"Feds: Tell Us Which Government Websites To Close" & A Complete List of U.S. Government Domains

From Information Week:

The White House is seeking advice from the public on which websites it should shut down as part of a broad campaign by President Obama to eliminate unnecessary federal IT spending.

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On Tuesday, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra and Sheila Campbell, director for the Center for Excellence for Digital Government at the General Services Administration, hosted a forum online in which they outlined some of the next steps for culling websites, including the formation of a 17-person task force to oversee how it’s done. The two also fielded questions from the public submitted on Facebook and Twitter.

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Kundra said that prior to the campaign, agencies had been registering 50 new domain names a month. That activity has now been halted, and the task force–comprised of Web managers, CIOs, and other creative people–will meet over the coming months to get public input about how best to proceed

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The first step of the task force was to post a list of all the federal websites on the federal Data.gov online repository so people can submit their feedback on which ones should be cut, officials said.

Read the Complete Article

Additional Info and a Comment

Here’s a list of task force members along with more info from today’s forum including video of a live chat.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any representatives from the Library of Congress, NARA, GPO, Smithsonian, or one of many information organizations found in various agencies. It’s not that the 17 members are not right for the job but the task force might have been well served in a number of areas by increasing membership by two or three more members.

Finally, here’s a list of all federal government websites. You can find it via FedScoop and includes a useful chart showing domains by agency or direct from Data.gov.

See Also: President Obama Says There are Too Many .Gov Web Sites (June 13, 2011)

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