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In the early days of the Obama Administration a mini-revolution was seemingly underway. The old school way of operating was on the way out. The monolithic, slow acting – or more accurately, reacting – bureaucracy was being replaced by an agile, transparent, collaborative and streamlined government.
This change was to be largely driven by Vivek Kundra, whom the President had named the first ever Federal CIO and Aneesh Chopra, the nation’s first CTO. These two seemed confident that Web 2.0 tools and solutions ranging from social networking, cloud computing, virtualization, blogging and the like could collectively transform Washington and at the same time bring the benefits of second generation Web technology to Americans.
Much of the Federal government as well as the military seemed readily to get with the program. Members of Congress began tweeting one another as well as their constituents. The US Army and DOD allowed and even encouraged their people to use FaceBook and Twitter. Rob Carey, CIO of the Navy Department, issued a memo that endorsed the use of Web 2.0 tools.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center developed a homegrown social-networking application that provides all NASA employees with the type of features found in Facebook. Called Spacebook it was announced by Linda Cureton, Goddard’s chief information officer on her blog.
Officials at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) use Twitter to announce funding notices and news. The General Services Administration (GSA) has negotiated terms of service agreements with Web 2.0 providers including MySpace and Blist, allowing federal agencies to use the services. Meanwhile, Vivek Kundra wants to set up a virtual storefront where agencies can quickly purchase cloud-computing services. And Obama has managed to take a major step toward achieving transparency by establishing Data.gov and Recovery.gov Web sites and the Open Government Initiative, Federal Computer Week noted recently.
Collectively, these measures are impressive, especially given the short time the President has held office. Of late, however, there have been indications of late that Obama’s ambitious Web 2.0 initiative has stalled or is slowing down. Only a few days ago we learned that for security reasons DOD is considering banning Twitter, Facebook and other social-networking sites.
More disturbing to me, the Administration has yet to fill a key position on its technology team, that of cyber coordinator. The cyber coordinator was supposed to ensure that everyone from the NSA to Home Security played nice, shared data and worked more or less of the same page when it came to securing the nation’s digital infrastructure. Supposedly whoever held this post would work out of the White House and have the full backing of the President. Yet it currently remains unfilled and only yesterday, Melissa Hathaway, the Obama administration’s acting senior director for cyberspace and one of the leading candidates for the position, tendered her resignation.
What does this mean? It’s far too early to tell. It could just be a bump on the old information highway, or perhaps the Administration has too many balls in the air at present.
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