Well, that didn’t take long. President-Elect Barack Obama got a jump-start on fulfilling the promises made during his campaign — specifically, to employ technologies, including blogs, wikis and social networking tools, to modernize public communication and information-sharing to improve government decision-making with yesterday’s launch of Change.gov. The Web site is designed to keep users informed and engaged through “the Presidential Transition Project” and beyond.
The Obama Campaign’s adept use social media likely contributed to his success in this week’s election. But I know many of us in the social media world were wondering, would he continue to walk the talk after all the votes were counted? And, moreover, what exactly would he do?
One can hope that Change.gov is a preview to the type of transparency and speed-to-action the Obama-Biden Administration will provide the American public. It currently offers the Administration’s agenda items, encourages users to “share your vision for what America can be,” allows users to apply for jobs with the Obama Administration and offers information on the President and Vice-President-Elect, the Transition and the Administration.
Change.gov is still pretty bare-bones: many areas of the site contain spartan content, or are completely empty (such as the Newsroom). And as of now, it is not the most social of Web sites: blog comments are disabled, and while users are encouraged to share their stories and ideas, they can’t yet see what others have shared. But speculation seems to be that this will change in the future. For example, web strategy blogger Jeremiah Owyang surmises that user submitted comments ideas may eventually be managed by a Digg-like feature. Mashable’s Adam Ostrow predicts the site will utilize social media to encourage public service. Whatever the case, Obama didn’t miss a day of contact with his loyal social media following, which is a promising indicator of things to come.
Change.gov states the promise that “just as this historic campaign was, from the beginning, about you — the transition process will offer you opportunities to participate in redefining our government.” I, for one, feel optimistic.