Documenting Government Services

Overview

This is a prototype project to quickly and easily expose information about government services in such a way that third parties can better share them with the public.

Why Do This?

Every government agency offers the public a variety of services, some general and others specific to certain constituencies. There's tremendous potential in making public discovery easier, thus helping more of those who these services are meant to help.

Though agency websites may contain information about these services on their websites, this information often cannot be consumed and disseminated further by third parties in a machine-readible way. By generating small, discrete machine-readable files that describe these services, an agency can empower these third parties, such as Internet search engines, to provide quicker, easier discovery to the public.

How Agencies Can Participate...

• Is your agency at the Agency Services Checklist? If not, add it and suggest one or two of your agencies services as 'Requested'.
• Review the project overview, then familiarize yourself with the example services description files and some files that have already been generated by other agencies (you can find them in their agency folders).
• Pick a service that doesn't yet have a Service Description File, and create one for that service.
• Add more services that need description files as 'Requested' services on the Agency Services Checklist.
• Get others at your agency involved, too!

How the Public Can Participate...

Along the same lines as the above, anyone can help this project by making pull requests to:

• Add suggestions of services to the 'Requested' section of the Agency Services Checklist.
• Create Service Description File for a service that doesn't have one yet.

Questions, Ideas, Problems?

Please share any feedback or requests for help in the Issues section for this project.