This link has been bookmarked by 13 people . It was first bookmarked on 20 Jan 2009, by Mark Spahr.
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13 Aug 09
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the chance for ordinary citizens to talk back.
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The real reason, however, was that Obama wasn't actually trying to have a conversation with Americans via YouTube. Like every president before him, he was simply harnessing the latest tools to talk to them, one-way.
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Technophiles who watched the campaign closely expected more, and now they are putting pressure on the White House to govern with unparalleled transparency and citizen interaction. Dan Froomkin of the Niemen Watchdog Journalism Project and The Washington Post summed up expectations in a blog post calling for Obama to embrace "wiki culture" in which "major policy proposals have public collaborative workspaces."
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Obama has himself to blame for raising such expectations. During the campaign, he embraced every form of social media.
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Obama had four times the number of Facebook supporters, 24 times the Twitter devotees, and three times the visitors to his site in the final campaign week. The public watched about 15 million hours of Obama campaign videos on YouTube. Along the way, Obama collected 13 million email addresses, more than a million cell phone numbers, and a half-billion dollars in online donations.
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But turning his innovative campaign and transition into Government 2.0 won't be easy. The nimble Obama startup is about to be absorbed into a stodgy, technologically backward behemoth: the federal government.
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There's also another reason to expect a tech-driven presidency: Obama promised it. He said he would expand government transparency by putting more data up on the Web, streaming meetings live, and letting the public comment on most legislation for five days before he signs it. He said he would bring blogs, wikis, and social networking tools with him into the executive branch—all overseen by a new national chief technology officer.
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he is listening to them
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"But we're going to have to change how government thinks about the Internet before we can do the things we want to do."
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For starters, the federal government operates more than 24,000 separate sites, many of them years out of date.
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Don't worry about trying wild stuff, like setting up federal social networks. Many agencies bar employees from even looking at sites like Facebook at work, much less building their own versions.
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Progress has been achingly slow. There have been some notable exceptions—like a blog on the Transportation Security Administration Web site, open to comments and manned by five agency staffers, and NASA.gov's numerous social media initiatives, including Twitter feeds from 20 missions and projects. But the successes are rare and isolated.
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For example, many of Obama's online campaign techniques would be impeded by a collection of obscure and well-intentioned rules.
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Obama or his CTO can lift some of the Internet restrictions with the stroke of a pen. Others will require congressional action or clever technology.
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To that end, the transition team served up small accountability stuff first. Change .gov supplemented Obama's weekly YouTube addresses with periodic videos from inside the transition process, everything from staff meetings to vlog-type updates from advisers.
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no matter how vibrant—doesn't represent all of the American public.
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it's hard to solve the actual problems" without effort from regular people
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And a presidential Twitter feed, Flickr photos, or WhiteHouse.gov video Q&A sessions may not vastly increase transparency or deeply inform policy, but they create a valuable intimacy with citizens. "People who think they are being listened to tend to respect more the person talking," says Rasiej.
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Obama's campaign was never a bottom-up endeavor
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didn't crowdsource
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one of the most tightly controlled, top-down campaigns in modern history
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Obama's best shot at rebooting the government is to remember how he got there: making people feel that they were part of the solution and then enabling them to talk to one another and take action.
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30 Jun 09
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08 Feb 09
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20 Jan 09
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Mark SpahrInteresting article that explores the challenges of bringing the technological savvy that was so successful for Obama during the campaign to the Federal Government.
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