How To Build a Web 2.0 Government?

UltraAyla writes "With the announcement that President-Elect Obama will record his weekly address as a YouTube video to be posted at Change.gov, questions arise as to how an Internet-fueled candidacy based in part on a platform of government openness can begin to use technology to make government transparent. Aside from popular Slashdot policies, such as Net Neutrality, how do you think government (either in the United States or elsewhere) can best utilize technology to engage the public and make government more transparent and accessible?" Reader Rick Zeman points out a related New York Times story about how Obama will have to give up some of his communications gadgets because of the Presidential Records Act. Despite that, he apparently hopes to be the first US president to have a laptop on his desk in the Oval Office.

Comments

Re:Executive Privilege

[Rick Zeman]

I'm frankly surprised that that is the case and I wonder if it isn't the law per se as much as a somewhat hidebound cya interpretation of the law.

Obviously, we can't have the president using some goofy webmail account loaded with cross site vulnerabilities and hosted god-knows-where, nor can we have him using the RNC mailserver, beyond the reach of document retention laws*cough*. That said, though, email security and retention are not exactly rocket surgery. Strong crypto is a consumer level technology at this point, and virtually every corporation of any size already has experience with massive email retention. If anything, it is easier to build a retention system for electronic documents than it is to build one for paper documents in equivalent volume.

You're missing the point--it's not that they can'tbuild a retention system, it's that they don't want one. They don't want every word or thought (or lobbyist/Abramoff buying them off) captured for posterity.

Plus, the NSA would probably shit a brick if the Pres had a Blackberry since every BES packet flows through a foreign country.

Re:a request

[Bob The Cowboy]

change.gov seemed 48 hours after Obama was elected to have (under the title agenda) a detailed policy list. This however disappeared quite quickly

It wasn't removed, just re-arranged. In fact it's still under "Agenda", the fifth tab in from the right and under the "Change.gov" logo at the top. From there you can click on any particular policy you want to know about.

Or just go to: http://www.change.gov/agenda/

Another site however seems to have all his policy details but is by a group called Obama for America, who are they, please post if you have any detail.

This was his campaign website during the elections. Pretty sure a lot of the policy stuff is the same, here.

HTH,
Bill