A Shout Out to Rachel Flagg – Headed to the Web Best Practices Team at GSA

If you’ve never met Rachel Flagg, you’ve missed something.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw her…we were doing a web clinic in Seattle, and Rachel was one of the Seattle staff who attended. She stood in the back of the room and beamed the entire time. After the session, I walked back to her and asked her why the big smiles. She said she was just so excited about what we were doing with the web. I liked her immediately.

Her rise in the web manager community has been earned. In 2001, Rachel became one of HUD’s first class of regional web managers (she manages web content for 5 HUD offices in 4 states); and she quickly proved herself to be a great leader and an outstanding web manager. She got involved in the work of the government Web Managers Forum, helping develop – among other things – a list of best practices in web management from other nations’ governments. In 2005, Rachel was chosen to be one of the first field representatives on the Federal Web Managers Council. In 2007, Rachel became Co-Chair of the Council, partnering with Sheila Campbell to lead this great group of government web managers in producing some excellent work, including the recent white papers on transforming online government and social media.

Now, Rachel is going on detail to GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Communication to work with Sheila on Government Web Best Practices. There’s no doubt in my mind that Rachel will be a great asset to GSA. She’s a master strategist, a terrific writer, and a born leader. Her passion for serving citizens through the web is unmatched, and her enthusiasm is contagious. Now that she’s able to devote all her time to the web manager community, like Sheila, watch out! This dynamic duo will do even greater things.

If you don’t know Rachel Flagg yet – believe me, you will. And you’ll be as dazzled as I was!

Congratulations, Rachel (and Sheila)!