Obama goes for Google government

Davey Winder
Tuesday, 02 December 2008 02:07

IT Policy - Government Tech Policy

Barack Obama promised change during the US Presidential election race, now he is delivering it by adopting a Creative Commons license and introducing online public discussion forums as a first step towards a Google-enabled government.

The way that government usually works, at least as far as the US goes, is that the White House welcomes public feedback every four years through the Presidential election system. Obama seems keen to change all that, keen to listen to public debate even before he takes over.

Thanks to the introduction of a discussion forum at the official transition Change.gov website, Obama is signalling that things will be very different this time around. That his will, indeed, be a Web 2.0 government.

The President-elect has already introduced an official blog, video addresses via YouTube and a veritable geek test for likely government candidates.

Obama is fighting to keep hold of his BlackBerry and during the elections he advertised in-game on the Xbox 360 and organised via a custom iPhone application.

Now the 44th President of the US is shaking things up at the Change.gov website as he starts the very real process of introducing a Google-enable government when he takes office at the end of January.

Shaking things up by moving to a Creative Commons license from the previous rather strict copyright notice that was found on the site. Not just any Creative Commons license either, but the most liberal of them all, the Attribution 3 Unported license.

If you need any more proof of the geek credential of Obama, he is currently advertising for someone to become the first Chief Technology Officer for the USA in order to lead the roll out of IT initiatives for the country.

A position that, at one time, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was in the frame for. Now that truly would have been a Google-enabled government!

But what do we mean by that turn of phrase? Well it would appear that the change Obama wants, at least in this regard, is for a real transparency of government held data and a real opportunity for that data to be shared openly.

Above all else, if Obama can make government more participatory then that is change everyone can be proud of.