It’s 2009: Welcome to the Wiki White House
January 9, 2009 
4 Comments
Craigslist Meets the West Wing
The New Americas Foundation sponsored a groundbreaking, live streaming webcast today on the potential uses of Internet-based social media tools and technologies in the incoming administration, in the executive branch, as well as by other U.S. federal government agencies.
What are the opportunities for transparency and accountability? The risks? Who benefits, and how?
From the NAF website:
Technology evangelists believe that Barack Obama has the potential to fundamentally alter communication between the presidency and the people. Wikis in the White House? Online public comments on legislation? A real-time two-way conversation between citizens and their elected officials?
For better or worse, however, nothing is as easy as it might seem. Federal regulations, First Amendment issues, and just plain common sense are going to slow — and potentially stagnate — technological innovation in Washington.
The New America Foundation and Wired Magazine will host a discussion of what can, should, and must change when the Obama administration takes the reins.
The event was co-sponsored by New America Foundation, Wired Magazine, and Google. View the archived video below:
Featured Speakers:
Craig Newmark
Founder, Craigslist
Ellen Miller
Executive Director, Sunlight Foundation
Sascha Meinrath
Research Director, Wireless Future Program, New America Foundation
Mindy Finn
Director of E-Strategy, Mitt Romney for President
Moderator
Nicholas Thompson
Fellow, New America Foundation; Senior Editor, Wired Magazine
About Mike Russell
Why change “communication between the presidency and the people?” Why not put the people in charge? After all, isn’t the president just a sort of democratic king?
With Web 2.0 technologies, the idea of a king or a president should go obsolete rather quickly.
It seems the Metagovernment is working to make this happen in the near future:
http://www.metagovernment.org/
Alex, thanks for the link.
Have you seen http://mysociety.org? Fascinating, groundbreaking “Government 2.0″ (there’s that term again) project in the UK.
It seems to be going around.
Metagovernment lists that plus projects in nine other nations:
http://www.metagovernment.org/wiki/Related_projects
Yes, there’s no doubt that the open source phenomenon, in various manifestations, is profoundly changing how governments worldwide conduct their day-to-day business. Everything from public diplomacy to intelligence collection and analysis are finding it increasingly necessary to play by a whole new set of rules.
Personally, I’m not persuaded that it’s necessarily “sweeping” through them as far as their own internal use goes, given the considerable institutional and cultural roadblocks these organizations typically face, but there’s no doubt that external, public expectations of transparency and responsiveness enabled by social media technologies are here to stay.
If you’re not already familiar with the Washington-based Apps for Democracy initiaive, I encourage you to check out some of the brilliantly innovative projects there based on mashups and interactive visualizations of open-source data provided by the DC municipal government. Amazing (and useful) stuff.