WhiteHouse.gov Tech
Learn about WhiteHouse.gov's technology development by reading the blog posts below, or send us your feedback on our use of web technology and participation in the open source community.
Manufacturing Innovation: Turning Science Fiction into Science Fact
Posted by on June 24, 2011 at 3:05 PM ESTCrossposted from the NASA blog.
NASA has always been on the cutting edge of innovation, investing time, energy and resources into the technologies of tomorrow. Technologies that can be spun-off into the private sector to help create jobs and improve the quality of life of all Americans.
With funding from NASA's Aeronautics division, engineers at NASA¹s Langley Research Center have developed a manufacturing process that has turned science fiction into science fact. The Electron Beam Freeform Fabrication, or EBF3, is a process that uses an electron beam gun, a dual wire feed and computer controls to manufacture metallic structures for building parts or tools in hours, rather than days or weeks.
NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver and Karen Taminger, the lead engineer on the Electron Beam Freeform Fabrication, or EBF3 project visiting a NASA field center holding an aircraft part made by the EBF3 during a demonstration. (Photo by NASA/Sean Smith)
The EBF3 is being used to manufacture titanium spars for vertical tails of the F-35 Joint Fight Striker. Less wasted titanium and reduced machining times result in a savings for Lockheed Martin, and ultimately the American taxpayer.
Learn more about Innovations, TechnologyTooManyWebsites.gov
Posted by on June 13, 2011 at 1:50 PM ESTAs the President points out in this video, our government doesn’t need a website dedicated to foresters who play the fiddle. We also don’t need multiple sites dealing with invasive plants (here and here). And I‘m pretty sure the website dedicated to the Centennial of Flight can come down... particularly since the Centennial was in 2003.
As President Obama has said, we can’t win the future with a government of the past. How our government uses the internet to communicate and deliver services is an obvious and critical part of this modernization effort.
Today, there are nearly 2,000 top-level federal .gov domains (this means a top-level url, [WEBSITENAME].gov, that links to a distinct website). This includes WhiteHouse.gov, as well as others like USDA.gov, USASpending.gov, NOAA.gov and USA.gov. Under many of these domains are smaller sub-sites and microsites resulting in an estimated 24,000 websites of varying purpose, design, navigation, usability, and accessibility.
While many government websites each deliver value to the taxpayer through easy-to-use services and information, an overall online landscape of literally thousands of websites – each focusing on a specific topic or organization – can create confusion and inefficiency.
What Our Facebook Fans and Twitter Followers Told Us
Posted by on June 10, 2011 at 10:15 AM ESTOver the past few months, we’ve been working to improve the White House’s social media presence to provide our Facebook fans and Twitter followers with timely, relevant and interesting updates about what’s happening at the White House and around the Administration.
We’ve recently conducted surveys of the White House’s Facebook fans and Twitter followers asking for their feedback on our online programs. Between the two surveys, we received thousands of responses and thought we’d share some of the results.
This wasn’t a scientific survey. The results reflect the opinions of those who took the time to respond to our posts and tweets and to complete the survey, and this kind of feedback is really helpful. We’ll be using this information to help improve and guide the efforts of our online program in the upcoming weeks and months.
If you haven’t already, don’t forget to join us on Facebook at Facebook.com/Whitehouse and on Twitter at @Whitehouse.
Here are a few interesting things we’ve learned:
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50% of Facebook survey respondents were over the age of 50, with another 35% between 35 and 49. Our Twitter audience is younger, with only 32% of respondents over the age of 50. A combined 62% are over the age of 35.
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62% reported visiting our Facebook page at least once a week. However, 93% say they read tweets from us at least once a week.
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A much larger percentage of our Twitter survey respondents are active on Facebook (80% of Twitter followers use Facebook weekly) than our Facebook respondents reported being active on Twitter (30% of Facebook fans use Twitter weekly).
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Over 50% of respondents from both surveys reported never using Flickr, LinkedIn and social bookmarking sites (such as Digg, Reddit, and Delicious).
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64% said that the frequency of our Facebook posts is “About Right,” with 31% wanting more, and only 5% saying that it’s “Too Much.”
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61% of the Twitter survey respondents report that the frequency of posting is “About Right,” with an additional 35% saying it’s “Not Enough,” and only 4% saying that it’s “Too Much.”
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Over 56% share White House Facebook posts on a monthly basis and 78% have shared at least once. However, only 35% of responders report retweeting @Whitehouse on at least a monthly basis, with only 58% having retweeted us at least once.
- The top requested content includes news-oriented posts (Breaking News, the latest news from the Administration), interactive posts (ways to engage with Administration officials, announcement of live streams, quotes from major speeches as they happen) and the Photo of the Day.
Most people are happy with the White House Facebook page and Twitter feed, but we received numerous useful suggestions.
Learn more about Technology-
50% of Facebook survey respondents were over the age of 50, with another 35% between 35 and 49. Our Twitter audience is younger, with only 32% of respondents over the age of 50. A combined 62% are over the age of 35.
Do you have the White House app for your phone?
Posted by on April 19, 2011 at 2:34 PM ESTToday, we're announcing two new developments for the White House's mobile apps.
Now, with the newly upgraded White House iPhone app, you can get an alert that President Obama is about to speak, then watch it live, right in the palm of your hand. Over 400,000 people have already downloaded the app, so if you don’t already have it make sure you do.
That’s not all. When we first released the iPhone app, we heard from a lot of Android owners who wanted something for their devices, too. So we’re excited to announce the White House’s new official mobile app for the Android operating system.
With both of these mobile apps, Americans can get alerts directly from the White House, check out behind-the-scenes photos and videos, and read the latest news from the blog or the Briefing Room.
As a reminder, WhiteHouse.gov is also optimized for any mobile phone’s browser. Take a look at http://m.whitehouse.gov/ to check it out.
According to the numbers, more and more of you are using mobile devices to access content on WhiteHouse.gov. In the last two months, 6.6% of visits to WhiteHouse.gov came from the iOS or Android operating system - nearly double the share of visits over the same period last year (3.6%).
We’re constantly working to make it easier for the American public to connect with the Administration. Please give us feedback on these new apps, the mobile website or anything else related to the White House online program’s technology.
Learn more about TechnologyWhiteHouse.gov Releases Second Set of Open Source Code
Posted by on February 11, 2011 at 8:07 PM ESTFriday morning at the Tech@State event at the State Department, the White House's New Media Director Macon Phillips announced the White House’s second code release to the open source community that powers the Drupal content management system.
Last April, we released four modules for the Drupal community, which focused on the scalability, communication, and accessibility of our site.Today’s code release constitutes a few modules we developed for ourselves, as well as a recognition of our sponsoring the development of modules widely used in the Drupal community, which improve the administration of our site in a variety of ways: file management, content presentation, and URL shortening are just a few examples.For the code originating from within the White House, we wanted to improve the functionality offered by a popular file manager, IMCE, so we developed a module called IMCE tools, which has three major functions:First, IMCE Directory Manager provides an interface for specifying which directories a user can access via the IMCE module. It is useful when you have users which have the same user roles but need to be confined to directories which cannot be derived from user data.Second, IMCE Search allows for searching for files in the IMCE interface which helps identify the location of uploaded files.Third, IMCE File Path easily presents the url of a file, facilitating sharing it as a link.We also recognize that there are really good projects already embedded in the Drupal community and reached out to help support their development. Several of these are used in the collaboration software suite, Open Atrium: Features, Spaces, Boxes, Context, StrongArm, and Admin. We also supported the development of an auto-tagging module, Calais, a bulk file uploading utility, IMCE SWFupload, as well as the module that powers our shortened wh.gov domain, shortURL.Learn more about TechnologyFCC.gov Announces Open Source Redesign
Posted by on September 22, 2010 at 5:13 PM ESTThe Federal Communications Commission just announced the start of a major overhaul of FCC.gov, aiming to seize a "special opportunity to become an expert technology agency in the federal government." The redesign focuses on making the FCC's web content more relevant and discoverable to the public, as Managing Director Steven VanRoekel writes:
We have been hard at work in redesigning FCC.gov: defining personas of citizens and business both current and potential, building our data infrastructure (as I mentioned in my O'Reilly Media Gov 2.0 Summit talk), combing through first-ever site analytics and user surveys, and talking to people both online and off about how they would reimagine FCC.gov.
At its core, the FCC's new online platform will leverage the same open source technology powering WhiteHouse.gov, and they're planning active engagement with the open source community. We've found open source technology to be a great way maximize the scalability and accessibility of WhiteHouse.gov, and we've even contributed some of the custom code we've written back to the public domain.
For more information about the White House's engagement with the open source community, read more or watch the video from a keynote talk I gave on this topic.
Learn more about TechnologyWhiteHouse.gov Releases Open Source Code
Posted by on April 21, 2010 at 3:26 PM ESTAs part of our ongoing effort to develop an open platform for WhiteHouse.gov, we're releasing some of the custom code we've developed. This code is available for anyone to review, use, or modify. We're excited to see how developers across the world put our work to good use in their own applications.
By releasing some of our code, we get the benefit of more people reviewing and improving it. In fact, the majority of the code for WhiteHouse.gov is already open source as part of the Drupal project. The code we're releasing today adds to Drupal's functionality in three key ways:
1. Scalability: We're releasing a module called "Context HTTP Headers," which allows site builders to add new metadata to the content they serve. We use this to tell our servers how to handle specific pages, such as cache this type of page for 15 minutes or that type for 30. A second module that addresses scalability is called "Akamai" and it allows our website to integrate with our Content Delivery Network, Akamai.
2. Communication: Many government agencies have active email programs that they use to communicate with the public about the services they provide. We have a mailing list for the White House, where you can get updates about new content and initiatives. To enable more dynamic emails tailored to users' preferences, we've integrated one of the popular services for government email programs with our CMS in the new module, "GovDelivery".
3. Accessibility: We take very seriously our obligation to make sure WhiteHouse.gov is as accessible as possible and are committed to meeting the government accessibility standard, Section 508. As part of that compliance, we want to make sure all images on our site have the appropriate metadata to make them readable on by screen reading software. To help us meet this, while making it easier to manage the rich photos and video content you see on our site, we've developed "Node Embed."
Learn more about TechnologyWhiteHouse.gov To Go
Posted by on April 2, 2010 at 4:30 AM ESTHave you ever tried to open a web link on a mobile device and the page looked jumbled or just hard to read? It can be pretty annoying, particularly in this day and age when more people are getting their info on the go. So here at the White House, we're addressing this problem with a new feature that optimizes WhiteHouse.gov for your mobile device, such as a BlackBerry, Palm Pre or really anything with a mobile browser. The best part is that it is pretty easy to try out, because it works automatically: just visit WhiteHouse.gov from your mobile device. (Of course, don't forget that we recently launched the White House App for iPhone and iPod Touch).
The Mobile.WhiteHouse.gov program is just the latest in our effort to make our content available on a broad number of platforms as technology changes how--and where--people get their information. And we'll continue look for new opportunities to develop applications for even more mobile platforms.
Oh, and one more thing.
WhiteHouse.gov is being featured by Apple as "iPad ready" thanks to our use of the latest web standards, such as HTML5 video support. This includes the ability to watch our live and on-demand video.
Learn more about Technology
