Spaghetti Testing | Peter Smith

Gotta admit that I have not paid close enough attention to Obama’s campaign 2.0 and its transition to Obama dot prez. Here’s an interesting point of view on what the implications for government really are. From an article in today’s citizen:

“His campaign was the first to truly see the potential of new media,” said [Jamie] McKown [brief bio here], “and it is now the model for everyone else. They understand the unique nature of the technology. They understand that whenever you have a new technology, the key is to figure out what it allows you to do that you’ve never been able to do before.”

Now they occupy the White House, adds Mr. McKown, the Obama camp is sitting on a gold mine gathered during the election campaign that gives it unprecedented potential to influence public policy.

“We focus on obvious things like Twitter, Facebook, texting and the rest,” he said. “but the real revolution is how easy it is to store and analyze information with database software. They know people’s concerns and interests and so they know who to contact for support when they want to pass a piece of legislation.”

Data mining will allow the Obama White House to create special interest clusters of supporters they can communicate with through Twitter and Facebook or basic texting.

“They will be able to ask people to lobby their representatives in Congress,” he said. “The message will be, ‘Obama needs you on this issue, tell your congressman to support him.’ “

Thinking: there’s huge implications for trust and privacy concerns. Will people’s concerns over privacy and how their data is used trump their desire to interact with govt using these channels? In the Obama example, it appears that folks are not so concerned (yet). But the amount of goodwill his campaign has generated online is very unusual.

Turning to the GoC’s fledgling attempts at using social media and social software, your typical govt program does not have this kind of goodwill built up. We gotta make sure we have our ducks in order, because the more we move into the 2.0 space, the more the questions will start to come.