WhiteHouse.gov makeover
January 20th 2009 is a historical day, it’s the inauguration of President Barack Obama. People showed up in record numbers and had to be turned away, people watched the coverage through whatever media was available to them. There is a lot of excitement at a global level.
True to his word his team have worked non stop since the election to transition his new media strategy and develop it into that of a New Media President.
Barack Obama.com is still alive and has regular updates. It’s unclear as to the future of that site. Post election there was Change.gov that gave regular updates on the road to the White House. He did promise to open the government up and engage the citizens which has resulted in the WhiteHouse.gov having a makeover and this is very exciting.
The White House Blog will serve as one of the communications vehicles so to speak. Macon Phillips is the Director of New Media for the White House. The Blog post Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov outlines the future of this site. It reminds people to keep tabs via the RSS feed and sign up for email updates.
They promise transparency by publication of proclamations and executive orders made public via this site.
In keeping with his promise to take the opinion of the people into the decision making process all non-emergency legislation will be available on the website for five days. This will give everyone enough time to send in their opinions before the President signs off on them. In the past people have been very disgruntled with politicians in general partly due to their furstration over the lack of their input into the decision making process. In other words open sourced democracy.
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Wired Magazine recently had a good article about the degree of difficulty bringing the promised level of digital communication and transparency to all areas of government. URL – http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/magazine/17-02/ff_obama
The quote from the article which drove the point home for me was this, “For starters, the federal government operates more than 24,000 separate sites, many of them years out of date. “Nobody stepped back and asked strategically, how do we do this?” Godwin says. “Whenever there is a new initiative or program, they put up a new Web site.” And the first thing they usually do on that site, she says, is post a bandwidth-hogging picture of the bureaucrat in charge.”