MyGov: Presidential Innovation Fellow Greg Gershman presents government OAuth app

For six months, software engineer and Baltimore resident Greg Gershman has been working for the White House as part of the inaugural class of 18 Presidential Innovation Fellows. In August, Technically Baltimore reported on the fellowship, which tasked those recruited with coming up with ways to make the federal government more streamlined and easier to access for citizens.
Gershman and four other fellows were responsible for MyGov, an OAuth platform that “puts citizens in control of how they interact with the government,” as Gershman said Wednesday morning at Baltimore TechBreakfast.

“The federal web is very distributed,” Gershman said. “Agencies have their own websites, and information is siloed.”
MyGov works by making that information more accessible.

• MyGov acts as a one-stop profile site where citizens enter in personal information (like you would on Facebook), and then use that profile to access different government agency websites at the federal level.
• The ultimate purpose is to reduce the amount of time it takes people to fill out government forms (say, when you need a passport renewed) by eliminating any redundancies people may encounter.
• For instance: it’s tricky to find what benefits are available to former service men and women by navigating to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs website.
• But with a MyGov login, clicking over to the Veterans Affairs website will bring up an on-screen interface that alerts MyGov users to the Benefits.gov website, which will pull information from people’s MyGov profiles to simplify the time it takes to figure out for what federal benefits people qualify.

The best part: MyGov was developed using open source software, and Gershman said that “anyone can use our APIs to build” applications that work with the MyGov platform.
Soon the site will be rebranded to MyUSA (there was an interest in changing the brand and then some “trademark issues” provided an opportunity to rebrand, said Gershman). And while the intent is to expand MyGov’s reach across as many federal, state and local government agencies, doing so will take awhile.
“One our biggest challenges,” Gershman said, “is getting government to adopt this stuff.”