FirstGov.gov was unveiled by President Clinton in September of 2000 amid much fanfare. As the first official federal web portal, it was to usher in a new age of electronic government, fundamentally changing the way the public interacts with and retrieves information from federal agencies. In some ways, FirstGov has met this vision. It provides a central location where the public can search for information across agencies -- without having to go to each separate agency web site. Yet in other ways, FirstGov has fallen short of its advance billing. The FirstGov search engine, for instance, can overwhelm users with the volume of information it returns, some of which may not be relevant at all to the user's search. In many cases, users cannot even find out if the agency has the information, especially if the information is not on the web. In other ways too, it is not always clear to the user how to retrieve relevant information or where to retrieve it. OMB Watch recently observed some of these usability problems firsthand. Several weeks ago, while participating in a computer training session for non-profit organizations in North Carolina on using government information, OMB Watch asked participants to find certain information using FirstGov in a limited amount of time. Specifically, users were asked to:

• Register to receive updates on federal policies affecting people with disabilities;
• Send an e-mail notice to the EPA about an environmental violation;
• View the statistical profile of North Carolina;
• Apply for retirement benefits; and
• Find the name and phone number of the legislative director to Sen. John Edwards.

The results were telling. No one successfully used FirstGov to find answers to all of these questions. For the few who found some of the answers, the average time was perceived by the participants as taking too long. Moreover, several commented that doing transactions, such as registering for retirement benefits, was far easier than obtaining information through FirstGov. Some of these people noted that the information that was available for nonprofit organizations was limited. Several knew which agency might have the answers they were looking for, and went directly to the agency web site to retrieve the information; another person became fed up searching for Sen. Edwards legislative director and used her cell phone to call the Senator's office for the information. Clearly, such an exercise should be easier, and could be indicative of much larger scale usability problems. Part of the problem is that FirstGov has solicited very little in the way of public input, which could be indispensable to improving usability. The good news is that FirstGov is starting to move in this direction. On December 6, 2001, the FirstGov team put out a notice that it is planning to makeover the site, marking the first major renovation since it came online. In doing this, FirstGov will contract with a company to conduct focus groups and usability tests -- which should include both people of different technical skill levels and different informational needs -- and develop an interim redesign of the existing site. The purpose of the focus groups and usability tests is to get feedback on how to best reorganize existing content to "highlight the following: online transactions; three primary customer channels (i.e. government to government, citizen to government, and business to government); government shopping, and topical information." Some specific changes that FirstGov says will occur in the interim redesign of the site include: repositioning existing content, forming new content categories, featuring graphical improvements, and positioning FirstGov to easily implement future features. The changes should make the site more eye-catching and customer-friendly. FirstGov will hopefully decide on a contractor to perform the usability tests by the end of February so the usability tests can be performed in March. We hope that one audience that will be tested will include nonprofit organizations since they work in partnership with government to deliver services. The type of information they may be interested in - availability of grants and contracts, for example - is not now easily obtained. These improvements to the front end of the site - what the user sees and can get- come at the same time FirstGov is hiring a (possibly new) vendor to run the back end of its site -- which powers the search engine and could also deliver important improvements. The General Services Administration (GSA) put out a Request for Proposal (RFP) on January 2, 2002, for vendors to bid on running the new search engine. (For more on this contracting process, and the controversy surrounding it, click here.) As laid out in the RFP, the Office of FirstGov expects the number of URLs indexed by the FirstGov search engine to increase from the current 50,000,000 by 50,000,000 each year until FY 2005, and then to level out at 200,000,000 pages. Moreover, FirstGov indicated its desire to significantly enhance public usability by:

• Making PDF documents searchable through FirstGov;
• Updating FirstGov's index of information (by re-spidering) every 7 days, as compared to the current 14 days.
• Installing a mechanism to remove broken links (sometimes referred to as "phantom" URLs) on a weekly basis; and
• Providing a "web authoring standard" that all agencies will use when constructing/uploading web pages for consistency.

As FirstGov goes through this period of transition, both with the user interface and search engine of its site, OMB Watch will continue to monitor the progress of FirstGov toward delivering on the promise of electronic government. The process of picking a vendor to power FirstGov will also be important to keep an eye on. Much of the media around FirstGov has focused on whether the contracting process is rigged in favor of Inktomi, which currently provides the system that powers FirstGov; Eric Brewer, founder of Inktomi, originally helped spearhead FirstGov through a donation of services carried out by a nonprofit organization he set up, the Fed-Search Foundation. Fed-Search, in turn, contracted with Inktomi to provide some of the key services. There are questions about whether Brewer's company, Inktomi, is now in position to profit from that donation, an issue explored by OMB Watch in this piece on the history of FirstGov. The Statement of Work (SOW) in the RFP makes specific information about the FirstGov computers publicly available for the first time since it began. FirstGov runs on a number of Sun E250, E220, and A1000 computers, totaling about 58 servers in all. According to the RFP, these servers will be wiped clean, and an incoming vendor (if not Inktomi) will have to build a new program to power the search engine. The specific dollar amount of vendor bids is not public information until a contract is awarded. GSA will decide on a new vendor by the end of February, and at that time it will be clear whether or not Inktomi had a true advantage, and whether it was able to bid notably less than a new vendor to continue running the search engine. OMB Watch will report on the result of the bidding process and the details of the contract as the information becomes available. Another specific concern that results from the government contracting with an outside vendor is that the government does not own the search engine technology that organizes the information in a usable way; that technology is proprietary information. Even if FirstGov contracts with a new vendor this will not change, according to Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) Part 12, which states that the government will not be entitled to more ownership of proprietary software/information than any commercial vendor. This will continue to be a problem unless the indexed database of government information is in the public domain. Back to Executive Report