[LINK] Government FedSpace

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

(US) Government to launch ‘Fedspace,' a social media site for feds

By STEPHEN LOSEY | Last Updated: April 27, 2010 
<http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20100427/DEPARTMENTS07/4270302/-1/>


The (US) government this fall plans to launch a new Facebook-like social 
networking program for federal employees.

The site, called FedSpace, is intended to provide feds with more 
opportunities to communicate, collaborate and share information. FedSpace 
will allow feds to write blogs, create wikis and share files with one 
another. It will also have employee directories and a search feature.

Tiffany Smith, a State Department official detailed to the General 
Services Administration, said employees at small agencies often don't 
have enough opportunities to collaborate with colleagues. FedSpace could 
help fix that and connect employees across agency lines, Smith said at 
the Government Web and New Media Conference in Washington.

"Together, we can use FedSpace to improve business processes that already 
exist, build effective relationships and collaborations across the 
federal government, and ultimately drive innovation and discovery in the 
21st century," Smith said.

This will not be the government's first experiment with social 
networking, but it is likely to be its biggest. The Office of the 
Director of National Intelligence in 2008 launched A-Space, a 
collaborative social networking program for intelligence analysts. The 
intelligence community also created a Wikipedia-type program for analysts 
called Intellipedia in 2005.

The government is testing another new website that will enable federal 
users to shorten government website addresses. Bev Godwin, head of GSA's 
Center for New Media and Citizen Engagement, said the website will make 
it easier for agencies to point to websites using Twitter and other 
systems.

GSA began beta testing Go.USA.gov in September, and it now has about 
1,000 users, Godwin said. It is similar to pages like tinyURL.com or 
bit.ly, and users can paste long Web addresses into the site and receive 
drastically shorter addresses that can easily fit into Twitter's 140-
character limit.

Godwin said Go.USA.gov will be better than sites like tinyURL because the 
public trusts the credibility of pages with a .gov suffix and because the 
site will be permanent.

Only federal employees, contractors and military service members 
with .gov, .mil, .fed.us, or .si.edu addresses are able to use the site.

Tell us what you think. E-mail STEPHEN LOSEY. <slosey at federaltimes.com>

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Stephen Loosley
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in Victoria, Australia