The American president’s office-cum-residence is, actually, just another government office. The 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has long lagged behind in terms of using technology for efficiency. It has been “relying in large part on face-to-face meetings and mountains of paper to conduct business.” But things started changing slowly after the very first black president, who is also a Blackberry-freak, moved into the White House. Since Barack Obama took office, the White House has established a dedicated digital team, started tallying incoming phone calls electronically instead of by calculator and has begun using computer software to design floral arrangements.
TPRC was the first organization set up to connect scholarly research and communication policy/regulation. CPRsouth, which is just three years old, was modeled on TPRC and EuroCPR. CPRsouth differs from its sister organizations by its explicit focus on capacity building and mentoring, tasks that are looked after by the well established universities and research institutes in North America and Europe. We were pleased that I and Alison Gillwald (who will be leading the CPRafrica initiative) were invited as guests to the 2009 TPRC conference, facilitated by Prabir Neogi, among others. Alison and I chaired sessions, at the kind invitation of Judith Mariscal who is in the leadership of DIRSI and also on the program committee of TPRC).
Barack Obama used his first weekly address as U.S. president to provide more details of his proposed US$825 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan that, among other things, will upgrade classrooms, invest in renewable energy and expand broadband Internet access. Obama stated his intention to invest in these areas during the presidential debates in September and came back to the issue in a December address that he issued as president-elect, but over the weekend he added concrete goals to the plan. But on one aspect of the recovery plan — expanding broadband access — he offered no concrete goals and a supporting document issued by the White House doesn’t mention the word “broadband” once.
Reproducing an op-ed piece from elsewhere: Barack Obama, self-confessed BlackBerry addict, will undoubtedly be the most tech-savvy president in history. But being tech-savvy isn’t the same as being tech-smart. The combination of Obama in the White House and new leaders of key tech-related committees in Congress should send warning flags up for all who cherish the freedom and vitality of the Internet. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) is the incoming chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the technology sector.
Exactly seven years from yesterday (still today to some), early in the morning on September 11, 2001, nineteen hijackers took control of four commercial airliners en route to San Francisco and Los Angeles from Boston, Newark, and Washington, D.C. The hijackers flew two of the airliners, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center. Another group of hijackers flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. A fourth flight, United Airlines Flight 93, whose ultimate target was either the United States Capitol or White House, crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.