Public Sector Buzz - Thursday, June 18

President Obama announced United We Serve yesterday, a summer community service initiative calling on Americans to give back to their communities. The initiative's web site at Serve.gov makes it easy to plan a service project of your own or find ones to participate in, and its search is powered by All for Good, an open source aggregator of volunteer activities that Google is proud to contribute to. The initiative will be formally launched next week at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service. We'll be there to help show All for Good. Check out coverage of All for Good on The Huffington Post and TechCrunch, and watch the President's video below:



The Brookings Institution released a new paper, "Comparing Technology Innovation in the Private and Public Sectors." The paper evaluated the websites of federal and state government organizations and compared them to a group of corporate websites, finding that, on average, corporate websites do better than government sites in terms of personalization, interactivity, and multimedia features, while public sector sites have stronger privacy policies and provide better disability access.

Sunlight Labs announced that they plan to bid on creating the new Recovery.gov and involve the community in the process, open-sourcing something normally reserved to a few government contractors. You can read the Recovery.gov Request for Proposal or and follow the progress of Sunlight's bid.

Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) asked for feedback on health care legislation on YouTube, and received over 500 responses with 26,000 votes on the ideas submitted, a new high level of involvement in YouTube's Senator of the Week program.

techPresident looks at the reaction to a State Department official's reaching out to Twitter about avoiding going down for maintenance during Iranian protests.

Posted by Eric Hysen, Public Sector Intern