National Dialogue on the Federal Mobile Strategy Results – Analytics
January 11 through January 27, 2012
The National Dialogue ran for just over two weeks and received hundreds of votes and ideas. In advance of the National Dialogue, members of the Federal Mobility Task Force convened to discuss their ideas for improving the ways the government implements mobile technologies. They were encouraged to submit their ideas to the National Dialogue after CIO Steven VanRoekel opened it to the public.
Top 10 Most Popular Ideas
| 508 / WCAG 2.0 Accessibility | – 59 votes |
| Web To Mobile - Content Portability | – 41 votes |
| Develop Shared Services Catalog | – 41 votes |
| Make Govt. Mobile Apps Easy for Elderly and Disabled | – 30 votes |
| Create Mobility Centers of Excellence | – 28 votes |
| The power of crowds | – 27 votes |
| Collaboration: the next-generation of information sharing | – 26 votes |
| Apps are easy… enterprise strategy, not so much | – 25 votes |
| Consider Responsive Web Design | – 25 votes |
| Establish Federal Mobility Infrastructure Standards | – 25 votes |
Observations on the National Dialogue
| • | High quality ideas that demonstrate a lot of thought. | • | A fair amount of overlap demonstrating that all of the objectives interconnect. | • | Great participation from the task force members. | • | Users submitted valuable online resources. | • | Evidence of a vocal minority. Some of the ideas were duplicative and many of proponents of those ideas did not vote for any other ideas. |
Top Submissions from the Public
Many of the top ideas were submitted by members of the public, and a few were notably different from the Task Force submissions.| 1. | Provide for 508 Compliance and WCAG 2.0 Accessibility - New |
| a. | Ensure Section 508 is addressed in the procurement and development phases. |
| 2. | Content Should Be Easily Portable from the Web to Any Mobile Device - New |
| a. | Consider Responsive Web Design and HTML5 |
| 3. | Apps are Easy… Enterprise Strategy, Not So Much |
| a. | Many of the comments support the Task Force’s findings |
| b. | The mobile strategy needs to be flexible enough to accommodate rapid changes in devices, bandwidth and use cases |
| 4. | Encourage BYOD Policies - Hot Topic |
| a. | Many of the comments support the Task Force’s findings |
| b. | Provide standard mobile data management (MDM) security protocols to allow employees to use their own, privately owned devices. |
| c. | Enable sandboxed or virtual machines on mobile devices (e.g. your phone/tablet has two "personalities" that can be switched between). |
| 5. | Create Reasonable Security Guidelines |
| a. | Many of the comments support the Task Force’s findings |
| b. | Evaluate, validate, protect and secure mobile technologies |
| c. | Perform a strategic review of existing policies |
| 6. | Collaboration: the Next-Generation of Information Sharing |
| a. | Foster secure, NIST compliant, collaboration and crowdsourcing technologies within and across government agencies to make information sharing more efficient and effective |
Top Submissions from Task Force Members
Members of the Federal Mobility Task Force were asked to submit tactical ideas that support one of the six core objectives. The public confirmed several of these ideas by giving them a considerable number of votes.| 1. | Develop a Shared Service Catalog that Houses Code, APIs, and Web Services |
| a. | Create an “applications enablement platform” comprising tools/resources/services |
| b. | Build applications as “services” that can be reused. |
| 2. | Develop a Gov Mobility Innovation Ecosystem / Centers of Excellence |
| a. | Beyond a Mobile FedRAMP, create multiple CoEs – one for each major domains (security, technology, applications, etc) |
| b. | Develop an Innovation Center - a live 'sandbox' environment to create and develop prototype solutions |
| 3. | Establish Federal Mobility Infrastructure Standards |
| a. | Create a robust Enterprise Mobile Device Management capability that works in conjunction with a proven authentication/user ID Management system |
| 4. | Develop Federal Mobility Based on User Needs – Hot Topic |
| a. | Suggest changing “User Needs” to “Use Cases” – different users have very different needs depending upon their use case |
| b. | Have targeted workforce be active partners in development – their real work environments can be extreme (e.g. First Responders) |
| c. | Maximize benefits of standardization while minimizing incompatibilities |
| 5. | Update/Develop Government-wide Mobility Policies |
| a. | Consider a layered approach: |
| b. | The highest level--government wide--should be the broadest guidance/requirements. |
| c. | The next level--department/agency--should be agency-specific policy guidance. |
Top Tags
| • | Although “security” was mentioned sporadically in the text of the ideas, it was used to tag 18 ideas – the most of any. | • | “Accessibility” and “508” were the second most popular. | • | “BYOD” and “privacy” were used to tag eight ideas. |
IdeaScale Statistics
| • | 6119 Total US Visits | • | 62% of US visitors have come from the National Capital Region – Virginia, Maryland, and Washington DC | • | 5% of US visitors have come from California | • | 4% of US visitors have come from New York | • | 134 Ideas Posted | • | 325 Comments | • | 1224 Votes | • | 455 Users |
New vs. Returning Visitors
A steady stream of visitors returned over the course of two weeks. By the end of the Dialogue, 40% of visitors had returned at least once.
Top Referring Sites
| • | Much of the traffic came from news sites like Nextgov and Federal Computer Week. | • | Steven VanRoekel’s White House blog also prompted a large percentage of traffic. | • | The majority of the remainder of the traffic came from sites such as informationweek.com, fedscoop.com, link shorteners like those for Twitter, cio.com, and fednewradio.com. | • | 48% of all traffic came from visitors who typed the URL directly into their browser. |
Social Web