Archive for 'barackobama'
Obama's openness directive
The Obama administration's long-awaited Open Government Directive was published on Tuesday - curiously, in PDF, TXT, DOC and Slideshare, but not HTML? - and seems to have received a warm welcome across the Atlantic. What's quite interesting is its very prescriptive approach. Within a specified number of days, specifically 45, they must have identified and [...] read on »
@downingst hits 100k Twitter fans
Entirely predictably, the Downing Street Twitter channel broke new ground at some time on Friday night, registering its 100,000th follower. To put this extraordinary growth in some perspective: one month ago, they had just 12,000. And just one week ago, they had 50,000. In relative terms, for now at least, they're now comfortably settled into [...] read on »
No10 leaps into Twitter's top 100
One of the biggest successes in e-government this past year, and arguably one of the most surprising, is Downing Street's use of Twitter. And thanks to a remarkable couple of weeks, the Prime Minister's Office now finds itself in the Top 100 of the most followed Twitter accounts worldwide, as ranked (fairly reliably) by Twitterholic.com. [...] read on »
The Obama memoranda
It's well worth reading the two memoranda issued by President Obama yesterday, on - ironically, given yesterday's events - FOI and transparency. There's nothing about them on the White House website (???), so I'm grateful to this Washington Post blog. On Freedom of Information: In our democracy, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which encourages [...] read on »
Technology, Innovation and Government Reform
In case you miss it in all the festivities... here's a video posted by the incoming Obama administration on the change.gov site, introducing us to the Technology, Innovation and Government Reform (aka 'Tigger') team. Some of the names might be familiar: Vivek Kundra, for example, is the guy who swapped Microsoft Office for Google Docs [...] read on »
Lammy's lessons from Obama
Labour MP David Lammy's speech to the Fabian Society on Monday wasn't the first to say 'we need to learn lessons from the Obama campaign', and it won't be the last. But it's a well-constructued speech, and well worth a read. He notes the eventual success of two 'outsider' candidates, prepared to take risks - [...] read on »
Meet the mainstream
Just to draw your attention to the latest website traffic numbers published by Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale. Now I've no desire to stir up previous arguments about statistical validity, certainly not here. But I do note Guido 's observation that his blog is now more popular than ITN, and Iain Dale attracts more traffic [...] read on »
Twitter etiquette for corporates
It's been amazing to watch news of Downing Street's new Twitter account spreading round the planet. Reaction on blogs and Twitter itself has been a combination of 'awesome!', 'boring!' and 'validates Twitter as a proper comms channel'. But it poses an interesting question. Should a corporate channel like /downingstreet be following other people, or is [...] read on »
'Gov 2.0' in US presidential campaigning
I'm grateful to Jeff Jarvis for a detailed post on 'government 2.0' (although it isn't a term he used, nor should he have). He points to two recent proposals from the Democrat candidates for the US presidency. I hadn't heard Hillary Clinton's suggestion, back in January, that government should actually be required to blog: I [...] read on »