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DigitalGov’s theme this month is mobile moments, which explores the impact of mobile applications in the federal government. For this post, I am examining the more than 300 mobile apps created by the federal government. An updated list of federal mobile apps is on USA.gov.

According to the list, 73 federal organizations have released mobile apps on a wide variety of topics. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has the most mobile apps with 31 releases. The Smithsonian Institution released 15 mobile apps while the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Defense and the Department of Health and Human Services have 14 mobile apps each.

Most of the apps are informational in that they provide a mobile version of online sites or printed documents. For example, there is the U.S. Capitol Visitor Guide that describes how to book tours and what to expect on your tour of the Capitol. Other mobile apps provide locator services such as the Department of Energy’s Alternative Fueling Station Locator. Some of the mobile apps provide real-time information such as the Transportation Security Administration’s My TSA app which gives updated security line wait times.

A random sample of the more interesting mobile apps:

• Department of Labor’s Timesheet—this app allows you to enter your hours worked so that you can calculate your expected wages (including overtime).
• National Center for Education Statistics’ The Condition of Education—provides key indicators for the state of public education in the United States.
• National Center for Telehealth and Technology’s Positive Activity Jackpot—this mobile app uses a behavioral therapy technique called “pleasant event scheduling” to help users fight depression. Using augmented reality, the user can find nearby enjoyable activities.

I am especially interested in federal mobile apps that provide mobile learning (“m-learning”). The Library of Congress provides a mobile version of the U.S. Constitution along with an analysis of the various sections. Another Library of Congress m-learning app is Aesop for Children. NASA has the most m-learning apps that use a wide variety of technologies to educate citizens on science and technology topics.

I believe there is a great potential for m-learning apps using federal data. I recently acquired the General Class Amateur Radio license which consists of passing an exam of 35 questions from the Federal Communication Commission (FCC)’s exam pool. Most of my studying was through a mobile app that created practice exams from the official FCC questions. This app demonstrated the value of federal information for m-learning.

The list of more than 300 federal mobile apps is a great snapshot of the various ways mobile apps can serve the important moments of our lives. This list also encourages other agencies to examine their data sources and create vitally-needed mobile apps. 2015 will be seen as the time when mobile Internet use passed traditional Web use. Now is a great time for federal agencies to release more mobile moments for the American public.

Is your agency’s app missing from the USA.gov Mobile Apps Directory? Join the Great Federal Mobile Product Hunt and learn how you can add it.

Each week, The Data Briefing showcases the latest federal data news and trends.

Dr. William Brantley is the Training Administrator for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Global Intellectual Property Academy. You can find out more about his personal work in open data, analytics, and related topics at BillBrantley.com. All opinions are his own and do not reflect the opinions of the USPTO or GSA.

There’s more than one way to harness the wisdom of the crowd.

In honor of December’s monthly theme, we’re diving into and defining the various ways that federal agencies use public contributions to meet real needs and fulfill important objectives.

Crowdsourcing

Two’s company, three’s a crowd—and getting input from many is crowdsourcing.

A White House blog post defined crowdsourcing as “a process in which individuals or organizations submit an open call for voluntary contributions from a large group of unknown individuals (“the crowd”) or, in some cases, a bounded group of trusted individuals or experts.”

Government agencies are engaging a diverse and broad spectrum of people whose skills, talents, and knowledge are key to solving problems and driving innovation at every level of program need.

Efforts range from technical skills to scientific data to creative and visionary designs:

• Notice a change in landscape after a disaster? The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is collecting data to understand the broader impact of natural disasters, and citizens around the country are sharing what they know online through iCoast.
• Can you fix a technical bug with your programming skills? The Department of Health and Human Services’s (HHS) Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services ran 100 technical challenge competitions to build a large-scale fraud detection platform. People could contribute micro- and macro-level programming skills.
• Have ideas about solar power? The Department of Energy launched an ideation program, SunShot Catalyst, to gather ideas from around the world about how to make solar energy cost-competitive.

These are just three examples out of hundreds of crowdsourcing initiatives in government that bridge collaboration and community among the federal government and the public.

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Internal Ideation

Sometimes, the best ideas start at home.

Within government agencies, there are departments that crowdsource ideas and solutions from employees. Internal ideation projects harness the knowledge and skills of the people who work day-to-day in their program offices as well as those who are in the field. These programs do everything from seek improvements to the workplace to searching for niche expertise among departments.

A few examples:

• The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) developed an open-source technology platform that is used to manage the agency’s internal crowdsourcing efforts. The code is available on GitHub and an on-demand webinar gives an overview of CFPB’s program.
• The NASA@Work platform “seeks to increase innovation by fostering collaboration within [the NASA] community through the contribution of interactive discussions and the submission of solutions to posted challenges.”
• Other agencies run occasional crowdsourcing efforts, like the General Services Administration’s Great Ideas Hunt, which solicited innovative ideas.

The Ideation Community of Practice is open to federal employees (with .gov or .mil email addresses) and provides best practices, resources and tools to help employees navigate the process of asking for ideas, implementing solutions and managing awards and expectations with contributors.

Citizen Science

Citizen science is a narrower subset of crowdsourcing.

A White House blog post defined citizen science as “a form of open collaboration in which members of the public participate in the scientific process, including identifying research questions, collecting and analyzing data, interpreting results, and solving problems.”

Citizen science contributions help advance a variety of federal projects:

• The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) works with citizen scientists to discover, collect and organize a variety of scientific data; one notable USGS citizen science project is tracking bird species.
• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has three mobile applications that are based on contributions from citizen scientists: Dolphin and Whale 911, Release Mako and CrowdMag.

Open Innovation Competitions

Take the power of crowdsourcing, add the thrill of competition, plus the possibility of a winning a unique or lucrative prize… and you’ve got open innovation!

Open innovation competitions have many interchangeable names, including incentive, prize and challenge competitions.

Challenge.gov defines a challenge as when a “seeker” poses a problem or question to the public and “solvers” respond and submit solutions. Agencies award prize money and non-monetary incentives for solutions that meet the established criteria and are chosen as winners.

These competitions are open to anyone, regardless of credentials, experience, expertise, connections, etc. It levels the playing field and brings solutions from a diverse community of solvers.

Since September 2010, federal agencies have launched more than 630 challenges and promoted the competitions on Challenge.gov. The website, which is the official hub for prize competitions across government, doubles as a no-cost technical platform used by agencies to host and manage their programs. The Challenge.gov staff also provides a suite of advisory, consultation and support tools for running successful and impactful challenge competitions.

Among the most recent competitions:

• Department of Agriculture (USDA) challenged the public to create an electronic application for the National School Lunch Program.
• The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is looking for technologies to recycle nutrients from livestock manure.
• The Bureau of Reclamation is looking for solutions to count food for critical fish species.

Read more about successful federal challenges and best practices for those interested in hosting one.

Crowdfunding

This is all about the money—raising funds.

In crowdfunding, a person or organization uses an online platform to explain their pitch, idea, or concept, and they may even have a product to deliver. The platform is used to raise money via donations to the person or company. Sometimes, there is an exchange of goods for a donation.

There is no official program within the federal government for crowdfunding. There are some initiatives for local and municipal government projects that can be found online.

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Next Steps

While the programs featured here are big bucket items, throughout government you’ll also find crowd-focused efforts like maker faires, data jams, hack-a-thons, game jams and demo days.

Consider which format would be best for your program; look through the options and consider what outcome you want and what group could be the best contributors to the project. Talk with others who have run these programs and learn from their experience.

There are also training videos and webinars on-demand that include all of the topics listed above on DigitalGov University’s Challenges YouTube Playlist.

Interested in getting more involved in crowdsourcing, citizen science and/or challenge and prize competitions? Join the two communities working in these areas: the Federal Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Community of Practice and the Challenges and Prizes Community of Practice.

It began with a history lesson and ended with an eye to the future.

In between, the Expert Training Series: How to Design & Operate Prizes to Maximize Success covered nearly every aspect of what it takes to run successful incentivized competitions.

Challenge.gov and DigitalGov University partnered with XPRIZE Foundation to bring together expert speakers from across the federal government and industry for seven webinars that began last summer and ran through January.

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Below, we’ve provided a quick snapshot of what they said, as well as an index of the full webinars for your review.

Module 1: Prize History, Prize Theory and What Makes a Good Prize

Solutions for your problem can come from anywhere, and a challenge open to all can elicit new ideas from doers and thinkers that government previously has never tapped.

“If you’ve got a problem, there’s a solution out there,” said Christopher Frangione, vice president of prize development at XPRIZE. “The purpose of a prize is to make everyone a hero. Why try to find the needle in a haystack? Let the needle find you.”

Watch/listen to this first webinar, originally hosted on July 14, 2015.

Module 2: It’s All About the Teams—The Importance of Operational Incentives in Prizes

It’s not always about the money. There are a variety of ways federal agencies can attract worthy competitors, including providing access to subject matter experts and official facilities where teams can test their solutions.

“You need a sufficient prize purse,” said Sam Ortega, manager of Partnerships Office at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. But that’s not all that matters. “You need enough to cut through the noise, you need enough to get teams excited.”

Watch/listen to the second webinar, originally hosted on Aug. 4, 2015.

Module 3: Operational Best Practices and Lessons Learned

From master-planning to team recruitment, experts discussed a variety of lessons learned from past challenges that can lead to future success.

“You should use all the tools you can to get the word out to recruit competitors, not just press releases and more traditional methods, but use a wide variety of channels including social media,” said Sandeep Patel, open innovation manager for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Idea Lab.

Watch/listen to the third webinar, originally hosted on Sept. 10, 2015.

Module 4: The Importance of Marketing and Public Education

Alan Zack, senior director of marketing and education for XPRIZE, discussed how the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE tapped into excitement over the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, the television series that popularized the idea of a handheld device used for sensor scanning and data analysis.

“We turned 40 million Trekkies into advocates,” said Zack, who also stressed the importance of public education programs that help spread the word. “Yes, we are ultimately trying to have teams compete to solve a grand challenge, but more importantly we want to educate society on the purpose of the grand challenge.”

Watch/listen to the fourth webinar, originally hosted on Oct. 20, 2015.

Module 5: Legal Considerations for Prizes

“Talk to your attorney early in the process of putting together a prize so they can help identify the correct statutory authority,” said Ami Grace-Tardy, deputy assistant general counsel for energy efficiency at the Energy Department, who offered advice on one of those authorities, the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act.

“Not every agency has interpreted all parts of America COMPETES consistently,” she said. “I’m hoping we can move toward that.”

Watch/listen the fifth webinar, originally hosted on Nov. 12, 2015.

Module 6: Building a Community

Egos and competing interests may be a problem in some groups, but that wasn’t the case with the community that developed around the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Rebuild by Design challenge, which saw teams develop plans to promote resilience in areas impacted by Hurricane Sandy.

“Designers were learning from finance people and finance people were learning from designers and they were all learning from hydrologists,” said Scott Davis, who helped administer the HUD challenge.

Watch/listen to the sixth webinar, originally hosted on Dec. 15, 2015.

Module 7: Post-Prize Industry and the Post-Prize Impact

“Sometimes you’re in the middle of a process where you think you know what you can get out of it, but then you realize you can get so much more,” said Alexis Bonnell, chief of applied innovation and acceleration at the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Global Development Lab.

USAID’s Fighting Ebola Grand Challenge continues to make an impact through cross-sector partnerships and technology development. In addition to providing front-line healthcare workers with a safer, easier-to-use suit, the challenge also produced innovations in sensors and information technology.

Watch/listen to the seventh and final webinar of the series, originally hosted on Jan. 14.

In addition to the expert training series, a YouTube playlist offers many more online training and informational videos about challenges and Challenge.gov.

We’ve added agency-specific dashboards to analytics.usa.gov!

Starting today, you’ll see a dropdown from the main analytics.usa.gov page that allows you to view the same dashboard, but filtered for websites that are administered by one of 10 specific agencies:

• Department of Commerce
• Department of Education
• Department of Energy
• Department of the Interior
• Department of Justice
• Department of Veterans Affairs
• Environmental Protection Agency
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• National Archives and Records Administration
• Small Business Administration

What Do These Pages Show Me?

These dashboard pages allow for greater insight into how the public interacts with specific agency websites as a complement to the aggregated view available at analytics.usa.gov. In many cases, the information we see as a government-wide percentage does not perfectly mirror an individual agency’s data. For example, at the time of writing this post, the domestic vs. foreign traffic on the whole of participating Digital Analytics Program (DAP) sites is about 90% to 10%, respectively. But the VA specifically has a 99% to 1% ratio, while NASA has a 62% to 38% domestic to foreign visits ratio.

The pages also allow you to see things like the most popular downloads at an agency-level. During tax season, the IRS contributes the majority of downloads in the “Top Downloads” section on analytics.usa.gov, which is logical since it is tax season. With agency dashboards, you can observe downloads at the agency level.

Why These Agencies? Are There More to Come?

The agencies included in this initial “batch” of dashboards volunteered to be part of the first release. They are not representative of total participation in DAP, which is currently at 45 agencies. In the future, we hope to continue to expand the number of agency-specific pages. If you’d like to see a dashboard for your agency, contact us.

Are the Dashboards Representative of All Agency Websites?

In most cases, no. The dashboards reflect only websites that participate in the Digital Analytics Program. You can see which sites are included in the data set for each agency by downloading the “Visits to all Domains in the Last 30 Days” .csv file from the “Download the Data” section. You can also get an idea of the level of participation of an agency at pulse.cio.gov. If you work on a federal website that you’d like to have participate in DAP, email us.

We think this level of data is valuable to gain a more clear understanding of the kinds of interaction the public has with the various different parts of the federal government, and what is important to them. We hope you feel the same!

Tim Lowden leads the Digital Analytics Program (DAP), which powers analytics.usa.gov. Gabriel Ramirez, Gray Brooks, Eric Mill, Colin Craig, and Julia Winn are Innovation Specialists at 18F.

The Digital Analytics Program currently tracks analytics data on more than 4,000 U.S. federal government websites across 45 agencies. To learn more or to find out how your agency/website can participate in the program, please email us.

For more on 18F, visit 18f.gsa.gov. The work on analytics.usa.gov is all open-source, and can be found in our Github repo.

Summary: Consumers empowered with their own data are in the driver’s seat to make informed choices.

In the 21st century economy, Americans rely on online services to access personal bank accounts, pay bills, and shop online, so why don’t we have similar interactions with Federal government through easy-to-use, online tools? The answer is we can—and increasingly we are—as we continue to build a 21st century government.

Since first taking office, President Obama has been committed to building a more open and transparent government while, at the same time, protecting consumers and empowering them to make informed choices for themselves and their families. As technology advances and integrates into nearly every aspect of our lives, a wealth of personal data is being created. This data can help people live healthier, better manage their finances, and gain control of their energy consumption, yet consumers often struggle to get access to their own information.

Recognizing this opportunity, the President launched a series of My Data initiatives beginning in 2010 to ensure all Americans have easy and secure access to their own personal data, whether related to health, energy, finance, or education. When consumers are empowered with their own data, they are in the driver’s seat to make informed choices.

“Because we want every American ultimately to be able to securely access and analyze their own health data, so that they can make the best decisions for themselves and for their families.” – President Obama, January 30, 2015

My Data initiatives raise the bar for both public and private organizations, empowering consumers through public-private data interoperability, security, and access. Working together, the Federal government and private sector have made considerable progress opening data for individuals. For example, Blue Button, a My Data healthcare initiative, works with public and private sector organizations to expand patients’ access to their medical records online so they can track their health, correct errors, be more effective caregivers, and better facilitate health information sharing between doctors, specialists, and their family. Green Button, a My Data energy initiative, is helping Americans access their detailed household or building electricity usage from their utilities online, facilitating virtual energy audits to identify inefficiencies and save money for both residential and commercial customers.

My Data initiatives have accomplished a lot for the American people, including:

• ​More than three million veterans, service members, and Medicare beneficiaries have now accessed their personal health data from their government more than 46 million times.
• An estimated 150 million Americans now have the ability to access their health records online from health professionals, medical laboratories, retail pharmacy chains, and state immunization registries. In fact, a majority of healthcare providers are now providing access to health information online. More than 16,000 healthcare organizations and providers are now listed on the Blue Button Connector, a tool to help patients and consumers access their health records online.
• More than 150 utilities and electricity suppliers have committed to providing more than 60 million homes and businesses Green Button. This data allows commercial properties and homeowners to understand their energy consumption patterns and make smarter decisions about usage, which translates into cost savings and a cleaner environment.

• Any American who signs up for a free online “my Social Security” account can now download a copy of their Social Security benefit statement, which they can then choose to share with a financial advisor or use in software that helps them better plan financially for their retirement.
• Millions of students and parents are using MyStudentData and FAFSA.gov data each year to access to their Federal student loan balance, grant, enrollment, and overpayment information, helping them understand their choices for paying off student debt or choosing where to attend school.

As we make progress, there’s still much to do to ensure access for all. For example, efforts like the President’s Precision Medicine Initiative will promote access to personal health data and allow patients to contribute their data to scientific research, revolutionizing how we improve health and treat disease. In February 2016 at the Precision Medicine Initiative Summit hosted by the President at the White House, six of the major electronic health record vendors announced that they will pilot the use of standard ways (e.g., application programming interfaces, or “APIs”) for individuals to access and contribute their data to research. You will soon be able to use these tools to participate in the National Institutes of Health’s Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort, once launched.

The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has long been a partner with agencies in helping them accomplish their mission as it relates to data. For example, GSA manages Data.gov for government open data and consults with agencies on relevant lessons learned and best practices for data management. In response to the 2016 priority on My Data, GSA is taking a leadership role to assist Federal agencies with responsibly managing data to benefit all Americans.

GSA, with the help of its digital services consultancy 18F, is developing a next generation identity and authentication service, which will be managed centrally at the agency. Following a successful yearlong pilot of Connect.gov, this new service will be a valuable tool for My Data, helping enhance security and privacy by: securely connecting people to online government services and applications; allowing individuals to sign-on only once for access to multiple Federal websites or services; and eliminating the need to maintain multiple logins for government agencies. The U.S. government continues to get smarter around data with increasing efficiencies and services streamlined for all Americans.

The Administration is proud to support these My Data initiatives and discover even more opportunities to improve and unlock individuals’ data.

This post was originally published on the OSTP blog by Kristen Honey, a Policy Advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Phaedra Chrousos, Associate Administrator, Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies/18F, U.S. General Services Administration; Tom Black, a Digital Service Specialist at 18F, U.S. General Services Administration.

With more than 400 projects in their portfolio, it can be difficult for the Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative to adequately convey the scope of the office’s work. The team can list their projects, organize them by program area, and write blog posts about them, but none of that has the same impact as seeing all of the projects displayed on an interactive map. Audiences are now able to click on a map, zoom to different sections and click onto icons to explore the diverse and wonderful world of the SunShot solar energy research and development portfolio.

Beyond just showing where projects are, maps are a handy, one-page overview of the scope of work. The Department of Energy is launching maps across its website; the SunShot Initiative chose to host a project map to spur public discussion of its projects and to encourage researchers, entrepreneurs and other solar-interested Americans to participate in helping to solve solar’s unique challenges.

The goal of the SunShot Initiative is to make solar energy cost competitive with traditional forms of energy by 2020. The solar industry has already achieved 70% of that goal. But it will take a herculean effort to achieve the remaining 30%, so participation from the nation’s best and brightest is needed.

To spur greater public dialogue about the future of solar energy, the SunShot communications team compiled detailed project description pages for every project in its portfolio for inclusion in the map. The active projects in the SunShot portfolio span from awardees that are tackling solar and storage to those creating an incentive program for local communities to go solar. Within the SunShot website, you can find game-changing solar startups, cutting-edge lab research on photovoltaics and leading concentrating solar power projects. These projects are described in detail, with information about how they approach the problem and what innovation they bring to the table.

As this information becomes more widely available, the SunShot team is able to encourage better public participation, increase effectiveness and improve the quality of their funding decisions. The more people who know about what the program is working on, the more the team can tap into the broad expertise and knowledge of the American people.

But maintaining the map is not a simple task. Simply writing and editing all the content included on each project webpage takes significant amounts of time, coordination, and effort. In addition, the team developed a database of the key details for each project, including title, funding program, amount awarded, landing page link, and more (download the full dataset here). Here’s how we did it:

• Created a content template for project landing pages. This step was key so that we had consistent content and layout across all the pages. We made sure to embed links to higher-level content to allow users to navigate through the hierarchy more easily. Each of the project pages had to be approved by the SunShot project manager.
• Write and publish landing pages for all projects. This was, by far, the most time-consuming part of the process. Working with the project managers, the communications team compiled a description, approach and innovation for each awardee in the portfolio. (PRO TIP: Carefully consider the naming convention you use for each project page. This can make it easy or hard to run Google Analytics reports in the future.)
• Create a database of projects and decide what information you want to share. This is never as simple as it seems. For example, the SunShot Initiative has many active projects—do we want to show inactive or completed projects? What about the funding amount—do you use the amount awarded (actually received) or what was announced as the project kicked off (Often in the course of a project the scope changes, so the amounts change)? Deciding how you want to navigate all these changes makes an impact on how much information you can include in your database.
• Meet with developers and lay out the scope and timeline of the project. Allow about three rounds of edits as you discover errors in your database, refine the functionality and adjust the wording and linking of the projects.
• Launch internally first. You want to make sure your team knows how to use the map and provides input for the second version of the map. We had the developer come into the office, demo the map and take suggestions from the entire office.
• Iterate. You’re not going to get it perfect the first time. Keep refining your database, adding projects, and re-examining the navigation. Ask your key stakeholders to review the map and suggest changes. The great thing about the map is that it can always be improved.

All told, this project took us several months to complete, with the landing pages taking the bulk of the time. Once the project pages were created, the project took about two weeks to complete.

If you’re considering a project map for your office, consider the following:

1. Do you have the time? Creating and maintaining this amount of content is very time consuming. Make sure you have the capacity to keep it up to date.
2. Do you have the content? Don’t create a map if your office only supports 10 projects across the country.
3. Do you have the internal support? Without the active participation of all the project managers, the communications team would not have been able to complete this project.

Susanna Murley is the deputy communications lead for the Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative (via The Hannon Group) and manages the complete digital portfolio, including online strategy, website development, email and social media.

A branch that does not stick to its source of nutrition will wither away and die. Just ask anyone who has received a bouquet of beautiful flowers about how long they really last. In the same way, as communicators we must stay connected to our audience, or we risk the chance of fading away into insignificance.

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First-time visitors are great, but return visitors are your loyal following. In the argument of whether to target your current audience or seek to grow more, why not stick your focus on equipping your current audience with ways and incentives to share your content? By drawing them in with excellent content, design, and follow-up methods, you can turn your blog readers into action takers.

This is a fact that cannot be overstated, regardless of platform (blog, social media, etc.). As we look to build our audience, we must consider several factors to keep the current audience engaged and interested in why they began paying attention to us in the first place.

1. Develop a plan: Determining your target audience is goal number one in building and keeping an interested and engaged audience. Whether jumping into a brand new venture, or cleaning up someone else’s [content] mess, it’s never too late to make this plan.
2. Be genuine: You [your agency] are who you are. What’s the value in jumping onto every trending hashtag, just for a few potential views? (An honest question each agency should ask themselves, I realize there could—and should—be two sides to this). Content these days takes the form of many shapes. As government communicators, the type of content you share is closely related to what you are offering as an agency—the types of services you provide. In other words, you educate people so that they know, like, and trust you enough to hear your message and take action.
3. Be a risk taker: With the above in mind, we still want to be spontaneous. The Internet can often just sound like LOUD NOISES … with everyone mindlessly scrolling through their social feeds. Don’t be afraid to say the message you wanted to say a different way. The National Weather Service (NWS) did a great job of this (with pun intended)
   

   BEGINNING ON MAY 11, @NOAA’S NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE FORECASTS WILL STOP YELLING AT YOU. https://t.co/4YjdvUdWxj pic.twitter.com/SAgbtUMMEp

   — NWS (@NWS) April 11, 2016

   as did the Department of Energy (DOE). To spur greater public dialogue about the future of solar energy, DOE “remixed their content,” displaying their projects on an interactive map as part of the SunShot Initiative.

4. Have a short memory: Getting stuck on the first mistake can deter future successes. Keep looking ahead, and remember to stick to the plan you’ve laid out for connecting with your audience (with tweaks here and there based on your results). (Football reference below, at the risk of turning off many readers—good NFL cornerbacks are said to have short memories so they can move on after a bad play—like this guy).
5. Stay focused: As Haley Van Dyck from the U.S. Digital Service said at a recent TEDTalk: “We care about making government work better, because it’s the only one we’ve got.” Every piece of content we create should be working towards this goal, improving services for our audience. At first glance, visitors may not be 100% on board with your content. However, they might come back if they are offered something in return.
6. Be inclusive: We all get frustrated when we experience slow load times or don’t find the content we expect when clicking on a link. But what if you have vision impairment and you click on a link from your favorite social media channel, only to find that the landing page is full of images that are not readable by screen readers? Staying 508 compliant will create an accessible user experience.

Implementing a few of these tips should help as you seek to draw and keep your audience. What interesting things has your agency done to foster an environment that keeps your audience?

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In a future post, I’ll discuss some strategies to keep content alive, so like the aforementioned branches and our beloved D.C.-area Cherry Blossoms, it doesn’t just wither and die.

I’m no expert at this stuff; I simply want to provide my perspective. Us content creators at FirstNet are considering the same things, and trial and error is a huge part of that. Thanks for reading and I look forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas.

You’ve just finished reading the latest article from our Monday column, The Content Corner. This column focuses on helping solve the main content issues facing federal digital professionals, including producing enough content and making that content engaging.

The Energy Department launched Direct Current, our first podcast, on May 9. The first episode—all about rooftop solar, as well as the history of our agency—has been well-received so far by press, stakeholders, and the general public.

One review stuck out. Headlined “From out of nowhere, the U.S. Energy Department launches a great podcast,” it underscored that most people might not realize how much work and planning actually went into creating our first 25-minute episode.

Here are five key takeaways from creating and launching our podcast:

1. Set a goal launch date, but don’t set it in stone. Our launch date was pushed back because of some technical difficulties, but just having a date in mind really set a fire under us. We got moving on recording, clipping and editing the episode, and it was fully finished by our original launch date, giving us extra time to work on future episodes.
2. Find a quiet recording space. We work in an open office, so recording at our desks was out of the question. We have a small conference room that worked for recording phone calls, but didn’t work well for recording narration, as people were always walking by and making background noise. Luckily, the Energy Department has a video recording studio in the basement. We reserved time in the studio for recording. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a lot better than anything we would’ve been able to do in our office space.
3. Everything will take longer than you expect. Give yourself extra time… and then more time on top of that. With our other roles and responsibilities, it took us almost a year to get the podcast off the ground. We had to figure out what to call the podcast, how long it would be, how frequently we’d release episode, what topics to cover, who would host, where the file would live, how we would roll it out, and many other things all while keeping up with our other obligations. Even just audio transcription and clipping took longer than expected, so give yourself plenty of lead time.
4. Pitch your podcast. We wanted to make sure people actually heard what we had produced. So we got our press staff invested early. They helped us pitch the first episode to multiple news outlets. We had stories written about the podcast in The Verge, CityLab and Engadget, to name a few. Needless to say, without that pitching, the podcast would not have gotten nearly as much reach as it did. Social media is great, and we’ll continue to use it. But traditional media is still very powerful.
5. Plan episodes ahead. Now that the podcast has launched, “When is the next episode coming out?” and “What’s the next episode about?” is all we hear. It’s really important to have a plan beyond the first episode and to be working on multiple episodes at once so you don’t fall behind.

Check out Episode 1.5, a teaser of all that’s in store this season! And don’t forget to subscribe via iTunes or your favorite podcatcher.

Allison Lantero is a Digital Content Specialist and co-host of Direct Current at the Department of Energy in Washington D.C. She can be reached via email.

Summary: Significant strides in improving public access to scholarly publications and digital data help usher in an era of open science.

This week marks the 8th annual Open Access Week, when individuals and organizations around the world celebrate the value of opening up online access to the results of scholarly research. It is an opportune time to highlight the considerable progress that Federal departments and agencies have made increasing public access to the results of Federally-supported scientific research and advancing the broader notion of open science.

karpenko_ilia/iStock/Thinkstock

This week, OSTP is announcing the public access plans of three more Federal departments and agencies—Department of Education (ED), Agency for International Development, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). These plans respond to the OSTP Memorandum on Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research and establishes objectives for departments and agencies to meet in improving access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications and digital data resulting from Federally-funded research. The completed plan from ED is now available online, and plans of the other two agencies should be published soon.

These three plans bring the number of U.S. Federal departments and agencies with OSTP-approved public access plans to 19. Together, agencies with approved public access plans account for more than 98 percent of U.S. Federal expenditures on R&D.

Agencies are moving quickly to implement their plans. Sixteen agencies now require researchers to ensure free public access to peer-reviewed publications resulting from all newly-funded research, with a delay of not more than 12 months after the publication date. All agencies have designated repositories and systems for opening up access to a large number of publications resulting from Federally-funded research:

• PubMed Central, the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) repository of life-sciences literature, now contains more than 4 million full-text articles and is used by more than 1.25 million people per day. NIH now provides access to a collection of 430,000 author manuscripts published since 2008, optimized for text-mining and freely available by file transfer protocol.
• The National Science Foundation’s Public Access Repository, NSF-PAR, launched earlier this year, now provides access to almost 11,000 full-text research articles; it leverages technology from the Department of Energy’s Public Access Gateway for Energy & Science, which now provides access to more than 24,000 full-text research articles.
• The Defense Technical Information Center launched a dedicated public-access system earlier this year that contains more than 2,000 articles resulting from research funded by the Department of Defense. It has also simplified access to more than 30,000 full-text journal articles housed in its extensive technical reports collection.
• The Department of Agriculture has made 95,000 full-text journal articles available through its PubAg and TreeSearch systems.
• The Environmental Protection Agency has signed an interagency agreement with the National Library of Medicine to use PubMed Central as the designated repository for peer-reviewed scholarly publications.
• CENDI, a group of Federal agencies that manage scientific and technical information, created a central source of authoritative information about agency public access plans and implementation and intends to enhance its existing Science.gov system to facilitate search across the various Federal agency public-access systems.

Agencies are also making considerable progress to improve the management of and access to data resulting from Federally-funded research. Thirteen agencies now require that all new research projects have data management plans describing the data to be collected during the project and plans for its long-term preservation and access. Other agencies are beginning to implement such requirements, and all are developing tools to improve data management, discovery, and preservation.

• The Department of Transportation has released more than 800 transportation-related datasets, ranging from intelligent transportation systems to on-time performance statistics for airlines and connected them to research project descriptions and full-text reports in the USDOT Research Hub‎  to provide seamless public access.
• The Department of Veterans Affairs received 1,677 data management plans as part of new funding applications since its new requirements went into place in January 2016. The Department of Education received 63 data management plans for projects awarded in Fiscal Year 2015 and 2016.
• The U.S. Geological Survey released the first version of its Data Release Workbench, a web-based application to provide funded scientists with access to data management and discovery tools and assistance in navigating through the stages of a data release.
• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s dataset identifier project has issued more than 587 digital object identifiers for datasets archived at the National Centers for Environmental Information, enabling the unambiguous citation of data used to support research results.
• The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched a new NASA-Funded Research Results portal in August to provide one-stop shopping for research articles and data resulting from NASA-funded research.

To help guide future efforts to improve access to the results of Federally-funded research, the National Science and Technology Council’s Committee on Science has just established a new Interagency Working Group on Open Science (IWGOS). The IWGOS will build upon progress to date and facilitate interagency coordination and cooperation on topics of common interest. It will also identify additional steps agencies can take to improve the preservation, discoverability, accessibility, and usability of the full range of outputs of, and data supporting, Federally-funded scientific research. In addition, the new interagency working group will identify opportunities for international communication and collaboration to advance open science.

Open science has become a priority for many other countries and has featured prominently in recent high-level statements and communiques from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), G20, and G7.

At their meeting in Tsukuba, Japan last May, G7 Science and Technology Ministers agreed to establish an international working group on open science to identify good practices for improving access to scholarly publications and digital data that result from government-funded research and explore incentive structures that can reward scientists who practice open science. The first meeting of that G7 Open Science Working Group is scheduled to take place next month in Japan. Additionally, open science will be a core priority for the OECD’s Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy over the next two years.

Together, these efforts to open up the results of Federally-funded research promise to increase the return of Federal investments in scientific research, bolster the reliability of that research, accelerate scientific discovery, stimulate innovation, promote entrepreneurship, and enhance economic growth and job creation.  These are certainly accomplishments worth celebrating during Open Access Week—and ones that will have lasting effects long beyond.

Jerry Sheehan is Assistant Director for Scientific Data & Information at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

This post was originally published on the OSTP blog.

Summary: The White House is hosting its first-ever Electric Vehicle Datathon, and nominations for participation are now open. Don’t miss your chance to join the discussion!

The White House Domestic Policy Council and Office of Science and Technology Policy will convene its first-ever Electric Vehicle (EV) Datathon on November 29. This event, held in partnership with the Department of Energy and four of its National Laboratories will bring together EV experts, charging-station providers, cities and states, automakers, and the software-development and data-analysis communities. This group will explore best practices on how data can inform efforts to deploy EVs and charging stations and how data collection and curation can serve the growing EV community.

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

Progress on EVs:

Electric vehicles are emerging as a technology that can help address many modern transportation challenges and are more affordable and better performing that ever before. Nearly thirty plug-in vehicle models are now available from more than a dozen manufacturers, giving vehicle buyers more choices of manufacturer, size, capabilities, and appearance. EVs dramatically lower overall emissions of harmful pollutants, including greenhouse gases. They use no petroleum, allowing owners to skip the gas station, save money, and reduce their vulnerability to volatile oil prices.

This progress on EVs is no accident, thanks in part to sustained investment in Federal research and development through the Department of Energy and by automakers in new vehicle models with more than 20 models of plug-in electric vehicles now available, up from only one in 2008. The deployment of EVs has been supported by national and local efforts to build out public-charging infrastructure. There are now more than 40,000 publically accessible charging stations, giving EV owners more confidence in the range of their vehicles. An ever-increasing number of Americans have access to charging at work; more than 250 employers have joined the DOE’s workplace charging challenge, providing thousands of stations for employee use.

The emerging field of data science is already creating widespread benefits in transportation such as real-time traffic alerts, crowd-sourced information on road conditions, digital citizen feedback on infrastructure through 311 systems, and a wide array of new “smart cities” technologies. EVs are benefiting from this improvement in data, computing, and analytics. Websites like fueleconomy.gov make it easy for a potential buyer to see how much they would save with different models; charging station locators such as DOE’s Alternative Fuels Data Center show drivers in need of a charge where their nearest stations are; policy tools like the Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency help prospective buyers identify incentives; and the Plug-in Electric Vehicle Readiness Score helps communities cut red tape and improve driver experiences.

Despite the progress in EVs and in data to support their deployment, more work in needed to continue the conversation among those who are generating and curating new EV data and those who could put this data to good use. The datathon on November 29 seeks to further this conversation by convening experts in EVs, data science, and software development to review currently available data, identify opportunities for improvement, and discuss new datasets and approaches that can enable EVs going forward. Topics of conversation include: what datasets could emerge from new efforts such as the Department of Transportation’s Alternative Fuel Corridors; what new data do local planners need as they work to make their communities EV ready; and what new information can be revealed by “mashing up” diverse available datasets?

How to get involved:

Due to space constraints, attendance is invitation only. You can nominate yourself or someone else, who would be an excellent contributor to the discussion or suggest or submit a data set for use by the research community. Email the datathon team.

Austin Brown is Assistant Director for Clean Energy and Transportation for the Office of Science and Technology Policy

Candace Vahlsing is a Senior Policy Advisor for Energy and Climate Change

This post was originally published on the White House OSTP blog.