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Obama’s new media strategy: communication, transparency and participation

Today, the United States has a new president and according to the first official Whitehouse.gov blog post this administration also has a new media strategy based on:

1. Communication
2. Transparency
3. Participation

This comes as no surprise for those who have followed the Obama campaign with its “appropriate” use of Internet and mobile technologies throughout. The thinking behind each of these efforts has always been “appropriate” (IMHO) and not a hasty combination of buzzword “web 2.0″ and mobile tools but efforts with an objective well suited for the use of that particular tool or technology. It is apparent that serious thought has gone into how best to leverage new tools and technologies, in a similar way to what psychologists, HCI and user-centered design professionals refer to as “affordances“, instead of trying to bring together all the latest trends without consideration of the underlying purpose and overall usefulness to accomplish the task at hand. The Obama “social network” (if you can call it that) for example was used to mobilize both young and old to support local (and distant) campaign and fund raising efforts not to connect people around their interests or create a social platform like Facebook or MySpace. Undoubtedly, mistakes will be made by our new administration in leveraging new tools and technologies in the future but the foundations for the thinking behind this latest announcement is very promising.

But what strikes me about this latest announcement in particular is the promise to highlight participation. According to the post, the President and his administration “will publish all non-emergency legislation” to allow the American people time to review and comment before the President signs anything.

I have signed up for updates (in hopes they don’t become as excessive as they once were during the campaign) and I encourage others to do the same and, more importantly, try to actively engage with what might be the best new media experiment of our time.

For the first time ever I feel a government, the largest and most powerful of its kind no doubt, is innovating faster and more effectively than most modern businesses. Why are companies and other organizations still fearful of this kind of communication, transparency and participation? What do you think?