BARACK OBAMA

Guide to using Twitter

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, Social Media Director for the Center for the Business of Government, shares his insights into how government can better leverage Twitter.

Introducing Sunlight Live

As the Open Government Directive was announced in a live webcast back in December, Sunlight tried something a little different by covering the event live in a variety of formats at once.

As is a norm around here, we basically just got a lot of people in a room, tried a bunch of stuff and paid attention to what seemed to work. At the end of the announcement we simultaneously had a tweet stream from across the open government community going, a live blog, and a Google Wave. We threw the obligatory word cloud at it, sent email blasts, and followed up with blog posts about the Directive’s many components.

It was fun and seemed to be pretty effective. And it also got us thinking …

White House ‘Transparency and Open Government’ memorandum

On January 21, 2009, President Barack Obama signed a ‘Transparency and Open Government’ executive order. Here is video of the signing and full text of the memorandum.