Obama To Agencies: Optimize Web Content For Mobile 322
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.'"
Re:90 Days!? (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:90 Days!? (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [fedscoop.com]
Re:That'll go well. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Accessibility (Score:5, Informative)
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.