presidential

President-elect Barack Obama's transition team has licensed the site Change.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, giving visitors more freedom to use content from the site.

Change.gov was previously was copyrighted under an "All Rights Reserved" notice.

Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig, who noted the change on his blog Monday, called the move "consistent with (Obama's) values of any 'open government' and with his strong leadership on 'free debates.'"

The license under which the site is copyrighted allows visitors to copy, distribute, display, and perform material from the site, as … Read more

President-elect Barack Obama's choice of James Jones as national security adviser brings a retired Marine general who advocates a comprehensive overhaul to U.S. energy policy in the name of national defense.

Jones was announced on Monday as part of the Obama administration's national security team. He has been president and CEO of the Institute for 21st Century Energy, an affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The group last month published a detailed set of recommendations on energy policy, written as a memorandum to Obama. (Click here for PDF.)

In the transition paper, Jones says "… Read more

President-elect Barack Obama on Wednesday announced the formation of an Economic Recovery Advisory Board, naming an economist with expertise in Internet policy as the board's staff director and chief economist.

The newly established economic advisory board will be expected to regularly brief Obama, Vice President-elect Joe Biden, and their economic team with independent, nonpartisan information and analysis that will help the administration formulate a plan for economic recovery. Obama named former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker as the board's chairman and Austan Goolsbee as staff director and chief economist of the board.

Goolsbee is an economics professor at … Read more

A new feature called "Join the Discussion" was added Tuesday to President-elect Barack Obama's transition Web site, Change.gov, making the site more interactive for visitors.

The new page allows people to post to comments on a specific topic deemed a top priority by Obama. The page's first discussion focuses on health care and features a video from health care transition team members Dr. Dora Hughes and Lauren Aronson. As of Wednesday morning, more than 1,100 comments had been posted.

"A critical part of our health reform efforts is making sure every American voice … Read more

The transition team for President-elect Barack Obama on Wednesday announced which advisers will lead the team's efforts to develop technology policy for the Obama administration.

The three team leaders of the technology, innovation, and government reform policy working group are Julius Genachowski and Blair Levin, two former Federal Communications Commission staff members, and Sonal Shah, the head of Google.org.

The purpose of the policy working group is to "develop the priority policy proposals and plans from the Obama campaign for action during the Obama-Biden administration," according to the transition team. Obama has promised to put more … Read more

WASHINGTON--Government leaders need to do more than provide bailout money for America's flailing economy, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said Monday. They need to use the bailout programs as an opportunity to invest in infrastructure and look for more innovative solutions to persistent problems.

Addressing a large audience of academics, government workers, and others in Washington on Monday in his role as chairman of the board of the New America Foundation, Schmidt laid out the myriad ways in which the government could open the doors for innovation … Read more

President-elect Barack Obama's transition team on Friday announced who will lead the transition project's review of the Federal Communications Commission, the office of the United States Trade Representative, and a number of other agencies, departments, and executive offices.

The new team members will review the agencies and offices to aid the new administration in its planning decisions. Obama's transition group first announced the formation of the teams on Wednesday.

Susan Crawford, a communications law and Internet law professor at the University of Michigan, is a leader of the FCC review team. Crawford was until recently on the … Read more

If you want a job in an Obama administration, be prepared to disclose every blog post or comment you've ever written.

A nine-page questionnaire requires applicants to list--and if possible, provide copies of--all "posts or comments on blogs or other Web sites" they have ever made. Also required are "aliases" or nicknames used on those sites.

Translated into English, this means that President-elect Obama wants to know far more about you than his predecessors did. That requirement would force applicants to disclose information about Facebook and MySpace pages, profiles posted on dating Web sites, and … Read more

For the first time ever, the president's weekly address to the nation will be delivered via video as well as radio.

President-elect Barack Obama, the Washington Post reported, will begin by taping this week's Democratic address at his transition office in Chicago on Friday, and the video will be posted on Saturday to Obama's transition site, Change.gov, via YouTube. Other members of the Obama administration will post online videos as well.

On Thursday evening, Obama's transition team co-chair Valerie Jarrett posted a YouTube video, shown below, to the site explaining the lobbying restrictions for Obama'… Read more