President Obama's nomination of Judge Sotomayor has brought increased attention to the U.S. Supreme Court. It also has led us to reexamine the Court's web site, which is long overdue for an overhaul. In its current form, its web design is suggestive of the 1990s, and its functionality is similarly dated.
The Justices appear to agree. They've recently ask Congress for money to move control of the site in-house, taking over responsibility from the GPO. This move would allow them, in their words, to "better control and manage the web site and to be able to expand the data and services provided by the site more efficiently."
Continue readingRedesigning the Government: Data.gov
One thing we’ve been most excited about here at the Sunlight Foundation is the concept of Data.gov. Due later this year, new federal CIO Vivek Kundra will release a new central repository for government data and research. And while in this series we traditionally re-design federal websites, we thought we’d actually take the opportunity to design data.gov right off the bat to show you all what we’d like to see happen.
Continue readingRedesigning the Government: Lobbyist Disclosure
John Wonderlich and I teamed up to show how Sunlight envisions a future executive branch lobbying disclosure site. Check it out on the Sunlight Foundation blog.
Continue readingRedesigning the Government: EPA
Continuing with our redesigning the government project, we have moved on to the EPA. Many of you might ask why we would want to redesign the EPA – it looks like it's been redesigned recently and seems to have a lot of new and up-to-date features. I think what happens with a lot of redesigns is that people start thinking of all the fun things they can add to a site, rather than thinking of the underlying problems and finding good solutions to fit those problems. Good design and good websites aren't just made up of pretty pictures and Web 2.0 features like gradients and podcasts. A good site has structure and organization, and is easy for users to navigate. I think the EPA has started down a good path, and I want to show them that by emphasizing the right things on a page, it makes the content much more accessible and would take their good site and make it a great site.
Continue readingRedesigning the Government: FEC
We got a lot of great comments and discussions happening from our redesign of USA.gov, so we thought we’d continue the series and call it “Redesigning the Government.” At Sunlight, we deal a lot with FEC information, both internally and through one of our grantees, OpenSecrets.org so we thought we’d take a look at prototyping some ways that the FEC could better disclose campaign finance information through the Web.
Continue readingRethinking usa.gov
With Obama in the President’s seat now, and many new people coming into the vast executive branch, they now have an opportunity to revisit their presence on the web and explore the possibilities of getting the American people more interested and more informed about what their government is doing. The hub for all this information is a site known as usa.gov.
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