Task Force Asks Public How To Dot-Gov

A White House task force charged with reforming the federal web presence launched a discussion board Monday to gather citizen feedback.

The most popular suggestion by the end of the day was imposing stricter standards for what constitutes "plain language" on federal websites. Too much information is poorly written and too complex, especially for the web, that poster wrote.

Other suggestions included requiring uniform hosting and management of websites across each federal agency, better differentiating between temporary and evergreen web content and ensuring foreign language content isn't a garbled word-for-word translation of English content.

The survey will be open until September 30.

The dot-gov reform effort is aimed at substantially reducing the federal Web footprint, which has grown to more than 20,000 individual sites since the early 1990s, and at rationalizing federal websites so citizens can more easily find information and services regardless of which agency is responsible for them.