Each of the government web sites in this week’s actions are quite unique. Some seem to be very helpful while others just seem to leave me dazed and confused. The dissemination of government information is not an easy task and the role that these web sites play is rather important. However, as a web developer myself, I have come to take a rather critical view of web sites; especially those whose sole job is to distribute information (as opposed to being interactive). 

Of all the sites, I found whitehouse.gov to be the most informative, well designed, and easy to navigate. It uses a number of technologies covered in this course including social networking like facebook, myspace, and twitter; streaming video through youtube and vimeo;  and photo and audio through iTunes (podcasts) and Flicker. However, I think the most important aspect to the site is the ease of navigation and finding of information. This simple fact alone contributes to a visitor’s level of interaction and participation with the site. The information pages are factual, concise, and well written. There are a number of links to external sites where further information can be found on a particular topic. To me, the site gives the feeling that it wants you to know things…it wants you to explore and see everything it has to offer. This feeling certainly aligns with Obama’s push for transparency of government process and information. The blog is a great touch and some of the articles have a personal feel to them which is even more inviting; it seem like the author is writing to you instead of because of you.

The apps.gov website left me less than impressed. It appears to be a web site geared towards government procurement of computer applications; sort of like an Amazon for government software. While the design is ok, the functionality and worth of information is less than par for the course. While searching for a few random applications I found the site to be, from a developer’s standpoint, disappointing. They list categories with no offerings in them (why not just hide them if there is nothing in them?) and each product that I viewed (about 10 in a few different categories) provided very limited information as to what the product is, what it does, or any specifics that a IT manager would want to know (support details, security/privacy considerations, dependencies…especially if these are all cloud applications) before purchasing a $27,625.51 annual license for “HP SAAS SM DPT BASE +5USR BNDL“…whatever that is. It would appear that procurement managers already have the details needed to make efficient and effective purchasing decisions because that information is certainly not on this site. However, it certainly does seem easy to purchase something…despite the fact that you may not know what you are getting.This is not very comforting to see as a tax payer!

The data.gov site gets points in my book for offering what it does. While the site does offer a number of technologies like basic web application functionality (information requests, data processing, etc.), its strength lies in the simple layout of detailed and complicated information. The purpose of the site is information sharing and it successfully achieves that. Federal level data seems to be relatively plentiful in certain categories (many categories have little to no results though), state level data is very thin. It would be nice to offer more links to external sites for more data sets. I think this would increase the utility of the site as an information gathering hub.

The recovery.gov web site is a great idea but I’m not too thrilled with the design. There is a lot of information on the pages and it is easy for someone to get lost in it all. Additionally, I found some user interface bugs where CSS styles were causing text to run out of boundary boxes and  option boxes were covering text. Technical details aside, there is a lot of great information presented here that definitely assists with the goal of transparency. There is also use of social networking like Facebook and Twitter. I think that if the user interface was better organized to present the massive amount of information, it would help users better interact with the site and provide for better comprehension of the data.

Finally, the serve.gov web site is a small but important site dedicated to getting people involved in their community. This certainly falls under civic participation and is a great idea in my book. The site is well designed and easy to follow. However, I was a bit dissapointed that when searching for a project, I was shuttle off to a third party site. In reality, this makes sense as there a number of volunteer search web sites already existing (like volunteermatch.com) but the change in interface sort of turned me off a bit. One part of the small web site that I really liked was the Getting Started “toolkit” section where the site walks you through setting up a community event. The “toolkit” offers loads of great information about how to organize and make your event a success. These are the types of things that you don’t expect government to do but now that it is being done, I think it’s great! This is the reason I voted the way I did in 2008!

It is hard to compare the sites against each other because each site servers a different purpose. However, they all have the goal of information sharing. The whitehouse.gov and serve.gov seem to speak to me the best with regard to knowledge and promoting a civic engagement willingness. Recovery.gov was definitely the most confusing and information laden but it seem to have the highest level of transparency. Apps.gov seems pretty useless to the public but data.gov is highly useful though to a specific type of educated audience.