Archive: Category: TechPresident

For a federal agency that has struggled for years to modernize its computer systems, this is pretty impressive, and just a tad worrisome: Sometime yesterday afternoon, a woman named Liz Thompson posted this tweet: "Roh-oh, looking at an email in my spam folder from Federal Bureau of Investigations saying, "Message from FBI." Dare I delete?" Not longer after, @FBIPressOffice replied, "@thisfullhouse Yes, you dare.. and report it to our internet crime complaint center: » link to ic3.gov." Thompson seemed a bit surprised by the interaction, tweeting "They ARE watching," and then, in reply to two friends, "I know, kinda scary ...

Jeff Jarvis is now up, keynoting at the Government Web Managers Conference. As with prior posts, my notes that follow are semi-verbatim but not be taken as exact quotations, though when I put something in quotes, it's a good rendition of what someone said. My comments and observations are in [brackets]. Sheila Campbell introduces Jeff by telling the audience that he got to DC in part by Twittering his need for a ride from Baltimore, after his Amtrak train from NYC was delayed by a flood in that city. The audience cheers. Here's Jeff's rap: You are the best hope we have for transparent government. You are the link. You feel your shoulders just got heavier? Well, I'm here to offer some...

Sheila Campbell and Rachel Flagg kick off the second plenary session of the Government Web Managers Conference, noting that this the seventh annual web managers conference. (In 2001, it was just 12 people sitting around a conference room, Sheila notes.) They also note that these sessions are open to the media, but the breakouts will be off the record. Up next are Katie Stanton, director of citizen participation for the White House, and Bev Godwin, director, online resources & interagency development, White House. Their topic is citizen participation and engagement, and we expect to hear about new initiatives to engage the public online, and what people can do at their agency to build greater participation with target audiences. Again, here...

Here are my semi-verbatim but not perfectly precise notes from this morning's speakers at GovWebCon. Random comments and observations from me in [brackets]. Martha Dorris, Acting Associate Administrator of the Office of Citizen Services and Communications, GSA, opens the morning: "You are the front lines and directly impact the lives of the American people. This is a great time to be a public servant." The question now, is where do we go from here? She cites Obama's Day One memo on openness and transparency...

I'm attending the Government Web Managers Conference in Washington, DC, today and tomorrow, and I'll be posting periodic updates as the event unfolds. Some 400 web managers from the federal, state and local level are here, a sold-out crowd in fact. Last year, my colleague Andrew Rasiej spoke at the conference and reported being struck by how many attendees viewed Barack Obama as the presidential candidate most likely to open up government use of the web. It's still a bit early, obviously, in the Obama administration, to make full judgments about whether that expectation is being fulfilled, but over the next two days I hope to be able to report on some of the most interesting developments. This morning's keynote...

Jeremy Bird, the deputy director of Organizing for America, was back in South Carolina for the Democratic party state convention. In this video, shot by a local activist, he talks about the intensive community organizing model that was "in many ways started here in South Carolina" during the campaign, and promises that OFA is going to staff up across the state and cover "every county, every precinct, every block, every neighborhood." That's an audacious goal, reflective more of the Obama campaign at its height than anything the Democratic party has had in the state (or in just about any state) in the past. I'm gathering notes on OFA's continuing development, hopefully for a longer piece (if time ever permits me to...

First Maureen Dowd writes a (justly parodied) silly diss of Twitter, and now Matt Bai, who covers politics for the Times Sunday Magazine, offers his own misreading of Twitter's importance for politics. Like many inside the Beltway, Bai focuses on the handful of DC insiders who have begun using Twitter to share details of their day--some inane, some intimate and some genuinely illuminating. But to him, this is most like former Senator Bob Graham's obsessive compulsive diary-keeping: "just plain weird." He adds, "it just may be the worst thing to happen to politics and its attending media since a couple of geniuses at CNN dreamed up “Crossfire” back in the 1980s." I guess some of the smart kids in the mainstream...

Looks like instead of mocking Nancy Scola, we owe her kudos for predicting all the way back in November that Obama's pick for the nation's first Chief Technology Officer would be "someone out of the small but vibrant government CTO world, like Virginia's able Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra." Well, Nancy gets the cake, as word has leaked that indeed Chopra is stepping into the post. Here's what President Obama says about the decision in his Saturday radio address: Aneesh Chopra, who is currently the Secretary of Technology for Governor Kaine of Virginia, has agreed to serve as America’s Chief Technology Officer. In this role, Aneesh will promote technological innovation to help achieve our most urgent priorities – from creating...

Organizing for America has begun hiring some state-level staff and is quietly beginning a series of "listening tours" aimed at engaging local volunteers, discussing the group's national program, and drafting state organizing plans. As some of the online invitations going out say, "The purpose of this tour is to reconnect, reengage, and reenergize volunteers to continue the mobilization of change started with President Obama’s campaign. We want to solicit feedback and comments from volunteers on the ground for moving OFA - [state] forward from both a statewide and local perspective. These events are a crucial part for laying the ground work needed to recreate a strong volunteer network designed to support President Obama and his broad agenda of change." Events have...

Sunday night, March 29, Carl Elkin posted a humorous take-off on the Passover Seder story (aka the "Haggadah"), imagining it as a series of wall postings on Facebook. Within a day his Facebook Haggadah was all over the web. It looks like David Bernstein at the Volokh Conspiracy was the first major blogger to post about it, Monday at about 5pm, and AllFacebook's Nick O'Neill tweeted about it two hours later. Soon it was being retweeted all over Twitter, and for good reason. If you're Jewish or you've ever been to a seder, Elkin's retelling of the story is hilarious. It's also deeply in tune with a longstanding Jewish tradition of modifying and updating the Haggadah to grapple with modern...