It’s a welcome change of pace to be able to say something nice about the federal government. Federal Computer Week reports on the Environmental Protection Agency’s use of the Web 2.0 style to help local citizens in Washington State working to clean up Puget Sound.

Last November, EPA held its 2007 Environmental Information Symposium where they activated its Puget Sound Information Challenge wiki. Participants were asked to supply information that could help local groups working to restore the Sound. The Web site was up over the two days of the conference, and received 18,000 page views, 175 entries with everything from documents to decision support systems and a significant volume of e-mail, the magazine reports.

Molly O’Neill, EPA’s chief information officer, wrote earlier this week about the wiki at EPA’s Flow of the River blog.

 

One of the many important lessons we learned from this Challenge is that Web 2.0 technologies pose incredible opportunity for collaborative work at EPA.

Hopefully more federal agencies and elected officials will soon see the potential of the Internet to engage citizens in similarly meaningful ways.