ObamaForTechnology.com Research

How President Obama Will Use Web Technology

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Montgomery) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:39:00 +0000

How Obama Will Use Web Technology

Editor's Note: The following guest post was written by Kevin Merritt, the CEO and founder of blist, a Web-based list manager and spreadsheet that was used on www.Change.gov, the Obama Administration's transition Website.

President Barack Obama was sworn into office this week as our nation's 44th president. Despite running into a few technical challenges in the first few days at the White House, the Obama Administration will embrace technology in unprecedented ways. Led by forward thinking, web savvy technologists, President Obama's new media team looks poised and ready to fulfill President Obama's vision of open-source democracy.

Coincident with Mr. Obama being sworn in, the Obama Administration's new media team assumed control of www.WhiteHouse.gov at 12:01 PM EST on Tuesday. This is the official website of the sitting administration. The new media team has identified three top priorities of the new administration communication, transparency and participation.

Let's examine how the new administration has been leveraging web technologies to meet these priorities.

Communication. This administration's use of Google's YouTube during both the campaign and after winning the election leverages Internet video to reach a generation of Americans and global citizens who no longer tune in to AM radio on a regular basis.

President Obama has vowed to continue video recording his fireside chats and publishing them via YouTube and other video sites. With the transition of WhiteHouse.gov to the new administration, for the first time ever an official White House blog came online. You can sign up for email updates from the president. Through the blog, Mr. Obama is the first U.S. president to have an RSS feed!

During the campaign President Obama relied heavily on Facebook, Myspace and Twitter to build support, communicate with constituents and develop a core audience. By far, Mr. Obama has more followers on Twitter than anyone else (168,000). His fan page on Facebook has more than 4 million fans.

Transparency. Mr. Obama promises to run the most open, honest and transparent administration to date. Through the Your Seat at The Table section on the CHANGE.GOV transition site, the Obama transition team posted the minutes of hundreds of private meetings with then President-Elect Obama.

Even all of the content on the www.CHANGE.GOV site, unless otherwise noted, is licensed to the public at large via a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

The Obama-Biden Transition Team used my company, blist, to disclose the names of all donors to the transition project. Two key points of note are that the disclosure was entirely voluntary and the tool they chose to use made the data itself much more consumable by the mainstream public. Compared to a plain HTML table, which is bulky, cumbersome and hard to work with, by publishing the data via a blist widget the data can easily be sorted, searched, filtered, downloaded, printed, emailed and even republished all capabilities not previously enjoyed by most consumers of public data sets.

Participation. The Obama Administration has been conducting bold experiments in interactive government. The Citizen's Briefing Book, powered by Salesforce.com, has allowed citizens to suggest topics Mr. Obama should consider upon taking office. Once a topic was submitted, other visitors to the Citizen's Briefing Book could vote the topic up or down and comment on it. Voting, ranking and commenting are hallmark features of web-based, social media applications.

The new Administration has brought forth a new era of honest, open, participatory and transparent government by creatively employing web-based software from innovative companies like Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com and blist.

We're eager to see the use of these technologies extended to WhiteHouse.gov initially and from there we'd love to see more government agencies quickly embrace web technologies to promote communication, transparency and participation.

12/20/08 President-elect Obama's Weekly Address

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Montgomery) — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 05:19:00 +0000

How Obama’s Internet Campaign Changed Politics

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Montgomery) — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 15:37:00 +0000

How Obama’s Internet Campaign Changed Politics

By Claire Cain Miller
for The New York Times

One of the many ways that the election of Barack Obama as president has echoed that of John F. Kennedy is his use of a new medium that will forever change politics. For Mr. Kennedy, it was television. For Mr. Obama, it is the Internet.

“Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee,” said Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post.

She spoke Friday about how politics and Web 2.0 intersect on a panel with Joe Trippi, a political consultant, and Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. (Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich had been invited to balance out the left-leaning panel, but declined, according to John Battelle, a chair of the conference.)

Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign -– which was run by Mr. Trippi –- was groundbreaking in its use of the Internet to raise small amounts of money from hundreds of thousands of people.

But by using interactive Web 2.0 tools, Mr. Obama’s campaign changed the way politicians organize supporters, advertise to voters, defend against attacks and communicate with constituents.

Mr. Obama used the Internet to organize his supporters in a way that would have in the past required an army of volunteers and paid organizers on the ground, Mr. Trippi said.

“The tools changed between 2004 and 2008. Barack Obama won every single caucus state that matters, and he did it because of those tools, because he was able to move thousands of people to organize.”

Mr. Obama’s campaign took advantage of YouTube for free advertising. Mr. Trippi argued that those videos were more effective than television ads because viewers chose to watch them or received them from a friend instead of having their television shows interrupted.

“The campaign’s official stuff they created for YouTube was watched for 14.5 million hours,” Mr. Trippi said. “To buy 14.5 million hours on broadcast TV is $47 million.”

There has also been a sea change in fact-checking, with citizens using the Internet to find past speeches that prove a politician wrong and then using the Web to alert their fellow citizens.

The John McCain campaign, for example, originally said that Governor Sarah Palin opposed the so-called bridge to nowhere in Alaska, Ms. Huffington said. “Online there was an absolutely obsessive campaign to prove that wrong,” she said, and eventually the campaign stopped repeating it.

“In 2004, trust me, they would have gone on repeating it, because the echo chamber would not have been as facile,” Ms. Huffington said.

The Internet also let people repeatedly listen to the candidates’ own words in the face of attacks, Mr. Huffington said. As Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s incendiary words kept surfacing, people could re-watch Mr. Obama’s speech on race. To date, 6.7 million people have watched the 37-minute speech on YouTube.

The Internet also changes the way politicians govern. Mr. Newsom learned that last year when he ran for re-election. He showed up at a rally and didn’t see the usual crowd. His aides told him the audience was made up of his Facebook friends. “I said, ‘What’s Facebook?’” Mr. Newsom recalled.

These days, Mr. Newsom is “obsessed with Facebook.” It strengthens his connection with his constituents and their connection with the causes they care about, he said.

The constant exposure can, of course, turn against politicians.

Ms. Huffington’s “off the bus” team of 10,000 citizen journalists caught candidates saying things that embarrassed them later, such as Mr. Obama’s “guns and religion” remark. Now, she said, “there is no off-the-record fundraiser.”

Mr. Newsom said he is fearful of the constant need to watch his tongue. “I have to watch myself singing, ‘I left my heart in San Francisco’ on YouTube and it can’t go away. I am desperate to get it to go away,” he said dryly.

“There will be a lot of collateral damage coming to grips with the fact that we’re in a reality TV series, ‘Politics 24/7,’” Mr. Newsom said.

That’s a good thing, Mr. Trippi said. “This medium demands authenticity, and television for the most part demanded fake. Authenticity is something politicians haven’t been used to.”

He predicted that this real-time Internet contact with constituents will also change the way the president of the United States governs. He recently proposed that Mr. Obama start a Web site called www.MyWhiteHouse.gov to talk with citizens.

(Mr. Obama just started a different site, Change.gov, on Thursday to keep in touch with people during the transition.)

“When Congress refuses to go with his agenda, it’s not going to be just the president” they oppose, Mr. Trippi said. It will be the president and his huge virtual network of citizens.

“Just like Kennedy brought in the television presidency, I think we’re about to see the first wired, connected, networked presidency,” Mr. Trippi said.

The Short List for U.S. Chief Technology Officer

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Montgomery) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:48:00 +0000

Barack Obama has pledged to name a cabinet-level CTO to oversee a job-creating national broadband buildout if he's elected. Big names abound

By Tom Lowry

Barack Obama says that the U.S. is not doing nearly enough to create jobs through technology. Shortly after he launched his campaign, the Illinois Senator promised that if elected, he would create the first-ever Cabinet-level post of chief technology officer. The economic crisis has since made it certain that a White House CTO would become one of Obama's most important advisers, should he triumph in November. "Obama sees greater broadband penetration as an enormous economic engine, much like the railroads were a century ago," says Andrew D. Lipman, a veteran communications lawyer in Washington. "That is why the CTO will play such a critical role in any recovery plan."

Among the candidates who would be considered for the job, say Washington insiders, are Vint Cerf, Google's (GOOG) "chief internet evangelist," who is often cited as one of the fathers of the Internet; Microsoft (MSFT) chief executive officer Steve Ballmer; Amazon (AMZN) CEO Jeffrey Bezos; and Ed Felten, a prominent professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University. An Obama campaign spokesman did not return phone calls seeking comment about potential CTO candidates.

Obama—who has effectively used the Internet and social networks throughout his campaign to raise funds, engage voters, and put forward policy positions—has long criticized the Bush administration for not doing more to increase broadband penetration in the U.S., particularly in rural areas. The country ranked 15th among industrial nations in penetration, with a mere 23 out of 100 Americans having access to broadband service, according to a report released earlier this year by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

A White House CTO would be expected to help create incentive programs to expand broadband's reach, particularly tax credits for smaller carriers. But the tech czar would almost certainly be deeply involved in overseeing a federally-backed $50 billion venture capital fund that Obama has proposed to develop more environmentally friendly technology.

CTO vs. FCC?

What is less clear is how a CTO would interact with the Federal Communications Commission. While the FCC chairman does not belong to the Cabinet, the person filling that role has traditionally been a leading voice on issues of media, telecommunications, and technology. It is widely expected that President Bush's appointed FCC chair, Kevin Martin, would step down if Obama were elected. Sources say Obama might then consider appointing his former Harvard Law School classmate and current campaign adviser, Julius Genachowski, to the chairman's post. A former adviser to FCC chairs Reed Hundt and Bill Kennard, Genachowski won plaudits for his work as top executive at Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI). More recently, Genachowski has been running his own venture capital firm, Rock Creek Ventures.

One who does not foresee conflict between a CTO and the FCC, whose charge is mostly regulatory, is Lawrence Lessig, a noted scholar on law in the digital age and the founder of Stanford University's Center for the Internet and Society. Lessig says he sees the positions as "orthogonal"—or perpendicular—to one another. "That said, I do think the CTO could be a critically important position, from deciding how to make government more efficient and transparent through technology, to helping advance public policy questions like those surrounding global warning." Lessig, who would certainly be considered a candidate for the job of CTO, says he has not been approached by anyone on Obama's staff and adds that he would not be interested.

Princeton's Felten says he has not been approached by Obama's team either, but believes a government CTO is necessary for these times. He sees the job as holding far-reaching responsibilities. "First, the CTO could act as the cybersecurity czar, ensuring that reliability of the government infrastructure is protected. And much like the role of presidential science adviser, the CTO could offer advice to the president on all areas of technology. The role could be a catalyst to push us closer to being a more entrepreneurial, high-tech country." When asked if he would be interested in the job, Felten replied: "Almost anyone would be interested in doing that job." Bezos and Ballmer were less forthcoming; each declined to comment. Through a spokesman, Cerf said: "I have not had any contact with the Obama campaign on this topic."

Lowry is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York.

Recommendations for a Cleaner, Greener Energy Future

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Montgomery) — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 22:38:00 +0000

Key policy recommendations for a Cleaner, Greener Energy Future include:

* Providing multiyear tax incentives for renewable-energy production and energy-efficiency projects.

* Setting national mandates that would require utilities to get at least 20 percent of their electricity from wind, solar and geothermal energy by 2020.

* Adding and updating the building code to require energy-efficiency measures in the construction of new buildings and the renovation of existing buildings, and setting a goal to reduce buildings' energy use 50 percent by 2030.

* Setting prices for carbon-dioxide emissions and creating a program that caps emissions from different industries and allowing companies to trade emissions allowances.

* Upgrading and expanding the nation's electric grid to enable it to support electric cars and the transport and storage of renewable energy.

* Providing incentives for utilities to invest in energy-efficiency technologies.

* Increasing the fuel efficiency of cars and trucks and investing more money in private-public partnerships that would develop transportation systems that rely on little or no oil, such as electric cars.

* Providing incentives to consumers and small businesses to buy plug-in hybrid cars and alternative fuels, including natural-gas-powered cars.

* Investing more federal dollars in cleantech research and development, including ways to capture and store carbon-dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants.

* Speeding up the process of setting aside public lands and improving the permitting process for renewable-electricity projects on public lands.

* Shifting from ethanol made from corn to ethanol made from wood chips, agricultural waste and other nonfood feedstock, and encouraging a joint U.S.-Brazil partnership to turn sugar cane into ethanol in the Caribbean.

Green Collar Job Education Comes to DC!

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Montgomery) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:43:00 +0000

Area Builders Bring Nation's First Green Job Curriculum to District of Columbia

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Councilmember At-Large Kwame Brown today joined the Green Builders Council of DC (http://www.builditgreendc.org), a coalition of more than 30 local builders and developers, to unveil the nation's first green collar job training curriculum for the Washington, DC area construction industry.

The curriculum will train current construction workers, plus Career and Technical Education students entering the District's construction trades programs, in environmentally-sensitive construction methods and green building rating systems as certified under the U.S. Green Building Council's ( http://www.usgbc.org) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard.

Thanks in part to the leadership of the members of the Green Builders Council of DC more than 100 buildings in the District, totaling over 120 million square feet, are already LEED certified. Including planned projects, members of the Green Builders Council will be responsible for more than 200 million square feet of LEED certified construction in the District. Upon successful completion of this curriculum, students will earn industry-recognized credentials that can help them gain employment at these and other green building projects across the District.

"The demand for District residents who can fill green collar jobs is only expected to grow. Now DC workers and Career and Technical Education students will be able to gain a valuable skill set that will benefit their careers and our city's green future," said Mayor Fenty.

"Now, when people ask me what a green collar job is, I can point to specifics. This training will lead to important results: A greener, more sustainable city and the jobs that go with it," said Councilmember Brown. "The District is looking ahead to the future, and we're fortunate to have partners who want to bring hope to our young people."

"Mayor Fenty and the City Council have been longtime advocates of initiatives that create jobs and promote a more sustainable city. Today, the private sector is proud to do its part," said Ted Trabue, director of the Green Builders Council of DC. "With this first-of-its-kind curriculum we're not just empowering District workers to take advantage of the green jobs of tomorrow, we're helping to grow this city's green economy and paving the way for other green collar workers across the country."

Specifically, the curriculum will train workers and students to be proficient in:
-- Recognizing the challenges that construction presents to the environment;
-- Understanding the life cycle phases of a building and their impacts on the environment;
-- Identifying eco-friendly alternatives to conventional building practices and understanding the costs and benefits of those alternatives, and;
-- Understanding the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED rating process and being able to apply construction practices that contribute to a building's LEED rating.

The new curriculum is the product of a partnership between the Green Builders Council of DC and the Florida-based National Center for Construction Education and Research (NCCER) ( http://www.nccer.org/). The Green Builders Council of DC and NCCER commissioned the Sustainable Facilities and Infrastructure Research Team of the Myers-Lawson School of Construction at Virginia Tech University ( http://www.mlsoc.vt.edu/) to develop the curriculum. An updated version will be prepared in the coming months to train workers in the U.S. Green Building Council's revised LEED standards for 2009.

The curriculum has been endorsed by the U.S. Green Building Council as well as Green Advantage ( http://www.greenadvantage.org/), an organization providing environmental certification for construction trades workers who demonstrate knowledge of current green building principles, materials, and techniques.

The training curriculum will be taught by NCCER-accredited training sponsors, including the Academy of Construction & Design at Cardozo Senior High School in Northwest.

The local builders and developers who are members of the Green Builders Council of DC have been leaders in green building and green jobs in the DC area for years. Their member firms have constructed over 100 projects totaling more than 120 million square feet that are certified LEED buildings and currently employ over 450 workers who are accredited by LEED as experts in environmentally friendly construction. George Hawkins, director of the DC Department of Environment, recently praised the Green Builders' Council of DC for "leading the charge on the business side of greening this great District."

http://www.builditgreendc.org

Great Promise Ahead for Cellulosic Ethanol in America

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Montgomery) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:18:00 +0000

Great promise lies ahead for Cellulosic Ethanol

Last December, Congress amended the national Renewable Fuel Standard, setting a goal that the U.S. will produce a whopping 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel by 2022. It's no surprise that much of this renewable fuel will be ethanol.

Given the rapid industrialization of Asia, global demand for fuel ethanol is steeply increasing and is expected to do so in the foreseeable future. In order to satisfy this big demand, let alone meet the Renewable Fuel Standard, there is a growing concern that the standard U.S. practice of mass producing fuel ethanol from corn won't be feasible. There simply isn't enough corn acreage available in America to meet the future domestic and international demands for fuel ethanol.

Scientists contend that the answer to this problem is cellulosic ethanol, a technology that is now under furious research and development at many universities, national labs, and private industries across the globe.

This is an interesting technology, because it makes ethanol from cellulose feedstocks such as ordinary trees, perennial grass and cropland residues instead of food crops such as corn or sugar cane.

Scientists contend that cellulosic ethanol, once it is perfected, can significantly reduce America's imports of foreign oil, while creating a big variety of "green collar" jobs including farmers, truck drivers, business professionals, engineers, and scientists.

Before cellulosic ethanol becomes a commercial reality, there are many technology hurdles to overcome. Crop scientists and chemical engineers are furiously studying the genetics, the molecular structure, and other biological aspects of trees and plants in order to improve the efficiency of cellulosic ethanol production.

Last year, our country embarked on a once-in-a-generation effort to study the underlying science needed to improve processing efficiency. In the meantime, scientists are making great headway. For example, the U.S. Department of Energy recently awarded $125 million to establish the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, a partnership between Michigan State University and the University of Wisconsin, to study the science of processing cellulosic ethanol.

Also, Michigan State University and Michigan Technological University recently partnered with the Mascoma Corp. (a Massachusetts company), to build a cellulosic ethanol plant in the Michigan Upper Peninsula.

Last May, at a scientific lecture in Copenhagen, Denmark, by Dr. Niels Lagvad of Danish Biogasol Corp. (www.biogasol.com). It was revealed that this company now has a proven, turnkey system to mass produce ethanol from a big range of perennial grasses and hemicellulosic feedstocks. He referred to the process as a "bolt-on, second-generation ethanol plant" which, in essence, attaches to the back end of a conventional plant making ethanol from food crops. "Second generation ethanol" refers to the use of non-food feedstocks to make ethanol, whereas, "first generation ethanol" refers to traditional methods that use food crops such as corn and sugar cane.

The immediate U.S. market for this Danish technology is to retrofit American corn-to-ethanol plants. In this concept, corn stover (corn leaves, stalks, and cobs) and distillers' grain (a voluminous, natural by-product of the corn-to-ethanol process) would be used as inexpensive feedstocks for ethanol production. The technology is now in the demonstration phase; a full-scale plant is planned for 2010 in Boardman, Ore., as part of a joint effort between the U.S. Department of Energy and the Pacific Ethanol Corp.

Danish Biogasol also markets the same technology to electric power plants, regardless of whether the electric plant is fueled by coal, nuclear, natural gas or oil. Why this terrific market? Electric plants routinely produce massive amounts of waste heat. This waste heat is harnessed by the ethanol plant, which in turn greatly reduces the cost of ethanol processing. Imagine a line of semi-trucks, all loaded with massive bales of locally grown perennial grass, driving to the local electric plant - which makes fuel ethanol too.

I am excited to imagine where this technology is headed because America is blessed with abundant trees and native grass. I believe we're in for some hopeful times ahead: new jobs from locally made auto fuel with no imported oil.

Technology Reshapes America's Classrooms

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Montgomery) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:24:00 +0000

Technology Reshapes America's Classrooms

BOSTON, Massachusetts (Reuters) - From online courses to kid-friendly laptops and virtual teachers, technology is spreading in America's classrooms, reducing the need for textbooks, notepads, paper and in some cases even the schools themselves.

Just ask 11-year-old Jemella Chambers.

She is one of 650 students who receive an Apple Inc laptop each day at a state-funded school in Boston. From the second row of her classroom, she taps out math assignments on animated education software that she likens to a video game.

"It's comfortable," she said of Scholastic Corp's FASTT Math software in which she and other students compete for high scores by completing mathematical equations. "This makes me learn better. It's like playing a game," she said.

Education experts say her school, the Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School in Boston, offers a glimpse into the future.

It has no textbooks. Students receive laptops at the start of each day, returning them at the end. Teachers and students maintain blogs. Staff and parents chat on instant messaging software. Assignments are submitted through electronic "drop boxes" on the school's Web site.

"The dog ate my homework" is no excuse here.

Read more at:

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-usa-education-technology.html

The Facebooker Who Friended Obama

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Montgomery) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:17:00 +0000

Technology

The Facebooker Who Friended Obama

By BRIAN STELTER
Published: July 7, 2008 for The New Work Times

When a Clinton strategist said Barack Obama’s supporters “look like Facebook,” Chris Hughes took it as a compliment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/technology/07hughes.html?ex=1373169600&en=8411d0bdc1c39837&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

San Francisco Passes The Largest Municipal Solar Incentive

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Montgomery) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 14:40:00 +0000

San Francisco Passes The Largest Municipal Solar Incentive

San Francisco, California, passed legislation on June 10 to implement a 10-year solar incentive program that will be the largest municipal solar program in the United States.

The incentive program provides solar rebates to local residents ranging from $3,000-$6,000. It provides up to $10,000 for non-profits and businesses that install solar. It also provides up to $30,000 for non-profit affordable housing. These rebates incentivize local building owners and leverage about 80% of the average solar installation cost from non-city sources (state, federal and the owner’s investment), promoting the installation of significant new amounts of solar with fairly limited resources. The highest residential incentive is reserved for residents or businesses who use an installer that hires graduates of the City’s workforce development program.

The San Francisco Solar Taskforce met for 12 months and crafted the program. The Taskforce concluded that an inclusive solar rebate program open to all local rooftops was the single most effective way to greatly increase solar in San Francisco.

The program enjoys the strong support of the full range of environmental groups and environmental justice advocates, including the Sierra Club, Vote Solar, the A. Phillip Randolph Institute, SPUR, Literacy for Environmental Justice, and the Neighborhood Parks Council, among others.

Technology Challenege: Unfilled Jobs

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Montgomery) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:02:00 +0000

June 25, 2008

U.S. High Tech Said to Slip

By ERIC A. TAUB

The United States may be synonymous with the high-tech revolution, but it is in danger of losing its high-tech edge, according to Cybercities 2008, a report released Tuesday by AeA, a technology industry trade association.

Because the federal government does not issue a sufficient number of green cards or work visas to talented foreign students studying here, there are a “tremendous number of unfilled jobs,” said Christopher Hansen, AeA’s chief executive.

“We educate them and then tell them to go home. This is absurd,” said Mr. Hansen, whose group has lobbied to increase the number of visas for foreign technology industry workers.

Over all, the number of high-tech jobs in fields like semiconductors, software, computer design and the Internet, remains below 2001 levels. Then, 6.5 million people were employed in the technology sector. But by 2006, that number had dropped to 5.8 million. However, jobs did increase by 2.5 percent from 2005.

The problem is exacerbated, Mr. Hansen says, because American schools are not producing a sufficient number of graduates capable of filling these positions. “Our public schools are not generating the kinds of people who can go into engineering and math and compete.”

According to Mr. Hansen, the result is that large numbers of high-tech jobs are being lost to other countries.

The AeA’s assessment of high-tech employment was its first city-by-city look at the industry since 2000.

The New York metropolitan area leads the nation in the number of high-tech jobs, followed by Washington, San Jose/Silicon Valley, Boston and Dallas-Fort Worth.

New York had 316,509 high-tech jobs, and Silicon Valley had 225,343. High-tech pay averaged $79,484, compared with $42,405 for all private-sector work.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/technology/25tech.html?ref=business

Obama Pledges Universal Broadband, Doubling Fedral R&D Budget

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Montgomery) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 02:56:00 +0000

Obama Pledges Universal Broadband, Doubling R&D Budget

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama Monday pledged universal high-speed Internet access and doubling the national research and development budget in a speech at Kettering University in Flint.

"At a time when technology is shaping our future, we devote a smalle rand smaller share of our national resources to research and development," the Illinois senator said. "I'll double federal funding for basic research and make the R&D tax credit permanent. We can ensure that the discoveries of the 21st century happen in America -- in our labs and universities; at places like Kettering and the University of Michigan; Wayne State and Michigan State."

The proposals found a receptive audience in Joe Heston, a 23-year-old Kettering senior who said he tends to vote Republican.

"I like his ideas, especially on the economy and education," said Heston, from Monterey, Calif., who attended Obama's speech. "I'm going to take a long look in this election."

Obama, making his third campaign swing through Michigan since mid-May, said Monday he wants to move America to a place where workers can compete in a global economy.

Read more at: http://www.wwj.com/Obama-Pledges-Universal-Broadband--Doubling-R-D-Bu/2421744

Silicon Valley and Barack Obama

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Montgomery) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 03:18:00 +0000

June 2008 Atlantic Monthly

How Silicon Valley made Barack Obama this year’s hottest start-up

by Joshua Green

The Amazing Money Machine

History has a way of prizing timeless qualities like vision and oratory above temporal things like money. So if Barack Obama becomes our nation’s first black president, civics textbooks will probably never note his fund-raising prowess or the financial challenges he had to overcome simply to compete with the likes of Hillary Clinton. But Obama would not be where he is today if he did not possess a preternatural ability to elicit huge sums. Obama prompts an impulse in people to reach for historical antecedents when describing him—as a speaker, Martin Luther King Jr.; as an inspiration to young voters, Robert F. Kennedy. No one I’m aware of has suggested an apt comparison for Obama, the mighty fund-raiser. But whenever I think about the quarter billion dollars he has raised so far, the image that leaps to mind is Scrooge McDuck diving joyously into his piles of gold.

The story of Obama’s success is very much a story about money. It provided his initial credibility. It paid for his impressive campaign operation. It allowed him first to compete with, and then to overwhelm, the most powerful Democratic family in a generation—one that understood the power of money in politics and commanded a network of wealthy donors that has financed the Democratic Party for years.

What’s intriguing to Democrats and worrisome to Republicans is how someone lacking these deep connections to traditional sources of wealth could raise so much money so quickly. How did he do it? The answer is that he built a fund-raising machine quite unlike anything seen before in national politics. Obama’s machine attracts large and small donors alike, those who want to give money and those who want to raise it, veteran activists and first-time contributors, and—especially—anyone who is wired to anything: computer, cell phone, PDA.

Here’s another thing: he is doing it almost effortlessly. That is to say, in an era when the imperative for campaign dollars demands more and more of a politician’s time and lurks behind so many recent scandals (including the auctioning-off of the Lincoln Bedroom), Obama has raised more money than anybody else without plumbing ethical gray areas or even spending much of his own time soliciting donations. During the month of February, for example, his campaign raised a record-setting $55 million—$45 million of it over the Internet—without the candidate himself hosting a single fund-raiser. The money just came rolling in.

Obama’s campaign is admired by insiders of both parties for its functional beauty—not just admired but gawked at, like some futuristic concept car leaking rocket vapor at an auto show. Obama’s campaign has made a similar leap in how it has applied technology to the practices of raising money and organizing, and it is already the clear model for everyone else.

To get a better sense of why it has succeeded, I opted to undergo the full tech immersion while reporting this piece, and soon had Obama ring tones on my phone, new networks of online “friends,” text-message updates from the campaign, and regular e-mails from its manager, all gently encouraging me to give money, volunteer time, bring in new friends, and generally reorient my life in ways that were made to seem hip and fun—and inexorably aimed at the greater glory of Barack Obama. How Obama arrived at this new model for campaigning is a tale of foresight and circumstance, his campaign’s enterprise and his opponent’s shortsightedness, and it has as much to do with Silicon Valley as it does with Washington politics.

Obama is a gifted politician by anyone’s measure, but what distinguishes him from earlier insurgents is his ability to fully harness the excitement that his candidacy has created, in votes and in dollars. Three forces had to come together for this to happen: the effect of campaign-finance laws in broadening the number and types of people who fund the political process; the emergence of Northern California as one of the biggest sources of Democratic money; and the recognition by a few Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that the technology and business practices they had developed in their day jobs could have a transformative effect on national politics.

A few days after Obama announced his $55 million figure, I went to Silicon Valley to meet some of these people, and to find out how they saw the future coming and got there first.

Mark Gorenberg decided to start fund-raising in earnest during the early days of John Kerry’s presidential campaign, back when Barack Obama was considered merely a comer in Illinois politics. Granted, that was all of five years ago. But it was a different world then, at least in the elite fund-raising circles Gorenberg was entering. Every election cycle, politicians looking for money traveled a well-worn circuit of important donors.

Two big changes had just come about when Kerry got going in 2003. The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law had taken effect for the first time in a presidential campaign, limiting the large “soft money” donations to political parties that Democrats in particular relied on; for years, they had solicited large donations from corporations and the rich to build the party. Now the only way to raise money was to attract small donors, a task Democrats had never done well. (The law limited individual donations to a presidential candidate to $2,000 for the primary and general elections each in 2004; the limit increased to $2,300 for 2008.) The other important change was the Iraq War, which had energized the Democratic Party.

Gorenberg, a partner in the San Francisco venture-capital firm of Hummer Winblad, was representative of a certain kind of prosperous Northern California Democrat whom the war and the general climate of Bush-administration malfeasance had pushed from casual supporter to committed activist. And he was representative of Silicon Valley, in that he thought in terms of networks. Partly, this was his job: a venture capitalist looking to invest in the next big thing must know everything that is happening and everyone who is making it happen. But everyone else was thinking about networks, too. The Valley was still emerging from the crash of 2001, yet it was already clear that the next boom would be in social-networking entities like MySpace and Facebook, which created vast, interconnected communities on the Web.

Political fund-raising, on the other hand, was stuck in an earlier era. “Take a typical Gore event in 2000,” Gorenberg, an affable and slightly rumpled engineer, told me when I visited his office in a converted brick warehouse on the Embarcadero. “By the time he was the nominee, a fund-raiser might be 20 people in a living room who’d given $100,000 to the party, and 50 to 100 in the backyard at $5,000.”

The engineer in Gorenberg was bothered by the system’s obvious inefficiency. Relying exclusively on the rich put limits on who got involved, and by design the new campaign-finance laws weakened their influence. He had an idea about how networks could help. “If the most that any one person could write a check for was $2,000,” he said, “then the important people suddenly became those who would put their hand up and say, ‘I’ll raise $50,000 or $100,000.’” Ever since Watergate-era campaign-finance laws put limits on the amount that an individual can give to a presidential candidate, “bundlers” who are able to gather many individual checks have been important figures, most recently the “Pioneers” and “Rangers” in George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns. But in the past, everyone tended to draw from the same moneyed crowd.

Gorenberg tapped into his broad network of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists and discovered that many of them were eager to get involved—eager enough not just to give but to tap their own networks to raise money for Kerry. Collectively, these “raisers” generated a great deal of money, and much of it came from new sources, particularly what Gorenberg likes to call the area’s new middle class.

“There is a tremendous amount of wealth in Silicon Valley,” John Roos, Obama’s Northern California finance chair and the CEO of the Palo Alto law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, told me. “Not just massive individual wealth, but wealth spread collectively among the engineers, lawyers, and executives who made gains in the good years and now have the ability to contribute a $2,300 check without it being a significant hit to them.”

By the end of the 2004 campaign, Gorenberg had surpassed all the old names to become Kerry’s biggest fund-raiser. And for the first time, spurred by these expanding networks, the Bay Area eclipsed Los Angeles as the biggest source of Democratic donations in California.

In Silicon Valley, as elsewhere, Kerry’s loss, while devastating, seemed only to intensify the activist zeal. Gorenberg teamed up with a friend, Nadine North, who recruits executives for tech firms, to pursue a new goal in 2006: helping Democrats win back the House of Representatives.

With guidance from Nancy Pelosi, San Francisco’s reigning power, the pair chose 10 races that looked like good possibilities to help Democrats pick up the 15 seats they needed to regain control. But they worried about how to raise money for a slate of House candidates who lacked the glamour of a presidential nominee. They found their answer in the software industry. After the Internet bubble burst, software companies had been unable to sell expensive systems. Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, hit upon a solution when he dropped the practice of charging full price up front in favor of a subscription model that charged a little at a time for access to software. The idea appealed to companies that lacked the budget or the appetite to write another big check, while the promise of recurring revenue helped reinvigorate the software industry.

North and Gorenberg borrowed the subscription model for their “Win Back the House” project. Instead of asking for a big check up front, as they would for a presidential candidate, they invited each of their House candidates to the Bay Area over the course of the year, so that supporters could give recurrent, but smaller, donations. Most of the donors were from the tech industry, and understood the software-subscription model. They came to enough gatherings, and kept writing enough checks, that the roster of House candidates eventually expanded from 10 to 30. As before, the emphasis was not on writing big checks but on building raiser networks, including people who couldn’t contribute much themselves. By November, North and Gorenberg were among the top Democratic fund-raisers nationwide.

On election night, everyone gathered to watch the returns come in, and this time they experienced a resounding victory: Democrats recaptured the House. “Many of the candidates in the key races were ones we had supported,” North told me. “It really brought the national political landscape home to Democrats in the Bay Area.

Barack Obama was new to most Americans when he entered the presidential race, in February 2007. But he was familiar to Silicon Valley in at least one way: like a hot Internet start-up in the glory years, he had great buzz, a compelling pitch, and no money to back it up. He wasn’t anybody’s obvious bet to succeed, not least because the market for a Democratic nominee already had its Microsoft.

This being Silicon Valley, however, Obama was quickly embraced. A few days before Obama declared, John Roos hosted a fund-raiser at his home, attended by Gorenberg and many other prominent figures. This sent an important signal to the community and added to Obama’s local mystique. “There is a lot of good feeling for the Clintons in California,” says Peter Leyden, the director of the New Politics Institute in San Francisco, a tech-focused think tank that is neutral in the presidential race. “But once the community here experienced Obama, that started to break up really quickly.”

That early fund-raiser and others like it were important to Obama in several respects. As someone attempting to build a campaign on the fly, he needed money to operate. As someone who dared challenge Hillary Clinton, he needed a considerable amount of it. And as a newcomer to national politics, though he had grassroots appeal, he needed to establish credibility by making inroads to major donors—most of whom, in California as elsewhere, had been locked down by the Clinton campaign.

Silicon Valley was a notable exception. The Internet was still in its infancy when Bill Clinton last ran for president, in 1996, and most of the immense fortunes had not yet come into being; the emerging tech class had not yet taken shape. So, unlike the magnates in California real estate (Walter Shorenstein), apparel (Esprit founder Susie Tompkins Buell), and entertainment (name your Hollywood celeb), who all had long-established loyalty to the Clintons, the tech community was up for grabs in 2007. In a colossal error of judgment, the Clinton campaign never made a serious approach, assuming that Obama would fade and that lack of money and cutting-edge technology couldn’t possibly factor into what was expected to be an easy race. Some of her staff tried to arrange “prospect meetings” in Silicon Valley, but they were overruled. “There was massive frustration about not being able to go out there and recruit people,” a Clinton consultant told me last year. As a result, the wealthiest region of the wealthiest state in the nation was left to Barack Obama.

Furthermore, in Silicon Valley’s unique reckoning, what everyone else considered to be Obama’s major shortcomings—his youth, his inexperience—here counted as prime assets.

I asked Roos, the personification of a buttoned-down corporate attorney, if there had been concerns about Obama’s limited CV, and for a moment he looked as if he might burst out laughing. “No one in Silicon Valley sits here and thinks, ‘You need massive inside-the-Beltway experience,’” he explained, after a diplomatic pause. “Sergey and Larry were in their early 20s when they started Google. The YouTube guys were also in their 20s. So were the guys who started Facebook.

And I’ll tell you, we recognize what great companies have been built on, and that’s ideas, talent, and inspirational leadership.”

This was the dominant refrain as I traveled around the Valley. From a policy standpoint, there are many reasons for tech-minded types to support Obama, including his pledge to establish a chief technology officer for the federal government and to radically increase its transparency by making most government data available online. “Barack recognizes that people in Silicon Valley are not just talking about a set of technical questions,” Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor and noted Valley demigod, told me. “It’s a broader generational issue of how to architect and orient the government on important issues, from privacy to security to competition, in ways that open up the process to everyone.”

But more than any policy, the idea of Obama and the world he speaks for seemed to excite something deep within the limbic system of the Valley brain that manifested itself through the early and continuing financial support that was crucial to launching Obama’s campaign. Getting behind Obama, especially for those who did so early, appealed to their self-image as discerning seers. Though she ultimately went with John Edwards, Nadine North captured this better than anyone: “Obama was the new, new thing, and that’s what we’re all about here.”

When Gorenberg joined Obama’s national finance committee, he was pleased to discover an institutional culture eager to embrace new ideas about building user-generated networks. The effects of this type of thinking are evident throughout the campaign, but nowhere are they more fully embodied than in the person of Steve Spinner.

Spinner is a 38-year-old entrepreneur and media executive who, when we met at a Starbucks in Menlo Park, came across as a prototypical Valley figure: bright and enthusiastic, a born networker with a dazzling command of the latest industry lingo, and someone who is a zealous exponent, in roughly equal measure, of both Northern California’s business-venerating culture and Barack Obama.

Spinner had only recently become active in politics, through Gorenberg and North’s “Win Back the House” effort. Although he hadn’t intended to do more than write a check, he had gotten swept up in the excitement. “I know most of the VCs and entrepreneurs here,” he told me, “so when companies are thinking about doing their initial fund-raising, thinking about raising $3 million or $5 million or $10 million, I’m able to help a number of them by making introductions to the various VC firms that might find what they’re doing attractive.”

Raising money for a political cause seemed like a natural progression, though it was not without its challenges. Unlike other professionals in Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs are typically cash-starved, and therefore unlikely contributors. But as he called around to friends and contacts, Spinner was surprised to find many of them eager to give and thankful to have found an outlet for political expression. Things quickly took off. He hosted an event in his home in 2006 that was headlined by Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano. “I realized, ‘Wow, I can do this,’” he told me. “And so I got totally hooked. On election night, I had an ownership stake in the effort.”

Eager to get involved in a presidential campaign, Spinner accompanied Gorenberg to the February fund-raiser at John Roos’s house and, somewhat to his own surprise, found himself volunteering to raise $25,000. Like so many of his Valley colleagues, Spinner was instantly infatuated with Obama and certain that supporting him was the right play. “I’m a start-up guy,” he told me. “We take measured bets. We will place a lot of money on something that has a greater likelihood of failure than success, but there has to be a path—if you’ve got the right plan and the right leadership, the game can be won. That’s how I looked at Obama.”

Spinner began sending out e-mails, tapping into his network. He browsed friends’ profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, and MyYahoo, trying to determine who might be a Democrat and donate. One friend also wanted to raise money for Obama, so Spinner brought him aboard. He soon exceeded his $25,000 goal.

This brought an invitation from Obama’s national finance chair, Penny Pritzker, to join the national finance committee and commit to raising $250,000. Spinner thought about it, and took the plunge. He’d been surprised by the excitement he’d encountered for Obama, but also by the lack of a forum to discuss it. So he established what Web denizens would call an affinity group, “Entrepreneurs for Obama,” to serve this untapped market.

Obama appeared before the group by videoconference in May and was a smash hit. Almost overnight, a whole new network, which would yield its own spin-offs, had come into being and gone to work for the candidate. And in a period of weeks, Spinner, who had never raised a dime for a presidential campaign, had gone from neophyte to mid-six-figure Obama fund-raiser.

What ultimately transformed the presidential race—what swept Obama past his rivals to dizzying new levels of campaign wealth—was not the money that poured in from Silicon Valley but the technology and the ethos.

The campaign’s focal point is My.BarackObama.com, which has made better use of technology than its rivals since the beginning. As a consequence of this fact and the general enthusiasm over the candidate, Obama’s Chicago-based staff is constantly besieged by suitors offering the latest applications, services, software, and widgets. Since many are based in Silicon Valley, Spinner volunteered his services as a talent scout.

To understand how Obama’s war chest has grown so rapidly, it helps to think of his Web site as an extension of the social-networking boom that has consumed Silicon Valley over the past few years. The purpose of social networking is to connect friends and share information, its animating idea being that people will do this more readily and comfortably when the information comes to them from a friend rather than from a newspaper or expert or similarly distant authority they don’t know and trust.

The success of social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and, later, professional networking sites like LinkedIn all but ensured that someday the concept would find its way into campaigning. A precursor, www.Meetup.com, helped supporters of Howard Dean organize gatherings during the last Democratic primary season, but compared with today’s sites, it was a blunt instrument.

Obama’s campaign moved first. Staffers credit the candidate himself with recognizing the importance of this new tool and claim that his years as a community organizer in Chicago allowed him to see its usefulness. Another view is that he benefited greatly from encouraging a culture of innovation and lucked out in the personnel department, with his own pair of 20-something wizards. Joe Rospars, a veteran of Dean’s campaign who had gone on to found an Internet fund-raising company, signed on as Obama’s new-media director. And Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, took a sabbatical from the company and came to Chicago to work on the campaign full-time.

When My.BarackObama.com launched, at the start of the campaign, its lineage was clear. The site is a social-networking hub centered on the candidate and designed to give users a practically unlimited array of ways to participate in the campaign. You can register to vote or start your own affinity group, with a listserv for your friends. You can download an Obama news widget to stay current, or another one (which Spinner found) that scrolls Obama’s biography, with pictures, in an endless loop. You can click a “Make Calls” button, receive a list of phone numbers, and spread the good news to voters across the country, right there in your home. You can get text-message updates on your mobile phone and choose from among 12 Obama-themed ring tones, so that each time Mom calls you will hear Barack Obama cry “Yes we can!” and be reminded that Mom should register to vote, too.

“We’ve tried to bring two principles to this campaign,” Rospars told me. “One is lowering the barriers to entry and making it as easy as possible for folks who come to our Web site. The other is raising the expectation of what it means to be a supporter. It’s not enough to have a bumper sticker. We want you to give five dollars, make some calls, host an event. If you look at the messages we send to people over time, there’s a presumption that they will organize.”

The true killer app on My.BarackObama.com is the suite of fund-raising tools. You can, of course, click on a button and make a donation, or you can sign up for the subscription model, as thousands already have, and donate a little every month. You can set up your own page, establish your target number, pound your friends into submission with e-mails to pony up, and watch your personal fund-raising “thermometer” rise. “The idea,” Rospars says, “is to give them the tools and have them go out and do all this on their own.” The organizing principle behind Obama’s Web site, in other words, is the approach Mark Gorenberg used with such success—only scaled to such a degree that it has created an army of more than a million donors and raisers. The Clinton campaign belatedly sought to mimic Obama’s Internet success, and has raised what in any other context would be considered significant money online—but nothing like Obama’s totals, in dollars or donors. John McCain’s online fund-raising has been abysmal.

The social-networking model provided Obama with something that insurgents before him, from Gary Hart to McCain, always lacked: a means of capturing excitement and translating it into money. In the 2004 primary, Howard Dean raised $27 million online. Obama is fast approaching $200 million.

At a critical point in the race, this money had a dispositive effect. After “Super Tuesday,” on February 5, Clinton’s campaign ran out of money—a scenario that would have been unimaginable a year earlier. Obama, flush with cash, proceeded to win the next 11 contests, all but putting the nomination out of Clinton’s reach.

“What’s amazing,” says Peter Leyden of the New Politics Institute, “is that Hillary built the best campaign that has ever been done in Democratic politics on the old model—she raised more money than anyone before her, she locked down all the party stalwarts, she assembled an all-star team of consultants, and she really mastered this top-down, command-and-control type of outfit. And yet, she’s getting beaten by this political start-up that is essentially a totally different model of the new politics.”

Before leaving Silicon Valley, I stopped by the local Obama headquarters. It was a Friday morning in early March, and the circus had passed through town more than a month earlier, after Obama lost the California primary by nine points. Yet his headquarters was not only open but jammed with volunteers. Soon after I arrived, everyone gathered around a speakerphone, and Obama himself, between votes on the Senate floor, gave a brief hortatory speech telling volunteers to call wavering Edwards delegates in Iowa before the county conventions that Saturday (they took place two months after the presidential caucuses). Afterward, people headed off to rows of computers, put on telephone headsets, and began punching up phone numbers on the Web site, ringing a desk bell after every successful call. The next day, Obama gained nine delegates, including a Clinton delegate.

The most striking thing about all this was that the headquarters is entirely self-sufficient—not a dime has come from the Obama campaign. Instead, everything from the computers to the telephones to the doughnuts and coffee—even the building’s rent and utilities—is user-generated, arranged and paid for by local volunteers. It is one of several such examples across the country, and no other campaign has put together anything that can match this level of self-sufficiency.

The alchemy of social networking and the presidential race has given Obama claim to some of the most fabulous numbers in politics: 750,000 active volunteers, 8,000 affinity groups, and 30,000 events. But the most important number, and the clue to how Obama’s machine has transformed the contours of politics, is the number of people who have contributed to his campaign—particularly the flood of small donors. Much of Clinton’s haul, and McCain’s, too, has come from the sort of people accustomed to being wooed in the living room, and Obama initially relied on them, too. But while his rivals continued to depend on big givers, Obama gained more and more small donors, until they finally eclipsed the big ones altogether. In February, the Obama campaign reported that 94 percent of their donations came in increments of $200 or less, versus 26 percent for Clinton and 13 percent for McCain.

Obama’s claim of 1,276,000 donors through March is so large that Clinton doesn’t bother to compete; she stopped regularly providing her own number last year.

“If the typical Gore event was 20 people in a living room writing six-figure checks,” Gorenberg told me, “and the Kerry event was 2,000 people in a hotel ballroom writing four-figure checks, this year for Obama we have stadium rallies of 20,000 people who pay absolutely nothing, and then go home and contribute a few dollars online.” Obama himself shrewdly capitalizes on both the turnout and the connectivity of his stadium crowds by routinely asking them to hold up their cell phones and punch in a five-digit number to text their contact information to the campaign—to win their commitment right there on the spot.

It’s possible to track the network effects in the growing fund-raising numbers that seem to arrive in ever larger denominations: $25 million … $30 million … $35 million … in February, the staggering $55 million—nearly $2 million a day.

In a sense, Obama represents a triumph of campaign-finance reform. He has not, of course, gotten the money out of politics, as many proponents of reform may have wished, and he will likely forgo public financing if he becomes the nominee. But he has realized the reformers’ other big goal of ending the system whereby a handful of rich donors control the political process. He has done this not by limiting money but by adding much, much more of it—democratizing the system by flooding it with so many new contributors that their combined effect dilutes the old guard to the point that it scarcely poses any threat. Gorenberg says he’s still often asked who the biggest fund-raisers are. He replies that it is no longer possible to tell. “Any one of them could wind up being huge,” he says, “because it no longer matters how big a check you can write; it matters how motivated you are to reach out to others.”

There is some irony in the fact that the architect of the most recent campaign-finance law also happens to be the Republican presidential nominee. John McCain likely views all that has happened with considerable trepidation. Contrary to the widespread assumption at the time the McCain-Feingold Act became law (The Atlantic published an article on the legislation titled “The Democratic Party Suicide Bill”), it has not hurt the Democratic Party. Neither has it clearly benefited Republicans; McCain in particular has little to show for it. He raised $15 million in March, only $4 million of it over the Internet. His small-donor base is virtually nonexistent. When challenged about his staunch support for the Iraq War, McCain likes to say that he’d be willing to sacrifice the White House for principle. Nobody asks about campaign-finance reform. But that, and not Iraq, may wind up being the principled stand that does him in.

Meanwhile, the Obama machine rolls on, to the delight of its early stakeholders. “They’ve gone from zero to 700 employees in a year and raised $200 million,” Steve Spinner says of the campaign. “That’s a super-high-growth, fast-charging operation.”

It’s also one whose growth curve is coming into sharper focus. The Obama campaign has not yet assumed a place in Silicon Valley lore alongside Apple, Google, and Facebook. But a few more months could change that. The hottest start-up in the Valley right now won’t make anybody rich, but it might put the next president in the White House.

The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/obama-finance.

Senators Obama and Collins STEM Bill Creates Financial Aid and Scholarship Database

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Montgomery) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 16:56:00 +0000

Barack Obama, Susan Collins Bill Creates Financial Aid and Scholarship Database
Legislation would coordinate public and private scholarships and fellowships for students pursuing science, math, and technology

December 13, 2007 -- WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) was joined by Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) to introduce the National STEM Scholarship Database Act (S. 2428), which would launch an innovative online database to coordinate information on financial aid opportunities available in science and technology through the federal government and public or private resources. More and more American students are pursing advanced degrees, and this database would make it easier for them to find and access the thousands of publicly and privately-supported scholarships and fellowships that may be available to them.

This legislation is co-sponsored by Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Norm Coleman (R-MN). Representative Rush Holt introduced companion legislation, which passed the House of Representatives in June.

“Higher education remains out of reach for far too many Americans,” said Senator Obama. “This country has the best and strongest system of college and universities in the world, and for decades we have been the leader in scientific advancement, research and development, and innovation. We must ensure every student has the financial opportunity to attend these institutions. The STEM Database will make it easier for students to know which opportunities for scholarships and fellowships are available to them, and will give all our students a fair shot at pursuing an advanced degree. If we are truly committed to restoring America's competitiveness in the world, we must recruit a new generation of science and technology leaders, and this legislation is an important step forward.”

“I join the growing concern that the United States is not preparing a sufficient number of students, teachers, and practitioners in science, technology, and engineering fields,” said Senator Collins. “For many students, the obstacle is often not a lack of interest but rather a lack of financial resources. The database created in this bill will have a complete list of STEM scholarships, fellowships, and other programs of financial assistance from all public and private sources. I am pleased to join my colleague, Senator Obama, in introducing this legislation.”

By creating a single web portal with the many financial aid opportunities available in science and technology, the National STEM Scholarship Database Act would promote study in these important fields. Access to this information is especially crucial for first generation college students who might otherwise receive limited guidance in how to successfully pursue, and finance, a degree in science or technology. As we attempt to raise the level of engagement and opportunity for students to enter STEM disciplines, it is essential that we reduce obstacles to accessing financial support; obstacles that might otherwise prevent students from pursuing their dreams, and America from maintaining its leadership in innovation.

The STEM Scholarship Database:
* Includes information on available financial aid that would be organized by fields of study as well as by postsecondary or postbaccalaureate programs of financial support.

* Organizes information on opportunities specifically targeted to individuals based on gender, ethnicity, family income, or other demographic characteristics.

* Makes available information that is searchable.

* Includes hyperlinks to programs and to application materials as well as contact information for applicants to receive further guidance.

* Calls on the Secretary of Education to contract with a private entity to furnish and regularly update the information available through the website.

Source: Senator Barack Obama

Call for the Adoption of a National Broadband Policy

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Montgomery) — Fri, 25 May 2007 16:35:00 +0000

Letter to Congress from Open Internet Coalition

United States Congress
Washington, DC

RE: Call for the Adoption of a National Broadband Policy

May 24, 2007

Dear Member of Congress,

We are writing to urge you to support immediate adoption of a national broadband policy that will lead to universal, affordable access for all Americans to high-speed Internet connections.

Congress, the White House, and leaders in the private and non-profit sector have long supported this goal. Yet in the last few years, the US has slipped well behind the world leaders in the performance and penetration of our broadband networks. America has seen nearly a decade of decline in its world standing in broadband services largely because of an uncompetitive marketplace -- with monopolies and barriers to entry written into the law. In part, this is because we lack a comprehensive policy to address the digital divide, ensure the free flow of content, and promote the development of ubiquitous, high-speed Internet access at affordable prices.

Now is the time to give this goal the urgency it deserves. A national broadband policy will provide the unifying principle to enact a variety of needed reforms and changes to our telecommunications laws. As broadband networks become more and more integral to our economic and social life, we are reaching a tipping point where legislation is no longer simply welcome -- it is imperative.

Taking concrete steps in this decade to increase access to the Internet is vital to economic growth, educational development, and social opportunity -- much like rural electrification in the 1930’s and our Interstate Highway system in the 1950’s. The 21st century information superhighway marries the power of free speech and free markets -- producing the greatest engine of democratic deliberation and open commerce since the printing press. With the concerted will of this Congress, backed by the support of the American people, we believe that a national broadband policy will deliver on the full promise of what information technologies have to offer.

To demonstrate our commitment, our coalition has come together in support of principles which we hope will guide your deliberations as we move toward a national broadband policy.

Universal Affordable Access

Broadband Internet access should be universally available and affordable. Rural or urban, rich or poor, every American must be able to access the information superhighway at fair prices and speeds that rival the rest of the world. Like world-class schools and the best research science, the information superhighway must be considered an indispensable part of our society that has the potential to provide economic and social opportunities to all. Programs focused on deploying high-speed Internet access in underserved areas are a key starting point for this goal.

An Open Internet

Access to broadband networks should be open to all producers and consumers of Internet content on fair and equal terms. The Internet should offer a free market to all competitors and maximum choice to all consumers. Consumers should have unfettered access on open Internet networks to all lawful Web sites, devices, applications and services. This principle, known as network neutrality, ensures that no self-interested gatekeeper can hold captive the online economic marketplace or marketplace of ideas.

Quality through Competition

A competitive marketplace creates jobs, helps the American consumer, fosters innovation, and drives economic growth. We must aspire to achieve the world's most advanced communications networks, building on the tradition of American policy and innovation that created the open Internet. We must maximize competition on next generation networks by guaranteeing access and by ensuring that all networks interconnect and interoperate. Regulation should be targeted, technology neutral and consistent across all competitive networks.

We thank you for reviewing these principles, and we look forward to working with the 110th Congress to achieve these vital goals.

Sincerely,

The Open Internet Coalition

Militarizing The Border

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Montgomery) — Tue, 15 May 2007 05:17:00 +0000

Militarizing The Border

by Frida Berrigan

The sun was strong and so was the rhetoric, as President George W. Bush headed to Yuma, Arizona on April 9 to tackle the problem of illegal immigration. Flanked by uniformed border agents, national guardsmen and members of local law enforcement whose stiff formality emphasized his bare-armed enthusiasm, the president asserted that “securing the border is a critical part of a strategy for comprehensive immigration reform… Congress is going to take up the legislation on immigration. It is a matter of national interest and it's a matter of deep conviction for me.”

The president rolled up his shirt sleeves and blamed a host of problems on illegal immigration: it “puts pressure on the public schools and the hospitals… drains the state and local budgets… brings crime to our communities.” He also urged Congress to get behind a tangle of proposals ranging from more border patrols and a guest worker program to stiffer penalties for illegal immigrants and the people who employ them. But the heart of President Bush’s effort against illegal immigration is the multi-billion dollar Secure Border Initiative (SBI).

As with so many other pressing issues -- from terrorism to oil dependency -- the White House is turning to the military industrial complex for a solution. SBI is the plan of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to erect a "virtual fence" of monitors, sensors, unmanned planes, and communications to help border agents catch illegal immigrants crossing the southern border.

In September 2006, DHS awarded initial contracts -- worth upwards of $2 billion -- for the high-tech surveillance technology along border region to weapons giant Boeing. The Chicago-based manufacturer beat out rivals Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman to gain a foothold in the lucrative realm of homeland security. Boeing was the Pentagon’s second largest contractor in 2006 with $20.3 billion in deals and now finds itself well positioned to receive the billions in contracts that DHS is doling out. It leads a team of more than half a dozen companies developing and deploying a network of advanced systems that could -- if it all works and is funded -- give DHS patrols a clear picture of everything that moves across almost 2,000 miles of border territory.

What is missing is a clear picture of exactly how many billions it will cost. Last November, Richard Skinner, the inspector general of DHS told lawmakers that estimates for this advanced surveillance network are all over the map: from the low end of $2 billion to a high of between $8 billion to $30 billion. Skinner testified that “our frustration right now is that we don’t know what it’s going to cost. We just don’t know what the big picture is.”

DHS answered that frustration with the Secure Border Strategic Plan the following month, stressing that “it expects to complete the SBI investment need to gain control of the Southwest land border by the end of FY 2011, although we certainly expect to gain substantial control of the border prior to that time.” The report put the estimate of total costs for equipment, logistics, and manpower at $7.6 billion though 2011. But, the Department admits it “does not as yet have a wholly satisfactory methodology of determining whether a portion of the border is considered under control.”

In Yuma, President Bush praised the personnel patrolling the border, but he saved rapturous prose for the Predator drone, a $40 million piece of hardware. “When I landed here at the airport, the first thing I saw was an unmanned aerial vehicle. It’s a sophisticated piece of equipment. You can fly it from inside a truck and you can look at people moving at night. It’s the most sophisticated technology we have and it’s down here on the border to help the border patrol agents do their job.”

At a January 2006 briefing, Deputy Secretary Michael Jackson told contractors interested in Homeland Security business, “We're asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business.” Now Boeing has come back with its answer -- give us the money and don’t think too much.

Luckily, some members of Congress are not accepting that. Henry Waxman (D-CA), the Chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and his staff are looking into the issue of contractor oversight, pointing out that “60 of the 98 people overseeing the border project are contractors.” A February 8 memo from his staff alleged that “at least one contractor hired to engage in contract oversight on the border project -- Booz Allen Hamilton -- may have a conflict of interest with Boeing” and suggested that because the technology consulting firm has teamed up with Boeing on a number of other contracts, it cannot provide effective and impartial oversight. Booz Allen Hamilton executives rejected this suggestion.

DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, in a press conference following President Bush’s speech, was quick to assert the Secure Border Initiative’s judicious use of resources: “We're not just going to say, ‘Oh, this looks like some neat stuff, let's buy it and then put it on the border.’” However, a look at some of the systems military contractors are proposing demonstrates that “buying neat stuff” is exactly what may happen.

For 2008, the president is requesting $46.4 billion in funding for DHS, an 8% increase over 2007. And with President Bush’s belated focus on border security and immigration reform, it is likely that more money will be spent in a hurry. In border security, a new focus on high-tech solutions follows on a wave of failure and money wasted. A $425 million system of cameras and sensors was installed improperly and never worked effectively, and a $6.8 million unmanned aerial vehicle patrolling the border crashed and was destroyed.

In Iraq, military contractors wasted billions of dollars of reconstruction aid. Boeing, meanwhile, is no stranger to corruption scandals: its chief financial officer went to jail in 2005 for wrongdoing in securing Pentagon contracts. To put military contractors, particularly Boeing, in charge of building SBI is a recipe for disaster.

But the issue of militarizing the border goes beyond questions of accountability. In order to craft truly effective, humane and “comprehensive” immigration reform, the president is going to have to do a lot more than show up in his shirtsleeves once in a while. He has to learn that the border is not a war zone, Mexicans are not combatants, and military contractors are not the solution.

Published by Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF), a joint project of the International Relations Center (IRC, online at www.irc-online.org) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS, online at www.ips-dc.org). © Creative Commons - some rights reserved.

FIRST BIPARTISAN H-1B VISA REFORM BILL TO PROTECT AMERICAN WORKERS

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Montgomery) — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 13:58:00 +0000

DURBIN AND GRASSLEY INTRODUCE FIRST BIPARTISAN H-1B VISA REFORM BILL TO PROTECT AMERICAN WORKERS

WASHINGTON , DC - U.S. Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) introduced “The H-1B and L-1 Visa Fraud and Abuse Prevention Act of 2007” late last week to overhaul the H-1B and L-1 visa programs to give priority to American workers and crack down on unscrupulous employers who deprive qualified Americans of high-skill jobs.

The H-1B visa program allows American companies and universities to employ temporary foreign workers who have the equivalent of a U.S. bachelor’s degree in a job category that is considered by the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services to be a "specialty occupation". The L-1 visa program allows companies to transfer certain employees from their foreign facilities to their U.S. facilities for up to seven years.

“Our immigration policy should seek to complement our U.S. workforce, not replace it,” Durbin said. “Some employers have abused the H-1B and L-1 temporary work visa programs, using them to bypass qualified American job applicants. This bill will set up safeguards for American workers, and provide much-needed oversight and enforcement of employers who fail to abide by the law.”

"This is about protecting the American worker,” said Senator Grassley. “We're closing loopholes that employers have exploited by requiring them to be more transparent about their hiring and we're ensuring more oversight of these visa programs to reduce fraud and abuse. A little sunshine will go a long way to help the American worker."

Provisions of the Durbin-Grassley bill would change existing law in the following ways:

Currently, the H-1B visa program is criticized for failing to protect American workers.

Under current law, only employers that employ H-1B visa holders as a large percentage of their U.S. workforce are required to pledge that they have attempted to find American workers before bringing in foreign workers. The Durbin-Grassley bill would require all employers seeking to hire an H-1B visa holder to pledge that they have made a good-faith effort to hire American workers first and that the H-1B visa holder will not displace an American worker.

The Durbin-Grassley bill would require that before an employer may submit an H-1B application, the employer must first advertise the job opening for 30 days on a Department of Labor (DOL) website. DOL would also be required to post summaries of all H-1B applications on its website.

The Durbin-Grassley bill would require that H-1B employers may not advertise a job as available only for H-1B visa holders or recruit only H-1B visa holders for a job.

The Durbin-Grassley bill would prohibit employers from hiring H-1B employees who are then outsourced to other companies. This is a method that some companies use to evade restrictions on hiring H-1Bs.

Currently, so-called “job shops” hire large numbers of foreign workers on H-1B visas for short time periods to train and then outsource these workers offshore.

The Durbin-Grassley bill would prohibit companies from hiring H-1B employees if they employ more than 50 people and more than 50% of their employees are H-1B visa holders.

Currently, the Department of Labor lacks sufficient oversight and investigative authority over the H-1B program.

The Durbin-Grassley bill would give DOL the ability to conduct random audits of any company that uses the H-1B program, and would require DOL to conduct annual audits of companies with more than 100 employees that have 15% or more of those workers on H-1B visas.

The Durbin-Grassley bill would give DOL authority to review employers’ H-1B applications for “clear indicators of fraud or misrepresentation of material fact.” Currently, DOL is only authorized to review applications for “completeness and obvious inaccuracies.”

The Durbin-Grassley bill would give DOL 14 days to review H-1B applications, instead of the seven days currently permitted.

The Durbin-Grassley bill would give DOL more authority to conduct employer investigations and streamline the investigative process by, among other things, permitting DOL to initiate its own investigations and eliminating the requirement that the DOL Secretary personally authorize an investigation.

The Durbin-Grassley bill would require the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to share with DOL any information in H-1B visa applications indicating that an H-1B employer is not complying with program requirements.

The Durbin-Grassley bill would strengthen existing whistleblower protections for the H-1B program and establish whistleblower protections for the L-1 program.

The Durbin-Grassley bill would authorize the hiring of 200 additional DOL employees to administer, oversee, investigate and enforce the H-1B program.

Currently, the H-1B and L-1 visa programs are criticized for making it possible for companies to hire foreign workers at lower wages and with fewer rights than Americans, in turn creating incentives for companies to avoid hiring Americans.

The Durbin-Grassley bill would require H-1B and L-1 employers to pay employees the prevailing wage to ensure employers are not undercutting American workers by paying substandard wages to foreign workers.

The Durbin-Grassley bill would require the government to provide H-1B visa holders with information about their rights.

Obama trouncing Clinton in MySpace race

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Montgomery) — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 13:40:00 +0000

Online enthusiasm for Sen. Obama is proving to be gaining momentum.

Obama trouncing Clinton in MySpace race by ZDNet's Donna Bogatin -- Obama trouncing Clinton in MySpace race

Welcome to Technorati

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Montgomery) — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 12:40:00 +0000

Technorati Profile

Sen. Barack Obama Promotes (CTL) Coal-to-Liquid Technology

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Montgomery) — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 22:22:00 +0000

Senator Barack Obama Promotes CTL

March 8. 2007 U.S. Senator Barack Obama, D-IL., called for increased invesment in coal-to-liquid technology at the U.S. Energy Forum in Arlington, Va.

Scale of investment, uncertainty in oil prices and a complicated environmental permitting process have prevented the industry from taking root in the United States, Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., said. Sen. Bunning and Sen. Obama, co-introduced a bill in January called the Coal-To-Liquid Fuel Promotion Act of 2007. It would allow the Department of Energy to provide loan guarantees for construction, planning and permitting of CTL plants. It would also expand investment tax credits and provide the Department of Defense funding and authorization to purchase, test, and integrate these fuels into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and military fuel supplies.

Coal-to-liquids technology was created by the Germans during World War II and further developed and is currently being used, in South Africa. Bunning said the technology is more than mature enough to be implemented in the United States -- all that's needed is investment from the private sector.

The U.S. Air Force, which has significantly invested in CTL, has already conducted several tests using a half Fischer-Tropsch and half J-8 fuel in the B-52 plane. Further tests are planned using 100 percent Fischer-Tropsch fuel and using the 50/50 blend in other planes and vehicles.

The synfuel made from coal is low in sulfur, nitrous-oxide and partical emissions. Another benefit to the military is that the lower burning tempture reduces the heat signature of jet engines.

One of the most important reasons to invest in CTL is that its a secure domestic fuel source and the American economy and military are too reliant on foreign fuel sources.

Obama for Technology Meeting in Dallas, TX

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Montgomery) — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 03:58:00 +0000

Obama for Technology Dallas, TX (Meeting)

This is an organizing meeting of the Obama for Technology national working group. Our group is undertaking research, analysis, development and articulation of the major technology and technology-related policy issues and opportunities that will inform the technology agenda of the presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama. We are seeking to connect with the brightest minds in science, technology, engineering, software and Internet skills to create and inspire the model technology platform for the next President of the United States of America.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/wwk

Date: Monday, March 5, 2007
Time: 7:00 PM
Duration: 1 hour
Host: Bruce Montgomery
Location: Westin Galleria Dallas
Address: 13340 Dallas Pkwy
City/State/Zip: Dallas, TX 75240

http://www.obamafortechnology.com

Gathering Storm - STEM Initiatives and Policy Resources

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Montgomery) — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 00:17:00 +0000

Gathering Storm - STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math)Initiatives and Policy Resources

There is a national outreach to follow up this initiative and to support the work of several committees investigating the areas of science, math, engineering , and technology, who have a concern for the future of the nation's emerging workforce.

Gathering Storm Convocation
http://www.nationalacademies.org/gateway/pga/3572.html
Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP)

Summary: The purpose of the Convocation on Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing Regions, States, and Cities to be held on Sept. 28, 2006, is to:
(1) convene leadership of industry, government, research, and education community from all 50 states and the federal government,
(2) share knowledge and encourage leadership of initiatives at the state and local level to strengthen US competitiveness, and
(3) discuss current national proposals to respond to the nation’s competitiveness challenge and their implications for states, localities, and regions. The focus of the convocation will be on the key action areas identified in the National Academies report: Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future. These include:
K-12 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education

Higher education
Research
Innovation environment

Research.ObamaForTechnology.com

noreply@blogger.com (ObamaForTechnology.com Research) — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 03:54:00 +0000

Is Here...