Presidential fellow hawks MyUSA site as proof government can innovate

For those who doubt that it is possible for the federal government to be innovative, Presidential Innovation Fellow Hillary Hartley has a message: MyUSA will prove you wrong.

According to Hartley, My.USA.gov is a great example of the type of civic innovation that can make government more relevant and a friendlier presence in people's lives. And it can achieve those goals through innovation, she said during a Jan. 28 event at the New America Foundation where she discussed the site's upcoming launch.

"We're hoping that it helps agencies build these new, effective tools to engage with the public," Hartley said. "MyUSA is kind of a single-sign-on platform."

Hartley, who has been working on the site during her tenure as a fellow at the General Services Administration, said MyUSA will be a place where people can save information pertinent to multiple online government forms (such as those at Benefits.gov) and keep track of interactions with agency websites.

According to the Presidential Innovation Fellows website, the goal is to organize the delivery of government services "around people and the specific tasks they need to complete" rather than "around the agencies that deliver them."

"[Users] are able to do things that they weren't able to do before, like [save] certain information or certain tasks or bookmarks or profile information to their MyUSA profile," Hartley said.

People with a .gov email address can sign up now to test the site. It will be open to the public in a few months.