Whitehouse.Gov is Launched – Barack Obama Becomes Our First Internet President
FDR was our radio president, JFK was our TV president and Barack Obama will be our Internet President.
Quietly at noon yesterday, as the world was fixated on the televised inauguration of Barack Obama, some obscure IT managers flipped a switch (metaphorically) and transferred Change.gov to Whitehouse.gov… While the inauguration spectacle was awe inspiring and the speech lived up to its promise, Whitehouse.gov is the herald of bigger changes.
Team Obama has shown a native fluency with the web – high engagement (personal video emails from David Plough), bottom-up organizing (empowering a thousand micro-campaigns to flourish via their social network), great use of data as a competitive advantage (they release voter lists to be called upon, scrubbed and returned to them by their members) and harnessing collective intelligence (during the get out the vote campaign they were feeding real time results of calls back into the system making it smarter with each succeeding call).
Thirteen million citizens joined MyBarackObama.com. They gave money and time. They occasionally rose up in protest of their man’s policies (see FISA). MyBarackObama.com fulfilled the deeper, more democratic promise of social networking; that people can organize around meaningful issues and coordinate action with near-zero barriers to entry. Change.gov was launched immediately upon Obama’s winning the presidency and we saw the same result – massive engagement and some surprises (the biggest topic members want answered is how Obama will deal with the issue of prosecuting torture). And now Change.gov has become Whitehouse.gov.
I applaud this use of technology to engage citizens in better government. I also carry a healthy bit of skepticism (every citizen should). To quote Barack Obama, “Power Does Not Concede” – It did not before the Obama and it will not after the Obama administration comes to power. But the responsibility for how this gets shaped over the coming years is ours. An Internet president presides (if anyone can) over a loose network of citizens capable of mobilizing and flexing their power (money, petitions) in near real-time. But, like any network – the power is with the massive swarm of citizens staying informed and participating in the social technologies that now take democracy from an annual ritual to a daily activity.
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