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 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 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, 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.
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.
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 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-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. We’re 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.
In other words he’s not going to be ignoring us last the last 8 years.
we definitely have all felt ignored. lets see if Obam changes the voting system to where all votes are transparent and recorded on the internet. we should be able to vote over the phone or net and confirm our vote online or by phone. thanks god a real game changer is in the House. takes one to know one.
LocalUnion.com – freedom reigns
Well, if you want to see new things about polling/voting system, have a look here:
http://harrysel...or-of-democracy
I am just launching right now this thinkosphere website that aims at accelerating democracy.
About the article, I can only be glad of what is said. Specifically I started this project more than one year ago because I was fed up with the lack of transparency in the polls that we are given everyday by the media. So this site is a kind of ‘wiki polling organization’.
I love what he did to WhiteHouse.gov and a really smart move to let the Citizens become ICitizens and participate.
He must have millions op ICitizens he can address to when he needs their support by sending them an e-mail and secure his position and get the people behind him.
He is Open in his communication, Personal, Engaging and networks with his ICitizens across the globe.
Chapeau for this 44th president of the U.S.A.
President Obama, I have a complaint, a serious one:
Nobody listens to me!
I want you to, ASAP, open a section on the site called “Complaint Box”.
This is good for many reasons:
(1) Everyone likes to complain – they may not complain well – but they will have something to say – of all of those complaints a few will be accompanied by brilliant suggestions from intelligent knowledgeable and ethical people.
(2) We have one hell of a lot of highly trained, super-efficient problem-solvers here on the internet. We are sitting around waiting for problems to solve. Throw those problems, in all their detail, at us. We’ll show you how quickly problems can be fixed if everyone works together online. It’s much easier to talk online, than to face the chill effect of hierarchy online.
We want a discussion room or forum where the complaint is received and discussed by the public – some will have the same comment – they simply add one to the score of complainants. Others can elaborate. The rest of us can figure out how to solve that problem.
(3) The complainant neither wants nor likes to pass many desks – he just wants to get his complaint across. The problem solver neither wants nor likes to be bossed around by administrators with routine tasks. He just wants the problem statement, all the details required, and he can start firing solutions right away. You’ve seen Twitter and it’s usefulness already. It is just the information that needs to be passed back and forth.
Why move people around when it all costs so much?
Why not use that money to actually implement the fix that everyone’s thought up.I heard someone say that we have just under four years left and a hell of a lot left to fix. So moving people around desks is definitely counterproductive.
If people must move, it must for implementation of ideas or for privileged information that cannot go around on wires or airwaves.
(4) Maps, photos, citizen’s videos all are things we need for this – the press isn’t going to visit every corner to look for complainants and complaints.
We need a citizen-friendly _bug tracker_ with all sorts of posting options – voice, video and text.
Oh and a complaint number for each bug instead of social insecurity numbers for people.
Thanks for a thoughtful, informed article about the diverse uses of new web technology by Obama’s staff. All indications are that they will continue to methodically apply these technologies in the future, when and where it is appropriate.
Hmmm, you sound really, really, really bored. <3
Dammit, that was supposed to be in reply to another comment, not the article…
Hi,
1. Interesting post and interesting viewpoint on the effects of the internet and web2.0 tools.
2. if you liked it, here are 3 more worth reading posts and documents I found, related to Obma’s web strategy and so on:
http://www.shar...abs.com/?obama2
Not only is WEB technology important to his administration, he may be aggressive about developing the next generation INTERNET technology.
If successful, imagine how this could usher in a new era for a whole host of ideas and implementations
With a new Treasury Secretary who doesn’t know how to use TurboTax? I suggest we all lower our expectations. Considerably.
Kevin – Congrats on this achievement for blist. It is refreshing to hear that the government is in support of startups, and Seattle is on their radar.
It would be very interesting to know how your company was approached or how you reached out to offer the service.
I’d love to have videos uploaded to TuneyFish by the Obama administration about the automotive industry, what issues need to be resolved, and how the DIY community can participate.
One suggestion for whitehouse.gov, they expand on their contact page to include a different section for technical issues / bugs. Their form is submitting on enter. I sent in a message about it.
Any guesses on how long will it take before its fixed.
Transaparency is inevitable {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/MT7REvYQd4_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Transaparency is inevitable ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/ctyrr8kDpB”}}}
Transparency is the way of the future, honestly, and helping this cause is Twitter.com. Get connected, stay connected, engage, collaborate, and grow!
http://www.twit....com/adrianeden
People talk about transparency like it’s a good thing without ever speaking about why. In an increasingly complex world – one which is become interdependent in so many ways, it is difficult or impossible to navigate into the future when the right hand doesn’t know the left exists. We are leaving a Neutonian world that thrived on predicatability, control and order and transitioning to a recognition that it is risky to leave the navigation map in the secretive hands of the few. Publish the damn thing and let the ppeople organize around it.
I wonder if they will update everything as much as they did with their Twitter account after they got elected. If you think Obama is open and transparent, you better start reading more about him so far.
Nice Post Kevin. We intend to fllow Obama’s technology initiatives extremely close and will post our findings on our blog askbinc.com. We actually have a pretty good one up there right now talking about Obama’s use of Social Networking tools to further his campaigning efforts.
Best to you and the Blist Team!!
Boris
http://www.thewebwar.com/blist
The only complaint I have is that they’re relying on private businesses that can change their minds about things whenever they like. Look at Youtube…they’ve silenced the audio of many videos. Look at Twitter, they’ve had to disable various parts of their service at different times to deal with the load.
If you don’t have the code available or there isn’t an easy way to extract all of your data from the service, then you’re relying on closed & opaque services. How does this make sense when you’re trying to promote more open & transparent government?
I was thinking the same. I believe never before has a government relied that much on private business. Though I welcome transparency and a new openness.
Should the government not distribute information via TV, because private companies control the networks? Even with the internet, private companies and schools control most of the “series of tubes”, so should Obama avoid using any network controlled by a private company? Should all White House computers run Linux, because Windows and OSX are not open source?
The government should not be in the software industry, but should leverage existing technologies that everyone already uses. There’s no reason for Obama not to use YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook simply because they are privately owned. There is plenty of competition in all of those markets, and if one of those companies were to misstep (a huge PR nightmare), then the administration could easily switch to a competitor.
Versus the government building/maintaining their own? Hah! It would cost $5 billion to change the text on a button.
On the transparency issue…it’s not only technology. For the past eight years it has been extremely difficult to obtain federal information through the Freedom of Information Act because the staff was told to search for any reason NOT to release the information.
On his first day in office, Obama completely changed that. With an unprecedented executive order, he said that any information could be released unless there was a law forbidding it. (A complete turn around…thank goodness!)
Rudolf,
You are right to raise concerns about software from private companies being used for public purposes, but I think it’s important to look at the bigger picture. Increased communication, transparency and participation are good things. The private sector can help get the public sector there more quickly. As an example, the Obama-Biden Transition team asked us to make a minor change to our widgets. They asked us to pop up an interstitial that says “you’re now leaving a government site and viewing the data on a private site.” We deployed that change within hours of the request. How long would it have taken for some governmental agency to provide a tool that allowed the consumers of the data to sort, filter, search, publish, redistribute, print, email, download, etc.? What’s smart about this Obama media team is that they recognize the most expedient path to meeting their goals by bridging public and private sector technologies.
In the specific case of public data being shared and published via blist, any user of the data can download it as a CSV file, republish it somewhere else, email it to themselves. The use of blist actually promotes its persistence on the web.
Creative Commons?
As much as I love those guys, anything created by the US government is public domain by definition. I’m not sure what the rules are about content created by private citizens for publication in a government forum (which may be why the CC license is there).
whose paying for all this?!
-Jim
http://www.movi...nlineforum.com/
(just getting started so check it out)
People making over $250,000, i.e. the only people in this country who really do ‘pay their fair share.’
As much as I would like to believe that Obama will continue to keep up with his technology, I believe now he has more important things to do than dick around on Twitter. Not only that, when he was campaigning, being accessible was important, now that he won, why would he keep it up?
I like the article… your frame for analysis was spot on, and you reminded me that I need to add Whitehouse.gov to my RSS reader.
But, I think you were a little heavy-handed in your sales pitch for blist. You’re really going to put yourself in the company of names like Google, SFDC, and Facebook?
Alex,
I’m glad you liked the post.
The Obama team chose to use blist on their own. Obviously we’re thrilled to be in the great company of Google, SFDC and Facebook, but the reasons I cited for why they’re using blist over an HTML table were told to me directly by one of the key technologists in their new media team. That’s part of what makes this a story – Mr. Obama’s new media team is savvy enough to know what’s going on in technology and how to use that technology to meet their goals.
You forgot “warrentless wiretapping.”
http://blog.wir...-sides-wit.html
Sometimes things don’t really *change* as much as we hope.
Reasons #8907-8999 to support our new president. I’m already loving the new path this country is heading. Thanks Mr. Obama.
To each and every comment made, I thank you and president Obama for using this technology you are in good hand, I am the creator and provider of the Web2.0 environment.
“Through the blog, Mr. Obama is the first U.S. president to have an RSS feed!”
It might have been difficult for the previous ones for obvious reasons…
anyway, interesting article
The Obaminator will use his BarackBerry to Obaminate!!!
Here’s the thing: Eight years from now, is the next guy going to keep this all in place or roll it all back?
I love what Obama is doing, and I know the web will be completely different in two years, let alone eight, but I’d like to see Obama lock the transparency down as a Constitutional amendment.
President Bush took a parting shot at the French by raising the duty on Roquefort cheese from 100% to 300%. This was in retaliation for a French ban on American beef. The French are notorious for protecting their crummy agriculture industry. Many people think President Obama will reverse the decision. He loves the French and they love him back. A cheesy dispute with France
Obama will set the tone and leadership but the actual execution will come down to gov’t employees. The good thing is there are tons of engaged gov’t innovators at all levels (fed, state, and local) ready for the green light. Many of them are connecting and collaborating at a site I run – GovLoop.com – and it’s pretty interesting.
What I like about bringing these technologies to the White House is that it sets an example, and maybe local governments will begin to follow the lead. This is truly needed because finding information on certain levels of government is very difficult.
I have to agree that Obama is taking major steps to revolutionize how government communicates with the public. I think it’s a step towards a better government.
Obama has said his BlackBerry allows him to more easily get around the bubble that presidents find themselves in.However Obama will only be able to e-mail senior staffs, as well as “a small group of personal friends”, but it will be a new path towards a better government.
-snsingh
http://snsays.com
As we know American dream ,God bless Obama and new change take new steps to America.
People should get true information about goverment. So technology is the weapon
of media.
Obama ,Osama ,and saddam are the great person
in this century.
Obama is supernatural minded and overseer of the universe.
He is making plans and new strategies not only in America but also in south Aisa. He is going to challenge the starvation and poverty .Definitely,People love transparency on communication.
He is confident and has good leadership,we have to support him and his new change.
Huge security breach for the President to have mission critical emails going through the Blackberry service.
Not secure enough, and even could be dropped and lost. Who knows?
http://www.tech...rt4brooklyn.com
… Get connected, stay connected, engage, collaborate, and grow! …
If you think Obama is open and transparent ….
Obama won with 53% and it was a big win for progressives. But that doesn’t means there’s a huge public mandate for everything you want. There’s also this little thing called Congress and the constitutional process by which policy is made in this country.
http://rajastha.../resources.html