Linking Hubs to Increase Visibility and Usability

Linking Hubs to Increase Visibility and Usability

For those local online hubs created by governments, I believe it would be quite useful for hub creators at all levels (local, state and federal) to work together to better coordinate and cross-link their hubs. That would also encourage standardized disclosure policies and potentially create a beneficial ‘race-to-the-top’ among government portals. It may be the case that the federal government can facilitate this process—especially through the new Open Government initiative—by working with state and local governments to link existing portals (potentially through USA.gov) and then working to make them more user-friendly.

Of course, whether we are talking about public or private portals, it may not make a difference how well linked they are since we live in an era in which search is the dominant information retrieval paradigm, not portals. The Pew survey cited above also found that “search engines are the most common starting point for obtaining online government information among all major demographic groups,” with 44 percent of respondents saying they found government websites via generic search (Smith, 2010). That percentage will likely increase in coming years. Nonetheless, it would not hurt for governments at all levels to work more closely together to make their websites more accessible to the citizenry by linking them in some fashion.

Social networking sites and capabilities also challenge the portal model, since bottom-up, user-generated sites can appear spontaneously and fill demands. For example, Facebook is filled with local community fan pages that often provide better information than some highly-planned community portals. Of course, community hubs that develop through social networking sites are not necessarily going to be developed with an eye toward the full range of local community needs in mind. Moreover, it is unclear whether or how they will be sustained over time. Their development is likely to be haphazard and because of that it is unlikely such sites would fully achieve the vision set forth by the Knight Commission.

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