You will likely be familiar with e-Obama. That’s the cute-if-awkward (lacks alliteration and sibilance) handle sometimes used to describe the tech-savvy new president of the United (kind of) States. Barrack Obama’s victories in last year’s Democratic primary and in the presidential election campaign that followed were widely considered a tech triumph, in that they relied on all manner of social media tools and techniques.

And Obama has in fact been true to that school, launching a serious (and busy) public policy wiki, adding a Chief Technology Officer to the mix at the top, ensuring (against vociferous objection) that he himself keeps plugged into cyberspace via Blackberry, and generally turning the Oval Office into a kind of cybersuite.

It’s all been great for the evangels of e-government everywhere, whether considered as service delivery or as the more exotic digital democracy. There’s many a slip, though, and one of them could materialize next month – specifically around May 21. That’s the deadline for a promised directive outlining just what agencies will do to make government more transparent, participatory and collaborative. As proposals go, it’s what you could call breathtaking in its audacity.

Obama’s assignment to his technology types was one of the first to materialize the day after his Jan. 20 inauguration and could well have been overlooked in the crush of copy. It’s on the record though, clearly enough to give government watchdogs one more thing to watch for. You could watch too.

 

 

Tags: Barrack Obama, Blackberry, Chief Technology Officer, e-Government, social media tools, Wiki