The first wiki president? Obama adviser votes 'yea'

WASHINGTON--Even Republicans will probably concede that Barack Obama's campaign made good use of the Internet in the last year. Now an advisor is saying that an Obama administration would do the same, even turning to wikis to discuss topics like privacy.

Reed Hundt, a technology policy adviser for Barack Obama, discusses the candidate's policy positions in Washington on Thursday.

(Credit: Stephanie Condon/CNET News)

Bureaucrats in Washington will have to confront a number of issues in the next few years such as how to regulate private, portable electronic health records, said Reed Hundt, a technology policy adviser for Obama and former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

"That's the kind of thing that shouldn't be decided by one person in the new administration," he said on Thursday. "There's not anything wrong with a collaborative process that could literally include hundreds of thousands of people."

It was supposed to be a debate here between Hundt and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, chief economic policy adviser for John McCain and former director of the Congressional Budget Office. But the McCain guy never showed, giving Hundt--someone who Wired magazine once said had "as much sincerity as a photocopy machine salesman"--plenty of opportunities to jab at his absent opponent.

Universal broadband is important, Hundt said, because it will allow anyone to communicate with lawmakers easily.

"Whether it's with Twitter or text messages, it's the creation of community at very low cost," he said. "The real commitment is to have our entire democracy include everyone and through these tools be able to share information in a rapid way and have ideas shared from below."

While Obama contends he will emphasize technology's role in the economy--by taking steps like appointing a chief technology officer--some of his policies have come under fire as possibly constraining to the technology industry.

While both presidential candidates support increasing the number of H1-B visas available for skilled workers, Obama has only said he will support a temporary increase.

"That doesn't mean we don't want skilled foreign workers coming into the United States, but we want it to be part of an overall (immigration) solution," Hundt said.

The Obama and McCain campaigns also take different positions on Net neutrality.

"John McCain does not believe in prescriptive regulation like 'Net-neutrality,' but rather he believes that an open marketplace with a variety of consumer choices is the best deterrent against unfair practices," the McCain Web site reads.

Some high-profile technologists, including Carnegie Mellon University's David Farber and TCP inventor Bob Kahn, are opposed to preemptive Net neutrality rules as well.

Obama strongly supports the concept of Net neutrality, though Hundt said, "We're not about to nationalize broadband networks."

He said while there should be a regulatory mandate about Net neutrality, it does not necessarily need to come through new legislation. More importantly, he said, the cable industry needs to be able to invest in the next stage of broadband with the prospect for seeing returns on that investment.

"Nobody's actually investing in anything big in America today," Hundt said. "That has to be solved. If you solve that, you'll be building at enough capacity that most of the Net neutrality issues will be easy to solve."

[Solaris_User]

Central planners must use top down, the whole idea of government is top down, they write laws we obey them.

[Mr. Dee]

I think Obama should start a Presidential blog when he becomes President. At least one blog post either from him or his wife everyday on the issues and actually interact with commenters. It would be setting a major precedence.

[richardgoodwin]

Funny I wrote something similar on this topic a few days back. I really hope they follow through and continue using technology for progressive transparency of government:

http://www.richardgoodwin.com/wp/2008/10/16/a-question-and-challenge-from-a-blue-deep-in-a-red-state/

[Vegaman_Dan]

I think the moment a president is elected, then they no longer need to appease the voters and any blog posts will cease as a result.

Face it, once they are elected, politicians really have no use for voters. You only get in their way until they are up for re-election again.

[marvin25]

You should understand that we may need net neutrality where we have major telecoms say that rural America should not get anymore broadband period. Whatever they have is all they should get and the ISP that is putting in broadband in rural America is doing without Government help and also at a faster rate then most companies can put it in. This is thru wireless. The bottom line is saying that rural America has all the broadband they need and will not get any more. Tell me what you think of telecoms saying you shouldn't get any more broadband for reason we are the big boys period.

[SteveW928]

(read dripping with sarcasm) And the coolest thing is.... if you want something changed in the government, all you have to do is text a message to Obama (that's 62262) on your mobile phone, and he will get right on it. You'll get a notification text back when he has completed the task. It's so 'bottom up' that he won't even have to think about it or make any decisions. Truly power to the people!

Time to pull your heads out of the sand and get back to reality people... geez! Obama's message of 'change' is just rhetoric. You're not going to get real change with either the Democrat or Republican party. Both are big government, they simply have different strategies to waste maximum amounts of the money they collect from us.

Blogs, wikis, e-mail, and all sorts of technology don't solve fundamental operating problems in any organization... never have... never will. Technology is simply a tool which can make what ever you ARE doing more efficient (if properly used... if not, then less efficient). If what they ARE doing isn't good, then things will simply go wrong more quickly.

[StareDown]

I am still looking forward to the day when we have wiki _without_ a president.

After all, representative democracy was the best we could come up with-- before we even had electricity. Isn't it about time we look to a more modern form of democracy? Why do we still have to have (usually corrupt) politicians be in charge when we have sophisticated collaboration technologies?

That is the point behind the Metagovernment project:
www.metagovernment.org

[SteveW928]

Re: StareDown

Because we have a constitutional republic, not a true democracy. This is a VERY GOOD THING! If you have a simple 51% democracy, anything can happen if 51% of people decide it's what they want. That might sound good once in a while, but could be really, really bad as well.

We have a constitution by which things must be compared, which overrides the will of the people if the basic provisions of the constitution are violated. This works well in theory unless activist judges implement their will rather than do their job of protecting the constitution (which has been happening more often these days). A good example is Roe v Wade. Rather than considering the human rights of the actual issue, they went through the back-door of privacy. If you want to check my case, fill some other human right you don't dispute into the privacy category and see what you think. Pretty much anything could be legalized under the guise of privacy if the issue is not first directly run through a constitutional check.

[StareDown]

Metagovernment isn't about majority rule or about maintaining a republic. It is a new form of government, one never conceived before we had speed-of-light collaboration technologies.