I’ve been buried with a big project for a few weeks but now that it’s been delivered — yeah! — I wanted to post a few blasts of presidential transition new media news that have been piling up in my bookmarks folder:
Peter Orzag, tapped by President-elect Obama to head up the Office of Management and Budget, (OMB) did a final goodbye post at his former blog at the Congressional Budget Office, saying of his blogging experience:
“This blog has also been a special treat: it has provided another way of discussing CBO’s work and some of my own views about the policy world.”
OMB doesn’t list any blogs on its site but given the Obama administration’s emphasis on Web 2.0 technologies, it wouldn’t surprise me to see one developed to add another line of communication to the public.
In other transition news, HuffingtonPost reports that Barack Obama will publicize the names and agenda items of the groups that are meeting with its transition team on a new Change.gov site page called: Your Seat at the Table. On this page, online visitors can track meetings, view documents provided to the Transition, and leave comments for the transition team. John Podesta, Obama-Biden Transition Project Co-chair ,described the move in a staff memo: ” Every day, we meet with organizations who present ideas for the Transition and the Administration, both orally and in writing. We want to ensure that we give the American people a ’seat at the table’ and that we receive the benefit of their feedback.”
It will be interesting to see if the Obama team will offer any additional online engagement in the form of updates and comments on what they’re hearing in the public feedback. It’s one thing to solicit discussion of new ideas as they did previously on the issue of health care, but for this new site initiative, will they really talk the engagement talk beyond posting a “Comments for this discussion have closed” message?
