My e-Government Santa Wish #2: an One Stop Government

This is a crosspost of http://dotgov.com

Dear Santa,

I hope you were able to enforce Web Accessibility on State & Local Government levels. My second wish is as challenging as the first one.

Santa Art by Sophie (7 years)
Santa Art by Sophie (7 years)

Each time I need a government service, I need to wade through numerous of websites to find out if it is offered by my city, county, state, federal or some other government agency.

Please put effort in offering a solution where I can access all services that are offered by THE government. I would like to have an Amazon.com-like “Government Services Catalogue” that contains all services offered within my zip code area, where I can shop around and find more information.

Here’s my suggestion on how to fix this:
a. Get someone on top level involved to bring out a vision on One Stop Government,
b. Go shop around in Europe. They’ve been doing this stuff for almost 10 years(!) now, so it is just a matter of copy & paste best practices,
c. Define a Government Services Catalogue XML scheme, which contains basic info like the service name, description, where to get it, what is costs, wait time and a link to the page with more info,
d. Set up laws and regulations that requires each government to publish its services in this XML file on their website,
e. Create a website that harvests these XML files and makes this stuff searchable (or ask Microsoft and Google to do it) per region.

I will post my third Santa wish tomorrow.
This is a series of 4 Santa Wishes for a better e-Government:
-eGov Santa Wish #1: enforce web accessibility for local government.
-eGov Santa Wish #2: an One Stop Government.
-eGov Santa Wish #3: benchmark all Government websites
-eGov Santa Wish #4: It’s the Local Government, Stupid!

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GovLoop

Love the wishes. I’m with you – as citizen I just want one place to go. Trick is so many levels of gov and agencies – some of them overlapping.

Michael Riedyk

Hi Steve, It can be done, see my suggestions. You shouldn’t care about the levels in Government. Have them all publish their services apart form each other in a standard format, harvest that an make it searchable. I’ve been working on a lot of these kind of projects in Europe in the last 10 years in Europe and it works really neat there now.