My story in this month’s Wired, on how technologically savvy Obama’s presidency can be, headed to the printer just before Christmas and came out online today. There were several developments on the Obama Web/technology front in the interim (although, for better or worse, not as many as I’d expected). The most significant was probably a non-happening: Obama has yet to name someone to his promised “federal chief technology officer” position. Steve Hamm at Business Week had the scoop last week that the choices have narrowed to Padmasree Warrior, CTO at Cisco, and Vivek Kundra, CTO of the District of Columbia. Outside of hearing good things about Kundra while reporting around DC last fall, I don’t have a take on the choice. The more salient point to me is that the decision to not name someone before taking office reveals something (not unexpected) about the relative priority of “rebooting the government” on Obama’s priority list.
Over at Change.gov, the transition team went through another round with the “Open for Questions” feature, with responses from press secretary Robert Gibbs. Participation was high: “103,512 people submitted 76,031 questions and cast 4,713,083 votes,” according to the Obama folks. But after moderating out the Blagojevich questions in the first round, the transition team chose this time to simply ignore the most popular question (about naming an independent investigator to look into possible Bush administration crimes), as noted by The Nation’s Ari Melber.
Speculation continued ad nauseum over the presidential BlackBerry question, and the NY Times observed that BB was getting a lot of free marketing out of it. Back at the Bush White House, a federal judge ordered staffers to hand over their own mobile devices, in a continuing effort to relocate 14 million mysteriously “disappeared” Bush administration emails. Somebody hacked Obama’s campaign Twitter account, dark since election day, highlighting the complications underlying the 21st century presidency. Then, just today, an email from Obama arrived in supporters’ inboxes, linking to a video announcing the creation of “Organizing for America.” It seems to be the long awaited answer to speculation about how Obama would try and keep his grassroots volunteers engaged. Meanwhile, some people started to find impediments to social media plans for the White House. Through it all, technology evangelists did their part, continuing to spin out grand “Government 2.0″ utopias.
The best place to track these and the many other techno-political goings on is TechPresident, run by Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry — both invaluable sources for my own story.
Posted at 4:30 pm | Filed under Articles, Politics, Technology, Wired |
