Obama To Agencies: Optimize Web Content For Mobile

CWmike writes "President Barack Obama has ordered all major government agencies to make two key services available on mobile phones within a year, in an effort to embrace a growing trend toward Web surfing on mobile devices. Obama, in a directive issued Wednesday, also ordered federal agencies to create websites to report on their mobile progress. The websites are due within 90 days. Innovators in the private sector and the government have used the Internet and powerful computers to improve customer service, but 'it is time for the federal government to do more,' Obama said in the memo. 'For far too long, the American people have been forced to navigate a labyrinth of information across different government programs in order to find the services they need.'"

Comments

Beauacracy

[MikeMacK]

'For far too long, the American people have been forced to navigate a labyrinth of information across different government programs in order to find the services they need.'"

Or perhaps we need to simplify the number of "programs", that might help too.

Re:Beauacracy

[Anonymous Coward]

So which programs do you ditch, and how would it help? How would eliminating farm subsidies help someone find information on WIC checks?

Knee-jerk anti-government responses may be great for karma-whoring, but there's no substance there. There may be a few edge cases where programs aren't pulling their weight and should be cut, but the vast majority of the government's efforts go into very important programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, etc. Dragging those programs into the 20th century is commendable.

Re:Beauacracy

[sycodon]

People like you have been bitching about knee-jerk anti-government responses for decades.

Now look what we have...an annual budget of over three trillion dollars (thanks to baseline budgeting, it's here to stay).

I have a better idea. How about YOU make a case for the programs you want to keep. All of them.

See ya next decade, 'cause it will take you that long.

Re:Beauacracy

[Anon-Admin]

So which programs do you ditch, and how would it help?

How about all of them?

We de-fund all of them, then each program has to come back to congress and justify it's continued existence. It has to provide supporting data that the job it is doing is needed and accomplishes the goals it was created for.

Farm Subsidies and WIC are easy things picked by most people as an example. Take a look at The U.S. Agency for International Development, Or the federal grant for $765,828 that was given to bring an International House of Pancakes franchise to Washington, D.C, and there are thousands more. The number of wasteful programs outweigh the number of good ones.

Re:Beauacracy

[cpu6502]

>>>Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, etc.

One simplification is to make SS and M like the food stamps program..... a needs-based system designed to help the 20-30 million poor persons. Those of us who have money will buy our own retirement through saving, our own medicine/insurance, and our own food at the store.

Re:Beauacracy

[cpu6502]

If you look at Ron Paul's plan to cut 990 billion dollars, that's essentially what he does. The bulk of the savings comes from stopping the killing of foreigners, while the last third comes from merging departments together for greater efficiency.

But ya know..... Paul is nuts. Why would we listen to a nutty idea like promoting peace & increasing efficiency? It's craaaaazy. So the Cable News tells me. ;-)

Re:Beauacracy

[KlomDark]

You are a fucking asshole.

My daughter came around before I was financially ready to have kids. (Which happens to a LOT of people) If it wasn't for food stamps, we'd have starved. Having a kid to support put me in hyperdrive. I learned as much as I could at college, quit to start a company, company luckily went pretty good (Till investors chewed me up like the naive kid I was at the time.), still got enough money out of the deal to pay off my student loans, put a down payment on a house, and the experience was better than a stupid degree for getting me into the corporate world. (They want results, not pieces of paper) I've since worked for several Fortune 500 companies, architecting huge projects. The peak taxes I've paid in a year (The year I got bought out of my company) was about $100,000. So I've more than paid back the food stamps and the time welfare paid to fix my car, although the guy who owned the repair place was such a "republican" so he threw a big fit about it being government money and really did a shitty job.

So shove your "Let's feed on the poor" up your ass. Next time it will be you that is poor. This life or the next.

The "Well if they can't afford to have kids, they shouldn't have kids" is the lamest cop-out of a non-realistic solution to a wide-spread problem. You ought get your ass kicked for saying something so stupid and selfish.

Basically you are saying my daughter should have been taken away from me back in the day? You suck shit. I raised her right, she's 22 now, has been thru college, just started her first career job making more money than I made at her age, and never got pregnant while a teenager.

I wish I knew who you were so I could beat some sense in your vacuous head. The world has changed, and you are not part of it...

Re:Beauacracy

[KhabaLox]

How about all of them?

We de-fund all of them, then each program has to come back to congress and justify it's continued existence.

I have a great idea, everyone. The Federal government is too wasteful - they're always making reports or wasting our money on things we don't need. So let's make each federal agency present a plan justifying it's existence to Congress. Every two years when a new Congress starts, each agency will come in turn to prove their worthiness with power point presentations, graphs, and spreadsheets. I know this will work, because we do it for Congressmen. They have to justify their existence to the voters every two years, and it's not like they have more important things to do in Washington than scrounging up donations and campaigning for 18 months in their districts.

Re:That'll go well.

[coinreturn]

Oh, quit your hate rant. He's trying to drag the government into the 21st century. He knows that mobile phones are everywhere and wants to make the government more accessible.

Re:That'll go well.

[jdgeorge]

Any president would do this, regardless of party, for the same reasons Obama is: People want it, it's entirely reasonable, it's politically inoffensive, and both parties support it.

Re:That'll go well.

[coinreturn]

I wish people would make fun of your "religion" like they do mine.

One more "religion" to add to the list, AGW, anti-AGW, Anti-Nukes, and Obama.

The OP didn't say anything that people didn't say against Bush, hell he even said something bad about Bush.

WTF are you talking about? I didn't make fun of any "religion" - unless your "religion" is one of spouting hate - the only thing I put down. If you think there aren't Obama haters out there - who will say anything no matter how ridiculous - then you must have your fingers in your ears and your your eyes closed. I don't think that this tiny detail is worth ranting against ANY president.

Hopefully Obama won't be writing the actual specs.

[Medievalist]

If he were genuinely interested in making the government more accessible, he would have told them to adhere to strict HTML standards without vendor extensions, and W3C accessibility guidelines, so they work with any browser, whether mobile or not, or not even existing yet, instead of tailoring it to specific clients or types of clients.

Did it occur to you that a career politician is unlikely to know any of that?

It's really good advice, though. A website that is minimally styled and standards compliant lets the endpoint device determine optimal format, which means that end users can judge the quality and personal applicability of their devices by how well they render your content. Everybody wins - except crap vendors who can't deliver a good web experience without special coding on the server side, and crap web designers who over-specify their presentation layer or drive navigation through nontextual blobs. And frankly, we want the crap vendors and designers to lose, it's part of how the web is supposed to work.

Re:That'll go well.

[mcgrew]

Anybody coming into office with the worst economy in over hallf a century and fighting two wars isn't going to do miricles. It took Bush eight years to raise gasoline from a buck five to four fifty, get our country attacked by ignoring the pervious President's warnings and his own FBI agents' warnings. You expected Obama to clean up the mess Bush left in half the time it took Bush to make that mess?

Obama's not a bad President. His only problem is he's not a great President. He's better than half the Presidents that have served in my 60 year life.