The Office of the President Elect put a novel twist on the 75 year old tradition by posting the addresses on video sharing sites, including YouTube, AOL, Yahoo, MSN. In five short weeks, these weekly addresses have become popularly known as Obama’s YouTube Addresses. 

Viewership varies widely week-to-week but the numbers are not trivial:

• November 15, 2008 — First weekly address — 993,086 views
• November 22, 2008 — Second weekly address — 525,420 views
• November 29, 2008 — Third weekly address — 231,842 views
• December 6, 2008 — Fourth weekly address — 454,600 views
• December 13, 2008 — Fifth weekly address — 135,783 views

     (Numbers were current as of December 16, 2008)

In a country of some 300 million people, the video addresses are well short of a mass medium.  The theme of most of the media coverage was that it was a harbinger that the new president would govern the way he campaigned … all Web 2.0′ish and sticky.

The sticking point for blogger Chris Soghoin was two-fold:

(a) Video Hosting is a “no host give away”: the transition team had a mountain of cash ($12 million) but was getting a free ride from YouTube’s parent and the company’s watermark in the corner of the videos has underdetermined commercial value to Google;
(b) Embedded Videos may violate privacy rules for federal websites: According to Soghoin, just by visiting the Office of the President Elect’s change.gov site, “visitors will be transmitting cookies to Google’s servers.”

Sohoin’s solution is captured in the post’s headline — “Obama should ditch YouTube,” presumably in favor of government-owned servers, here-to-for overlooked video sharing start-ups such as Veoh, Vuze, Revver, Blip.tv and his personal favorite, BitTorrent.

The no cost dimension of this video sharing deal reminds us again that public procurement rules are either silent on or, at least, unhelpful on the issue of governments buying things that are free.  While an occasional annoyance in the past, the procurement problem around free will not serve us well as government confronts business models that  would have been unimaginable at the beginning of the average contract administrator’s career.

The privacy implications here are not trivial but there are ongoing conversations between Google and public agencies as more and more governments establish YouTube channels to aggregate and host their videos.  Both sides in the dialogue have an interest in positioning YouTube as more than a novelty or plaything, but a platform for doing important things.

Clearly, YouTube and most of the rest of Web 2.0 environment remains wide open for experimentation, pilots and even some production-level work, even with a couple of caution flags fluttering in the distance.

For its part, the federal government has been in negotiations with YouTube for eleven months to get special terms for federal agency use of the service because, as one federal director of web communications noted, “The standard terms contain several points that federal agencies cannot agree to….”

Even as governments, acting together or alone, work toward creating a private label video sharing environment that meets policy requirements, there should be some consideration to the one thing that they cannot re-create: the audience.  YouTube aggregates eyeballs.  People who like videos go there, and to AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Veoh, Vuze, Revver, Blip.tv and BitTorrent.  The great lesson is to go where the eyeballs are, engage people in a community of their choosing, and avoid a false start in a field of dreams of government’s making. 

The organization announced today that Utah CIO Stephen Fletcher will replace Robinson as NASCIO’s Vice-President, and Michigan CIO Ken Theis will fill the resulting director vacancy on its executive committee.

The group’s midyear conference is scheduled for late April in Baltimore, Maryland.

Dating back to the 1920s, roads, bridges, dams and schools have been the pillars of infrastructure or public works projects.  Now, with an estimated $600-750 billion in new or refocused stimulas funding at stake, the working definition of public works is broadening to include things about which we care. 

Notice the use of technology-inclusive language in describing the Obama plan for a massive investment in national infrastructure, which the new president would try to pass immediately once in office:

• Improve the energy efficiency of government buildings;
• Rewire schools “to help our children compete in a 21st-century economy”;
• Expand broadband capacity to all US communities, saying it “unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption”; and,
• Instituting electronic medical records and reducing the cost of health care delivery by millions of dollars through advanced technologies, because “That won’t just save jobs, it will save lives.”

Obama also noted that the governors with whom he met last week had a long list of infrastructure projects that were “shovel ready,” that is, ready to go and able to get people back to work quickly.
 
Noting again that the US is “the country that invented the Internet,” the incoming administration seems intent on paying for some overdue routine maintenance.  Yes, digital technologies will compete with roads and bridges for whatever pot of federal stimulus funding finally becomes available but at least they are in the mix.

Robinson was named to head DIS by Governor Chris Gregoire on February 16, 2005.  As DIS director, Robinson was the de facto state CIO and had just become the vice president of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO).  He was slated to become NASCIO president in 2010.

The announcement comes less than a month after Gregoire’s re-election.  Since then, the returning administration confronted estimates that the state deficit has ballooned to as much as $6 Billion, prompting the governor to warn about what to expect in the budget she plans to release this month, “I will come up with something that will look truly ugly, truly ugly.”

The sharp decline in state fortunes came as DIS was working to revamp its proposal to build a new state data center, estimates for which had spiked $110 Million from $260 Million
to $370 Million earlier this year thanks to rising construction costs and the unforeseen need to mitigate the effects of increased traffic
on the neighborhood.  The revised, smaller package came with an estimated cost of $262 million.  When contacted for comment on the data center’s status, DIS Communications Director Joanne Todd wrote that, as of November 21, “The project is still under consideration by [the governor's budget writers at] OFM.”

Earlier this fall, the state pushed a long-troubled offender management system at the Department of Corrections over the finish line.  The turnaround began three years ago after the state changed vendors and, at the insistence of the governor, made the DIS director responsible for its success.

Robinson began his career in Washington State government with committee staff positions in the House of Representatives and then the Senate, followed by an administrative role at the state Parks and Recreation Commission and a long tenure at the Office of Financial Management (OFM).

As has become traditional each December on this page, with a wink and a nod to Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University, here are the five things we’ll remember about 2008 five years from now.

1.    Getting over IT’s love affair with the general fund.
General
fund budgets are easily oversubscribed in times such as these by just
the big three categories of state government functions – educate,
medicate, incarcerate.  Studies updated this year indicate that only 28
states rely on the general fund as a dominant source for funding state
IT programs.  What were once characterized as “alternative” funding
schemes have grown up largely under the radar are now essential to the
new public sector IT funding mix.

2.    Making green the new green.
While
data is not the plural of anecdote, dispatches from the field indicate
that the confluence of sustainability sensibilities, energy savings and
telework is netting real results.  Witness energy savings of 32% or an
estimated $12 million in Virginia by refreshing 60,000 PCs with
EnergyStar-rated machines.  Or projected savings of $1 million a year
in Washington state through installing energy management software on
its existing PC fleet.  Or a double digit spike in server utilization
through virtualization in New York.  Consider too that Utah has adopted
a four-day work week for public employees that saves trips and saves
money while maintaining service delivery thanks to a robust and proven
suite of e-government self service offerings.

3.    Putting the public back into public records.
As noted this time last year, disgraced former congressman Mark Foley
should have provided a sufficient object lesson that e-mail and instant
messages are public – read: disclosable – records.  Former Detroit
mayor Kwame Kilpatrick learned the lesson
this year when 14,000 text messages made a liar of him on the stand. 
Resignation, criminal charges and conviction followed.  As one legal observer succinctly put it, ‘Send Now’ May Go Public Later.”

4.    Getting us out of the way.
Human
latency is the cold, clinical, science fiction-sounding term that
engineers use to describe what is wrong with most business processes -
the delays we cause through our apparent inattentiveness.  Increasingly
sophisticated machine-to-machine web services make human intervention
unnecessary, and the presence feature in unified communications
promises to track us down when we’re needed – on the device of our
choice, of course.

5.    Confronting the point where mobility and utility computing meet.
Speaking
of devices, mobility means that smart phones are more than cameras,
e-mail clients and music players.  They are computers that work really
well in uncontrolled environments.  Mobility has its own top level
domain (.mobi) and is going mission critical with mobile ERP
applications in the labs and soon on the streets.  Imagine the
possibilities.

On the threshold of a new year, there is at least
the prospect that a viable and sustainable future is literally in the
hands of the people government serves and figuratively in the cloud. 
Surely we can do something with that.

The move comes as MINI has just begun electric car trials in New York, New Jersey and California and two years before Chevy is slated to roll out the Volt, the plug-in hybrid on which GM appears to betting the company.

The executives of GM and the other Detroit-based auto makers are due back in Washington, DC on Tuesday for a second shot at extracting at least $25 billion in bridge loans from Congress by presenting more detailed plans for how they will use the money.  It seems that, in the “other Washington,” other public officials are presuming on the what those plans contain.

“Our Politicians Fiddle as Innocents Die,” blared the Times of India newspaper on Sunday as the political recriminations began in the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai. The headline coincided with the resignation of India’s highest-ranking internal security official, who said he was taking “moral” responsibility for the tragedy.

While the country’s black-cat commandos have been largely commended for their work in the street-to-street (and sometimes room-to-room) combat with the assailants, the Indian intelligence, counter terrorism and surveillance services faced almost immediate criticism for allowing the attacks to happen in the first place.  There are even reports that the government had advance warning.

All of this sounds eerily reminiscent.  The early reporting from India suggests that national governments have not learned the lessons from the failures of earlier targets of terrorism.

It is worth saying out loud that the strengths and weaknesses of the evolving media landscape were also on full public view during this latest tragedy, marking an evolution that can be traced back to natural disasters (hurricanes on the gulf coast of this country or the Asian tsnami) if not before.

Consider stories that were published and posted while Mumbai was still under siege. NPR introduced its listeners to Sreenath Sreenivasan, a journalist who also serves as dean of student affairs at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.  Within in an hour of learning of the Mumbai attacks, Sreenivasan “was hosting a Web radio call-in show with other Indian journalists relaying what they knew.”  It was the meeting of old and media, with the conventions of journalism tempering the noise that inevitably follows shocking developments.

Elsewhere, a Reuters dispatch reported, “Bloggers across Mumbai fed live updates … [on the] …attacks in the heart of India’s financial
capital, highlighting the social media’s new expanding role in news
coverage.”  It pointed to photos of the attacks on Flikr, frequent updates of an entry on Wikipedia, a steady stream of updates and comments on twitter and myriad bloggers doing what they could to help.  Clearly, these Web 2.0 technologies are as effective as anything we have seen in terms of immediacy — a particularly powerful attribute when they are in the hands of those on the ground with unique, authoratative information.  

But, and there is are two big buts here: (a) precious few bloggers and even microbloggers are that close and that relevant, prefering instead the comfort of home half way around the world (present company included); and, (b) something disturbing happened to embedded links as they aged.  Dina Mehta blogged furiously from Mumbai during the siege, originally describing herself as “upset and angry and bereft.”  But by Sunday night, visitors to her blog learned that she had grown weary of a secondary problem — inappropriate and even abusive speech. 

In a helpful clarification (including a corrected URL for her post) to the original version of this post, Mehta wrote me: 

I have only been deleting some comments for this reason as stated in my
blogpost:
“I’m getting a huge load of comments around the politics of religion,
of division and hate at my last few posts on the Mumbai terror attacks.
While religion and politics may have a lot to do with the state of our
world today, my blog’s not the forum to air or feed these divisions. I
almost feel it’s a violation of my own person.
So I am deleting them. Sorry. All other comments and conversations are
welcome, as always!
The #Mumbai Twitter feed is now flooded with them too. I’m stopping
watching it. I’m certainly not playing.
For all those who feel they have lots to say – I’d recommend they do
something more constructive. Start by reading Ingrid Srinath’s post
titled This is not India’s 9/11 … and
Priyanka Joshi’s comments there.”

[See comments for full text.]

Another blogger, Gaurav Mishra responded to Mehta’s decision by setting out a multipoint plan for confronting extremest commentary.  Citizen journalism has no conventions to guide it, and those that comment are prepared to say almost anything under the veil of anonymity.

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[As if to remind us of those things at which Web 2.0 is particularly good, Mishra provides links to events or movements spontaneously conceived on or through the Web to benefits of victims of the 11/26 terrorist attacks -- some local, others global -- Nov 30 Tweetup at Leopold Cafe, Facebook Wear White Event, Facebook Support 11/26 Fighters Event.]

At the risk of making a snap judgment even as the events of last week are still unwinding, the response and the reportage were both only partial successes.  Honoring those who served well is important but taking a hard look at what failed may be where the greatest value lies.  It is the only way to perfect or reform institutions about which we care — government, media and that still amorphous thing called Web 2.0.

A final note.  There is another post about Mumbai that I struggled to write over the long Thanksgiving weekend.  I couldn’t get it right.  Thankfully, CBC essayist Rex Murphy did:

We should not see what
happened … in India – what is happening – as something in a
distant country, but as a chilling and depraved assault on on what all
decent people share in common.

Terrorism is the murder of innocents as
a tactic in the service of fanaticism. It is the anti-politics of our
time. It is a threat to us all. The blast was in Mumbai, but its
vibrations are meant for every civilized city of the planet.

… It is merely right therefore that we give our
thoughts to their particular plight – and offer – to these, our fellow
citizens – our alert and full sympathy.

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But this year’s finalists hold the promise of being red meat — “bailout” for conservatives, “maverick” for liberals — at the extended-family Thanksgiving Day feast, which just isn’t right because the day is supposed to be about turkey (the original white meat).

Of course, if you received an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner this year, you have probably figured out the wisdom behind the prohibition on talking politics and religion in such settings.

But there is an occupational hazard that could send your tryptophan-saturated hearers face down into the jellied salad.  Infrastructure.

It is an easy shorthand in the private vocabulary of information technology but both high- and low- culture word watchers don’t think much of it.

According to no less an authority than Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Director of the Annenberg School of Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania in comments at the fall NASCIO conference, IT’s coupling of infrastructure and architecture has little meaning outside of the technology community and is confusing to the very people with whom CIOs and their kin seek to communicate.

MSNBC commentator Chris Mathews agrees. “Infrastructure is an awful word,” he gurgled during an early on-air dissertation on the merits of the depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA) and how it may be time to try such a scheme again.

But his cable news colleague Rachel Maddow opened her show early on Monday by enthusing about the opening of the federal spigot under the new administration:

President-elect Obama’s … big plan? He’s rolling out what amounts
to a new “New Deal” to invest in infrastructure. Yes. I’ve wanted
infrastructure to be a sexy political issue for so long now that when I
say the word, I can almost hear wakachicka-wakachicka background music
in my head – infrastructure, yessss.

That last little wakachicka-wakachicka bit has morphed into a downloadable ring tone under the heading of what Maddow calls infrastructure porn.

Even with infrastructure worth about 115,000,000 returns on Google, when and if real people think about it, they think about roads, bridges and schools.  They don’t readily think about the Internet and digital infrastructures.  We run the risk of thinking we are part of this new national conversation when we are not.  We don’t share a common definition of the word, a word it should be noted that nobody really uses in casual conversation anyway.

The final caution can be ripped out of context from The Princess Bride, the 1987 Rob Reiner film that has become a perennial favorite rental on Thanksgiving long weekends. In a recurring exchange with Vizzini, Inigo Montoya calmly intones, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”  Inconceivable!  No, infrastructure. 

Empower the state chief information officer with tools and resources to oversee a generational transformation of information technology in state government. The state must consolidate resources under the Office of the State Chief Information Officer, including the Department of Technology Services, the Office of Systems Integration, geospatial information functions and the information security functions of the Office of Information Security and Privacy Protection.

Use public money for technology projects responsibly and with transparency.
To rebuild the confidence of the Legislature and the public, the process through which California’s technology projects are governed must be open and transparent. The Information Technology Council should expand to include legislative members as well as members from existing technology councils, and it should be empowered to prioritize overall technology projects for the state and aggressively monitor their implementation. The state chief information officer should regularly report on the progress of the state’s information technology projects through a more robust Web site.

Use technology to track, measure and improve performance.
The state should encourage and foster the burgeoning development of performance measurement projects throughout state departments and agencies by re-establishing the technology innovation fund and creating opportunities to regularly integrate performance data into the state’s management and budgeting strategy. The governor should hold regular public meetings with agency heads to evaluate performance data.

Even while tacitly recognizing that these changes will be difficult and take time, the Commission points to a new model for IT governance as key to a more effective fiscal management in the long run.

In the name of full disclosure, I was one of many who provided testimony to the Commission and worked with its staff in the preparation of the report.  To read the full text of the report, download it here — LittleHoover.pdf .

He was alongside Governor Sonny Perdue to announce the signing of a pair of contracts intended to consolidate and outsource the state government’s IT operations.  The larger of the two, worth $873 million over eight years, was awarded to IBM to take over infrastructure — from the raised floor data centers, mainframes, services and disaster recovery to PC and laptops.  The other will pay AT&T $346 million over 5 years to manage network services for the state.  Both contracts have two one-year renewal options.

The state estimates that it will save an estimated $180 million over the term of the contracts but it comes at a cost to state employees, 92 of whom will lose their jobs in May 2009 and 322 others will be offered jobs with IBM and AT&T.

IBM and AT&T were effectively sole bidders after two other companies withdrew their bids before the apparently successful vendors were announced.

The award comes on the heels of a decision late last month by the state of Texas to suspend an $863 million outsourcing project with IBM to transfer state records to a centralized computer system.  In a letter to state IT officials, Governor Rick Perry said the company had failed to backup the data of more than 20 state agencies.

As for my presentation, you can download it here [11-08CDGStealThisIdea1.6.pdf].