Obama has made a lot of promises about using technology and the web to make government more transparent. Today, the founder of PoliticsTV.com put forward a number of ways the President-Elect can make good on those promises right away, using a tool as simple as web video. Here’s his shorthand list:
(1) WhiteHouse.gov/TV; (2) Weekly Obama Webcast; (3) GovTube; (4) Video Content on Non-Governmental sites; (5) in every executive branch agency, create New Media, Transparency, and Technology offices; (6) have cabinet members/agency heads give monthly Webcasts; (7) Webcast the Inauguration; (8) make the State of the Union an interactive, multimedia event; (9) make the President’s annual budget a digital, multimedia document; (10) enact all of this and more first by executive order, then through legislation, so future Administrations can’t just hard reboot your digital legacy.
You can read about each of these ideas in detail over at the Huffington Post. Among relatively pedestrian (but useful!) ideas like streaming White House press conferences online and hosting executive department webcasts, there are some innovative ones, like turning the federal budget into a “multimedia, dynamic document with web apps, widgets, and appendices applying Quicken-style functionalities, dynamic charts, etc.” Definitely worth checking out.
