[Yr7-10it] How Obama Will Use Web Technology

[andrew barry]

maybe we can ask the pope for his opinion:)

On Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 6:54 PM,  <stephen at melbpc.org.au> wrote:
> How Obama Will Use Web Technology
>
> Saturday, January 24, 2009; 2:54 AM  <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
> dyn/content/article/2009/01/24/AR2009012400646.html>
>
>
> President Barack Obama was sworn into office this week as our nation's
> 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 by forward thinking, web savvy technologists, President Obama's 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 www.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.
>
> http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/change_has_come_to_whitehouse-gov/>
>
> 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 www.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, Myspace
> and Twitter to build support, communicate with constituents and develop a
> core audience. By far, Mr. Obama has more followers on Twitter than
> anyone else (168,000). His fan page on Facebook has more than 4 million
> fans. <http://twitter.com/BarackObama>
>
> Transparency:
>
> Mr. Obama promises to run the most open, honest and transparent
> administration to date. Through the Your Seat at The Table section on the
> CHANGE.GOV transition site, the Obama transition team posted the minutes
> of hundreds of private meetings with then President-Elect Obama.
>
> <http://change.gov/open_government/yourseatatthetable>
>
> Even all of the content on the www.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 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.
>
> Obama Administration has been conducting bold experiments in interactive
> government. The Citizen's 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 social media applications.
> <http://citizensbriefingbook.change.gov/>
>
>
> 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. We're eager to see the use of these
> technologies extended to www.WhiteHouse.gov initially and from there we'd
> love to see more government agencies quickly embrace web technologies to
> promote communication, transparency and participation.
>
> --
> Cheers people
> Stephen Loosley
> Victoria, Australia
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