Its been at least two years now that dotgov has hijacked this site for their support.
Hijacked is pretty harsh, but this has been a long time coming.
From linking directly here from their sites for support, to creating tags without following any procedure, and ultimately neglecting this forum and these tags, they're dumping all of their work on this community.
Example: labor tag was created by the US Department of Labor, before there was a need for one. Even worse, labor is not unique to America, as far as I can tell every country on this planet has some form of labor.
So I call it hijacking, because they're not a part of the community in visible way, shape, or form. Active members should be aware of the tag creation process, furthermore active members properly create tags: see need for specific tag, create tag including giving it a proper definition. Mea Culpa: I have created tags before they were needed thinking I was being smart before. I learned that was a bad idea from asking in Meta if there was a need. The thunderous succession of downvotes still rings fresh today. I've also made mistakes elsewhere on stack sites, in many ways. The difference is I kept coming back (stayed active), read comments/downvotes of where I was wrong in the community's eyes and/or policies, and learned from it. I now view pretags as a premature optimization, and therefore think they are unnecessary. There is zero guarantee there will be a need for a future tag in this forum.
Furthermore, pointing here for help from a canonical source in and of itself is not bad, on the contrary it is desired! Please send everyone interested in open data our way! How this has been implemented is where things go south: as far as I can tell there has been zero discussions here about any of this with these departments/agencies, which in effect simply equals zero discussion. Reaching out to a few of these groups has not fixed anything, except given me clarity into the realities of the situation. At least one of the responders was a third-party contractor, who was very responsive, but in the end too busy/didn't care. And why should they? Its not their product, nor their company/career. The College Education Scorecard's parent repository is devoid of information. They can't even be bothered to link to their home site, let alone explain what the acronym of their group means.
So after two+ years of this, I have turned 180 degrees on this topic and now am in favor of closing certain types of questions regarding support for these sites.
It would be one thing if these people were active in this community, heck, I'd even take them just regulating their questions.
Clearly this is too much to ask of them...considering most of their stuff is on GitHub (which begs the question why are you asking here in the first place), their users need to meet them there where they are.
I have wasted entirely too much of time on here (as have a few others) directly dealing with these issues.
I have commented on here and commented on questions about this on Open Data SE, and nothing ever changes. I have commented on numerous GitHub repositories, to get answers and get the owners to their users.
Its a fools game. What I find most concerning is the lack of responses here.
To that point, I could be entirely wrong here. I would never know because I never get an answer.
tl;dr; Moving forward I am going to be recommended any dotgov question that is incredibly vague, technical, repo-related etc., for closure and pointing the users to the owners. I hope you all will join me.
Edit: Non-definitive list of tags:
Labor, referred from https://developer.dol.gov/ "Ask questions"
collegescorecard, referred from http://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/collegescorecard "Join the Conversation"
possible tags:
fcc
2000-census
federal
fbo.gov
irs
noaa
pubmed
usaidopen
us-census
usgs
