Change.gov is coming — and has Obama picked his CTO?

November 5, 2008 | Eric Eldon

President-elect Barack Obama has long said he wants to create the position of chief technology officer in his cabinet, a person who will make government more accessible to citizens. The first step in that plan, reportedly coming later today, is the launch of a web site about the new administration’s transition into the White House. Not yet live, it’s called Change.gov.

Meanwhile, the Obama has named Julius Genachowski — a former executive at Internet company IAC executive and former Federal Communications Commission counsel — as part of his transition team. Could Genachowski, a long-time friend and adviser of Obama’s, be the new CTO? Someone else from the tech industry is also on the team: Sonal Shah of Google.org.

Genachowski is certainly a front-runner for some sort of tech-related job in the administration. There have been various reports that he’s in the running for FCC chairmanship. Yet he also chaired the group that came up with the CTO plan, and the rest of Obama’s tech policies.

Last fall, Obama’s campaign told VentureBeat some more details about what the CTO position entails:

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 hold 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.

Specifically — and this will be very interesting if it actually happens — Obama wants the public to be able to comment on the White House website for five days before he signs legislation. (I wonder if the Obama campaign will use Facebook Connect so you can leave comments on pending legislation and let your Facebook friends see them? After all, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes helped lead Obama’s web campaign.)

Genachowski is a managing director at Rock Creek Ventures, a special adviser at General Atlantic, a board member of The Motley Fool, Website Pros, Beliefnet, and Marc Ecko Enterprises, and is part of the founding group that launched New Resource Bank — according to startup incubator LaunchBox Digital, which he also helped found.

Indeed, the electoral importance of interactive online tools that helped people learn about the government was obvious yesterday. Twitter trumpeted its election-day traffic gains, as have social networks like MySpace and Facebook.

From a Facebook company post:

  • More than 5.4 million of you shared that you voted with your friends on Facebook
  • More than 15 million of you of voting age in the U.S. logged into Facebook on Election day
  • More than 1.5 million of you mentioned Obama, McCain, Palin, Biden or Election on your Facebook wall
  • More than 2.4 million of you joined the Facebook Election Day event to spread the word and encourage your friends and loved ones to vote
  • More than 1.7 million of you donated your status and joined the election rally through the Causes application
  • You gave over 2 million Election-related gifts

From MySpace:

  • MySpace had 300 million more page views on election night then last Tuesday and over 2 million visits to our MySpace election coverage that was hosted on www.myspace.com/decision08
  • Obama is the first president on MySpace
  • Over 300,000 new voters registered via MySpace
  • Almost 850,000 friends just on the national Obama MySpace page
  • Obama also has almost 60 other official profiles (1 for each state and numerous for each constituency)
  • He participated in our MySpace/MTV Presidential Dialogue in Iowa in Oct. 2007 and his polling numbers went up soon after in Iowa (a critical state in the primary selection period)

[Genachowski photo via LaunchBox.]

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He writes and edits stories about lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a now-failed startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers.

  • I'm really happy to see that moves are already being made to work towards this openness -- I'm very interested to see what will be done to leverage and involve the 1.5m barackobama.com users and the 3m donors.
  • Charbax
    Although the number of registered users of http://barackobama.com is impressive, their multi-user blogging portal at http://my.barackobama.com is cool. I wonder how many of those hundreds of thousands of blog posts that were actually read or how much those user-generated blog posts actually mattered.

    Putting some wiki, chat or user-generated blogging type blog comments on http://change.gov I think may be more of a gimmick then really useful and powerful.

    I think they need to create an online congress where every citizen is a representative, can vote on all ideas, can suggest ideas, can amend ideas, express themselves in meaningful ways. Then all this needs to be done using clever algorithms to promote the good ideas automatically using clever new wisdom of the crowds algorithms. On the Internet, one vote shouldn't count as one vote, votes should count proportionally with the influence and activity each verified user has on the rest of the community. This way, an algorithm can automatically filter out the experts and the representatives.
  • Interesting point about fine-tuning an automated way to pick out qualified people. That'd certainly be representative technocracy in action -- not a pure democracy.

    Can you shoot me an email? eric (at) venturebeat (dot) com
  • I disagree.

    Maybe you see what's happenning at popular crowd-sourced websites such as digg.com, with sensationalist stories; but downplaying a member's vote is not the way to go. People will feel alienated and won't participate.

    What I've done (on http://techentreprise.com for instance) is a mix between crowd-source algorith + authorative editorial team. that is a core team which sets the original vision, but still accepts feedback and issues coming from all members.
  • I'll venture to guess that the selection of Genachowski is more likely to help vet / scout out a potential national CTO... but you never know. looking forward to the launch of change.gov - to bad the site was announced before it was ready.
  • Could be. I was certainly guessing. It's just that Genachowski has executive experience -- and he's been in charge of tech policy for Obama up to this point, including the idea of having a CTO! Remember what happened when Dick Cheney was in charge of finding a vice president for Bush ;)
  • Hi,

    Exactly.

    I wish more Americans were aware of how things happened after Tony Blair won his election in May 1997 -It's like seeing a train heading for a crash, but not being able to do anything!

    The same type of promises and hopes of the people were piggy-backed, though hope always reigns supreme, and Obama has a sense of history and responsibility.

    What might be more worrying for some in the Tech community would be how fair and objective Obama insists on being when it comes to which companies his working with, how many of those friends and advisors former companies will be getting an advantage, let alone anything.
    With so many insiders....... did anyone invest in Haliburton in 2000?


    Yours kindly,

    Shakir Razak
  • Luc CAPO-CHICHI
    Obama, you're now a president of USA and president of the world. You have a big and hevy work during four years. First you must deal amercan's problems such us economic, politic, social and accept somme good proposition. A good diplomacy is the best politic you must take with your partenors in Europe, Asia, Africa ,south America and Oriental continent. The Peace in this world will be your way during your four years. You can tall for the leadears in Africa to change their old and power politic wich is wait for Europe, America or Chine helping, tall them to work their self like you, like BARACK OBAMA to develop their country. It 's very ashame to see african leaders in this situation. I'm african. God blest you and give you a long life OBAMA!
    Luc CAPO-CHICHI
  • Lisa_P
    Obama wants to know all about you if you plan to work in his Cabinet or staff. Makes sense, doesn’t it? If a person is going to hold a high-responsibility position in America’s federal government, it is in the best interests of the nation and its people that the employee meets the qualifications and not be a security risk. However, it seems to me that there are limits to what is reasonable. With as much information as Obama asks for in his seven-page, 63-question application, you’d think the administration would have enough to perform credit repair for everyone who applies. CNN leaked a copy of the questionnaire, which requires applicants not only to talk in detail about nearly everything they’ve done over the past 10 years or more, but also to do the same for their spouse. Here are a few of my favorite questions. I hope applicants do indeed get free credit repair as part of the deal… (1) Writings: Please list and, if readily available, provide a copy of each book, article, column or publication (including but not limited to any posts or comments on blogs or other Web sites) you have authored, individually or with others. Please list all aliases or “handles” you have used to communicate over the Internet. (2) Electronic communications: If you have ever sent an electronic communication, including but not limited to an E-mail, text message or instant message, that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe. (3) Please provide the URL address of any Web sites that feature you in either a personal or professional capacity (e.g., Facebook, MySpace, etc.) This only scratches the surface of how deep the application goes. If you’re going to serve under the “change” president and you don’t have all your ducks in a row, you’ll have to change that right away! Click to read more on Credit Repair.