I know there’s going to be an awful lot of oohing and aahing over the shiny, valuable and ‘actually-getting-it’ online initiatives that everyone’s expecting from the Obama administration (not least from us; after all, it looks like a lot of the sorts of approaches and opportunities we’ve been advocating are going to be realised from probably the most prominent seat of democracy in the world).
But I don’t know what to say about a point raised in this BBC story: that apparently one area where Obama will be surging forward with online innovation in government is (wait for it)… e-mail! E-mail? Has the world’s biggest superpower seriously been run for the last however many years without a ‘get mail’ button?
I’m astonished in so many ways — I can’t conceive of how anyone can work quickly without email; I can’t believe that, just when we thought we were going to see a ‘bleeding-edge’ revolution in online government, it turns out that we’re back to square 1.0 in some regards; and I can’t understand why the Obama spokesperson seems to feel the need to apologise for him having his Blackberry in the Oval office!
Anyone else have any thoughts?
