Obama wants to use the social networking sites to create more citizen participation in government. It might be more difficult than it appears to fulfill that promise. -DB
New York Times
Commentary
June 1, 2009
By Saul Hansell
The Obama presidential campaign made groundbreaking use of social networking sites and other tools to organize its supporters. President Obama has promised to use similar technology to bring citizens into government. As in so many other areas, turning promise to policy may well be more difficult than it sounded on the campaign trail.
That’s the conclusion of Peter Swire, who was a lawyer for the new media team of the Obama transition leading up to Inauguration Day. He had also worked as the top privacy officer for the Clinton administration. He has now returned to his job as a law professor at Ohio State University and as a fellow with the Center for American Progress. He published a paper Monday on the early use of Web 2.0 techniques by the administration. (The paper will be on the Web later in the day here.)
The administration, at least in the early days, has struggled to replicate the responsiveness of the campaign, he argued. The paper cites a survey of new media experts by the National Journal that gave the administration’s Web 2.0 efforts a grade of C+.
Mr. Swire writes that the scope of the problem became clear in the transition, which was much less responsive to comments and questions than the campaign:
The campaign learned how to cope with a motivated group of just over 10 million individuals. After Election Day, the transition and later the administration had to respond to the concerns of over 300 million Americans, as well as interested persons in other countries.
At the same time, pretty much everyone working in a campaign is devoted to communicating in one way or another with prospective voters. The transition site, Change.gov, had only had a few workers. And most government agencies allocate only several workers to public outreach.
Campaigns, moreover, use armies of volunteers to carry their messages. The White House and other government agencies are very reluctant to delegate any authority to others, Mr. Swire wrote.
More important, campaigns trade in aspirational generalities. The government, Mr. Swire writes, defines the framework of rules that affect so many people. Moreover, even vague foreign policy statements are parsed for nuance. The upshot is that many government pronouncements need to be cleared by policy makers, slowing down the process of responding to queries.
The consequences, Mr. Swire writes, in an extreme but not entirely impossible example, could well be dire:
Now suppose a White House blogger — or someone else answering comments on whitehouse.gov — can’t get a hold of the North Korea expert and simply goes with his or her best judgment about what to say. During the campaign, that could backfire if the other candidate gets a good talking point. But in government, the consequences can be much more serious: What if North Korea didn’t like the White House comment and decided to launch a missile attack on a neighboring country?
Mr. Swire lists some ways that the Obama administration has gotten around some of these constraints so far. It has extensively used Web video to communicate. Video has an immediacy, he writes, but it still essentially one-way communication.
A second method is to narrow the questions that officials must respond to by having the public vote on the topics of most interest. This was used in President Obama’s Internet town hall. Similarly Tom Daschle, when he was the nominee to be Health and Human Services secretary, asked for a series of community discussions on health care policy. Each discussion group was to summarize its concerns and send it to the transition team, which promised to review each one. But it didn’t promise to read letters sent after that defined time period.
A final approach Mr. Swire cites is simply to sample comments randomly. President Obama is said to receive a purple folder each night with 10 letters he has received, by mail, fax or e-mail.
I’m not sure that most people who send a letter to the president expect he will read it personally. But I do know that the campaign promise for open and interactive government is a difficult one to keep. And the promises keep coming. Citizens are invited to find and report abuse in the stimulus program using its recovery.gov Web site.
Mr. Swire, by the way, also is releasing two more papers Monday: One is on the legal issues faced by government agencies that want to use social networking tools. The other looks specifically at the challenges for government in using free software and Internet services.
What are some of the other ways the White House can be more responsive to more people?
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