I read a post in VentureBeat today. It is entitled “Exclusive: Barack Obama to name a Chief Technology Officer.” I know, I know the title is riveting.
OK, back to it. First off, I am not a member of One Million Strong for Barack. Also, I am pretty sure that I am going to keep my political opinions to myself in this polarized age, since my views liberal/conservative/independent don’t offer a whole lot of upside to PlansForUs.

Here is the statement to help set-up the whole discussion:

The CTO’s mandate would be quite different from the Cybersecurity czar appointed under the Bush Administration. Bush’s czar helped defend against cyberattacks. Obama’s CTO, by contrast, would ensure government officials holds open meetings, broadcast live webcasts of those meetings, and use blogging software, wikis and open comments to communicate policies with Americans, according to the plan.

This is just fascinating.

I. OPEN GOVERNMENT

He wants Cabinet officials, government executives and rulemaking agencies to hold meeting that are open to the public and transmitted with a live feed. The CTO’s mandate will be to ensure this happens. Specifically, Obama wants the public to be able to comment on the White House website for five days before legislation is signed.

Look, I don’t know if this going to just be edited crap and it ends up as a PR stunt, but the notion is really fascinating. What happens when you link this data dump with the media amplifiers or data management software, you could have some really interesting stuff come out of this. With filtering technologies, we could all become Tim Russert (for better or for worse) as we search the government data dump for inconsistencies. Even more interesting, how does freeing this information effect accountability and transparency? Is there a historical precedent?
The one policy that is stupid is the Privacy policy, but I guess every candidate has to have a position to save our children from the pandora’s box of content that the Internet has unleashed.

Obama is a pretty interesting dude and his message definitely resonates. Looking forward to the next few months of the campaigns. What are your thoughts?

by Tyler, CEO