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How to Start a New Community
Digital.gov maintains several Communities, providing free tools and resources to its leads and membership. To be added to our list of Communities, we kindly request that you follow the steps outlined below.
If you have any other questions, feel free to contact us at DigitalGov@gsa.gov.
To become a Digital.gov Community, your group should be:
- Comprised of mostly federal government employees.
- Led by a federal government employee (preferably with at least one co-lead and leadership from different agencies).
- Seeking to provide best practices on designing, building, and deploying easy-to-use solutions.
- Focus on technologies or implementation/management approaches that can improve online customer experiences, such as:
- Public experience
- Public participation
- Content design
- Measuring impact
- Governance & operations
- Technology infrastructure
- Other emerging technologies
- Formulated around a topic that is relevant to several federal agencies and their strategic initiatives.
- Unique compared to our current list of communities.
- Product agnostic and open to promoting a range of solutions.
If your group is similar or could overlap with a current community, we will look to merge your group with the other community or get approval from our existing community before adding your group to the list of communities that we support.
To request a new community, please email us at DigitalGov@gsa.gov with the following information:
- What is your topic of interest? Describe what topic your group will focus on or provide a link to your current community page.
- What is your goal for the group? Explain your primary purpose(s) behind the group (e.g., creating new knowledge, learning and developing activities, increasing collaboration, or sending notifications).
- Who would be the interested stakeholders or audience? Describe the federal employee or federal position that might be interested in this topic.
- Who will lead your community? Please provide name, agency, email, and job title.
- How does it align to Digital.gov requirements? Give us a few sentences on how this group might fill a gap within our current communities and align to our stated requirements.
- What are the key issues that the group would look to solve? Provide a little background on the needs of the target audience and how this group may address a need that is currently not being met.
- What is the current status of your group (if hosted by another agency)? Let us know why you want to transfer your group and any specific requirements to transfer it (e.g., revising your group bylaws/charter or moving content to our site).
- What support would you need for events, hosting content, or sharing other information? Provide some information about how frequently you might be creating content, or let us know if you have content that might need to transition to our pages.
After receiving your request, Digital.gov will take the following steps:
- Send you a response letting you know that we received your request and ask for additional information, if needed.
- Review your information with relevant Digital.gov Program and TTS leads. We normally review community requests every other week.
- (Yes) If your community is approved, we will set up a meeting with the requester to gather any final details and discuss next steps.
- (Maybe) If your community is similar to an existing community, we will send a note to the existing community lead to determine if there are overlapping objectives.
- (No) If your community is not a match for Digital.gov, we will send you an email with our decision and possible entities that might be more appropriate to host your group.
If approved, we will need the requester to:
- Complete a short form that will help us create a community page on Digital.gov.
- Send us an Excel or CSV file with their current list of community members so we can upload the list and create a LISTSERV.
- Send us a list of any content that might need to be transferred or hosted on Digital.gov.
- Provide the names and email addresses of the community lead(s) and co-leads.
With this information, we will be able to set up your community on Digital.gov.
In addition, we will look to schedule check-in meetings with the community leads for the next 1-2 months, while we look to get the community leads familiar with our channels and processes. We also will use this time to offer recommendations and advice that might help keep your community active and engaged so it continues to grow.
Please review “How Digital.gov Supports Communities” for additional information about our continued support for community engagement and growth.
Active and engaged Digital.gov Community Leads and Co-Leads are key to the success of our communities.
Since most are volunteers, we try not to ask too much of our leads and support them as much as possible, but we have found that successful leads and co-leads usually have a/an:
- Manager approval and support for this work.
- Ability to spend 2-3 days per month sending messages, coordinating content development, or planning training for their members.
- Personal interest and drive to improve federal implementations and customer experiences.
- Previous experience, professional assignment, hands-on knowledge, or an educational experience (e.g., degree or certificate) related to the topic of interest.
Digital.gov includes communities with various leadership structures. While some communities are led by a single individual, we generally recommend a co-lead or committee approach to managing a community.
Communities with co-leads usually have equal responsibilities and split time managing the ongoing needs and fostering of the community. These co-leads are usually both strong leaders who meet at least monthly to coordinate their activities and assignments.
Communities led by a committee are normally larger and very active communities with over 800 members. Each member of the committee is responsible for specific aspects of managing the community, and the committee may meet quarterly or monthly to plan out future activities or provide updates on their responsibility area.
Below is an example of responsibility areas or possible committee assignments:
- Chair set priorities and goals for the committee, making decisions regarding the strategic direction of the community and coordinating across the various areas.
- Co-Chair supports the Chair and leads meetings in Chair’s absence.
- Marketing Coordinator manages social media, event/content promotion, and membership recruitment.
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Content Coordinator develops and manages a content schedule, including contacts potential authors, reviews submissions, and coordinates with Marketing Coordinator to promote content. Some communities also have specific roles for different content types:
- Events Coordinator coordinates and plans training, workshops, and other events during the year.
- Case Study Coordinator solicits use cases or case studies of implementations from the community on a quarterly basis, which may be used for website or event content.
- Research Coordinator tracks new research or does surveys among the community members to promote new findings that may be relevant to the community.
- Post Coordinator develops a schedule (or sometimes a regular newsletter) to send content or pose questions to engage the community. This person also may manage the approvals for any posts that community members want sent out in coordination with the Administrative Coordinator, , if the LISTSERV manages content.
- Working Group Coordinator organizes sub groups around specific topic areas within the community.
- Administrative Coordinator schedules community huddles/meetings, manages the LISTSERV requests/approvals, and supports other administrative details.
To keep our community members active and engaged, Leads typically engage with their community on a regular basis. Below are some examples of these regular engagement activities:
- Write to the LISTSERV to demonstrate consistent communications. These simple emails to your community can focus on a variety of items, such as:
- Recent news articles that might be relevant or interesting with a prompt to start a conversation among community members.
- Updates about policy, legislation, or other regulatory changes which might impact your community on the topic of interest.
- Recognition of an implementation or case study being completed.
- Reminders about upcoming events, notifications of new content, or distribution of past event materials.
- Philosophical or specific questions to the community on your topic area to start a conversation.
- Weekly job postings to further career development in the community.
- Check-in with co-leads, key contributors, IP support team on recent news, upcoming events/training, and potential content.
- Host a training, event, series, collaboration session, or huddle/meeting. These events can include various discussions, such as:
- Case studies with an implementation of an approach or solution (ex. USA.gov Journey Mapping).
- Overviews of new approaches or methodologies (ex. Agile Series).
- Networking, mentorship, or leadership talks (ex. Women in IT).
- Training to improve compliance with federal regulations or best practices (ex. Navigating the Complex World of Digital Policy).
- Talks from experts about a specific approach or concept (ex. Ginny Reddish).
- How to manage or use potential solutions in the government (ex. Intro to Github).
- Produce a form of written content for the Digital.gov website based on your topic area (ex. This Week’s IDEA).
- Work with the Digital.gov team to review recent community discussions, and identify/publish evergreen content pieces to provide broader exposure to the topic.
- Host a community-wide meeting to allow members to network.
- Check-in on the impact of their activities on membership or engagement.
- Attend the Digital.gov Community Leads In-Service Day to get updates on Digital.gov communities and look for opportunities to collaborate with other groups.
- Set goals and plan activities to help achieve their goals.
- Develop an editorial calendar for developing resources, events, or other content.
- Track metrics of events and content.
- Send out news or regulatory updates to members.
- Review LISTSERV settings or drop-off rates for anomalies or issues.
Please note that Digital.gov will work with you to identify an alternative Community lead or co-leads if you are no longer able to support the members. We recommend that all communities have a lead and co-lead, which are from different agencies to offer community members a broader perspective on a topic.
Communities with noticeable declines in membership or inactive LISTSERVs also may be retired or merged with other communities as technology, innovation and recommended approaches evolve.
NOTE: Any event related to a potential solution for the federal government must follow the TTS guidelines on non-federal speakers to remain ethical and compliant with federal laws.
🎉Questions? Email digitalgov@gsa.gov