• Managing their technology more effectively and with lower costs
• Creating websites that are easy to use on different devices and screen sizes through mobile apps and new techniques such as responsive design

Deputy Chief of Staff Justin Johnson and Chief Information Officer Matthew Perry gave an overview of OPM's work and then introduced the two keynote speakers. Gray Brooks, Senior API Strategy at the Digital Services Innovation Center, talked about the impact of the Digital Government Strategy, and Joshua Davis, founder of Mil-OSS, spoke of the Defense Department's work in making open source software secure.

After the keynotes, there were conference sessions on data and security, policy, and advanced technical topics, as well as a hands-on workshop.

The workshop was the second meeting of the Drupal4Gov Ladder community, a governmentwide group of developers who meet regularly to create open source modules and applications for free distribution to government agencies. Over 50 participants broke up into 3 groups. Beginners created their first Drupal site. Others learned more advanced techniques. Still others collaborated to create a new Drupal module: in under 3 hours, they decided on features for the module, designed it, tested it, and distributed it for other members of the open source community to use in their sites. This was the Drupal4Gov Ladder community’s first successful effort in creating and distributing a shared module.

The comments participants offered in the closing session were overwhelmingly positive. They were excited about the knowledge they'd gained and their contributions to sharing knowledge among government agencies. They were very grateful to OPM for hosting the event – as one attendee put it: "OPM hit it out of the park hosting us and providing a great event."

Many thanks to all the volunteers who made this event a success!

Follow OPM’s implementation of the Digital Strategy on our Digital Strategy page.

As you will see in the report, we've primarily focused our efforts on informing and training our own OPM employees. We're also de-cluttering our website and beginning to ensure our documents are written in plain language for everyone. However, we'd like your help. Keep an eye out for a challenge we will issue for you to identify OPM documents we should make easier to understand using plain language.

Until then, we'd love to hear your comments on the report and how you think we’re doing with the plain writing initiative. Please leave us your comments in – you guessed it – the "Comments" section.

We encourage you to use the FAQs to their fullest to get answers to your questions, and we welcome your comments on our open government efforts here.

Use the Internet and our Retirement Services Online site to:

• Change your Federal Income Tax Withholding
• Change your State Income Tax Withholding
• View/Print/Request a duplicate Form 1099R for the current tax year and the two previous years
• Change your password
• Establish an allotment to an organization (e.g., union dues)
• Change your mailing address
• Sign up for direct deposit of your payment
• Set up a checking or savings allotment
• View your annuity statement

If you misplace or forget your password, email retire@opm.gov or call OPM at 1-888-767-6738 between the hours of 7:30 a.m. and 7:45 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. We will mail you a new temporary password. The temporary password will allow you to create a permanent password and establish personal security questions for your account.

Many thanks to everyone inside and outside of OPM who has contributed to the success of our Open Government Plan! We'll continue to keep you informed as we move forward with implementation.

Here are some of the questions about transparency, collaboration, and participation we asked in the 2010 survey:

• I can disclose a suspected violation of any law, rule or regulation without fear of reprisal
• The people I work with cooperate to get the job done
• Employees in my work unit share job knowledge with each other
• Managers promote communication among different work units (for example, about projects, goals, needed resources)
• Managers support collaboration across work units to accomplish work objectives
• How satisfied are you with the information you receive from management on what's going on in your organization?

Over a quarter-million government employees responded to the survey. Read our Published Reports for narrative accounts of the results or check out the weighted and unweighted results to see the data.

Now that we’ve collected the data, we need to act on the results. OPM is starting a new initiative through which we will provide customized support to agencies wishing to use the results of the survey to spur changes within their organizations.

The Fedview survey is one way employees can help improve their agencies. Others include President Obama's SAVE Award, through which the Administration is collecting ideas from Federal employees on how to achieve efficiencies and savings within their agencies. We'd love to hear from you about other ways Federal employees might help bring about improvements at their agencies, especially at OPM.

Please share your thoughts on the Fedview survey with us!

• We have formed the Component Teams mentioned in our Open Government Plan and Charter, both of which can be found from the OpenOPM homepage.
• Speaking of our plan and charter, we released version 1.2 of the plan and finalized the charter.
• We are scheduling our first Component Team meetings for early to mid-July. In preparation for those meetings, we held a day-long training session for the coaches and presenters for those teams. Several other OPM employees participated in the session — having seen the gains the Open Government Core Team has made in learning, they are interested in exploring possible uses for Action Learning in their organizations.
• We completed a brief analysis of the comments we've received on this blog. We concluded that many of you are interested in hiring reform and related policies. You're seeking ways to improve communication with OPM and are sometimes frustrated with the process of seeking Federal employment. As time passes and the initial excitement of setting up the Component Teams begins to subside, this analysis will remind us of why it is so important for us to work to improve communication with the public and service to our stakeholders.
• One major way in which we are seeking to improve customer service in the immediate future is our Searchable Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) engine. We are completing the testing of Stage I of the FAQs engine and will launch this Wednesday. Please use it and share your ideas about it with us in this space. We are already planning Stage II, with more features greater interactivity.

As always, we look forward to hearing your ideas about how we can improve openness at OPM!