What IT Wants From The Next White House

BARACK OBAMA Current Job: U.S. Senator (D-IL) Key IT Advisors: Economic Advisor Eric Schmidt (Chairman & CEO Google); Senior Economic Advisor Austan Goolsbee (Professor of Economics, University of Chicago); Economy, Globalization and Trade Policy Co-Chair Daniel K. Tarullo (Professor of Law, Georgetown University)

While Obama doesn't have the IT luminaries advising him that John McCain does, he has much more comprehensive policy proposals for advancing the country's technology ecosystem via a combination of spending and incentives for infrastructure, education and R&D. The difference between McCain's hands-off approach to business versus Obama's plans for an active role by his administration is clear -- which philosophy wins out will depend on what the voting public thinks a battered US economy needs to get chugging again.

Obama's great strength may be of the "proof is in the pudding" variety -- his campaign itself has done a bang-up job leveraging the Web, e-mail and social networking technology to attract and coordinate supporters while raising tons of cash. On the other hand, the Obama campaign's botching of last Friday's vice-presidential announcement -- supporters were promised text messages announcing the Biden selection before the news media found out, but CNN and others broke the news first -- left some egg on the face of these supposedly PR-mastering, tech-savvy operatives.

Obama's path towards building 'the generation that reshapes our economy to compete in the digital age' includes:

• Appointing the nation's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century

• Supporting the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet

• Increasing the Federal Trade Commission's enforcement budget and stepping up international cooperation to track down cyber-criminals so that U.S. law enforcement can better prevent and punish spam, spyware, telemarketing and phishing intrusions into the privacy of American homes and computers

• Making government data available online in universally accessible formats to allow citizens to make use of that data to comment, derive value, and take action in their own communities

• Employing technologies, including blogs, wikis and social networking tools, to modernize internal, cross-agency, and public communication and information sharing to improve government decision-making

• Deploying next-generation broadband ... bringing broadband to our schools, libraries, households and hospitals

• Investing $10 billion a year over the next five years to move the U.S. health care system to broad adoption of standards-based electronic health information systems, including electronic health records

• Supporting pilot programs that provide incentives for businesses to grow their IT workforce in inner-cities and rural communities

• Doubling federal funding for basic research and making the R&D tax credit permanent

• Giving the Patent and Trademark Office the resources to improve patent quality and opening up the patent process to citizen review to reduce the uncertainty and wasteful litigation that is currently a significant drag on innovation

• Restoring the basic principle that government decisions should be based on the best-available, scientifically-valid evidence and not on the ideological predispositions of agency officials.

Next: John Chambers