1 Overview

This document proposes a technical standard for the publication of government agency news on the web. "News" in this context means media releases and other event-related content authored by government agencies and intended for public consumption via outlets in various media.

The E-government Unit (EGU) of the State Services Commission proposes the standard to support the development of an e-government "component" that can be used by government agencies in a variety of ways. The component has the following features:

1. A news feed provided in RSS format (the format described in this paper).

2. A news fetch operated by the EGU, which collects and aggregates news stories across participating agencies.

3. A news syndication service operated by the EGU, which allows agencies and other organisations to subscribe to the aggregated news feed.

This document describes the first feature only. The syndication component is currently under development.

1.1 Scope

"Syndication" normally refers the distribution of articles and photographs to several newspapers or magazines for simultaneous or later publication. RSS (RDF Site Summary) has become de facto standard for the syndication of news and current events material on the Internet. RSS is an extensible XML-based schema that allows the syndication of lists of hyperlinks, along with metadata.

Syndication using RSS is achieved by making an RSS feed available on a website at a specific URL address. The feed can be requested just like any other file or resource on the server, which is normally done at regular intervals to get the most recent items on the list. In practice, several feeds are made available by an aggregator, which is a website or program that manages a number of lists and presents them in a single interface.

In this proposal, participating government agencies provide their news content as a feed, which the central server managed by the E-government Unit regularly downloads. The central server acts as an aggregator, displaying the news in a single interface. The central server then makes an aggregated feed available for further consumption. The initial consumer of all news published in this fashion is the government web portal at http://www.govt.nz/.

1.2 Who Should Use This Standard

This standard should be used by all agencies wishing to make their news stories available beyond their own website. Specifically agencies can use this system to avoid the manual and often duplicate entry of news stories onto the government portal.

Agencies implementing this standard and making news feeds available will need to notify the E-government Unit so that the aggregator can be appropriately configured to harvest news feeds from agency web servers.

1.3 Implementing This Standard

There are four steps to adopting and implementing the standard:

1. An agency creates news articles in the format described in this document, and creates the appropriate URLs on their web server;

2. The agency notifies the EGU of the URLs by sending email to newsfeed@portal.govt.nz with details of your configuration. The EGU will send the agency a confirmation;

3. The EGU runs a test fetch of the articles and parses the XML code. Details of any errors will be returned to the agency for correction;

4. Once corrections have been made and the agency is happy with operation of the system, the agency sends email to newsfeed@portal.govt.nz nominating a suitable start date and preferred fetch frequency.

Please note there is no formal audit or compliance procedure associated with this standard; rather, agencies can self-certify their compliance. The EGU has configured the XML parser to conform to the standard and will send email detailing any failures encountered, enabling agencies to fine-tune systems where necessary.