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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.'"
The fact that users are forced to navigate a labyrinth means that the government is trying to do to much.
Or perhaps we need to simplify the number of "programs", that might help too.
The government's problem isn't technology. You can't automate well a process you cannot do well on paper. The thicket of laws and regulations is such that any government process becomes bogged down in irrelevancies. You WANT a bureaucracy for things like making passport issuance regular, but is our online passport application going to come with a must-accept click-through with a paperwork reduction act notice?
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
To be clear, they are not being ordered to implement the new strategy in 90 days, they're being ordered to implement the new strategy in 12 months. The 90 day requirement is to have a page publicly documenting their progress.
That said, I'm still curious whether agencies can move fast enough to get something like this done in even 12 months. =P
To be fair, as a supplement to the President's memorandum, the U.S. CTO and CIO are leading programs to stop the proliferation of .gov sites and focus on converting all the PDF and static website content into machine-readable data so public/private services can communicate create content via APIs. Your sites won't need updating if the data coming from the government is being streamed into an embedded visualization app. You'd be able to consume whatever report or graph you need in whatever form you need it in, using the scope you want.
The video for the the CTO/CIO announcement (more for the Slashdot crowd): http://fedscoop.com/video-vanroekel-park-announce-new-government-digital-strategy/
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
to know that Obama can pay attention to the really important stuff while he deals with a trillion dollar budget deficit, a factious Congress, the European Debt crisis, the Iran nuclear crisis, China's disputes with the Philippines in the South China Sea, ...
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
An excellent opportunity to double the amount of babble presented making it twice as difficult to find the information you want and hide the fact that many things that we should know are just omitted.
As scientifically minded people, we have tendency to model systems. The only model that really fits most democratic systems is extreme cynicism. The politicians may not be exclusively power- and money-driven with just about total disregard for the will of the people, but if you apply a model based on that you can fairly accurately predict outcomes.
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.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love driving your mountain roads that go from nowhere to nowhere and have absolutely zero traffic for hundreds of kilometres. Certainly a beautiful way to waste money. This seems like the very same thing.
Mobile devices such as these have been around for about 5 years. That makes them new technology, especially in government circles. What's going to happen after the 90 days? Will the next order be to improve the sites to support the next big mobile browser? Oh wait, that's what this is -- wasn't it just two years ago that he ordered everybody to make their services available online in the first place?
Government's always been required to make things available to the widest audience. If everyone could access the government services from a desktop, that'd suffice. It needn't be better than functional. You don't need to pay your taxes from your shitty smart phone -- especially because 10 years from now your smart phone won't be so shitty.
Yeah, a couple of years. Not decades. By government standards, taking action now is actually pre-emptive!
Actually, if there's a silver lining here (which happens to address that very point), it's the 90 day deadline. One thing I've learned is that if something needs to be ready in one year, it is pretty much guaranteed to suck and overrun its deadline (i.e. it won't really be ready in a year) and have its best features neutered and a lot of worthless crap done to it.
OTOH if someone needs something in two weeks, the techs just say "well, we have to do this, and we're already running out of time" and get it done and there aren't any meetings and expansion and nobody gets to add delays to it.
90 days is a bit long for this kind of thing, but it might be short enough that the job can get done. (30 days would be better, though.)
The constants above are obviously an over-generalization; the Apollo Program couldn't be done in 90 days better than in one year, though doing it in one year just might be better than doing it in ten years. But for making websites modern-touch-mobile friendly/formatted (as opposed to merely "working") setting the deadline to a few weeks is .. about right.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
More likely, he's mostly accessing internet from his smartphone, and is looking out for number one.
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.
But as I said, he cares about number one and not the public. He's a career politician, for cripes' sake, so that should go without saying.
Shit! Oh well, never mind what I said here then; it really is a boondoggle after all.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Yes every decision the president makes has this huge political meaning...
He was probably at a meeting, and one of his aids tried to look up the data on his phone and couldn't access it because it was flash... And Obama was like. Why don't we make sure all the government websites work on mobile browsers?
When asked people they didn't come up with a good argument against the idea so he put it into practice.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
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.
Actually, if there's a silver lining here (which happens to address that very point), it's the 90 day deadline. One thing I've learned is that if something needs to be ready in one year, it is pretty much guaranteed to suck and overrun its deadline (i.e. it won't really be ready in a year) and have its best features neutered and a lot of worthless crap done to it.
OTOH if someone needs something in two weeks, the techs just say "well, we have to do this, and we're already running out of time" and get it done and there aren't any meetings and expansion and nobody gets to add delays to it.
That's a great point. I've noticed that as well. Only objection I'd raise is that injecting a project with a short deadline causes delays in every other ongoing project as people have to stop whatever else they were working on to get this done. Of course if you happen to have people sitting around doing nothing, then you're not interrupting anything.
Lucky for you the Republicans just happened to pick a small soap dish to run against him.
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.
.And I would vote for anyone but Obama if anyone wasn't enthralled by the cult of Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers.
Uh, you do understand the 90 day deadline is for the agencies to have a website that shows their progress. It isn't referring to actually getting the job done.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
That's known as Section 508 compliance. In addition to basic accessibility, the law says an access board will further establish guidelines, and among them are adherence to standards and ommission of non-compliant plug-ins.
In case you want to slap a party label on it, this was introduced by Democrats during a Republican-controlled Congress and passed. The cynical (and usually right when it comes to politics) side of me says that because this was introduced by two California Democrats, one of them the rep for Silicon Valley, there was motivation to funnel money to the tech companies that would likely be haired to overhaul sites to compliance.
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.
Free Martian Whores!
After all this time, he has nothing to crow about other than "it is Bush's fault"? Ok...he got Bin Laden. Nice...however, that hunt had been put in place a long time ago.....hey, guess that was started by Bush, so, ok...he's still on that kick.
You'd think after over 3 years, Obama would be trying to run on his amazing record and accomplishments for his presidency....but no....all's quiet on that front.
[crickets chirping]
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The word "hate", just like "racist", has lost all meaning in today's discourse. Being diametrically opposed to someone's viewpoint is not hate. This overuse of the "hate" label is evidence of one party's inability to form a coherent argument in response the opponent. "I don't like what you said about my guy, and I'm too lazy or unable to counter your argument, so... that's hate speech."
Weak.
sig: sauer
I hate it when people tell me what a politician "wants to" do. You don't know what he really wants. All you can comment on is the action and behavior, don't spout-on about his intentions.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Not really. Just the "fiscally conservative" folks who claim that tax cuts for the ultra wealthy will balance the budget, educate the children and secure national security. That isn't fiscal conservatism, it is a radical attack on this nation that will bring us to our knees so that the yoke of plutocratic oppression can be placed on our shoulders. That is of course assuming the Chicoms don't take advantage of the opportunity before the plutocrats can.