Macon Phillips

What The White House Saw In Code for America

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When the White House announced which of more than 700 applicants would become Presidential Innovation Fellows last month, it also gave a subtle endorsement to a concept pioneered by a small, but growing nonprofit organization called Code for America.

Founded by Jennifer Pahlka in 2009, Code for America has been helping to bring experts and entrepreneurs from the private sector to work together with public sector leaders and inject a dose of innovative ideas into government services. Keep reading →

 /  Published September 21, 2012 at 4:30 PM

Red Cross Launches Social Media Ops Center For Humanitarian Relief

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The American Red Cross, borrowing an approach used successfully by Dell, launched what’s being billed as the first social media-based operations center devoted to humanitarian relief.

The Digital Operations Center, located in the Red Cross National Disaster Operations Center in Washington, D.C., expands the Red Cross’ ability to engage with the public during emergencies. The new operations center, which Dell help fund and design, is modeled after Dell’s Social Media Listening Command Center, where Dell personnel monitor what customers are saying online about Dell and try to remedy customer issues proactively. Keep reading →

 /  Published March 7, 2012 at 2:40 PM

TooManyWebsites.gov

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White House Director of Digital Strategy Macon Phillips, on behalf of President Obama, makes the case in a blog that there are simply too many federal websites. The White House announced plans July 12 to reduce roughly 24,000 federal government website domains to fewer than 2,000 core domains.

As the President points out in this video, our government doesn’t need a website dedicated to foresters who play the fiddle. We also don’t need multiple sites dealing with invasive plants (here and here). And I’m pretty sure the website dedicated to the Centennial of Flight can come down… particularly since the Centennial was in 2003.s President Obama has said, we can’t win the future with a government of the past. How our government uses the internet to communicate and deliver services is an obvious and critical part of this modernization effort. Keep reading →

 /  Published July 13, 2011 at 10:02 AM