[keane]

A beautiful website designed for usability, an API for exporting public data, an open source website available on Github, and feedback through Tender Support; this is by far the greatest .gov I have ever seen. Thank you for your hard work!

I'm absolutely blown away. If all government websites (especially http://usaspending.gov, http://data.gov, http://itdashboard.gov, http://federalreporting.gov, http://recovery.gov) were this well designed I might start to think that the government was finally catching up.

Can you explain more about your team? Are you an outside company working on contract or are you federal employees? What process and team structure allowed the Federal Register site to be developed like this when so many other .govs are backwards and languishing? How can other federal websites follow your lead?

[andrewcarpenter]

Thank you (and everyone) for your kind words.

We're a team of three SF developers (Dave Augustine, Bob Burbach, and myself) working on FederalRegister.gov in our spare time (we have day jobs at airbnb.com and wested.org).

Two years ago we entered a developer competition run by the Sunlight Foundation to use content from the newly-released data.gov clearinghouse to build an open source application; we created http://GovPulse.us, and took second place; traffic grew and we kept working on the site.

Six months later, the Government Printing Office and the Office of the Federal Register contacted us; they wanted to know if we could take GovPulse and expand on it to create a new face for the Federal Register. We jumped at the opportunity, quickly formed a company, and got to work. Last July we launched Federal Register 2.0 and we've been iterating on it ever since.

It's hard to say what the lessons are; but we're definitely not typical government contractors. Largely I think it comes down to having the right people in the agencies who really want to make change, and having strong leadership from above encouraging such change. And I don't think its surprising that the Office of the Federal Register is on the cutting edge for openness--the Federal Register is one of the earliest and most important open-government institutions; and when trying to cut through red tape it doesn't hurt to have a staff comprised largely of regulatory lawyers.

[arihersh]

I add to what everyone has said here and elsewhere: terrific work. I would love to discuss with you guys adding a commenting component to meaningfully organize public comments, particularly on proposed rules.

I am a lawyer with a tech background and had ~10 years of experience with (comments on) Federal Rulemaking at the Natural Resources Defense Council. State of the art is still often hundreds of printouts of electronically submitted comments.