Obama’s signature on the stimulus bill yesterday brought with it further complaints that the new administration isn’t living up to its transparency pledges. It seems that the White House is having trouble squaring the need for emergency legislation with their explicit promise to post bills for five days before the President signs them. A better question, which Micah Sifry raised again last week, might be: what’s the point of fulfilling this promise? Any useful public input into the process would need to happen before the bill hits the President’s desk.
But with the stimulus bill’s approval also comes the full launch of Recovery.gov, which holds out hope for the kind of transparency we actually need. Naturally, the site features Obama’s trademark blue-box Web design. And some of the initial features like the spending breakdown charts and the recovery timeline are interesting, as others have observed.
But the true measure of the site will be in the amount and the detail of the data, about how the money is actually spent and how many jobs are actually created. Post continued…
Posted at 1:05 pm | 1 Comment | Filed under Politics, Technology |
At yesterday’s press conference describing the administration’s new “financial stability plan” for the banking system, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner offered what seems to be the obligatory new Web site for any Obama administration proposal:
Our work begins with a new framework of oversight and governance of all aspects of our Financial Stability Plan.
The American people will be able to see where their tax dollars are going and the return on their government’s investment, they will be able to see whether the conditions placed on banks and institutions are being met and enforced, they will be able to see whether boards of directors are being responsible with taxpayer dollars and how they’re compensating their executives, and they will be able to see how these actions are impacting the overall flow of lending and the cost of borrowing.
These new requirements, which will be available on a new website FinancialStability.gov, will give the American people the transparency they deserve.
(Clicking over there a few minutes ago, I found a text-only “coming soon” page, with links to Geithner’s remarks. In a way, the page echoes the lack of detail critics observed in the speech itself.) FinancialStability.gov thus joins Recovery.gov, the designated future source of stimulus bill spending, and Astrongmiddleclass.gov, a site that’s meant to provide info on the Vice President’s middle class task force. The former sits idle, awaiting instructions that will presumably come with the passage of the bill. The latter redirects to a section of the White House Web site, and contains the same Obama-esque design. All this Web building, but to what end? Post continued…
Posted at 3:23 pm | 2 Comments | Filed under Politics, Technology, Wired |
When the Obama transition team posted the President-elect’s first weekly video address on YouTube, several transparancy advocates complained that, without comments or response videos enabled, the addresses were merely a one-way conversation. The Obama camp soon relented on comments, resulting in a typical flood of juvenille nonsense following each of the President’s sober monologues. But the transition team, and now the administration, drew the line at video responses. I mean, who knows what kind of crazy shit people might post?
Well, via TechPresident, we learn that the YouTube afficionado most outraged by his inability to see his own grainy face alongside the President’s is…House Republican leader John Boener.
Boener’s people want his own video approved as an official response to the President’s January 24 address. They’ve got a point. If you’re going to allow “djfishbone” to advance our democratic dialogue by writing “YEA BUSH 2.0!! i’m not getting on the bus and going to the camp,” why not a proper video reply from the House Republican Leader? It’s possible that Obama’s new media folks have mistaken Boener, so…YouTubeish a screen name, for a less serious respondent. Post continued…
Posted at 12:26 pm | 1 Comment | Filed under Politics, Technology, Wired |
The most vexing phenomenon I encountered in my recent reporting on Obama’s Web team was the insistence by Obama press folks that everyone inside the transition team speak on background, with quotes attributable only to unnamed “Obama aides.” At first it reminded me of the way certain corporate PR departments — hello, Google — tacitly infantilize their employees by shadowing every interview, under the presumption that even executives aren’t smart enough to resist blabbing away the company goods.
Upon further reflection, though, the Obama policy seemed even more baffling. After all, they didn’t stop people from speaking to me. In fact, they kindly arranged some interviews. They just wouldn’t let those people put their name behind their (completely uncontroversial) words. More to the point, however, I was actually interviewing these people about transparency, which led to unintentionally ironic anonymice like this:
“Day one, do we need a White House My.BarackObama? I don’t think so,” says the Obama aide, who was required by the transition press office to speak anonymously. “It’s more important to step back and ask, what are the goals for the White House? And I think that making the government more accountable and transparent is more important than getting people to act.”
Important, but not so important as to warrant putting an actual person’s name behind the statement. To top it off, the Obama aide didn’t even seem to want to remain anonymous. They just didn’t want to break the rules. Even stranger, some of those same people have since spoken in public forums and made the exact statements which I was forced to keep un-attributed.
As Jack Schaffer points out today at Slate, this sort of knee-jerk impulse toward anonymity is also afoot in White House press “background briefings.” At the very least, an administration promising to be the most transparent in history should be required to offer an explanation for the policy, and probably discard it altogether, save for especially sensitive circumstances. It would be a good first step in creating a “presumption of openness.”
Posted at 12:02 pm | Comment | Filed under Politics, Technology, Wired |
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.
Posted at 2:00 pm | 1 Comment | Filed under Politics, Technology, Wired |
Doing my part to fill the bottomless news hole that is Obama’s first week in office, I made a couple of forays into other media this week, to discuss my Wired story. The first was on public radio’s “Future Tense,” which aired on Wednesday and is archived here. Next up was G4 channel’s “Attack of the Show,” in which I followed a segment about a Japanese talk show hosted by a chimp. My bit is, perhaps, less riveting.
This weekend on NPR (Sunday, I think, on most stations), I’ll have a stint on Bob Garfield’s show, “On the Media.” UPDATE: Here is my appearance, and here is the transcript.
UPDATE 2: I also appeared on BBC Five Live Radio on the same topic. Podcast available here.
Posted at 12:33 pm | Comment | Filed under Media appearances, Politics, Technology, Wired |
Just back from drinking mimosa’s and celebrating the inaugural festivities, I checked in on the new White House Web site. TechPresident reports that the handover happened precisely on time, at 12:01 pm eastern; pretty cool that the Web operation mirrors the transfer of power tradition online. As Obama’s online folks had told me back in December, there’s basically no radical change to the site on day one. No wikis, no social network, and in fact not yet the same participation engines built for Change.gov. The only feedback area I can find is a standard a 500-character contact form. There is, however, a prominently featured blog announcing the new site and reiterating the pledges for transparency and participation. No doubt they’ll be rolling more of that out in the coming weeks. But it’s worth keeping in mind that Obama’s Web operation was estimated to have somewhere between a dozen and 30 people involved in it. David Almacy, who formerly headed up Bush’s online efforts, told me that they managed WhiteHouse.gov with a staff of…six.
Meanwhile, Change.gov is now frozen but still up; it’ll be interesting to see what they do with it, if anything. And if the transition team carried out the promise made on their “Citizen’s Briefing Book” segment, Obama at this very moment has a notebook on his desk revealing the nation’s top priority, according to the online crowd’s wisdom: “ending marijuana prohibition.” Somehow I’m guessing the answer is…no we can’t.
UPDATE: I should have noted that the first blog post on Whitehouse.gov is authored by Macon Phillips, I quoted in the Wired story and who was one of the savviest people I spoke with. It bodes well for the White House Web operation that he stayed on. Several of the biggest names from the campaign’s Web side returned to the private sector.
UPDATE 2: Some blog reaction: PC World notes the changes and the lack of avenues for participation, and points out that the Bush transition team flubbed their own digital transition in 2001. Tim O’Reilly, not surprisingly, trumpets the site as the culmination of a victory for “Web 2.0 principles” — although it’s unclear how those principles are actually reflected in the site. Kottke observes the Obama team’s more parsimonious coding. Valleywag gets all clever with a they-say-they-for-participation-but-look-no-comments-allowed joke. (In other news: Valleywag still exists! Who knew.) And much more.
Posted at 1:03 pm | 2 Comments | Filed under Politics, Technology, Wired |
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.
Posted at 4:30 pm | Comment | Filed under Articles, Politics, Technology, Wired |
Just in time for the inauguration, my latest feature for Wired — on whether and how President Obama will carry out his promises to reboot the federal government — is available online. The glossy version should be out sometime later this week or early next.
I’ll have more to write shortly here about what has happened vis-à-vis Obama’s digital strategies since the piece closed in December. First, however, a note of disclosure. Originally the piece contained a description of my own minimal participation in the campaign, part of a longer section on how Obama utilized tech to win the presidency. Eventually we decided that the role of tech in the campaign had been covered well elsewhere (most expertly by Jose Antonio Vargas at The Washington Post). So we focused the piece more on how Obama might use the same digital techniques to govern. The longer first person bit shrunk to the somewhat cryptic:
Those efforts were combined with massive database-crunching to identify potential voters who could be approached door-to-door by last-minute canvassers, myself included.
Posted at 2:09 pm | Comment | Filed under Disclosures, Politics, Recent stories, Technology, Wired |
