Social Government

Scribd, SlideShare and 19 other social media tools are featured on Apps.gov, the General Services Administration’s new government cloud computing Web site that launched today.

U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra announced the site, writing in a post on the White House Blog:

Apps.gov is an online storefront for federal agencies to quickly browse and purchase cloud-based IT services, for productivity, collaboration, and efficiency.

The social media tools not only carry the GSA’s blessing but will also be easy for agencies to deploy — two previously difficult-to-overcome barriers.

In the case of the Social Media Apps category — there are three other main categories on Apps.gov — the site serves more of a clearinghouse for agencies to “request” usage of the tools. Users are presented with a page that contains a link to each tool’s GSA Terms of Service and Agreement. This agreement was the big legal barrier that prevented so many of these tools from being available to agencies for so long.

In addition to the 21 tools that launched today, six other categories of tools will be launching in the future: Livecasting, Mashups, Opinions and product reviews, RSS and Other Syndicated Feeds, Virtual Worlds and Widget Creation.

In addition to the aforementioned document sharing services, integration with FriendFeed, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube also launched.

Notably absent is Twitter.

But my favorite service that launched is something called IdeaScale. IdeaScale is similar to Google Moderator, where agencies can crowdsource ideas. More popular ideas “bubble to the top,” its Web site says.

Sept. 15, 2009 will be a turning point in how government agencies use social media. Obviously, this site and its underlying regulatory approval took a while to develop. Keep up the good work.

In a related development, Google launched a government portal today. The popular Google Apps e-mail collaboration suite is set to launch next year for agencies.

P.S. Is it just me, or does Apps.gov seem to run on the slow side?

In an attempt to get government agencies more involved on Facebook, the social network has launched a new page, Facebook and Government.

While the page is still new and largely devoid of content, it’s easy to see how this page could soon become a great resource for many agencies that use Facebook to communicate with citizens.

Could this hub be using the White House’s ambitious Facebook page as an example? When that page launched in the spring (it now has over 350,000 fans), it was followed shortly afterwards with a Facebook App, White House Live, which streams live events right in Facebook and allows for live comments from citizens.

It’s too early to tell how exactly this page will be used. But it does have an “Other Pages” tab, which includes popular agency pages like the State Department, EPA, NASA and Coast Guard.

All readers of this blog should become a fan of Facebook and Government — it will be interesting to see what’s coming. Could other social networks follow Facebook and create a similar portal?

In March, I wrote about best practices for government communication on Facebook.

Unfortunately, we were unable to gain access to the Gov 2.0 Summit that’s going on in D.C. today and tomorrow.

Please check the Twitter hashtag #g2s for the latest!

If you’d like to contribute a report from the summit to the blog, let me know.

We hope to have in-depth coverage of future events.

NASA, an agency that understands Government 2.0 quite well, is hosting a tweetup at their Washington headquarters Sept. 24.

But it’s not just any tweetup: it’s an opportunity to meet the astronauts of STS-127, a shuttle mission this summer on Space Shuttle Endeavour to the International Space Station.

Commander Mark Polansky is big on Twitter as @Astro_127. He also responded to YouTube videos from orbit.

NASA also hosted a similar event in July.

I’ll be there, and I hope to see you there as well. Registration opens today, at this Web site.

We’ll be live tweeting the event at @socialgovt!

In the speech that President Obama is set to deliver tomorrow to America’s schoolchildren, a paragraph caught our attention:

It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

Congrats to Larry, Sergey, Mark and Jack for getting some love from POTUS!

Obama is set to deliver the remarks in Arlington, Va., at 12 p.m. EDT.

This crossed my Twitter radar yesterday: a wiki of “Web 2 0 [sic] Governance Policies and Best Practices.”

This comprehensive wiki contains links to government social media best practices sites as well as blogging and commenting policy sites.

We’ve covered many of the sites mentioned there already, but there were some gems — especially the links to state-level policies and guidelines.

If you see something interesting on the wiki, let me know!

[h/t to Jeffrey Levey and Craig Newmark]

Today’s Washington Post has some astonishing news: the federal government will need to hire 270,000 people for “mission-critical” jobs over the next three years, according to a study released by the Partnership for Public Service today.

Powerful job search tools await prospective government applicants at USAJOBS, the Office of Personnel Management’s job portal.

In particular, you can create your own resume using an interactive resume builder at My USAJOBS. The tool guides applicants through every step of the process — and creates a resume containing all the information that federal employers need, in an attractive format.

My USAJOBS also allows users to create custom search agents — which will send the user an e-mail every time the criteria in a particular agent is met.

In the future, the site could certainly get more social. Better graphics and possibly YouTube videos could help explain the complex federal hiring process — something that is done adequately on the current site — but could be improved.

To all those applying: good luck with your job search!

In the past few weeks, the Internal Revenue Service has started posting a their videos on YouTube. While the videos themselves aren’t new (in fact most are a couple of months old), the potential here is big for this agency that many Americans love to hate.

The short videos focus on everything from charitable contributions to tax scams.

Could Americans be able get help filing their 2009 1040s from an official government YouTube video? Tax season is a headache, and a series of comprehensive YouTube videos from the IRS could certainly help alleviate the stress.

The IRS also deserves major props for offering the videos in American Sign Language and Spanish.

See another agency doing something cool with YouTube? Let me know.