Comments on: Obama Online: More To Transition Transparency Than Meets the Eye

By: SHIRLEY JOHNSON

SHIRLEY JOHNSON — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:27:14 +0000

NUMBER2: BEFORE OUR GOV. GIVE THESE GIANT BAIL-OUTS, HOW
ABOUT CONSIDERING A BAILOUT FOR THE MIDDLE-CLASS AND THE
SENIORS THAT ARE STRUGGLING TO MAKE ENDS MEET.
JUST THIS MONTH EVERYTHING WENT UP, MY INSURANCE, MY MEDICINE
AND FOOD PRICES ARE OUTRAGEOUS. ITS TIME TO REALIZE, THOSE WHO SAY THEY NEED THESE BAILOUTS ARE NOT BEING TRUTHFUL,THEY ARE
USING THE NEW ADMINISTRATION AND LAUGHING ALL THE WAY TO
ARUBA IN THEIR NEW JETS…. PLEASE GIVE US THE LIL’ PEOPLE A
BAILOUT PLEASE. YES WE CAN. YES WE CAN.

By: SHIRLEY JOHNSON

SHIRLEY JOHNSON — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:19:12 +0000

this will do for comments, until I can find a direct line to deliver this message
to my President Obama.
number 1, please mr President, check out your FEMA OFFICES.
THEY SHOULD NOT BE MANNED BY SENATORS AND CONGRESSMEN (CHILDREN)
COLLEGE GRADS. IF THEY ARE WORKING THERE THEY SHOULD BE
TRAINED TO USE EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS”.
GOD FORBID IF THERE IS ANOTHER KATRINA. IT WILL BE THE SAME.

By: b!X

b!X — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:15:44 +0000

Where did this "obamabidentransitionproject.org" site come from all of a sudden? You're the only place on all of Google linking to it. b!X´s last blog post..St. Joseph, 8x12 Photograph

By: Jed

Jed — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:11:41 +0000

I’m not a member of the transition team, but here goes.

#1. The transition team gets a .gov domain, but as far as I know, there are no laws on the books demanding that all .govs be hosted on government servers. It’s true that GSA might have some spare space/bandwidth to host change.gov, but I’m going to presume that the site has been designed and is being maintained by the Obama-Biden Transition Project (if anything, its quality indicates that it wasn’t produced by a large bureaucracy). I also don’t know much about the price of registering a .gov, but I imagine it’s very close to $0. In short, I’m inclined to think that this isn’t costing taxpayers much, if anything, at all.

#2. The transparency afforded by social media is two-way. I highly doubt that the transition project will be granted any visibility into anyone’s protected profiles. If so, lawsuits will fly. Rather, they’ve asked for an extremely broad catalog of each applicant’s participation online. If a candidate has effectively hidden anything that may be a liability, I’m sure they’ll be fine.

This is becoming a standard part of vetting, and it’s only a crutch as long as long as an otherwise extremely qualified person lacks the judgement to present themselves online inappropriately. I would hope that Sergey Brin’s picture of him in a dress wouldn’t disqualify him from anything though.

#3. I’m not clear on your concerns regarding Cluen. They’re a service provider. I would assume that 3rd party contractors competing for such high profile contracts have every incentive to provide a high degree of security. Is there any evidence that government servers are any more reliable than 3rd parties’.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to finding out if you get a response.