On December 17, 2004, OMB issued Policies for Federal Agency Public Websites. These policies facilitate the interpretation of the E-Gov Act of 2002 for federal agency web sites. Reference: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/memoranda/fy2005/m05-04.pdf

Policies address the following areas: maintenance of dissemination product inventories, priorities and schedules; information quality; agency-wide linking; communication with public, state and local governments; public websites; use of approved domains; security controls; privacy protection; accessibility; and records management.

OMB expects agencies to become fully compliant by 12/31/05. Suzanne Nawrot, from the DOE CIO’s office, is the DOE point person for this activity.

ICGI was created in June 2003 to implement Section 207 of the E-Government Act of 2002 (Public Law 107-347, 44 U.S.C. Ch 36).

ICGI has worked with OMB to identify practices that many federal agencies have adopted to make their websites more citizen-centered and to broadly interpret the E-Gov Act.

ICGI has established a Web Content Management Working Group, made up of webmasters, public affairs officers and other information representatives such as from FirstGov. The Committee has established an online toolkit to help Agency webmasters through the various implementations.

While U.S. federal web content managers are the primary audience, web managers from state, local, and international governments are also welcome to use the toolkit. It is a ""work in progress"" and may be found at http://www.firstgov.gov/webcontent/index.shtml.

The page entitled ""How to Implement the OMB Policies: Recommendations and Guidance from the ICGI"" is the most helpful in laying out the objectives.

In parallel, the DOE CIO’s office is attempting to establish some common elements among DOE sites to identify them as such and to provide a baseline consistency among them.

DOE is interpreting the OMB guidance for DOE in the form of a Manual from the DOE CIO’s office.

The three main areas being considered are: Records Management, CyberSecurity and Web Content. As far as web content, the current objective is to redesign energy.gov and then make it the standard for all other DOE components.

OSTI has representatives on each group (Records Mgt, Cybersecurity, Web Content) that are working with their respective offices in HQ as well as talking with each other on the various subjects. Each area covered is being coordinated through a different person/office.

OSTI has made preliminary comments on the draft manual and provided input on 6 references for inclusion that our business is dependent upon, including:

- Scientific and Technical Information Management Order, DOE O 241.1A

- Scientific and Technical Information Management Guide, DOE G 241.1-1A

- DOE-STD-4001-2000, March 2000 ""Design Criteria Standards for Electronic Records Management Software Applications

- DOE O 200.1 Information Management Program

Under APPLICABILITY, the draft manual states that it does apply to contractor information systems that access, process, transmit and/or store DOE information.

The timetable for formal comment on the manual is unknown at this time.

In addition, on April 15, the Office of Public Affairs distributed a DOE web survey to solicit feedback on the current DOE web site and how it could be improved as part of the upcoming Energy.gov redesign.