Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey (R-Blountville) announced that the Center for Digital Government, www.centerdigitalgov.com, has selected the Tennessee General Assembly Web site for the 2010 Digital Government Achievement Award (DGAA). The awards create a forum for recognizing outstanding agency and department Web sites as well as contributions at the application and infrastructure level. The purpose of the DGAA is to showcase innovative and useful Web sites and digital applications around the world.
“When I became Lt. Governor I put a high priority on using technology to make government more transparent and user-friendly for Tennesseans,” said Lt. Governor Ramsey. “We owe our citizens easy access to information about their government and I am very pleased we are building on our successes in this arena.”
In 2009, the Tennessee General Assembly website was chosen by the National Conference of State Legislatures to receive the Online Democracy Award for making democracy user-friendly. The award recognized Tennessee’s navigation, depth of content, openness and availability of information to the public. Also in 2009, the General Assembly’s website climbed to the top 2 of a national ranking of government webcasts due to its leading performance in recording, producing, and distributing streaming media content online.
“Tennessee’s legislature has established a national reputation as an online leader since 2007,” said Lt. Governor Ramsey. “We will continue to use emerging technology to serve the citizens of Tennessee.”
The General Assembly was awarded the honor in the Government-to-Citizen communication category. The award was based upon the innovative use of technology, particularly the use of video indexing, of which we are a national leader.
Cathilea Robinett, executive director of the Center for Digital Government, said: “The winners’ innovative use of the Internet to continue delivering citizen services despite tight fiscal constraints is inspiring. This skilled use of the Web embodies the spirit of the Best of the Web awards and provides examples to state and local government leaders around the country on how to bring quality services to their citizens while containing costs.”