Obama 19 articles

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

Draft Whitepaper on Obama and Transparency

last updated over 3 years ago, 2 Comments

This is an early version of a whitepaper I am working on about the Obama administration's open government initiatives. I realise that we are all waiting with bated breadth for the transparency directive that is due in the next couple of weeks, but I would be interested in feedback on the paper in the meantime. I do think this year Nobel Peace Prize winner :-) has done a good job in moving the debate forward in this area, but I think there is still plenty to think about and a lot more that nee...

posted in Obama Transparency draftwhitepaper nobel

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

Power to the Many

last updated over 3 years ago, 0 Comments

Interesting video from Beth Noveck, now in the Obama Administration.

posted in Transparency e-Democracy Obama

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

Engineering a Better Town Hall

last updated over 4 years ago, 0 Comments

The Berkman Centre's Gene Koo had some great reflections on Obama's Open for Questions in a recent blog which I reproduce below. Its great watching the new US administration try things since even when they don't work perfectly they certain push forward the debate. I reckon all these ideas have moved forward faster in the last three months than in the preceding three years! Engineering a better virtual town hall Gene Koo | March 27, 2009  President Obama and his new media team are r...

posted in Obama citizen empowerment

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

Ask the President - Raising or Lowering the Debate?

last updated over 4 years ago, 2 Comments

Thanks to Norm, I came across the new Ask the President site that Community Counts are hosting and a range of media organisations including the Nation and the Washington Times are supporting. The idea is to bring a new voice to traditional Presidential news conferences by allowing citizens questions pulled from the net and voted on by citizens. Its a great site and very easy to get involved since you can vote without logging in. Obviously that means that non-US citizens like me can vote (and ...

posted in Obama US Transparency Media askthepresident

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

Who should run the U.S.?

last updated over 4 years ago, 4 Comments

Here's another interesting one from the techno-democrats - I don't mean President Obama's team but rather those who like the idea of marrying technology and direct democracy. This time it is in the US and it looks like a good platform - http://whitehouse2.org/ I still think, however, that it is going in the wrong direction - the point is to transform our democracy, not to pretend it does not already exist! In my view the value of this kind of thing is that it increases pressure on g...

posted in US Obama Collaboration Consultation

Headshot_medium njacknis

President Obama's New Virtual Community Created to Shape his Open Government Directive

last updated over 4 years ago, 0 Comments

The Obama administration is starting to implement the idea of using collaborative tools internally as part of their management approach.  (I have been discussing with the Federal website folks various ways to expand this approach.)   Norm ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On February 16th, a new government-wide community - the Open and Innovative Government Community - was created on the MAX Federal Community system to capture ...

posted in Obama Transparency

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

U.S. follows UK lead on transparency!

last updated over 4 years ago, 0 Comments

Ok. I am deliberately being a bit provocative, but its great to see a couple of US organisations creating a site called http://www.showusthedata.org/ where US citizens (and probably anybody) can suggest US federal data sets that should be publically available and people can vote on which ones they think would be most helpfully make public. So its a bit like showusabetterway but with a direct focus on data sets rather than interesting uses of data sets plus use of direct voting to highlight th...

posted in Obama Transparency US UK

Copy_of_diogo_vasconcelos_by_jo_o_oliveira_silva004_medium Diogo Vasconcelos

Online tracking of the stimulus plan: an excellent example

last updated about 1 year ago, 0 Comments

    President Obama has announced plans to launch Recovery.gov, a website dedicated to keeping track of all the money the government spends in the stimulus. This is a excellent example of open government: a willingness to share, be accountable and (hopefully) get feed back.  Recovery strategies are too serious to fail - otherwise we will be paying the social and economic costs for many years to come. It's our right, as citizens, to be aware of the content and ...

posted in Obama Transparency

Headshot_medium njacknis

Organizing for America

last updated over 4 years ago, 0 Comments

This is one way that President Obama intends to continue to use the Internet as a political tool.   From: David Plouffe, BarackObama.com <info@barackobama.com>Date: Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 12:45 PMSubject: Organizing for America Friend --When Barack Obama was declared our 44th President, you didn't just revel in that victory -- you started asking what's next for this movement.How is this unprecedented group of volunteers, grassroots leaders, and dedicated supporters g...

posted in Obama

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

Obama: Memo on Transparency

last updated over 4 years ago, 1 Comment

Following his fantastic inaugural speech yesterday, the new US President got off to a great start on the issue of transparency with a memo to heads of all executive departments and agencies underlining his commitment to unprecedented openess in government. Way to go, Mr President! No doubt he read the whitepaper on Government 2.0 we shared on this site before Christmas :)-

posted in Obama Transparency

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

Mass Citizen Input

last updated over 4 years ago, 5 Comments

Now Obama is President the Change.gov site is now longer active and vistors are encouraged instead to go to the official whitehouse site. However, it is still (at the moment I write this) possible to look at the interesting experiment on mass citizen input which was the citizen briefing book. This enabled citizens to input ideas and comment on and vote up or down the suggestions of others. The most popular suggestions make interesting reading: 92970 points for ending marijuana prohibition 7...

posted in Obama US Consultation

Copy_of_diogo_vasconcelos_by_jo_o_oliveira_silva004_medium Diogo Vasconcelos

Obama should embrace social media to create a more effective and transparent government

last updated over 3 years ago, 0 Comments

Yesterday, the Federal Web Managers Council  (FWMC) of US Government published a report on "Social Media and the Federal Government: Perceived and Real Barriers and Potential Solutions." (PDF) . The paper adresses the perceived and real barriers to using social media and recommend potential solutions. Cultural issues, lack of a strategy for using these new tools, employee access to online tool, advertising, procurement, privacy, acess for people with disabilit...

posted in Obama social media

Headshot_medium njacknis

Your Seat At The Table

last updated over 4 years ago, 0 Comments

The latest from the Obama Transition team's efforts at transparency -- a list of the groups visiting them, what is being proposed and a chance to comment. http://change.gov/open_government/yourseatatthetable "The Obama-Biden Transition Team will be hearing from many groups over the next several weeks. On this page, you can track these meetings, view documents provided to the Transition, and leave comments for the team."

posted in Obama Transparency

Martin_medium msweeks

Obama is coming...but are we ready?

last updated about 1 year ago, 0 Comments

I was struck by this piece about the looming collision of the Obama world of connected campaigning and the often rather less connected government machinery he will be inheriting... "President-elect Barack Obama has offered up a compelling vision for how he’d like information technology to transform government. Citizens would be able to view agency policy and regulatory meetings via Webcast. They could chime in with their concerns about a pending bill awaiting his signature. They could...

posted in US Obama

Martin_medium msweeks

The Obama Stats

last updated over 4 years ago, 0 Comments

Many will be familiar with these Obama campaign stats, but they are astonishing not only for what they reflect on but for what they promise... 3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. Obama's e-mail list contains upwards of 13 million addresses. In total, more than 1 billion e-mails landed in inboxes....To put this in perspective, John Kerry's '04 ca...

posted in Obama US

Martin_medium msweeks

All together now?

last updated over 4 years ago, 1 Comment

A great article in The Weekend Australian reflects on the true potential of the Obama virtual campaign and its implications for the rebuilding of a public realm.  http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24635990-5010800,00.html Here's the potential.., Taken together, these are developments unprecedented in the course of Western democracy. Never before has a technology proved itself capable of replacing the town halls and city squares that, since the early democratic experim...

posted in Government 2.0 Obama

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

e-Democracy - Alive and Kicking!

last updated over 4 years ago, 0 Comments

Today I participated in e-Democracy 08, the annual e-democracy event in London. There was an interesting opening presentation by My Society’s Tom Steinberg who assessed progress over the last 12 months. Not surprisingly, his initial focus was the recent US elections and to my outsider’s eyes I thought his analysis got it just right. He highlighted President-elect Obama’s success in securing mass participation, but noted that much of his online campaign was about usin...

posted in e-Democracy MySociety Obama US

Headshot_medium njacknis

Interview with Marshall Ganz, Designer of Obama's Organization

last updated about 1 year ago, 2 Comments

The link and summary below is an interview with Marshall Ganz of Harvard's Kennedy School, who helped build the organization for Obama's election campaign.  In a few minutes, it is one of the best presentations of what really happened organizationally. I found it interesting in the way he discusses themes we have emphasized and in the intention to take this approach inside the government of the new Obama administration.    In my own presentations to public leaders,  I ...

posted in Obama

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

High Hopes for Obama

last updated over 4 years ago, 0 Comments

The victory of Barack Obama certainly seems to have raised lots of hopes for more transparent, citizen-led government. Here is an interesting site that is trying to get a crowd-moderated issues to the president-elect. I think it is very interesting, but I wonder whether it isn't too open - it lets people raise anything they want and that is just too miscellaneous for me to get my mind round!

posted in Obama