Owner | General Services Administration |
---|---|
Created by | 18F |
URL | Analytics.usa.gov |
Registration | None |
Launched | March 15, 2015 |
Analytics.usa.gov is a website of the government of the United States, created through a collaboration between GSA's Digital Analytics Program and 18F, based on unified Google Analytics data for some .gov domains. [1]
Analytics.usa.gov was launched on March 19, 2015 with data for about 300 (out of 1350) .gov domains, including every cabinet department. [2] [3] [4] [5]
On February 18, 2016, analytics.usa.gov introduced agency-specific dashboards for its participating agencies: users could now filter to results only from that specific agency. [6]
Around April 22, 2015, the government of Philadelphia launched its own analytics website at analytics.phila.gov, built using a forked version of the source code developed for analytics.usa.gov. [7] [8]
On January 6, 2016, a blog post on analytics.usa.gov discussed adaptations of analytics.usa.gov by three regional governments and government agencies in the United States, including comments by people who had worked on each of the adaptations. [9] The adaptations were for: the city of Philadelphia (noted above), the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, [10] and the city of Boulder, Colorado.
As of July 7, 2017, the following adaptations are listed on the main README of the analytics.usa.gov GitHub repository: [11]
The 18F blog provided a detailed description of the technology stack used to build the website, [40] which was picked up by Hacker News [41] and formed the basis of a more picture-heavy version in Storify. [42] The data is collected through a unified Google Analytics account that stores anonymized IP addresses to preserve privacy. This is periodically queried using an open source analytics tool built by 18F called the analytics reporter, whose repository is available on GitHub. [43] The JSON result is stored to Amazon S3 and served statically through Amazon CloudFront. [40] The entire website's code is also available in a GitHub repository. [44]
A number of people expressed concerns about the storage of potentially private user data in Google Analytics, despite the IP address anonymization. [41] The creators of analytics.usa.gov emphasized that they were concerned with privacy and therefore only revealed aggregated data to the public, rather than allowing arbitrary queries on the data. [4] [45]
Discussion of the analytics focused on the fact that pages from the Internal Revenue Service were among the most visited, and the "Where's My Refund?" page had the top spot. This was explained by the timing: taxes were due April 15 and many people had started the process of tax filing. [3] [4] Other top visited pages were on the websites of the National Weather Service, National Park Service, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, and StopBullying.gov. [46] Greg Boone wrote that analytics.usa.gov is an active expression of government "for the people, of the people, and by the people." He elaborated: "All told, there were nearly 1.4 billion (with a b) people who interacted with the government in the last 90 days. [...] They're coming to the government for information and help they know only the US government can provide. They're coming for public services and resources they can use to improve people lives." [47]
Writing for GovFresh, Luke Fretwell praised analytics.usa.gov and suggested it would be helpful if each agency's website had an analytics subpage that provided information on analytics just for that agency. He also suggested that government agencies avoid spending resources on apps and instead aim to make their main websites more mobile-friendly, and that they reduce their sites' focus on information about the agency and make the services offered more front-and-center. He also recommended that data on spending on websites be made available in conjunction with data on website traffic so that the return on investment to spending would be clearer. [48]
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is a combat support agency within the United States Department of Defense whose primary mission is collecting, analyzing, and distributing geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) in support of national security. Initially known as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) from 1996 to 2003, it is a member of the United States Intelligence Community.
The domain name gov is a sponsored top-level domain (sTLD) in the Domain Name System of the Internet. The name is derived from the word government, indicating its restricted use by government entities. The TLD is administered by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a component of the United States Department of Homeland Security.
The General Services Administration (GSA) is an independent agency of the United States government established in 1949 to help manage and support the basic functioning of federal agencies. GSA supplies products and communications for U.S. government offices, provides transportation and office space to federal employees, and develops government-wide cost-minimizing policies and other management tasks.
A source-code-hosting facility is a file archive and web hosting facility for source code of software, documentation, web pages, and other works, accessible either publicly or privately. They are often used by open-source software projects and other multi-developer projects to maintain revision and version history, or version control. Many repositories provide a bug tracking system, and offer release management, mailing lists, and wiki-based project documentation. Software authors generally retain their copyright when software is posted to a code hosting facilities.
GitHub is a developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage and share their code. It uses Git software, providing the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.
Vivek Kundra is a former American administrator who served as the first chief information officer of the United States from March, 2009 to August, 2011 under President Barack Obama. He is currently the chief operating officer at Sprinklr, a provider of enterprise customer experience management software based in NYC. He was previously a visiting Fellow at Harvard University.
Homebrew is a free and open-source software package management system that simplifies the installation of software on Apple's operating system, macOS, as well as Linux. The name is intended to suggest the idea of building software on the Mac depending on the user's taste. Originally written by Max Howell, the package manager has gained popularity in the Ruby on Rails community and earned praise for its extensibility. Homebrew has been recommended for its ease of use as well as its integration into the command-line interface. Homebrew is a member of the Open Source Collective, and is run entirely by unpaid volunteers.
The Presidential Innovation Fellows program is a competitive fellowship program that pairs top innovators from the private sector, non-profits, and academia with top innovators in government to collaborate on solutions that aim to deliver significant results in months, not years. It was established in 2012 and has operated continuously since then. The program focuses on generating measurable results, using innovation techniques from private industry such as Lean Startup, Design Thinking, and Agile Development.
Datadog is an observability service for cloud-scale applications, providing monitoring of servers, databases, tools, and services, through a SaaS-based data analytics platform. The mascot is a dog named Bits.
iDempiere. Community Powered Enterprise, also known as OSGi + ADempiere, is an open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software that is fully navigable on PCs, tablets and smartphones, it also has customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM) functions. It is in contrast to proprietary or most other open source ERP solutions driven only by a community of supporters.
18F is a digital services agency within the Technology Transformation Services department of the General Services Administration (GSA) of the United States Government. Their purpose is to deliver digital services and technology products.
GitHub has been the target of censorship from governments using methods ranging from local Internet service provider blocks, intermediary blocking using methods such as DNS hijacking and man-in-the-middle attacks, and denial-of-service attacks on GitHub's servers from countries including China, India, Iraq, Russia, and Turkey. In all of these cases, GitHub has been eventually unblocked after backlash from users and technology businesses or compliance from GitHub.
Under Chinese law, the use of geographic information in the People's Republic of China is restricted to entities that have special authorization from the administrative department for surveying and mapping under the State Council. Consequences of the restriction include fines for unauthorized surveys, lack of geotagging information on many cameras when the GPS chip detects a location within China, and incorrect alignment of street maps with satellite maps in various applications.
RocksDB is a high performance embedded database for key-value data. It is a fork of Google's LevelDB optimized to exploit multi-core processors (CPUs), and make efficient use of fast storage, such as solid-state drives (SSD), for input/output (I/O) bound workloads. It is based on a log-structured merge-tree data structure. It is written in C++ and provides official language bindings for C++, C, and Java. Many third-party language bindings exist. RocksDB is free and open-source software, released originally under a BSD 3-clause license. However, in July 2017 the project was migrated to a dual license of both Apache 2.0 and GPLv2 license. This change helped its adoption in Apache Software Foundation's projects after blacklist of the previous BSD+Patents license clause.
Wagtail is a free and open source content management system (CMS) written in Python. It is popular amongst websites using the Django web framework. The project is maintained by a team of open-source contributors backed by companies around the world. The project has a focus on developer friendliness as well as ease of use of its administration interface, translated in multiple languages.
Alvand "Alvin" Salehi is an American tech entrepreneur, attorney and angel investor. He is the co-founder of Shef, Code.gov and a former White House technology advisor under President Obama.
Emily Webster Murphy is an American attorney and former government official who served as the administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA) from 2017 to 2021. Before serving in the GSA, Murphy was an attorney for the Republican National Committee and worked for several congressional committees and executive departments in the field of acquisition policy.
Login.gov is a single sign-on solution for US government websites. It enables users to log in to services from numerous government agencies using the same username and password. Login.gov was jointly developed by 18F and the US Digital Service. The initiative was announced in a blog post in May 2016 and the new system was launched in April 2017 as a replacement for Connect.Gov.
Vladlen David Zvenyach is an American government technology executive, author, lawyer, and professor. From 2021 to 2022, he served in the Biden Administration as the Director of the Technology Transformation Services and the Deputy of the Federal Acquisition Service in the U.S. General Services Administration. Zvenyach's prior roles in public service included serving was the Executive Director of the federal innovation organization 18F and the Acting Assistant Commissioner, Office of Systems Management within the Federal Acquisition Service. In his role at 18F, he pioneered new methods of government procurement. Zvenyach is also the author of Coding for Lawyers.
Hillary Hartley is an American technologist and government official who has served in both local and federal government in the US, and in the Canadian province of Ontario.