Feb 1, 2009 0
WhiteHouse.gov : Reinventing Government
Within minutes of Barack Obama taking office, whitehouse.gov was changed. This is not only a departure in the way that the incumbent and the President Elect view and use technology, or the way that the two parties work with technology, it is a fundamental change in the way that government uses technology. Barack Obama’s campaign employed technology like no other presidential candidate before. His use of social media, sms, e-mail, twitter and his website was a savvy deployment designed to communicate with a new generation of voters.
Like most corporations and businesses, Obama has made use of emerging technologies to make his platform clear and his positions clear. Obama is not the first to employee the Internet as a campaign tool. In 2004, both George Bush and John Kerry had aggressive online campaign tools. Howard Dean was a fore-runner of the media-savvy Obama-style campaign, but his nomination was not to be. What makes Obama’s 2008 campaign unique is the well-orchestrated deployment of so many techniques.
The new design is clean and elegant. It makes use of modern web design practices and is accessible for screen readers and mobile devices. Additionally, this site is indexed for search. The previous administration’s site was not set-up for widespread search via “web crawlers”. While not one of these items by itself makes an astounding statement about how the need for technology in government makes a difference, the cumulative effect of the site redesign says a lot about how important web design is how the public approaches your website and identity as an organization. The importance of your most visible, public facade to be welcoming and engagable is crucial—not only from an aesthetic point-of-view, but also from the ability to find the website and the information held within.
The redesign and deployment of whitehouse.gov represents a new outlook on how the whitehouse is communicating with the public. It represents a new, responsive and transparent government. Whether or not this new technological outlook translates to conduct, I am not sure, but it seems to represent a welcome change in approach.
