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Report cards are hard to receive. Good grades provide praise and cause for pride, while bad grades provide a harsh reminder of how things really are. A new open-source platform called ScanGov, which calls itself the Digital Government Experience Monitor, has both.
ScanGov is the brainchild of tech entrepreneur Luke Fretwell and his son Elias. It's the father-son civic hacker duo's most ambitious project to date. (We profiled Elias in a previous episode of TFIC, when the 14-year-old self-taught civic hacker was making sense of public data sets posted by public agencies with little thought for how they would be used.)
In this newly launched project, Fretwell and his son created an assessment tool to monitor government websites for their attention to the fundamental elements that underpin performance and reliability. ScanGov evaluates a variety of web practices and scores sites based on metadata, URL structure, site maps and robots.txt policies. Elias, now 16, says the project aims to highlight areas for improvement on government sites and encourage adherence to best practices, ultimately making these websites more accessible and secure. Since its launch, ScanGov has received positive feedback from federal and state government agencies, with many of them updating their sites based on the project's criteria.
Meanwhile, Luke emphasizes that the goal of the project is to encourage behavioral change within public organizations by educating them on basic digital practices. The project will start with metadata and expand to include other important web elements, with further enhancements planned, such as content security policies and accessibility checks. According to ScanGov, most state and federal sites currently have low scores, but the initiative is not punitive, but aims to improve public digital services.
Show Notes
Here are five key takeaways from this episode:
- ScanGov Launch: Luke and Elias Fretwell developed ScanGov, a project that evaluates the basic web practices of government websites. The tool scores these websites based on factors such as meta tags, URL structure, sitemaps, and robots.txt policies to see if they meet certain criteria.
- Impact and feedback: ScanGov has received positive feedback from various levels of government. The project aims to encourage behavioral change in public authorities by highlighting areas for improvement. The initiative has already resulted in numerous requests from government agencies to update their scores and make the necessary corrections.
- Current state of government websites: ScanGov's initial results reveal that the majority of state government websites fail to meet the basic standards they are assessed against: only six states received an A grade, and the average score across states was 59 percent, equivalent to an F. This highlights significant room for improvement in how states manage their digital services.
- Educational approach: The Fretwells emphasize that ScanGub is not just about pointing out deficiencies, but also about educating agencies on best practice. It provides detailed documentation and guidelines to help them understand and implement the changes needed to improve their scores.
- Continuous improvement and future plans: The project is designed to be iterative and responsive to feedback: new metrics and features will be added over time, including aspects such as Content Security Policy and US Web Design System compliance. Additionally, there is a focus on adapting ScanGov to different levels of government, including counties, and providing guidance for organizations to set up their own versions of the tool.
Related Links Items mentioned in the episode:
Our editors used ChatGPT 4.0 to create the show notes and summarize the episode in bullet points. The main image for this story was created using DALL-E 3. Government Technology is a sister site GovernanceBoth are parts of e.Republic.
