Tech: Can Obama Keep Americans Plugged-In?

During the 2008 presidential race, one of the oft-cited feathers in the Obama campaign's cap was its Internet arm. From his unexpected win at the Iowa caucuses to his unprecedented field operation, the heart of the new president's machine was MyBarackObama.com. The brainchild of Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, the site allowed Obama supporters to register for information updates, plan events, become part of local groups, sign in at the site's virtual phone bank to make canvassing calls, and create individual fundraising pages. On top of that, his team took full advantage of existing social networking tools: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter. By the time Election Day rolled around, more than a million people had signed up at MyBarackObama.com, and nearly half of the record-breaking contributions to the campaign were donated in discrete amounts of $200 or less.

While Obama may be keeping his BlackBerry, many of the digital tools he once relied on will no longer be at his full disposal. For the president and his White House staffers, there will be no ready, spur of the moment access to Facebook status updates, Twitter posts, YouTube video uploads, or, most importantly, the campaign's 13-million strong e-mail list. The bulk of his campaign machine, along with its list of e-mail addresses, has been turned over to the Democratic National Committee, which does not have the same legal restrictions. But from the moment Obama's transitional site change.gov transformed into the presidential site whitehouse.gov, the chattering classes have been speculating about how the new administration would make use of it in light of the aforementioned restrictions.

To get some insight on whitehouse.gov's potential, I turned to Web veterans Jeff Jarvis (among other things, he's the director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York) and Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of the social news site Reddit. Both were impressed with the Obama team's approach to the Internet and social media, and both expressed some concern that the administration might lose direct access to some of those tools now that Obama is in office. "I think it's a damned shame," says Jarvis. "God save us from lawyers and security people running the world. If we're going to have an open, collaborative government, we need to have access to those tools. Not only should the White House be blogging and Twittering, but so should members of congress. We've got to experiment and learn."

When the Bush administration took office in 2001, there was little question that a site like Whitehouse.gov would be used primarily as a vehicle to promulgate the official line on various issues. Eight years later, that model's clearly insufficient, given a campaign that enabled its supporters to communicate both amongst each other and with the campaign itself. A visit to Whitehouse.gov shows a sterile form under "Contact Us" and a blog with no comments. Given the occasional hair-raising comments that pop up on Obama's YouTube videos, it's understandable that Whitehouse.gov doesn't want to degenerate into a free-for-all. That said, with participatory sites like MyStarbucksIdea and Dell's Ideastorm having figured out how to foster useful dialogues that funnel the most compelling ideas to the top, it's no surprise that Jarvis would like to see something like a Governmentstorm make its way to the White House's site.

But Jarvis, a longtime blogger, quickly makes it clear that he wants the Obama administration to go even further than just a mere conversation enabler. "Government should be an API," he says. The term stands for Application Programming Interface, the hooks that allow programmers to build on top of an existing piece of software or operating system. Jarvis takes Obama's pledge that his administration will be open and transparent and turns it into the idea that "government should be a platform for what we want to do as citizens."

Heady stuff, yes, but it's a sentiment echoed even more concretely by Ohanian. "Lots of data comes out of government; we don't all want to have to slog through it, but computers can," he says. "So if they can make that data available in accessible formats—data that belongs to us as taxpaying citizens—that could be great." He cites "Web 2.0 mashups," like Google Maps with housing values or crime statistics overlaid on them, as an example of the kinds of creative ways that government-assembled data could be reused if provided in XML (extensible markup language) formats, which define the content of a document separately from its formatting precisely so that it can be repurposed in other applications.

And if anyone from the White House is reading this, that means no more PDFs, whose contents aren't easily searched or extracted for further use. Says Ohanian: "PDFs are the bane of my existence—they aren't much more of a favor than having a printed document."

It's clear from my conversation with Jarvis and Ohanian that what may have been buzzwords and slogans in openness and transparency have the capacity to become much more should the Obama administration truly take them to heart. Jarvis, whose book "What Would Google Do?" just landed in stores, points to the search giant's "Don't be evil" mantra as a lodestar for the Obama team. "The founders of Google said that the motto 'Don't be evil' allows any employee to question the company's behavior," he says. "If transparency is the default position, it becomes the 'Don't be evil' that lets government employees and citizens ask, 'Is this transparent?'"

As for Ohanian, what he hopes to see after a four- or eight-year Obama presidency is for Whitehouse.gov to become a useful tool. "I've never had a reason to go to Whitehouse.gov before. So if it becomes a usable tool for citizens, that will be an accomplishment, because it means that the tech has been put to good use." That's a lot to place on a single URL. Let's hope that Obama & Co. are up to the task.