Organizing for America | Cairns Blog on Obama: Freedom to Tinker Covers Obama Tech Plan

Freedom to Tinker Covers Obama Tech Plan

By Beth from San Francisco, CA - Dec 31st, 2007 at 4:47 pm EST

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Tags: Bloggers, E-democracy, tech policy, technology

Princeton Computer Science Professor, Ed Felten, Director of Princeton's Center for InfoTech Policy and renowned blogger on Internet freedoms has an extended posting and commentary (http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1241) on "Obama's Digital Policy." The blog states: "A quick glance at the sites of other candidates suggests that Obama is an outlier -- none of the other major players has gone into anywhere near the level of detail that he has in their official campaign output."

"My favorite part of the document, by far, is the section on government transparency."

"...The web is enabling amazing new levels, and even new kinds, of sunlight to accompany the exercise of public power. If you haven't experienced MAPlight, which pairs campaign contribution data with legislators' votes, then you should spend the next five minutes watching this video. Josh Tauberer, who launched Govtrack.us, has pointed out that one major impediment to making these tools even better is the reluctance of government bodies to adopt convenient formats for the data they publish. A plain text page (typical fare on existing government sites like THOMAS) meets the letter of the law, but an open format with rich metadata would see the same information put to more and better use.

Obama's stated position is to make data available "online in universally accessible formats," a clear nod in this direction. He also calls for live video feeds of government proceedings. One more radical proposal, camoflaged among these others, is

… a pilot programs to open up government decision-making and involve the public in the work of agencies, not simply by soliciting opinions, but by tapping into the vast and distributed expertise of the American citizenry to help government make more informed decisions.

I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds exciting. If I wanted to start using wikis to make serious public policy decisions -- and needed to make the idea sound simple and easy -- that's roughly how I might put it."

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