The first week of the Obama administration has offered answers to what were probably the four biggest questions about how he would translate the campaign’s tech acumen into the White House:
The first, which I addressed earlier in the week, was to what extent would the White House Web site feature the kind of social media and participation elements — common to the campaign and Change.gov — on day one? Answer: not much. There’s a blog and some YouTube videos (see number two, below), but only a standard feedback form for contact. Personally, I’m neither surprised nor particularly disappointed about the lack of interactivity, which I don’t find particularly compelling in the first place. I am a little surprised that it took them a few days to get the executive orders up. But it is the first week.
The second was: would the Obama administration let bureacractic and legal obstacles get in the way of what they wanted to do online? Answer: apparently not. In posting the YouTube videos, the campaign circumvented the federal government’s long running inability to make a deal that would let them utilize YouTube (over, among other issues, YouTube’s terms of service, which require that any disputes be resolved in federal court — a no go for the executive branch.) As far as I can tell, there is no closed captioning on the current videos, which would be in violation of amendments to the 1973 Rehabilitation Act. They also have quietly sidestepped prohibitions on government Web sites using persistant cookies.
Third, would Obama be allowed to keep his BlackBerry? Answer: Yes.
Finally, what would the Obama team do to try and keep alive the grassroots activism that flourished during the campaign? Or, in shorthand, to whence the list of 13 million email addresses gathered during the campaign? Answer: A new outfit, called Organizing for America (OFA), that will be housed at the Democratic National Committee. Obama announced the new setup in an email and video last week, and then David Plouffe and Mitch Stewart, the new executive director of OFA, talked about the handoff today. The campaign social networking hub, MyBarackObama.com, now has a form for people to enter there information and have it ported over to OFA. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of response they get, and whether they release the numbers.
Posted at 2:00 pm | Filed under Politics, Technology, Wired |
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Atavism Obama | Reference.com on
August 9th, 2009 1:07 pm
[...] Four Obama reboot-the-White House questions answered : The Atavist The first week of the Obama administration has offered answers to what were probably the four biggest questions about how he would translate the campaign’s tech acumen into the White House: [...]
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