The President's December 17 electronic government and electronic society memos are available at: http://www.pub.whitehouse.gov/uri-res/I2R?urn:pdi://oma.eop.gov.us/1999/12/20/5.text.1 and http://www.pub.whitehouse.gov/uri-res/I2R?urn:pdi://oma.eop.gov.us/1999/12/20/2.text.1

FCW's December 21 article on them is at http://www.fcw.com/pubs/fcw/1999/1220/web-egov-12-21-99.html

Among the highlights of the E-Gov directive are the following items, which require agencies to:

1. "... promote access to Government information organized not by agency, but by the type of service or information that people may be seeking ..." That is consistent with the thrust of the Blue Pages initiative with respect to telephone directory listings. On the Internet, it suggests not only functional groupings of links for browsing but also the capability for categorical searching across the Web sites (and records series) of all agencies.

(The E-records Standards Committee is striving to specify the metadata elements by which all records series should be classified, Governmentwide, and thus by which searches could be conducted.)

2. "... to the maximum extent possible, make available online, by December 2000, the forms needed for the top 500 Government services used by the public ..." Regardless of whether or not our services are considered to be among the top 500, we should aspire for them to be and act as though they are. The December 2000 deadline is nearly 3 years earlier than required by GPEA.

5. provide "... a public electronic mail address through which citizens can contact the agency with questions, comments, or concerns ..." We will be expected to do a better job of managing our responses to the public. "Correspondence tracking" systems should be designed to help us *manage* and effectively *respond* to communications with all of our stakeholders regardless of the mode they choose to use. Such systems should be 5015.2 compliant.

8. provide "... private, secure, and effective communication across agencies and with the public, through the use of public key technology ... agencies are encouraged to issue ... a Government-wide minimum of 100,000 digital signature certificates by December 2000."

9.(e) provide "mechanisms for collecting input from the agency's stakeholders regarding agency use of the Internet."

Each of the specified activities are to "be conducted subject to the availability of appropriations and consistent with agencies' priorities and [the President's] budget, and to the extent permitted by law."

-- Anonymous, December 22, 1999