Group advises EPA on Web site management

In February 2000, investigators from the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) announced that the security measures on the Environmental Protection Agency's Web site were so permeable that hackers had set up their own chat room on the agency's servers.

The EPA, embarrassed and concerned that the announcement would make the site a target for new attacks, pulled the plug on its Internet site, leaving the agency without a home page (or e-mail capacity) for several days. Many of the agency's Web-based services took weeks to repair.

Five years later, the EPA is at the forefront of a new initiative to improve oversight of government agency Web sites, creating centralized management structures and practices to replace the decade-old model in which division managers construct their own pages and post whatever information they see fit.

In a December 2004 memo to EPA staff, then-Administrator Michael Leavitt (now secretary of Health and Human Services) acknowledged that "management of our Web site has been largely ad hoc." With the growth of the Internet, the Web site has become "a more critical part of doing business," Leavitt wrote, and "it is time to bring structure to the management of epa.gov."

Leavitt established new governance principles for management of the Web site and established a "Web Council" -- a group of senior managers from every office and region within the EPA -- to overhaul the site. The council, which met for the first time this month, includes a content manager and an infrastructure manager in each branch of the agency; they are responsible for developing procedures and standards for the Web site and overseeing and organizing the content. These officials report to Rick Martin, the national infrastructure manager in the EPA's Office of Environmental Information, and Richard Stapleton, the national content manager in the Office of Public Affairs.

The new structure will ensure that the Web site content is up to date, high-quality, and easily accessible to the public, Stapleton said. The "grassroots" process for posting material led each office within the EPA to create its own Web page, with information that might overlap or conflict with material on other pages. "We've found wildly conflicting information about things, such as the health effects of a substance," Stapleton said. "If you are saying different things about the toxicity of a chemical, you are simply confusing people."

Beyond content, organization of the site is also a critical issue for the Web Council. On the current Web page, a visitor has to choose which office to browse, rather than finding information organized by topic. The group plans to restructure the content by subject area and root out conflicting and outdated information.

The EPA is part of the leading edge of agencies trying to establish more-coherent management practices for their Web sites, said Bev Godwin, director of First Gov.gov, the federal government's central Internet portal. "There is definitely a movement in government, and everybody is trying to improve their Web sites so that they are the best in the world," Godwin said.

While this effort has been emerging throughout the government over the past few years, it has been spurred on by a December memo from the Office of Management and Budget establishing a December 31, 2005, deadline for agencies to comply with Web site policies, ranging from ensuring the quality of Web content to establishing clear standards for linking to other sites.

HHS and the Department of Housing and Urban Development are also at the forefront of Web site management, Godwin said. HHS content manager Bill Hall said his agency is creating a single "Web management team" in the Office of Public Affairs that will bring the content staff and the technology staff under one roof.

The primacy of the public-affairs offices in Web management makes some watchdogs nervous. Sean Moulton, a senior policy analyst at OMB Watch, said, "I worry that this could become a tool for greater control and manipulation of the political message" on agency Web sites. Moulton said he is particularly concerned that the agencies have not included open-government advocates in their policy development. "They need that reality check when they say, 'We don't need to put this up.' Somebody needs to be able to say, 'Yes, you do.' "

The EPA's Stapleton acknowledges that "the control of the Web site is shifting away from the IT people and moving to the communications people." But he and Hall both say that that only means the Web site will be treated like any other official agency communication. "To me, the Web site is an organization's public face on the Internet," Hall said. "It is no different than the published material that you put out, whether it is an annual report or a press release." The key, both content managers agree, is to separate the agency's political message from its professional or scientific content, and to clearly indicate the difference. "We are not making this a place that is simply a political piece of real estate on the Internet," Hall said.