Comments on: Will Obama Empower Government 2.0?

By: Cincinnati Change

Cincinnati Change — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 19:47:54 +0000

Technology is in his transition and will be in his governance.

The members of the 15-person Obama transition board are listed on the Obama website change.gov, and include two other representatives of the technology sector: Julius Genachowski, former InterActiveCorp executive and co-founder of the start-up incubator LaunchBox Digital, and Donald Gips, group vice president of Level 3 Communications.

In addition he named Sonal Shah who will take a leave of absence from Google.org, where she helps to define Google’s global development strategy and promote its philanthropy work, at least till Obama is sworn in on January 20 as the 44th U.S. president. She will help usher in new U.S. government technology leadership and policies, focusing on preparing new U.S. technology policies and helping to ensure a smooth transition to power for Obama.

By: Chris Rasmussen

Chris Rasmussen — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:59:55 +0000

“making Wordpress secure for government”

I work, teach, train, and evangelize Enterprise 2.0 for the US Intelligence Community. Our darling media applications is called “Intellipedia” but we also use Wordpress for blogging on all three networks of classification–Top secret, secret, and sensitive but unclassified.

The secret networks are air-gapped from the public internet, but through a SSL connection you can blog remotely into the unclassified space.

I understand that https and VPNs may be too much for public internet interaction, but I just wanted to let you know that there is some form of “secure” Wordpress out there.

By: Mark Drapeau

Mark Drapeau — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:20:47 +0000

Outstanding article.

By: Jesse

Jesse — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 23:41:24 +0000

Great post, Joe. You provide a great description of carrying over the social media from the Obama campaign into the White House. I shared your analysis on a recent blog post.

Look forward to reading more from you.

By: Label

Label — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:55:30 +0000

This is a global problem with government organisations. If the Obama administration can effect change, the world will be watching and hopefully catching up.

By: Eric Hackathorn

Eric Hackathorn — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:23:11 +0000

Excellent post Joe!
Ironically enough I just had to cancel a virtual world presentation tomorrow for the Department of Commerce due to IT banning technology they do not understand. Surprisingly, it is difficult to explain to management why they need web 2.0 when we are not allowed to even demonstrate it.
Hopefully the new administration will do a better job balancing the needs of security with being able to advantage of cutting edge technology. I sincerely hope government does a better job of interfacing with its constituents before it looses its relevancy.
Eric

By: Jeffrey Levy

Jeffrey Levy — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:38:29 +0000

Hey, Joe. Great summary! I was just thinking it neatly wrapped up the major obstacles and then I realized who the author was. Just goes to show – no one looks at banners.

By: joeflood

joeflood — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:25:11 +0000

Thanks for the comment! I hope you’re right and that things change quickly. The slow pace of change within government I found to be frustrating. I think the Obama people will come in and think all the restrictions in place are really silly.

By: Scott Horvath

Scott Horvath — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:18:53 +0000

I couldn’t agree with you more! The Obama campaign has used social networking tools very well and managed to break many records for fund raising and outreach by politicians. It should be obvious to all the organizations that block social networking tools that there’s a huge benefit to NOT blocking them.

Yes, there will be people that abuse their use. Someone will obviously spend all day playing WordChallenge on Facebook or fighting Zombies and Pirates. But organizations have so many free tools at their disposal to monitor network traffic and the personnel that are accessing those sites. So, when there’s a flag raised or when there’s suspicion that someone is abusing their privelages then they can be dealt with individually. Blocking the entire organization makes no sense.

I agree that as soon as the Obama administration comes into office it’s going to put in it’s people throughout the various Depts and agencies. As soon as they realize they can’t get to basic sites like YouTube, Facebook, Scribd, etc they’re going raise a hailstorm and things will change…and probably very quickly.