Obama At Press Conference

"I do not underestimate the enormity of the task that lies ahead." "It's not going to be quick, and it's not going to be easy to dig ourselves out of the hole that we're in," Said Barack Obama he discussed the tough economic times ahead and his solutions to the financial crisis in his first press conference as the President Elect of US. But the most significant cabinet decision by President-elect Barack Obama will be the creation of a Chief Technology Officer. This is unprecedented and will, more than any other cabinet position, define his presidency and launch the transformation of government from its current nature to what’s known as the 2.0 world. America’s CTO will not only assume the job of cyber-protection for the government against terrorists, hackers and criminals. But it will revolutionize governance itself and here are the main goals: 1. The CTO will be responsible for enhancing and financially supporting technology of all kinds: environmental, scientific, engineering, medical. This will include massive funding for green (US$150 billion in 10 years), biotech, computer tech and pure scientific research but will also involve incentives to universities to step up engineering graduates annually from 60,000 a year to double that number within half a generation. 2. America’s CTO will be responsible for making the government more transparent, accessible, responsive. Like the Internet-savvy Obama election machine, this President-elect wants to stream meetings live which are held between cabinet ministers and business CEOs or their organizations; he wants to post on government websites legislation for five days to solicit public comments; he wants to provide other interactive policy sites, chat rooms and forums so that citizens can participate in governance and he wants to streamline or convert government departments and their websites into efficient service-providers. 3. Extend broadband access to all Americans, up from the 23% which now can tap into the Internet and its vast store of information or services. The U.S. ranks 15th in the world in this regard, according to the OECD. 4. The CTO will interface and lobby for more open immigration policies to attract more of the world’s brainpower to its government-funded research projects. 5. Obama’s America will earmark money to upgrade and computerize the country’s education system. 6. His plans include cleaning up the patent protection and copyright processes to end frivolous and vexatious litigation as well as “trolling” or tweaking existing protections to create new, invasive ones. http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/francis/archive/2008/11/07/second-thoughts.aspx Read the blog “Obama: world’s first tech revolutionary published in Financial Post, Nov 7, 2008