Change.gov coming to the White House

Reports that www.change.gov will be the new www.whitehouse.gov at noon tomorrow--"touted as a bold experiment in interactive government based largely on lessons learned during the most successful Internet-driven election campaign in history"--also talk about the effect of this shift in communications throughout the bureaucracy.

"According to some political analysts here, the biggest learning curve in the days to come is not for the Obama White House -- which already 'gets it' -- but for the entrenched Washington bureaucracy and members of Congress.

'Obama is going to change the game with government the way he changed the game with politics,' said Simon Rosenberg, president of NDN, a Washington-based progressive think-tank.

'We should expect that experimentation is not just going to happen in the White House, but there will be competition inside the administration,' he said at a panel discussion this week on the Internet and policy-making.

'Using these tools is going to become a critical way that Barack is going to evaluate the performance of his own team,' Rosenberg said. 'My joke is that at the Monday cabinet meeting the (agency) directors will be comparing notes on how many YouTube views they got and how many comments on their blog post.'" Read more. Change.gov coming to the White House

We know that many federal web managers have been preparing for this future, and many have been using social media tools--see for example work of CDC, NASA, and EPA. I guess it's on!