Apply to BOLD.gov

[lpgoldstein]

Each year at BOLD GOV, Government Executive and Nextgov team up to explore the powerful combination of technology, culture, and people that enables government to deliver on its essential mission.

https://www.govexec.com/f/2021-bold-gov-nomination-form/

Do you have colleagues that are transforming the way government operates and provides services? Nominate them to present at BOLD GOV, a virtual celebration of innovation in government!

A panel of Government Executive and Nextgov editors will review the nominations and select the top nominees to present at this year's BOLD GOV. Here are a few examples of past presentations:

How Tablets Kept the Asylum Program Safe: Creative Digital Responses to the COVID Emergency at USCIS Innovative Methodology for Assessing Racial Disparities in Promotions Autonomous Vehicle Pilot - Yellowstone National Park Inclusive Staff Wellness and Resilience Training Program Enabling Enterprise Data Sharing at HHS

Nominate yourself or a colleague who's doing exceptional work. Nominations across all agencies, seniority levels, and scope will be considered. The nomination deadline is Wednesday, October 20 at 11:59 PM ET.

If you have any questions, please contact Kayla at kmccloud@govexec.com.

[cthomasONRR]

@lpgoldstein here's my write-up for the 508 presentation. Please feel free to modify!

What is the proposed theme or title of the presentation? From 5,000 to 0: Prioritizing Documents for 508-Compliant Remediation

Please give us a four sentence description of what this presentation would showcase. When the Director of the Office of Natural Resources Revenue (ONRR) decided to ensure all documents on onrr.gov are Section 508 compliant in July of 2020, we thought it would be a reasonable project. This presentation focuses on our plan to correct all the documents currently on the website, and our plan going forward for any new documents requested to be uploaded to the website. We provide tangible steps that other agencies can follow to ensure 508-compliance. This is our story of how we remediated the 5,000 documents on onrr.gov to be 508-compliant!

There is a lot of innovation going on in government today. What makes this program or project stand out? What is bold about it? Accessibility is the foundation for inclusion, diversity, and equity within the federal government. As agencies work toward making their websites and documents 508-compliant, they will encounter many obstacles during this often daunting task. Our presentation outlines tangible steps that other agencies can apply and follow to ensure 508-compliance. We hope that our experiences will inspire and motivate other agencies to remediate all of their documents, no matter how old! In addition, we discuss the use of GitHub for 508-compliance tasks, which is fedRAMP authorized and free!

[lpgoldstein]

@cthomasONRR What is the proposed theme or title of the presentation? Bringing UX in-house: Cultivating digital skills through peer training Please give us a four sentence description of what this presentation would showcase. Many organizations have small UX teams and could benefit from UX researchers training their peers in user research to increase capacity. We have a small team working on a government open data website, with only one experienced UX researcher, so we decided to teach two analysts on the team how to conduct and analyze the data from user interviews. We found the best way to train them was to have them conduct mock user interviews to learn the process by doing. We’ll share what we did, what we learned through the process, and how others can apply our process in their own organization. There is a lot of innovation going on in government today. What makes this program or project stand out? What is bold about it? This talk will focus on sharing how we’ve created a sustainable user experience skillset in non-UX, career federal employees for a government open data website. Our website was started by a digital consultancy within the government, which brought user-centered design skills to our agency for the first time. When it was time for their team to roll off the project, our agency wanted to hire people with similar skills to continue working on the website. To get around roadblocks to hiring replacements as permanent government employees, our agency hired a team of three term-limited innovation specialists focusing on content strategy, development, and user experience. Since the innovation specialists only have up to 4 years working on the website, one of their major goals is to make the site sustainable for their career government employee colleagues to continue working on after they’re gone. The career employees on the team first included a product manager and three program analysts who were subject matter experts in the site’s data and had backgrounds in economics and financial management. User research seemed like a natural fit for our first foray into training the program analysts because it’s well suited for people who are already trained in analysis. The program analysts had already been participating in studies by taking notes and participating in debriefs and two of them had an interest in picking up the skill. We also knew that other teams within our agency were interested in user research, so we figured that if we grew capacity to do user research, we could spread digital literacy further in the organization. We’ve been so successful that we are now responsible for a second website and its redesign and serve as a go-to resource for innovation and tough projects within our organization.

[cthomasONRR]

@lpgoldstein Yours looks good! Should I write more for mine??

[lpgoldstein]

@cthomasONRR I think yours looks good too - it has all of the keywords but isn't too wordy. I'm worried mine is too long. @mcharg or @Maroyafaied do you want to review before we submit?

[mcharg]

@lpgoldstein @cthomasONRR These look good.

[cthomasONRR]

Are we good to submit these today??

[Maroyafaied]

@cthomasONRR Yes please go ahead!

[cthomasONRR]

I tried to apply but one of the narrative prompts kept disappearing! I combined my 2 narratives into one to submit, then emailed the contact person with the 2 individual narratives and requested verification that my application is complete.

[lpgoldstein]

@cthomasONRR I did the same thing.