Introduction and Overview

Abstract

On July 8, 2013, President Barack Obama entered the White House State Dining Room to address a packed chamber of reporters and dignitaries and lay out his new management agenda. He spoke forcefully on behalf of his vision: harnessing communication technology, so effectively deployed in his campaign, for empowering citizen participation in government. His remarks compactly frame the theme of this book. He declaimed:

Back in 2007, when I was first running for this office, I had the opportunity to visit Google headquarters in Mountain View, in Silicon Valley, to discuss ways we could use technology to allow more citizens to participate in their democracy, and bring a government built largely in the 20th century into the 21st century.

After all, we had already set out to build a new type of campaign—one that used technology to bring people together, and then trusted them with that technology to organize on their own. And the idea was simple: instead of bringing more people to the campaign, we wanted to bring the campaign to more people, and let them determine its course and its nature. If you wanted to make phone calls or knock on doors, you didn’t have to come into a field office first, you could just get the information you needed right on your phone and go out there and do it. If you wanted to get your friends involved, then we had the tools to help you connect.

And I very much felt that some of the things that we were doing to help us get elected could also be used once we were elected….Now, once we got to Washington, instead of an operation humming with the latest technology, I had to fight really hard just to keep my BlackBerry.¹