Wiring Obama

Wired has an absolutely fantastic story on President Obama's challenges in making the White House a Web 2.0 insitution. It's great for two reasons. First, because it addresses the divide between the campaign and the governing process, and how the Obama team needs different things from its supporters moving from the former to the latter, and how supporters want different things from Obama during the campaign and then now that his presidency has become. But second, the authors actually went and talked to the General Services Administration and lay out in clear, reasonable language, the legal barriers to doing some of what Obama wants to do. I know we here recognize the challenges to making government more Web 2.0 oriented, but as I've written here before, I don't think folks who aren't in government understand those roadblocks particularly well. So to have a piece that melds the philosophical and the legal challenges to provide a clear portrait of what's going on with Obama's web efforts is really valuable. You should go read it. But if you're not, here are some key takeaways from the article(A Note: readers here sometimes seem to assume that things in indented blocks of text are things I've written. They're not. They are always quotations from the piece to which I'm referring):

1) Using Web 2.0 technologies doesn't actually mean you're more connected:

It wasn't long, however, before savvy observers noted what was missing from this and other Obama videos: the chance for ordinary citizens to talk back. The campaign initially disabled the comment function on YouTube and prevented response videos from appearing alongside. A YouTube video without comments, some pundits groused, is more like a monologue than a chat, fireside or not. "I don't see how one-way messages provide any more transparency for the work of the White House or government than the current old-style radio addresses," blogged Ellen Miller, director of the Sunlight Foundation, a government-transparency watchdog group. "Is Obama ready," challenged TechCrunch, "to be a two-way president?"

2) Even if you're getting more responses, the content of those responses won't necessarily be meaningful:

Building that intimacy from the Oval Office will be a delicate and complex task, and just letting "AcidTrout" respond to a YouTube address with "Who's the black guy?!?" isn't going to do it. "One of the things that gives me ulcers is that there are a lot of high expectations," says an Obama aide. "But we're going to have to change how government thinks about the Internet before we can do the things we want to do."

3) Even if feedback is meaningful, it doesn't mean it's actionable:

with everything he's done so far, Obama has been acknowledging feedback but not necessarily heeding it. And that's what we can expect from Obama's plan to post all pending nonemergency legislation online and allow the public to comment for five days before he acts on it. By mid-December, technology advisers were still struggling to determine the best way to implement the idea. The bigger question is, what will it accomplish? Even the system's own architects concede that it's unlikely that online comments and voting will sway the decision to sign or veto.