President-elect Obama's 2008 presidential campaign team fused grassroots organization and Internet technologies to bootstrap its candidate to victory on the theme of "change," but if Obama follows through with some of the technology-related ideas he floated on the trail, that promised change will require a sea change in the way the federal government operates.
During a 2007 interview at Google, Obama told YouTube's News and Politics Editor Steve Grove that his team was trying to "model transparency." As the candidate explained, just as people can watch the campaign through disparate technologies, "we want them to be able to watch what I'm doing while I'm in the White House."
Emerging technologies that have made the Web an interactive, data-rich environment, combined with the deployment of these technologies within the federal government, could make Obama's proposal a reality soon: Most crucially, they could put the federal government's day-to-day operations under closer public scrutiny and analysis.
The most prominent indication of Obama's ambition to deliver on his promise is his proposal to appoint the first-ever appointment of a chief technology officer. The position "would add visibility and political vision and heft to a fresh approach to making government more transparent, more interactive, and more collaborative," says Micah Sifry, TechPresident's co-founder and editor-in-chief. "The role of CTO ideally is somebody in the White House who has the ear of the president and is making sure that ... the president directly ... is evangelizing for these changes," he said. "It's bigger than just the implementation level."
The idea sounds like something straight out of Silicon Valley, where the title "chief evangelizing officer" at tech firms is not unheard of. Sifry, who issued a manifesto and petition in 2006 calling for "America's First Tech President" along with his TechPresident Co-Founder Andrew Rasiej, says the position could be analogous to the president's science adviser position. Whoever it will be, the person will need power to prod the federal bureaucracy. In addition, the relationship between the nation's first CTO and the current position that Karen Evans holds at OMB as its administrator of e-government and information technology will need to be defined. The reason is that the CTO, in order to deliver on Obama's campaign promise to bring more transparency to the federal government, will have to convince department heads to dedicate enough resources to overhaul the way they generate information.
For example, instead of static Web pages and disparate formats, such as PDF files and other kinds of database-generated files that each department comes up with when presenting public information, each department may have to start standardizing the formats of their streams of information so that those seeking access will find it more useable and ready to analyze.
One example of this idea already underway is at the SEC, which has required since Jan. 1 that all public corporations and mutual funds file their financial reports in a specific Web format known as eXtensible Business Reporting Language. The idea is that the information would become more accessible on the Web, and to the public at large. The information would be available in a format that Web applications and spiders could more easily interpret than a simple text of PDF file. As a result, it would become more accessible to the public in a more timely fashion -- rather than being buried and obscured in a database.
David Stephenson, a consultant who advises governments on information technology issues, believes that open source projects may also play a bigger role under Obama's administration. He notes that the intelligence community is already using collaborative software known as "wikis" to share information internally. Taking a page from Wikipedia, the project is called "Intellipedia." Stephenson said he would call it "a change to open-source thinking within organizations." The advantage is that the more open approach to sharing information fosters a robust brainstorming environment where different perspectives might spark new approaches to knotty problems.
Stephenson has already worked with Vivek Kundra, Washington D.C.'s CTO, to implement some of these ideas. (There is widespread speculation that Kundra, a member of Obama's transition team, is in the running for the CTO position.) In his upcoming book "Democratizing Data," Stephenson notes that the idea of making information about the city government's operations easily accessible via these formatted data streams was crucial to trying to restore residents' trust in the city's government. Kundra's system has already established a protocol for thinking through what gets published. During the process of building the public data feeds, a team of staff creates a memo to sort out what data can be made public, and what the legal implications of the publication of the information are.
Obama has already signaled how he intends to use the code and culture of the Web and social media tools to open up the relatively closed culture of Washington. He makes news on Saturdays during his YouTube addresses, which unlike traditional White House radio addresses can be widely re-distributed visually across the Web on blogs and web sites by copying and pasting the video's code. In addition, the transition team has conducted two rounds of online question-and-answer sessions in which thousands of people submitted and voted on which questions should take priority with the transition team.
"President Clinton was the first Web President, [George W.] Bush was the first digital president, and President [elect] Obama will be the first social media president," says David Almacy, a vice president at Waggener Edstrom who worked as Bush's White House Internet director until May 2007.
The use of these kinds of tools, which fall under the broad category of "social media," were only recently seen as tools of political innovation. By extension, they would become routine in the process of governing. Indeed, during the same 2007 Google interview, Obama noted: "If we can apply technology to some of the biggest issues we face, [such as ] health care, energy, or education, then we can leap over some of the problems that have been plaguing us for a very, very long time. And one of the things that I've seen is that technology gets pushed aside as something separate, when in fact, it's really an opportunity to make progress that we haven't seen in a long time."
Want to stay ahead of the curve? Sign up for National Journal’s AM & PM Must Reads. News and analysis to ensure you don’t miss a thing.
Join the Discussion