The Federal Communications Commission launched Dec. 20 the public beta of My.FCC.gov, an online tool for creating, saving and managing a customized FCC website based on a menu of 22 "widgets." The widgets are automatically-updating feeds, such as "Today's documents," "Blog," "FCC forms" and "FCC encyclopedia search," based on FCC.gov's application programming interfaces, or APIs. The APIs also allow each widget to be embedded on any other website for sharing.

In addition to the launch of My.FCC.gov, the FCC is releasing the source code behind the tool, its first Drupal module, to help other agencies make their content available through an API. My.FCC.gov leverages a Drupal-based module called Content API, which was built as part of the FCC.gov redesign.

Using Content API an agency with a Drupal-based website could hypothetically install the module on a Wednesday, monitor it on Thursday to make sure it doesn't break the website, and then on Friday make publically available an API that queries all of the content on the website, FCC New Media Lead Gray Brooks told FierceGovernmentIT.

"If we're able to build something that's relevant to 20 other agencies there's an enormous potential for making things faster, stronger and cheaper," said Brooks.

When FCC rebooted its site in April 2011 it took an "API first" approach. Where other agencies have to retrofit old projects in order to coax the data into an API, FCC's data is in APIs already and ready to plug into a variety of shells, said Brooks. All of the FCC's publically available data is also available via API at FCC.gov/developers.

"I basically think everyone's going to be doing this in the next two years," said Brooks.

"There's a tremendous amount of [information] that is public. It's already out there, it's available to the public but it's kind of locked away somewhere. It's very similar to matter in a solid state," said Brooks. By formulating APIs first and then thinking about presentation, "we're liquefying our web presence kind of soup to nuts."

Users create a customized experience on My.FCC.gov by creating an account and adding their preferred widgets. Some visitors may want to view a website tailored to their interests but won't want to create their own account or pick widgets. Those users can select from a menu of sample dashboards based audience categories such as "Business/Legal: Cable," "Business/Legal: Wireless" or "Consumer."

"We think it's a useful tool that some people will find very helpful. For other people it won't be their cup of tea," said Brooks. "But it's a good illustration of .gov as a web service."

For more:
- visit My.FCC.gov
- see a blog post on the announcement

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