when I first asked for something like it a couple of years ago, and now it exists. Amazing achievement.
Pretty cool. Will be interesting to see how much this helps other agencies move fast. Sometimes you hear the “but our agency is special so can’t do it” excuse even when GSA approved
It’d be cool to track the first few projects that get done with this and then timeline to projects of the past.