ObamaCTO.org

By Xeni Jardin at 5:41 pm Wednesday, Nov 12

Micah Sifry writes:

While much of the tech industry and blogosphere is pondering who President-elect Barack Obama might appoint as the nation's first Chief Technology Officer--Eric Schmidt? Jeff Bezos? Larry Lessig?--a bunch of heavy-hitting public interest groups in Washington and a couple of civic-minded techies out in Seattle have each launched promising interventions in the discussion.

The first one, out yesterday, is a new site called ObamaCTO.org. The site is basically a feedback forum centered on one question: What should be the CTO's top priorities?

ObamaCTO is built on Uservoice, which enables anyone to create an account, post their own idea, comment on any idea, and distribute up to 10 votes to help rank all the ideas posted. ObamaCTO.org just went live, so the number of participants is pretty small, but my guess is it will get a lot of participation soon. Some of the ideas being posted aren't really the responsibility of a potential CTO, however, and it's not clear how the site's managers will filter those out.

Obama's CTO: Never Mind Who; What Should S/he Do? (techpresident.com)