NOTE: This case study draws on my experience in the public sector as an employee of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
CHALLENGE:
After the Deepwater Horizon-BP oil spill in the Gulf, DHS faced significant digital communication challenges.
DHS is the lead agency in the federal government for incident communications and oversees the US Coast Guard (USCG). USCG rules for oil spills (which predated the Internet) required the responsible party to conduct joint communications with the government. When the website was created at DeepwaterHorizonResponse.com, it was hosted on a .com platform, and BP shared publishing rights.
The White House sought to place the government in charge of a domain wholly owned and controlled by the federal government. It directed DHS to end operations on the .com site and launch an independent website on a .gov domain in its place.
Multiple agencies involved in the oil spill clean-up used the existing site. Our mission was to develop a replacement website while the need to communicate to the public via the Web was ongoing.
The CMS platform on which the dot-com site was built was proprietary software that did not meet the capabilities required for the new site. Additionally, the existing process of Incident Communications via the Web was not ideal: visitors only saw a list of links from other federal sites, where the actual content resided.
Under the settlement agreement, ultimately, the U.S. Government would bill BP for the costs of the website. The higher price was the labor of federal employees: resources from across government shifted away from core duties to support this new Website. In the future, what could the practice of Incident Communications via the Web look like — aside from creating yet another government website?
It was time to make way for something new.
SOLUTION:
We launched a new interagency portal, www.RestoreTheGulf.gov, containing content related to the Deepwater Horizon-BP Oil Spill in two waves.
First, the domain came to life in an HTML format (version 1.0); the last incarnation stood up in a CMS format (version 2.0).
When the second version of the site launched, we decommissioned the DeepwaterHorizonResponse.com site, as mandated by the White House, and redirected visitors to the new RTG.gov site from the old URL.
Restorethegulf.gov version 2.0 is built on the Drupal platform and hosted in the cloud, representing the agency’s first try at using open-source solutions for Web development activity.
The team completed the project in record speed. Over 33 business days, the team marshaled resources to:
- Migrate over 1300 assets from a site scheduled for decommissioning
- Re-purpose existing content in a user-friendly topic-centered navigation system
- Migrate and post translations for core documents in 10 languages
- Source, clear, and publish a relevant A-Z index of related content by agency and by topic
- Set up and deploy a third-party email subscription capability reaching over 20,000 subscribers from the media and the public.
We collaborated with OCIO to establish new protocols that enable content from other federal agencies to be published on the DHS Network, marking the first time this has been done. Six government organizations were involved in publishing content to this platform, and over 30 individuals have received training and been granted the authority to publish. We onboarded and trained a 36-member interagency publishing team, comprising staff from DHS HQ, the USCG, Commerce, NOAA, FWS, and HHS.
RESULTS:
The site received an award for excellence in education and outreach from the Center for Environmental Innovation and Leadership in 2010, shortly after its debut. We achieved the primary goal of the White House mandate in record time: publishing controls were firmly put into the hands of government employees, and all content was migrated to a .gov domain. Other noteworthy results included:
Interagency Publishing Transformed: In an experiment that paid off, the www.restorethegulf.gov Web site marks the first time the federal government has established a Web site that enables interagency publishing on a common platform.
While RTG.gov still acts in a portal capacity, it has also enabled content-rich agencies with an active role in the oil spill recovery, such as NOAA, to publish directly to a common platform. This innovation holds promise for future federal government efforts where multi-agency collaboration can streamline operations and remove bottlenecks to publishing information for the public.
Open-Source and Cloud Hosting Piloted: Our work with Drupal and cloud hosting provided a successful pilot for DHS, which in turn paved the way for an agency-wide program to adopt cloud publishing and open-source solutions for all public-facing Websites. Cloud hosting has the potential to save the agency significant funds in the years ahead.
Government Resources Saved: As the federal agency lead changed hands three times over the intervening years, operational control of this website shifted seamlessly due to the cloud publishing model. The DHS initially operated the site, followed by the EPA, and then by the Department of Commerce. Because the restorethegulf.gov site existed, it was not necessary to build more websites, spend more taxpayer dollars, or retrain the public about where to find content.
Future Incident Communications Practice Realized: I collaborated with the Incident Communications team at DHS Public Affairs to develop a new policy guiding existing federal sector website owners on using the usa.gov site for web communications in the event of a future incident.
The White House approved the proposal. Soon after, it was put into operation when instructions were added to federal workforce manuals that govern how Incident Communications does its job.
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