The White House - 2.0

One of the reasons why I support Obama and believe that he will be successfull as a president is that he is consistient and follows through with what he has said in the past.  

I was initially attracted to him as a candidate when I saw a youtube interview of him with Google back in November 2007.  One of the things he said in the interview, 

"To sieze this moment, we have to use technology to open up our democracy [...] 

We will put government data online in universiblly accessable formats. (applause) 

I will let citizens track frderal grants, contracts, earmarks, and lobbying contracts- 

I'll let you paricipate in government forums, ask questions, in real time,offer suggestions that will be reviewd before decisons are made, and let you comment on legislation before it is signed. 

And to ensure that every government agency is meeting 21st century standards, 

I will appoint the nations first Chief Technology Officer to coordinate and make certain that we are always at the forefront of technology and that we are incorporating it into every decision that we make."

He mentioned his interest in incorporating the new technological communication and collaboration tools that characterize Web 2.0 into the US government, and particularly the Executive Branch.  All in an attempt to improve not only the perception of the government by its citizens, but also to enhance its efficiency and effectiveness by leveraging its citizens as resources on many of the routine government functions.  

Now that he is actually in office, it is impressive to notice that along with his actions on shutting down the Guantanamo Bay facility and reversing some of the most controversial policies of the previous administration, Obama has chosen implementing his plans on "White House 2.0" to be one of his "day one" initiatives.  I found this article from washington post.com which provides details on the work that he has already begun.

How Obama Will Use Web Technology

Guest AuthorTechCrunch.com 

Saturday, January 24, 2009; 2:54 AM

Editor's Note: The following guest post was written by Kevin Merritt, the CEO and founder of blist, a Web-based list manager and spreadsheet that was used on Change.gov, the Obama Administration's transition Website.

President Barack Obama was sworn into office this week as our nations 44th president. Despite running into a few technical challenges in the first few days at the White House, the Obama Administration will embrace technology in unprecedented ways. Led byforward thinking, web savvy technologists, President Obamas new media team looks poised and ready to fulfill President Obama?s vision of open-source democracy.

Coincident with Mr. Obama being sworn in, the Obama Administration's new media team assumed control of WhiteHouse.gov at 12:01 PM EST on Tuesday. This is the official website of the sitting administration. The new media team has identified three top priorities of the new administration communication, transparency and participation. Let's examine how the new administration has been leveraging web technologies to meet these priorities.

Communication. This administration's use of Google's YouTube during both the campaign and after winning the election leverages Internet video to reach a generation of Americans and global citizens who no longer tune in to AM radio on a regular basis. President Obama has vowed to continue video recording his fireside chats and publishing them via YouTube and other video sites. With the transition of WhiteHouse.gov to the new administration, for the first time ever an official White House blog came online. You can sign up for email updates from the president. Through the blog, Mr. Obama is the first U.S. president to have an RSS feed!

During the campaign President Obama relied heavily on Facebook, Myspaceand Twitter to build support, communicate with constituents and develop a core audience. By far, Mr. Obama has more followers on Twitterthan anyone else (168,000). His fan page on Facebook has more than 4 million fans.

Transparency. Mr. Obama promises to run the most open, honest and transparent administration to date. Through the Your Seat at The Tablesection on the CHANGE.GOVtransition site, the Obama transition team posted the minutes of hundreds of private meetings with then President-Elect Obama.

Even all of the content on the CHANGE.GOV site, unless otherwise noted, is licensed to the public at large via a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

The Obama-Biden Transition Team used my company, blist, to disclose the names of all donors to the transition project. Two key points of note are that the disclosure was entirely voluntary and the tool they chose to use made the data itself much more consumable by the mainstream public. Compared to a plain HTML table, which is bulky, cumbersome and hard to work with, by publishing the data via a blist widget the data can easily be sorted, searched, filtered, downloaded, printed, emailed and even republished all capabilities not previously enjoyed by most consumers of public data sets.

Participation. The Obama Administration has been conducting bold experiments in interactive government. The Citizens Briefing Book, powered by Salesforce.com, has allowed citizens to suggest topics Mr. Obama should consider upon taking office. Once a topic was submitted, other visitors to the Citizen's Briefing Book could vote the topic up or down and comment on it. Voting, ranking and commenting are hallmark features of web-based, social media applications.

The new Administration has brought forth a new era of honest, open, participatory and transparent government by creatively employing web-based software from innovative companies like Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com and blist. Were eager to see the use of these technologies extended to WhiteHouse.gov initially and from there we'd love to see more government agencies quickly embrace web technologies to promote communication, transparency and participation.