Hey, I think Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej do a really big job at TechPresident.com pushing ahead the cause of networked grassroots democracy.
Here in Politico they push ahead regarding what an Obama Chief Technology Officer should be about, with a little extra detail:
For a long time, we've been saying that America's politicians couldn't tell the difference between a server and a waiter. Now, it looks like President-elect Barack Obama not only knows the difference, but he also understands how to harness the power of the former to improve the life of the latter.It's not just that Obama wants to keep using his BlackBerry and reportedly will be the first president to have a laptop on his desk in the Oval Office. He also sees that we as a society stand to benefit from everyone being connected to high-speed Internet in all aspects of our daily lives, and is planning to include significant spending on technological infrastructure upgrades as part of his economic recovery program.
1. Internet evangelist: The CTO should first and foremost be an evangelist for the Internet as a public good.
2. Economic development and savings: The CTO should be tasked along with the Council of Economic Advisers to conduct a study of all the benefits of achieving universal, high-speed wireless access to the Internet, including economic and energy efficiencies, environmental benefits, and improvements in transportation, health care and safety.
3. Citizen.gov: The CTO should be tasked with developing a government-wide online platform -- call it Citizen.gov if you like -- for civic engagement that connects Americans to each other to identify and solve problems. Citizen.gov would foster connections between all the public advocates, volunteers, community organizers and activated citizens who want to get to work rebuilding America.
4. Transparency: The CTO should help ensure that the Obama administration is the most open, honest and accountable in history by overseeing the creation of a government data commons that pulls together lobbying reports, ethics records, campaign finance filings, regulatory interventions, earmarks, contracts, grants, subsidies -- all the ways that outside actors attempt to influence government.
5. Connected democracy: The CTO should be tasked with encouraging all government agencies, as well as the legislative branch, to make maximum use of new communications technologies to make the processes of government more accessible and participatory.
6. Technology quotient and review: The CTO should develop a process by which all government agencies are working to reboot themselves in light of newly available technological capacities.