Dec 2nd, 2008 |
Several opinion-makers trying to influence President-Elect Obama’s technology policies thorough blogs. Part of the intent, no doubt, is to simply use a historic election and a public focal point to aid mass communication. But it does seem like these bloggers seem to be nurturing long-shot hopes that they’ll actually be heard. Here are three examples:
- Wikinomics author Don Tapscott on “What Obama’s New CTO Should Do” on the HuffingtonPost
- Navi Radjou on the Harvard Business blogs writes an “Obama’s Innovation Agenda: An Open Letter to the President Elect.”
- And Jeneanne Rae at Businessweek weighs in with “What Obama needs to know about Innovation.”
Most of this stuff is very much at the vision-and-principles level, with no attempt to link the suggestions to how federal technology policymaking actually works. This begs the question, how would you actually (rather than rhetorically) attempt to influence Obama in novel ways? To make the goal concrete, here’s a hypothetical challenge: get Obama to take $1 billion of the many billions he’s promised for green energy research, and use it to fund a new NSF/NIH program in support of home-office technology, to get more cars off the road. Is there a Lobbyist 2.0 out there willing to take on this challenge?
